City of Blades

5. Components

It’s midafternoon by the time they start out, twenty of them on horseback with Nadar in the lead. It’s been a while since Mulaghesh went anywhere on horseback, and her ass and crotch start reminding her of this almost immediately as they compensate for her handicap—handling the reins one-handed isn’t always easy—but the country roads won’t tolerate an auto.

The ride north is quiet and somber. The firs on either side are close and dripping with moisture. Low clouds veil the distant Tarsil Mountains, turning their bright pink hue to a muddy brown before obscuring them entirely.

Not for the first time that day Mulaghesh wonders if she knows exactly what in all the hells she’s doing. She’s not at all sure if impetuously hopping onto an expedition north to what’s apparently a brutal murder scene will benefit her investigation into Choudhry and the thinadeskite.

She supposes it could. She imagines Shara saying something like, A good operative plays every angle, insinuates themselves into everyone’s good graces, and learns every story they can.

That seems like something Shara would say, Mulaghesh thinks. So maybe this isn’t that bad of an idea.

But another thing Shara might say, though, would be, A good operative doesn’t waste everyone’s fucking time. Which Mulaghesh just might be doing here.

Curious forms emerge from the mist as they ride: tall, smooth standing stones, placed in patterns that couldn’t be coincidental. Then a fallen arch or causeway, white stones stained green by the mold and moisture. A mile later they encounter half of a tower, vivisected by some unknown catastrophe, its bricks scattered over the hills like broken teeth. Relics and remnants of a culture that collapsed long ago.

The last is the most startling. The sight must be a familiar one, because only Mulaghesh reacts as it comes into view: at the top of a distant hill sit two giant stone feet, perhaps eighty feet long and fifty feet high, truncated at the ankles. The feet are bare and stand on a massive marble plinth that sits uneven on the loam, like the soil below could no longer suffer the weight of whatever huge figure once stood there. But no matter how Mulaghesh searches she sees no more of the statue: no distant stone shoulder or marble hand, shattered and moldering on the nearby hills. No blank white visage half-submerged in the loam, cracked and corroded.

She looks back at the feet and the plinth as they ride on. “Do I want to know what that was?” she asks.

Nadar says, “I know I don’t.”

Mulaghesh smells it before she sees it: soft, wet wood burning somewhere nearby. Pandey consults the report he received—“Directions are a devilish bastard here, General,” he breathlessly confides—and points down one of the narrow country roads. They round a copse of firs, and Mulaghesh sees a narrow tendril of dark smoke threading its way into the late-afternoon sky.

They ride up in silence. The farmhouse is a low structure with a large porch, dark smoke streaming out from somewhere at its back. But there’s something in front of the porch that’s hard to comprehend: six totems, perhaps, or maybe decorations, pale white and placed on stakes. Yet they seem to tremble strangely, like the light around them is fluttering.

I don’t like this, thinks Mulaghesh.

As they ride closer they spy a hint of a breast on one of the totems, and on another a wisp of chest hair, and soon it’s apparent that the reason the air seems to tremble is because it’s positively swarming with black flies.

“Oh, by the seas,” says Nadar, disgusted.

They are human torsos, or rather halves of human torsos, vivisected from collar to crotch, with each half placed on a stake. The body cavities are open and exposed, the organs within withered and black. The heads, arms, and legs have been neatly shorn off and placed in piles in between the stakes as if they were no more than kindling. It is, despite the viscera and stink, a curiously neat presentation, carefully and thoughtfully done, as if these corpses were vegetables to be washed and peeled for dinner.

As the sight comes into view many of the soldiers hang back, appalled. Nadar senses the change in disposition, turns, and says, “Secure the area. Pandey, search the woods for signs of any passage. You and you, stay here and guard the gate. Stop anyone you see nearby for any reason.” Then she turns back to the grisly scene, muttering, “Fucking shtanis…”

“Are you good to look closer?” asks Mulaghesh.

Nadar glares at her defiantly. “Yes.”

Mulaghesh rides forward and Nadar follows, looking fainter and fainter with each step. Soon the horses begin to resist, disturbed by the scent.

“How could they…How could they do this?” asks Nadar.

“Carefully, it looks like,” says Mulaghesh, waving away flies and circling the bodies. “They managed to part the sternum and the spine, even. That’s not easy to do—though the spinal column seems to have been a more difficult tas—”

Nadar turns her head and vomits onto the grass. Her horse whickers, startled.

“Do you need some water?” asks Mulaghesh.

“How can you just look at them?” says Nadar, spitting and wiping her eyes.

“It’s the worst I’ve seen, yes,” says Mulaghesh grimly, looking at the closest body. “But not by a lot.” She looks at the severed heads on the ground. A family, Pandey said—a wife and two sons, both adolescents. Their faces, blue and distorted, have the dull, stupid look of the dead, as if they’ve just been asked a difficult question.

Mulaghesh dismounts, waves more flies aside, and steps closer to the corpses. There are no wounds on them besides their mutilations, no stab wounds or slashes or bullet holes. One of the sons has some kind of ugly rash on his ribs, but that’s clearly not fatal. Though she doesn’t search the pile of limbs on the ground much—even she has her limits—she doesn’t see any damage there, either. “Either they were poisoned or suffocated or something,” she says aloud, “or the wounds they suffered were the killing blows.”

“As in, they had their heads struck from their shoulders?” says Nadar.

“Maybe.” She looks at half of a truncated neck, which is already withered and gray. “It’s a smooth cut. Done either all at once, in one blow, or done slowly. Tricky to do, either way. People aren’t liable to stand still for such a thing. The boy has some kind of skin infection, something nasty….But I’m not sure if that means anything.”

“Would you…Would you get away from there?” says Nadar. “You are absolutely crawling with flies.”

Mulaghesh wades out of the throng of buzzing insects. “Pandey said there were four.”

“What?”

“The initial report. He said it was a family of four. Where’s the fourth?”

The two of them ride around to the back of the farmhouse and find the fourth body lying in a patch of clover by the fence, facedown. It’s a man of about forty, from what Mulaghesh can see, but he shows no sign of mutilation or even harm. Mulaghesh dismounts again, looks him up and down, then squats, grasps him one-handed, and flips him over.

His still, white face stares up. Though he’s now discolored and crawling with beetles—she grimaces as something dark and scuttling dashes out of his mouth to hide in his shirt collar—she sees no slashes, cuts, or injuries of any kind on him. His throat, however, bears a strange tattoo, a band of green ink that resembles a braid, completely encircling his neck.

“So this is the dad, I guess,” she says.

“I guess,” says Nadar. She dismounts as well, though it’s clear she doesn’t want to.

“What’s this tattoo here?”

“Tattoo?” Nadar’s face darkens as she looks at it. “Shit.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a tribal tattoo. All the tribes have them. Once you’ve passed all the tests and are sworn into the tribe, they give you this mark, a ring around the neck. The symbolism implies that the only way to leave the tribe—”

“Is to lose your head,” says Mulaghesh.

“Right. All the tribes have different colors, patterns. This one is the Orskova tribe, a river clan. So this will piss off some important people, probably.”

Mulaghesh looks up at the farmhouse, whose back side is smoldering, and suddenly this is all too familiar: the smoking farmhouse; the wet, cold grass; the whine of the flies; and the smell of corpses….

Mulaghesh shakes herself. She stands and walks over, examining the crude wooden structure. Part of the back door has collapsed, like someone drove a truck into it. This must have broken open the hearth, which started the fire. “Lucky it’s wet,” she says aloud. “Otherwise we’d have a forest fire.” She looks back at Nadar. “You know what this is, don’t you?”

“I do?” says Nadar.

“Shorn of limbs, with the torsos vivisected and placed on stakes…”

Nadar thinks about it. Then her eyes spring wide. “Oh, by the seas…”

“Yeah. This is what Voortyashtani sentinels used to do to Saypuri slaves who rebelled or tried to escape. Breaking them down into components, I think is what they called it. Proving that we weren’t really humans in their eyes: just devices, instruments, easily taken apart. Then they put the bodies on display for everyone to see. You’re unlikely to resist slavery with something like that out your bedroom window.” She shakes her head. “I’ve read accounts of it happening, but…I’ve never seen someone try to duplicate it.”

Nadar and Mulaghesh lead their horses back around to the front of the farmhouse. “So you think it’s a message?” asks Nadar.

“This is your region, your backyard,” says Mulaghesh. “You tell me.”

“I do. He’s Orskova, and this is disputed territory among the tribes. Maybe this is an insult, or warning—betray us, and we’ll treat you like Saypuris.”

“Seems likely.” Mulaghesh brushes a fly off of her face. “This is going to fuck up your negotiations something fierce, isn’t it.”

Nadar groans and rubs her eyes. “Oh, definitely. Biswal and Rada will have a merry time trying to get the damned tribes to stop trying to murder one another after this abomination.”

“Rada?”

“Rada Smolisk. She’s the polis governor here.”

“Rada Smo…” Mulaghesh’s mouth opens as she realizes what Nadar’s suggesting. “That name…You mean the polis governor is a damned Continental?”

“Oh, yes,” says Nadar. “It’s one of the Ministry programs, trying to get more Continentals involved in governing themselves. Unlike other programs, though, this one turned out quite well. Rada’s a good sort. She’s a bit of a shrinking violet, but she’s a highly accomplished doctor. Goes all over the place fixing people up, even comes up to the fort to work on the wounded. She’s well liked.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing in my life! A Continental, as a polis governor!”

Nadar smirks. “I thought you were part of the minister’s cadre, General. Isn’t she quite the progressive?”

“There’s progressive and then there’s stark fucking barmy.” She shakes herself and tries to focus. “You said this had happened before?”

“What? Oh. Right. Yes, once, seven months ago. It was a couple, though, not a family, and the murder wasn’t nearly as…ornate as this.”

“No body parts on stakes?”

“No. From the patrol’s reading of the scene, a man killed his wife, removed her head and limbs. He didn’t get to vivisecting the torso, though. We found him dead in the same room in their little hut. The wolves had been at him.”

They begin walking back to the front yard. “No sign of foul play in his death?”

“Like I said, the wolves had been at him. But no. We thought he’d been drunk when he did it, maybe died of alcohol poisoning. Or had a heart attack. That scene wasn’t nearly as fresh as this one is—they’d been there for a while. We thought it was an isolated event. All kinds of horrible things happen here. But this…”

“Yeah,” says Mulaghesh. “It’s a trend now. Maybe the first one was a warning, too; they just didn’t complete the job the way they wanted to. They got sloppy. But now they’ve learned. They know how to do it right.”

Nadar looks off into the dark trees. “So it’ll happen again.”

“Probably, yeah. Unless you can find the person or, more likely, people who did this.”

“You think there’s more than one?”

“It’s tough, killing a whole family. Kids run. Someone comes at you with a knife, maybe. Best to bring some helping hands. Though I wouldn’t rule out poison or suffocation. Start a fire, choke them in their sleep. That’s one way they could do it alone, I suppose.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I just know.” She clucks her tongue and shakes her head. “They don’t mutilate the men, though. The rest are fair game. It’s damn odd.”

There’s a shout from the lane outside. Nadar and Mulaghesh remount and ride over to find Pandey and three other soldiers grouped at where the trees run along the road. “What is it?” asks Nadar.

“We found something, ma’am,” says Pandey. He points at the trees. “It’s like a deer blind, in a way.”

Nadar and Mulaghesh dismount again—Mulaghesh’s thighs are already complaining—and squat to see. There between two trees are dozens of fir cuttings, carefully arranged to make a crude wall.

Nadar parts the wall a bit with one hand and peers inside. “Needles have been cleared away,” she says softly. “Like someone sat here for a long time. Good eye, soldier.”

Mulaghesh stands and lines herself up with the blind. Its line of sight peers right through the fence to the side of the farmhouse, giving a clear view of anything that might be happening in the front or the back.

“They watched,” she says quietly. “Watched and waited until the time was right.”

It’s late evening by the time they return to the city proper. Mulaghesh is exhausted, and the muscles in her lower back feel like they can hardly keep her upright. “I’ll send a messenger to notify the Orskovas,” says Nadar as the gates to Fort Thinadeshi open, “as they’ll probably want to be the ones who’ll dispose of the bodies.”

“What’s the next step for you, Captain?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Send a patrol to start canvassing the area in the morning,” says Nadar. “Ask questions, see what looks suspicious. That’s as good a place to start as any. Will you be staying here tonight, General?”

“No, I think it’d be wiser to stay in the city,” says Mulaghesh. “Two generals under one roof…I don’t want to step on any toes.”

“And I assume that SDC’s goosedown beds, ample fireplaces, and top-line chefs have nothing to do with your decision,” says Nadar. Her voice is surprisingly cold.

“It’s been a long day, Captain,” says Mulaghesh sharply, “and you’ve seen some disturbing shit. So I’m willing to give you a pass this one time, Nadar. But just the one.”

“I apologize, General. You have been most helpful in your assessment of the scene back there. Pandey can drive you back down, if you’d like. I’m afraid the rest of us have a busy night ahead.” She salutes, Mulaghesh returns it, and she trots inside Thinadeshi headquarters. Mulaghesh watches her go, reading her subtext loud and clear: You make motions like you want to help, but at the end of the day, you’re still on vacation.

“Whatever,” mutters Mulaghesh, walking to the auto. “I’ve got work to do, too.”

Pandey salutes. “Back to the lighthouse, General?”

“No, not tonight,” she says, climbing in. “Let’s go to the harbor works instead.” She flips through her portfolio, staring at the copies of Choudhry’s strange, disturbing drawings. “I’ve got someone I need to talk to.”

The first place Mulaghesh goes to find Signe is the SDC front desk, where she’s met by a thickset man who glances at a schedule, says “Dock D4,” and points in a somewhat northeasterly direction. Mulaghesh treks to Dock D4, only to be informed upon arrival that Signe has moved on to Prep Station 3, a fenced-off portion of the SDC construction yards. But when she arrives there the foremen tell Mulaghesh she’s missed Signe by twenty minutes; and while they don’t know her schedule, they think she was headed for the Tower Test Assembly Yard—whatever the hells that is.

Mulaghesh, huffing and puffing, trots back in the direction of the SDC headquarters, thinking that Signe must be under the impression that there are actually seventy-two hours in a day: there’s no other explanation why a sane human being would ever schedule their work in such a manner.

As she runs she looks to the edges, the shadows, searching the workers. Dreylings are commonly thought of as pirates and savage seamen by most of the civilized world—and Mulaghesh knows that this reputation is not unearned—but industrialization seems to suit those working here for SDC. Their sealskin coats are all color-coded and smartly arranged, their construction helmets festooned with badges and stickers signaling which areas they’re approved to enter. These people are here to do work, and they mean to do it well.

But some are…different. She spies some of the workers lurking in the shadows, watchful creatures with what are obviously riflings and scatter guns hidden in their coats. She even spots something downright disturbing on the top of a watchtower above the train tracks: a PK-512, a stationary, fully automatic, six-barreled turret capable of spitting out an incredible amount of destruction per second. She takes careful note of the hulking pile of machinery and its massive barrel set: it’s like a scaled-up version of the carousel currently holstered at her side. She remembers seeing one of those during a demonstration just a few years ago and recalls how it shredded a quarter-inch-thick steel plate like it was paper.

Biswal was right, thinks Mulaghesh. They’ve got a private army here.

She finally catches up to Signe, who is being pursued by a flock of anxious Dreylings like a mother duck pursued by her ducklings. As she nears she hears Signe rattling off instructions, and at the conclusion of each order a man peels himself away from her entourage and goes sprinting off through the construction yards. “…Dock G7 is currently undergoing maintenance, so we’ll need to reroute all shipments to H3 until 1200 next Thursday. Repeat, next Thursday. Tower 5 is being assembled, but when it’s finished, it should be able to provide stabilization for Tower 34, which is having trouble finding purchase. Tower 34 needs to be fully operational by 1000 hours Sunday in order for us to do the lift—we have to get that obstruction cleared if we want to get started on the western delta. How are we on diesel?”

“Tanker’s due in tomorrow.”

“What time?”

“Oh-nine-hundred hours.”

“Not good enough. Escalate.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

On and on and on. Signe winnows down her entourage until only three men are left. One of them is obviously her bodyguard, though from his uniform he’s somewhat high-ranking. He spots Mulaghesh coming, glances at the carousel holstered at her hip, and twitches slightly—almost certainly undoing a clasp on some hidden holster.

Signe glances at her. “Oh. Ah! Hello, General. How was the fortress? Illuminating, I trust?”

“Something like that,” says Mulaghesh. She watches the bodyguard closely—he’s a lean, lupine sort of Dreyling. His hair is so short it’s hard to tell what’s hair and what’s stubble.

“Allow me to introduce you both,” says Signe. “This is my chief of security, Lem.”

Mulaghesh smiles thinly. “Evening, Lem.”

Lem just nods. His glower doesn’t change one bit.

“I have some matters to discuss with you,” says Mulaghesh.

“Absolutely,” says Signe, checking off something on a clipboard with a surprising amount of vindication. “I would be more than happy to chat with you. However, I’m reviewing a new tower assembly process that might significantly accelerate a crucial stage in our process.”

“Okay…So?”

“So…” Signe points ahead to a line of thick iron walls, nearly twenty feet tall, riddled with riveted seams. The only visible entrance is a very threatening door with a multistep locking system. It looks like something built to withstand an armed assault, though its roof is a series of canvas tarps, stretched out to give it shelter from the rain. “So, you will not be able to accompany me, I’m afraid. That’s the tower test assembly yard. There are quite a few very, very valuable patents hidden behind those walls, and it wouldn’t do to keep the door open too wide, if you understand me.”

“You’re worried about me being an industrial spy?”

“I wouldn’t normally, but…A Saypuri general, eager for retirement, looking for a way to carve out a nest egg…Maybe I’m paranoid, but paranoia has, in my experience, rarely harmed, and usually helped.”

“Thanks for the kind assessment. So when the hells can I talk to you?”

“Mm…After this, I’ll be headed back over to Dock G7, so…tomorrow?”

“You can’t talk until tomorrow?”

“It is a busy evening,” says Signe. One of her aides hands her a clipboard, which she casts an eye over. “I believe I can give you an hour tomorrow evening. Say, 1900, in the board club.”

“The fancy place we ate at? Fine. Just one more question. When do you sleep?”

“Lem?” says Signe.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“When is my next scheduled sleep?”

He consults a ledger-sized notepad. “Eleven hundred tomorrow, ma’am.”

Signe smiles at Mulaghesh. “Well. There you go. I do have some information for you as well, General—some that needn’t wait. I put out the alert you requested, notifying all employees to come forward if Sumitra Choudhry had approached any of them. And it turns out she did. She asked one of our medics as to whether or not Voortyashtan had an apothecary—a place where one can purchase all manner of—”

“I know what an apothecary is,” says Mulaghesh. She makes a note of this in her portfolio. “Did she say why?”

“She didn’t, I’m afraid. But our medic told me she was quite eager to buy something. What, she wouldn’t say. Look for the shop with the green door on Andrus Street.”

“Wait, the streets have names here? I didn’t even notice.”

“They’re written in the curbs at corners,” says Signe. They approach yet another checkpoint—this one at the door to the tower test assembly yard—and Mulaghesh hangs back, eyeing the Dreyling guard with the rifling slung over his back. “They use fish bones to spell them out. Anyway, here’s hoping more of my workers come forward with something about Miss Choudhry. Maybe one of them will know something more useful to you.”

Mulaghesh continues taking notes. The giant iron door in the wall swings open. Signe walks through, head buried in her clipboard and whispering notes to herself. She doesn’t even look back as the door swings shut with a tremendous clang.

The shop on Andrus Street is really more of a hut, featuring animal-skin walls with seams tightly stitched shut with tendon. The door is a dangling wooden slat painted dull green, its paint cracking. It offers absolutely no insulation against the chilly drafts.

Mulaghesh walks up, knocks three times. Someone inside calls, “Come in!”

She pushes the door aside and finds she is inside of a labyrinth of messy shelves, all curling around her, a cyclone rendered in wood. All the shelves are filled with bottles and jars, most holding blackened and shriveled things that might have once been organic. Others hold seeds, powders, the cores of strange fruits. It takes Mulaghesh a moment to focus on a desk at the other end of the hut, where a small man who’s just as shrunken and withered as his wares is smiling at her.

“Hello, ma’am,” says the little man, “how are you?” His eyes widen, then narrow when he sees her Saypuri uniform. “Beautiful evening, isn’t it?”

“I guess.”

“What can I help you with?” asks the little man. He nods at her arm. “Need a pain poultice for that? I get a lot of sailors from the harbor works here missing all kinds of their bits. I know my way around a stump or two, that I do.”

Mulaghesh pauses, trying to figure out how offended she is by this statement. “No, I—”

“Having women’s issues, then?” He grins. His teeth are like pebbles laced with black lichen. “A lady your age—do you feel the heats upon you? Not an issue at all. I have a—”

“Do you have any poultices that work on a fractured eye socket?” she asks. “Because you’re going to need them if you persist in this line of salesmanship.”

He blinks. “Oh. All right.”

“I’m not here to buy. I have some questions about someone who came here a while ago.”

The little man whistles. “Well, that particular subject matter can be tricky. Very tricksome indeed, unfortunately.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, it would not be in the interest of my clients or my business if I were to go blabbing about what they buy here.” And then, as if an afterthought: “It’d also be a mite bit dishonest, too, I suppose.”

“This would have been a Saypuri,” says Mulaghesh. “A Saypuri woman, like me. Would this be a different situation, then?”

“I’m offended that you would think me being a Continental would prejudice me against a Saypuri enough to compromise my honesty,” says the little man. “It’s a hurtsome thing to think, honestly.”

Sighing, Mulaghesh slaps a twenty-drekel note down on the table.

The little man pockets it in a flash. “Right,” he says brightly. “So. This Saypuri woman.”

“She would have come in several months ago, at least.”

“That’s as I thought. You’re in luck. We very, very rarely get any Saypuri women in here, so I think I remember the one you’re talking about. Short? Bandage here?” He points to his brow. “Acted like she’d been shut up in a room all day?”

“Sounds like the one.”

“Mmm. Yes, I remember her. Very strange person, she was.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The way she acted,” he says, as if her question was powerfully stupid. “The way she looked at things. I take a pellet of drangla weed every morning—it helps me notice things about people.” He taps the edge of his right eye with a dirt-encrusted finger. “Helps me glimpse the edges of their secret selves. Not easy to make, but I have it reasonably pri—”

Mulaghesh loudly cracks her knuckles against her jaw, bending each finger.

“Right, right. Well. This girl, she made me think of someone who’d come out of hiding, and was counting the seconds until they could sneak away again. She bought some very strange things, too—things I hardly ever sell.” He tilts his head back, eyes closed, thinks, and says, “Rosemary. Pine needles. Dried worms. Grave dust. Dried frog eggs. And bone powder.”

“That’s an impressive memory.”

“Stems from a concoction I make.” He sniffs. “Which I, ah, would never be interested in selling you.”

“Smart move.”

“Of course, it did help that she came back and bought those same ingredients over and over again. Each time in larger quantities, too.”

Mulaghesh makes a note of all this. “And I suppose you wouldn’t know,” she says, “exactly what all this could be used for.”

The little man scratches his head theatrically. “Mm, I might have once known, but the thought escapes me now….”

Mulaghesh puts another twenty-drekel note on the table.

The little man snatches it up. “Well, the reason I never sell any of those items anymore is that their primary use doesn’t exist anymore. In that their primary purpose used to be Divine.”

“I see,” says Mulaghesh.

“Yes. They were popular reagents for performing some of the more mundane miracles, with the sole exception being the frog eggs, as those were more top-tier, I suppose you could say. All of the ingredients she bought were Voortyashtani-oriented: rosemary and pine needles, for their evergreen nature; dried worms, for their regenerative properties; grave dust and powdered bone, for their finality; and frog eggs, for their capacity for metamorphosis. All of these things, you see, deal with the threshold dividing life from death.”

“The domain of Voortya,” says Mulaghesh.

“Uh, yes,” he says, somewhat nervous to be so candidly discussing the sacred.

“And what exact miracle do you think someone would try to accomplish with these reagents?” she asks.

“That I can’t say. All the specific stuff was banned when Saypur enforced the Worldly Regulations. They took all those books and packed them away somewhere. I only know the general stuff, which wasn’t quite so illegal.”

“Do you know anyone who might know what miracle they could be used for?”

“Well…” He scratches his chin. “Komayd did roll back a whole lot of the Worldly Regulations when she took the crown, but so far it hasn’t trickled down to us little fellers yet. The only folk who might know are the highlanders.”

“Like, the tribes?”

“Them’s the ones. They’re old traditionalists, they are. They wouldn’t have forgotten a thing like that. Though it’s a bit hard to just sit down and have tea with them.”

Mulaghesh makes another note of this. “What do you have in the way of sleeping aids?”

“Oh, well…that depends on the sleep you need. Do you have trouble falling asleep? Or staying asleep?”

“Staying,” says Mulaghesh, rubbing her left arm.

“And what kind of sleep do you seek, ma’am? Light? Dreamy? Or deep?”

“Deep,” she says immediately. “No dreams, if you can.”

He looks at her, and there’s a curious shine to his eye that makes her think that maybe he wasn’t lying about the drangla weed. “Is it sleep you want to find?” he asks quietly. “Or dreams you wish to escape?”

She looks at him hard. “The latter.”

He reviews his shelves, then takes down a small glass jar filled with tiny brown dots. “Nickletop mushroom caps,” he says, “have a distinctly soporific effect—they make you sleepy, I mean, ma’am. Gets stronger when you steam ’em.” He carefully pours some of them into a tin and affixes the cap. “Sometimes used to put horses asleep before surgery. What this means, ma’am, is don’t take too much of ’em. Cut one in half, and put it below your tongue before bed. You can brew it in tea, too, but the effects take longer. And don’t lick your fingers or prepare any food without washing your hands. Or, ah, engage in any manual intimacy. A dusting of nickletop will render any man’s trouser eel worthless for hours.”

“Now that I’ll keep in mind.” She takes the little tin, pops the cap open, and looks inside. The mushroom caps look like tiny, flaky brown pearls. “Any side effects?”

“Just the one on your purse,” he says. “Thirty drekels, please.”

She grouses for a moment—thirty drekels would be enough for a steak dinner, if there was any beef to speak of around here—but she forks it over. She needs sleep more than she needs money.

Back in her room at the SDC headquarters Mulaghesh massages her arm, pulls the carousel from its holster, and sets it on her nightstand. Then she sits on the edge of her bed, alone in her sumptuous room, listening to the wind and the sea bickering outside her window.

The images of the farmhouse swirl about in her mind: bodies ravaged beyond recognition, the black smoke unscrolling from the tips of the dark trees, a human form half-concealed by a clump of clover.

She tries to tell herself that she’s just disturbed, as anyone would be. She just strolled through the scene of a brutal mass murder and abominable desecration—that’s why her heart is beating so fast. It has nothing to do with the fact that these sights, however grisly, are somewhat familiar to her.

She rummages through her coat, pulls out the little tin of nickletop mushrooms, and taps out one of the dark little buttons. She uses her combat knife to cut it in half and examines the tiny, crumpled half-circle balanced on her index finger. After a second’s hesitation she opens her mouth, sticks it under her tongue—it tastes of wood and wool—and lies down on the bed.

The effects are almost instantaneous. She feels woozy, like her brain is waterlogged, and everything is suddenly incredibly heavy. It’s as if her bones are so dense they’re about to fall through her flesh and through the bottom of the bed.

She remembers what Biswal said to her: It helps me fight the feeling that I’m a fiddly old man wondering if the past ever really happened….

Her lids grow heavy. The nickletop might keep her from dreaming, but it’s helpless to keep her from remembering so much in the few fleeting minutes before sleep.

If you were to bring up the Yellow March in Saypur these days, chances are you’d get a variety of reactions, none of them positive: there’d be a lot of sighs and eye-rolling—not this again—and perhaps a snicker or two. Among the more patriotic quarters such a mention would likely evoke outright hostility: you could be booted from the premises, or even struck in the face.

This is because, in Saypur, all talk of the Yellow March has long been considered either a smear campaign or a paranoid delusion, a dangerous or ludicrous conspiracy theory that only crackpots and the unpatriotic would ever entertain.

Everyone respectable agrees that the Summer of Black Rivers (called such even though it lasted nearly three years) was one of Saypur’s greatest triumphs. It was the war that defined Saypur’s modern national identity, so who would dare besmirch its reputation? Those Saypuris who wish to appear thoughtful will concede that, yes, there might have been something that inspired the wild tale of the Yellow March—war is war, after all, and full of horrors—but it was certainly far short of the events the conspiracy theorists detail.

But Mulaghesh knows it was no conspiracy. Because she remembers. Even though it was almost forty years ago, she remembers.

The Kaj captured the Continent in 1642, and Saypur pulled off the Great Censoring just eight years later, scouring the Continent of all of its sacred images and art. Shortly after that Saypur plunked down the Worldly Regulations, hoping—in futility—that outlawing mention or acknowledgment of the Divine would mean it would no longer affect modern life. Saypur was pretty strict about the WR for most of the Continent, but they tended to tiptoe around Bulikov: even in its postwar, decimated state, it was still a massive metropolis, and it still wielded a lot of power by sheer population. So, to a certain extent, the WR were enforced in Bulikov in name only, so that Saypur could remain unchallenged and keep the remainder of the Continent in check.

Up until 1681, that is. By then Saypur had built up its military and started to flex its muscles, and it was decided Ghaladesh could no longer tolerate such lax control over the Continent’s central city. A litany of severe laws were passed and the crackdowns began. Things escalated—first a protest, then a riot, and then municipal buildings were occupied and the clerks there held hostage—until by ’85 Bulikov was in a full-fledged revolt: the Bulikovian Uprising, they called it. And what started out as an uprising quickly evolved into an outright war.

It was to be the world’s first taste of modern warfare, of battle bereft of Divine intervention. Saypur had just scaled up its production of bolt-shots and other mechanized weaponry to the extent that common infantry could utilize them, and its forces were fresh and eager to fight, keen to prove to their old repressors that Saypur deserved to be a world power. But the Continent had numbers and territory on its side, and despite General Prandah’s claims that this would be a “lightning-fast war, a lot of noise followed by a long silence,” and the vigorous public campaign that all hostilities would merely last a summer—hence the name, which stuck—soon both Saypuri and Continental forces found themselves dug in two hundred miles east of Bulikov on the banks of the Luzhkov River, with no indication that either could break through the other’s fortifications.

Enter Captain Lalith Biswal, then twenty-three years old, a careful, bookish student of what few non-Divine wars could be studied. And, under his command in Yellow Company, a sixteen-year-old Turyin Mulaghesh who had run away from home, lied about her age, enlisted, and gotten her stupid ass promoted to sergeant without even realizing what was going on.

It was during the fifth Battle of the Luzhkov when Captain Biswal and Yellow Company were dispatched in an ambitious flanking maneuver, marching upstream, floating the river, and attacking the Continental positions from the north. It should have worked perfectly and caused massive disruptions in the Continentals’ lines…or it would have if the Continentals hadn’t been aware of the pending attack, right down to the minute it started.

The Saypuri attack was routed both quickly and brutally. The skiffs that had been used to float across the Luzhkov were captured and burned, leaving Yellow Company stranded on the wrong side of the river. All order and discipline collapsed, and the Continentals drove them mercilessly north, away from the battle and the Saypuri lines.

Yellow Company retreated through the night, a rambling, uncoordinated rush through the Continental countryside, pursued by forces far more knowledgeable about the territory than they were. The woods were filled with screams, sprinting horses, distant firelight. When the sun came up, the ragged Saypuri soldiers looked around and realized they did not recognize where they were.

They had never seen this particular set of hills before. Their scouts reported settlements nearby, but not fortifications: they were simple farms.

It took Biswal a moment to realize: “We’re past their fortifications,” he said, sitting atop his horse. “By the seas, we’re behind them!” Though Yellow Company could not have known, the Continental brigade that’d been dispatched to pursue them had been distracted by a full-frontal assault by General Prandah’s forces far to the south. Which meant Yellow Company no longer had any pursuers, no one to push them out of Continental territory.

It should not have happened. But it did.

Mulaghesh still remembers the evening of that first day, when Biswal approached her and took her aside. The mist gathering on the hills, the moaning and weeping from the scattered troops. Fires were forbidden—the smoke would give them away—so all of them clutched their arms and legs and shivered, eating dried meats. This had not been intended to be a far-ranging mission, so they had very few provisions, and many of those had been lost in the retreat.

He led her to a small forest clearing. “Lieutenant Pankaj died of wounds this morning,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. Though I’ve heard a lot of sorries today. The word’s losing meaning.” He sighed. “We can’t find Niranjan, or Kapil, or Ram. Which means that I’ve lost nearly all of my officers overnight. I don’t have powers of promotion, but you’re more or less going to have to be my lieutenant, Mulaghesh, so that’s what I’m going to call you. And if we live to get busted down for that, I’ll be grateful.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re young, but I’ve watched you fight. You’re not stupid, and other soldiers listen to you. That’s a valuable thing.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Biswal turned to watch the hills. “So. It seems like we have three choices. We can return south, survey the enemy’s position, and try and flank them again when the time’s right, carrying out our original orders. Or, we can go east, try and ford the Luzhkov, circumvent the enemy’s position, and rejoin Prandah.” He paused.

“And our third choice?”

He looked at her, his pale eyes sharp. “What do you think our odds are of pulling either of those two options off, Lieutenant?”

“Minimal, sir.”

“And why’s that?”

“The Continentals aren’t stupid. At some point they’ll realize we’re still here. If they aren’t in pursuit by now, they’ll be ready for us to return. They’ll watch the river. That’s what they’ll expect.” She glanced, side-eyed, at the ragged, wounded soldiers sitting below the pines. “And I don’t think we’re in any shape for serious combat, sir. We don’t have any supplies. I’m not sure if we can last more than a handful of days.”

“I agree.” He looked at the hills surrounding them again.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“You mentioned a third option, sir.”

“I did.” He sucked his teeth. “Do you know what keeps the Continental forces on their feet, Lieutenant? What keeps their fortifications so firm?”

She was smart enough by then to know not to answer a superior officer’s rhetorical questions. “I don’t, sir.”

“Farms,” said Biswal. He walked to a tree, leaned against it, and watched a tiny hamlet nestled in a distant valley. “Food and farms. We’re in the middle of the breadbasket of the Continent, Mulaghesh. By complete and total accident, sure, but here we are.” He paused. “And there are lots of ways to win a war. A war isn’t between armies, it’s between nations.” He pursed his lips, sighed, shook his head. “But by the seas, what a way to fight.”

“Are you suggesting we…”

He looked over his shoulder at her. “Go on, Lieutenant.”

“Are you suggesting that we make war upon the civilians here?”

“I’m saying one option is we destroy their farms, their infrastructure, their irrigation systems. Take what we need to survive, destroy the rest, then move to the next town, and do it again. We’d cut right through all of the Continentals’ supply lines. But it’s a damn bastard thing to do, that I’ll say.”

He looked at her, and she somehow understood that he wanted her to judge him, to say something, perhaps to approve. And what lay unspoken between them was the knowledge that they now made war in the nation of those who once enslaved them.

All Mulaghesh could manage was, “We’re dying, sir.”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“We’re starving.”

“Yes.”

“I think we’re going to die here no matter what we do.”

He was silent. Then: “Yes. I agree.”

“My conclusion, if I might be so bold to give it, sir, is we might as well try and do our part,” she said quietly. “With as much time as we have left.”

He nodded and stared off into the distance, lost in thought. Then: “Gather as many troops as you can. Comb the forest, comb the hills—carefully. Round up the survivors. Tomorrow morning, we’re going to move.” He took out his spyglass and watched the little hamlet in the valley. “We’ll approach from the southwest, through the forest. It’ll be slow going, but we’ll want to surprise them. And damn it, Mulaghesh…” He ripped away his spyglass and held it tightly in his hands, as if imagining choking someone, and she understood how furious all this made him. “If…If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this right. We’ll do it peaceably. We’ll be organized, disciplined. No casualties, unless we can’t avoid them. I will not condone the shedding of innocent blood, even if it is Continental. Certainly not women or children. We are soldiers, not raiders, with strategic goals. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

“Do you think we can achieve that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you have your orders, Lieutenant. Dismissed.”

She saluted and trotted away through the woods.

Lying upon the bed in the SDC headquarters, head swilling with the fog of nickletop, Mulaghesh looks back on that moment and thinks, What wild promises we make in order to justify the worst of decisions.

Yet even as her body grows leaden and numb, one last thought persists, nagging at her.

Something she saw today isn’t right.

She remembers the corpses from the farmhouse that afternoon, and thinks, I’ve seen those bodies before. I’ve seen something like that before.

She tells herself: Bodies in the Continental wilderness. Certainly. I know that sight well.

Yet still: No. No. I saw those bodies just recently. I saw that sight just today, before I went to that farmhouse….

And she realizes that she’s right.

Mulaghesh attempts to sit up, but her body won’t obey. She lurches forward with one arm outstretched, grasping for her portfolio, but succeeds only in knocking it off her nightstand. Then darkness closes in on her.

Don’t lose that thought. Don’t lose that thought….

When she wakes in the morning she feels like her eyes are made of drying mud. It takes a disconcertingly long time for her to make some basic connections—Where am I? Why does my arm hurt? What in hells is wrong with my head?—and an even longer time for her to find the energy to sit up and rub her face.

“No side effects,” she mutters. “Fucking bullshit.” Everything hurts: her back, her legs, her arms. It’s a miracle she didn’t overdose and kill herself.

Suddenly, she remembers.

“Holy shit,” she says. She grabs her portfolio and sprints out the door.

It takes twenty minutes for an SDC telephone to open up—apparently some major construction work is going on upshore—and even longer for the on-call sergeant to get Captain Nadar on the phone.

“What?” says Nadar’s voice, not even bothering to try to be cordial. “What is it? Who is this?”

“It’s General Mulaghesh. Listen, I realized something about those bodies the other day.”

“Oh.” Nadar clears her throat, affecting a more formal tone. “Yes, General?”

“We’d seen them before. Both of us had. That very day, as a matter of fact. We saw them before we ever went to that farmhouse.”

A long pause.

“What?” says Nadar, bewildered.

“I made some copies of the sketches in Choudhry’s room,” says Mulaghesh, flipping through her portfolio. “And in one corner was something I couldn’t make sense of. They looked like, like little chicken wings on kebab sticks or something like that. But that’s not what they were. It was a drawing of human bodies. Bodies mutilated just like the ones we saw yesterday!”

The Dreyling foreman on the phone next to her slowly turns to stare at her over his shoulder, bug-eyed.

“What are you suggesting, General?” says Nadar.

“I’m suggesting that Sumitra Choudhry drew the murder scene we saw yesterday months before it actually happened. She predicted it, somehow!”

“What? How could that be?”

“I don’t know. But I know what I’m looking at.”

“But Choudhry was mad….Couldn’t it just be a coincidence?”

“I feel like drawing ritually mutilated torsos and then seeing ritually mutilated torsos is a pretty damned unlikely coincidence, even for a madwoman.”

The Dreyling foreman is now sweating heavily and stretching out his phone’s cord to its fullest extent as he inches away from her.

“So what are you proposing?” says Nadar.

“You probably don’t have time for this, but I do,” says Mulaghesh. “I want to ride up to where the first murder took place and check it out. If there’s a chance Choudhry was involved in this, we need to look into it.”

“The first murder took place deep in disputed territory, General. It’s not safe.”

“Neither am I. I can handle myself.”

“I admire your confidence, General, but—if it turns out that you can’t?”

“Well, you all are getting pretty handy at boxing up dead generals. I expect you could handle me in your sleep.”

Nadar sighs. “I’ll talk to Pandey and have him make preparations for you.”

“Excellent,” says Mulaghesh. “I appreciate your cooperation, Captain Nadar.”

“Always happy to help, General,” says Nadar, though she pauses just long enough to make it clear the reverse is true.

Later that day Mulaghesh—armed and provisioned in case she gets lost—sets out into the countryside, taking the same road they took yesterday, north of Fort Thinadeshi. But at one creek she makes a hard right toward the Tarsil Mountains, which swell up in the distance, forming a towering pink-and-green wall.

She consults the map again. The village she’s looking for is called Ghevalyev, deep in the woods along one of the many creeks in this area. Everything she sees is covered in damp, soft green moss—tree branches, stones, even the road itself. Eventually Mulaghesh wonders if she, too, would find herself covered in moss if she didn’t keep moving. But after a few miles the lumps of moss take on some more organized shapes, and she realizes that underneath the greenery are walls, fences, and gates—civilization, in other words.

She checks the map. “I must be here,” she says, surprised. “Huh.” She checks the rest of the original report, which Pandey included with the map. There’s not much on this first incident—they thought it was a clear and simple case of murder at the time, albeit a particularly gruesome example—but there is a note that the man found dead at the scene was the village charcoal maker.

She keeps riding until yurts and huts emerge from the firs ahead. A small boy of about eleven sits by the road, filthy and malnourished, surrounded by an absolute swarm of tiny goats. Both the boy and the goats stare at her with the same expression: curious but utterly lacking in intelligence.

Mulaghesh looks at him. “This Ghevalyev?” she asks.

He stares at her, openmouthed. She can’t tell if he’s impressed or if his face just does that.

“I understand there was a charcoal maker here until a few months ago,” she says. “Know where he would be?”

The boy just stares at her. Then there’s a voice from the yurt behind him: “Vim, the only damned reason I asked you to be out there in the first place is to keep. The goats. Outside.” There’s a frantic baa-ing, and a tiny goat scurries out the front flat of the yurt, springing away down the muddy road. “Now there’s shit all over the floor and it stole some of the turni—”

A big barrel-chested man exits the yurt and does a double take when he sees Mulaghesh sitting on her horse. “Oh,” he says. She watches carefully as his eyes take in her weapons: carousel, rifling, and sword. His look is much too watchful for her liking. “How can I…uh, help you?”

Mulaghesh smiles widely. “Good morning,” she says, her words ringing with forced cheer. “I’m General Turyin Mulaghesh of the Saypuri Military.”

“A general?” he says, surprised. “Here?”

“Seems to be so.”

“Oh. Well. My name is Drozhkin,” says the man. “And this is Vim.” He nudges the boy with the toe of his leather shoe. The boy, unsurprisingly, doesn’t react.

“Good morning to both of you,” she says. “I’m told there was a charcoal maker in this village once.”

“Was and once are the right words to use,” he says. “Mad bastard’s dead.”

“Mad?”

“Oh, yes. Mad as a hare in a collapsing tunnel. But most charcoal makers are. Part of the trade.”

“Why’s that?”

“Why?” he says, as if the question is absurd. “Because he had to spend days awake making sure the whole forest didn’t burn down. Poor bastard had to invent himself a one-legged stool to sit on. If he fell asleep then it’d tip and he’d fall on his ass. No surprise he murdered his wife. I’d go mad, too, if I had to stay awake that long.”

“I suppose you’d be surprised if I told you we actually don’t think he murdered her anymore,” says Mulaghesh.

“ ‘We’ being”—his eyes trail over her uniform—“you.” The word drips with many unspoken sentiments, chief among them: And why would we care what you think?

“A family was killed southwest of here in nearly the same fashion. Four of them.”

“A whole family?” His face pales a little. “Zhurgut’s tears…What an abomination. So there is a killer, then?”

“Did anyone actually see him kill his wife?”

“No one wants to live next to a charcoal maker. But I heard a rumor Gozha said she saw…something. The night they died.”

“Gozha?”

“An old woman. Mushroom peddler. Also mad. Might be why she went to see Bohdan, so they could have something to talk about.”

Mulaghesh scribbles furiously. “And who’s Bohdan?”

“Who? The charcoal maker, of course. Don’t you know anything?”

“Apparently not,” says Mulaghesh. “So Gozha says she saw something the night Bohdan the charcoal maker got killed. Is that about the cut of it?”

“She didn’t say that,” he says hastily. “I just heard she acted like she did. I don’t have anything to do with this business. I’m…I’m not even sure I should be answering your questions. I mean…” He gestures to her. “Even this looks bad.”

“Tell me where Bohdan and Gozha both live,” she says, “and you won’t have any more to answer.”

After twenty more minutes of riding along forest lanes, the trees begin to thin out, replaced by stumps. It doesn’t take long to see why: up ahead is a filthy dirt clearing spotted with curious mounds of earth, almost like giant anthills or beehives, all reeking of cinder. Mulaghesh recognizes them as charcoal kilns: they’d make a pyramid of wood, cover it with earth, then set the exposed tip alight, letting it slowly smolder for days and days. And the maker would have to watch it carefully: if a log shifted the earth could collapse, allowing in too much air, and the pile of wood would go up in a flash—along with most of the forest, probably. A filthy, miserable way to make a living, she thinks to herself. But at least it’s a living….

She sees the living quarters up ahead, if it could even be called such: it’s a misshapen wooden box of a structure, set atop a long dirt hill. Mulaghesh gets the impression that the charcoal maker didn’t invest much effort in his home, as there was always a chance it could go up in flames. Perhaps it had burned down before, only to have him rebuild it.

Mulaghesh looks around the clearing. Then she ties up her horse, considers the angle of the home, and begins walking through the surrounding forest, trying to find the best angle where she can see both the front and the back of the house….

It doesn’t take long for her to find it: another blind, created from clippings from fir trees. These clippings have browned considerably by now, making it easier to spot, but when the blind was first made it would have been almost invisible—hence why the original investigation team never found it. That, and they didn’t know to look.

Mulaghesh shoves the branches away. Again, she sees that whoever made it cleared the forest floor of needles. Perhaps this mysterious observer, thinks Mulaghesh, possesses an unusually sensitive backside. She looks around for some sign or spoor and finds nothing. As she starts to withdraw she pauses, stoops, and looks again.

Carved into the trunk of a tree is an unusual sign, but a familiar one to her: the crude image of a sword with the hilt made of a severed hand.

“The sword of Voortya,” says Mulaghesh, touching it with two fingers.

She imagines this person, whoever they were, sitting behind this blind, carving this into the tree….She gets the impression that this was not an act of reverence but rather boredom, just something to occupy the time. Someone patient, then, waiting a long time for the right opportunity.

She walks back to the hut on the dirt mound. It has no door—it’s been torn off the hinges, somehow—so she walks in. It’s the same on the inside as it is on the outside: just a simple wooden box built of scrap wood. The floor is wood slats, the ceiling patched over with skins. At first Mulaghesh thinks the floor looks unusually dark, but then she realizes it’s stained—the residue of the blood of Bohdan’s wife. To most people the stain would look unusually large, but Mulaghesh is quite aware that the human body possesses more blood than one would expect.

She looks around the depressing little shack. It’s bereft of almost anything personalized or pleasant. The bed is just a raised fretwork of sticks covered in furs and skins, the fireplace a teetering stack of bricks. Mulaghesh can’t imagine why someone would marry into such a life—but then, she knows not everyone has a choice.

As she walks around the shack she realizes her footsteps sound oddly…hollow. She bounces up and down on the balls of her feet and listens to the creak and moan of the floorboards. Then she squats and peers through two slats of wood. It’s hard to tell, but it almost looks like there’s some kind of a space down there….

“He built it to escape a fire,” says a voice from the door.

Mulaghesh snaps up, hand on her carousel, and pauses at the sight of the old woman at the doorway. The old woman, to her credit, hardly flinches: she’s a brown, hard, wiry thing, like a human form carved from old, smoked wood. She’s dressed in ratty furs and skins, her eyes dark and hard and glittering.

“Lady,” says Mulaghesh, “I know there’s no door, but there’s still plenty of stuff to knock on.”

“You’re from the army,” says the old woman. It’s not a question. “An easterner.”

“And you are?”

“I am Gozha.”

“Ah.” Mulaghesh relaxes, but only a little. “How is it you came to be here, Gozha? I have you on my list to visit. I have some questions for you.”

“Drozhkin came to me to beg forgiveness.” She steps inside. “He felt he had slighted me by telling you what I saw. Betrayed a neighbor, I suppose. That man…Nothing goes in his head that doesn’t come out his mouth. I’m surprised his brains have stayed where they are.”

“And what was it that you saw, ma’am?”

Gozha stands beside her, looking down at the stain on the floor. “He was not a bad man, Bohdan. Not smart, not lucky, but not bad.”

“Is that so?”

“He built the cellar down there to hide in case of a fire, in case the whole house went up. He even built a pipe out the side of the dirt mound so they’d have air.” She looks at Mulaghesh. “He loved her, you see. Wanted to protect her. He always had the doctor out here, checking on her, just in case. He fretted so. But…he wasn’t smart—if she was hiding in the basement, and the house caught fire, why, she’d be trapped with it falling in on her….Not one for deep thinking, Bohdan.”

Mulaghesh stands up. “What happened here?”

“Why? What does it matter to you?”

“What’s happened here has happened elsewhere. And it could happen again.”

“Again. What does it matter to you?”

“They’re getting better at it, I think. The last one was worse than this. The next one will be worse still.”

“Again. Still. What does it matter to you?”

“Why wouldn’t this matter to me?” says Mulaghesh.

“Why? You are an easterner, a Saypuri. We are Voortyashtanis. To you we are no better than pigs or goats—yes?”

“I’ve seen Voortyashtanis bleed and I’ve seen Saypuris bleed. It looks the same. I’d like to keep everyone’s blood right where it is as much as I can.”

“Glib pleasantries,” says Gozha. “The sort of thing a diplomat claims before cutting your throat and making off with your daughter.”

Mulaghesh looks her in the eye. “Do I look like a fucking diplomat?”

Gozha holds her gaze for a moment. She looks away. “I did not see the murders.”

“Then what did you see?”

“Very little.” She looks out the window. “I was just over there, in the trees. It was dark, late at night, but the moon was bright. I was leading my pony through the woods nearby….She has a strong sense of smell, my little pony. And when she started acting up, I could tell what she smelled. I knew there was blood nearby.” Gozha walks to the open door of the shack. “I came to the edge of the clearing to see, and I saw a woman standing there in the charcoal yard.”

“Bohdan’s wife?”

Gozha shakes her head. “No. This woman was shorter. I think she was short. Perhaps I only had eyes for what was standing at the door of the house….”

“Which was what?”

“You’ll think I’m mad.”

“I’ve seen mad things. You can believe me.”

Gozha tilts her head, thinking, and says in a dreamy voice, “I thought it was a scarecrow, at first. Not a real person, a real man. A picture of a man, arranged from…well. Made of things.”

“Things?”

“Yes, things. Scraps, it seemed. Spikes. Rags and thorns. A man made of thorns, six or seven feet tall, dark and faceless….And in his hands was a gleaming sword, silvery and bright. I didn’t think he was real until he turned around and walked back in the house.”

Silence.

Gozha turns around. “You don’t believe me. You think I’m mad. Of course you do.”

Mulaghesh thinks for a moment. “I don’t….Well. Hells. I don’t know what to believe. He was wearing a suit? A suit of rags and…and thorns?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if he was a he. It was dark and hard to see. But he and the woman just looked at each other, seeming to speak quietly, before he went back inside.”

“Tell me about this woman.”

“Like I said, she was short, and wore a dark cloak. Purple or green, perhaps. She had it pulled tight over her head. I couldn’t see her face or even her hands.”

A careful one, then, to hide so much of herself. “What happened after the man in the thorn suit walked back into the house?”

“I had tied my pony up in the lane east of here. It began to whinny and whicker, frightened, and I worried the woman and the man of thorns would see me, so I snuck away. It wasn’t until two days later that I heard that Bohdan and his wife were found dead.”

“And you don’t think Bohdan was in the thorn suit?”

“Bohdan was like a lot of men around here, easterner—he is lucky if he ate as a child. He was not, shall I say, broad of beam.”

“Which the man in the suit was.”

“He cut a fearsome figure, that thing,” says Gozha quietly. “Like something from a nightmare.” She looks at Mulaghesh. “You think these people killed Bohdan and his wife?”

“It seems likely, yes.”

“Why? Why kill the charcoal maker of Ghevalyev? Who could possibly care about poor Bohdan?”

“I think that’s the point,” says Mulaghesh. “It’s easier to harm those considered unimportant—a charcoal maker and his wife, or a family on a farm, out in the middle of nowhere.”

“But why do it at all?”

“It sounds like…like some kind of ritual,” says Mulaghesh. “A ceremony. The way the bodies are mutilated, the way the person doing it dresses. And someone watches, from a distance, needing to make sure it happens….”

“Voortyashtanis have many ceremonies,” says Gozha. “And surely they had more before the collapse, the Blink. But I never knew of this one.”

“That’s not to say it didn’t exist,” says Mulaghesh. “But what it’s meant to do is beyond me.”

Gozha begins to walk away. Then she stops at the door and says, “It feels strange to say this to an easterner. But I hope you catch these people.” Her gaze sharpens. “We are not pigs or goats, General Mulaghesh.”

“I know that.”

“I hope the others who wear your uniform think the same as you.”

Mulaghesh goes to the doorway and watches Gozha walk away through the forest. Then she looks up and tries to gauge the position of the sun in the sky. It’s early afternoon. She needs to be back in the city by evening. If she misses her hour with Signe tonight, she’ll probably die of old age waiting around for an opening again. She takes one last look around the shack.

She stops. Cocks her head. Then walks to the corner.

There’s a trace of something silvery on the floor in the corner of the shack. Mulaghesh touches it with her fingertips and looks at them in the light.

It looks a little like graphite, soft and powdery.

“Ah, shit,” says Mulaghesh. “It can’t be….” She looks around for the trapdoor, finds it, tears it open, and drops down to the earthen basement.

It’s close, dark, and damp down here. She lights a match, sending warm, fluttering luminescence dancing over the dark walls. Bohdan stocked this room with the bare essentials, pots of water and skins for sleeping on. She looks up, guessing where she saw the residue, and walks to the corner.

The earthen floor glimmers at her feet. She squats to examine the loose pile of light, dusty ore collected in the corner, where it must’ve trickled through the cracks in the floor. She touches it with her fingers. It falls apart like powdered sugar.

She knows what it is. She saw mounds of it yesterday, after all.

“Thinadeskite,” she whispers. “Well, I’ll be fucking damned.”

Nadar’s eyes dance around Biswal’s office as she thinks. “That’s…not possible.”

“I don’t know how, either,” says Mulaghesh. “I could be wrong—I’d prefer to be wrong. But I dumped out my water and put it in here so you could check to make sure.” She holds her canteen out. “How long would it take for Prathda to confirm this is actually thinadeskite?”

Nadar takes it, still stunned and blinking as she tries to process this revelation. A dove flits by the windows of Biswal’s crow’s nest, glancing at these three strange creatures having a discussion at the top of the tower. “An hour at most,” she says. “It’s easy to identify.”

“Then I suggest we start now,” says Biswal. He sits staring eastward at the Tarsils, fingers steepled and deep in thought. “The security implications are…concerning.”

“You’re absolutely right, sir,” says Nadar. There’s a gleam of sweat around her temple. “To have such a substance appear in Voortyashtani hands…”

“And at the scene of a brutal murder,” says Mulaghesh.

“And, if what you’ve said is correct,” says Biswal, “a murder that a missing Ministry intelligence operative had some knowledge of.”

“Maybe,” says Mulaghesh. “There are a lot of maybes here. We still haven’t worked out how Choudhry could have predicted the murders.”

Biswal sits back in his chair, eyes fixed on the distant Solda. “There are no other verified or known sources of thinadeskite in this region. We’re the only source. So somehow it got from here to there. Now I have to wonder what else might be getting from here to there, or vice versa—intelligence, resources, weapons….Could someone have an operative or an informant in Fort Thinadeshi? Someone who could tell insurgents how to cut through the perimeters, throw open the gates, and work around the schedules of our patrols?”

“Determining this is a priority for me, sir,” says Nadar. She looks pale. Mulaghesh isn’t surprised: having a security breach take place under your watch is something your superiors aren’t quick to forget.

“I’m glad to hear it. Have your most trusted people run the tests on what General Mulaghesh brought back,” says Biswal. “Then do a thorough probe and reevaluation of the mining and research operations. We’ll want to know what happens to the thinadeskite every step of the way, and who’s involved. See if anyone squirms under the pressure. And have General Mulaghesh here check out the mines, too.”

Mulaghesh’s heart nearly sings. She was hoping Biswal would say that. If he didn’t, she was going to have to ask for it herself, and requesting access to such a highly controlled site could be a considerable overreach of authority.

“Yes, sir,” says Nadar. “I…I would like for my own investigators to get a look first, if that’s possible.”

Biswal looks to Mulaghesh. “Sure,” she says. “I’m here to help, if I can. I’ve no talent for vacations. Make use of me if you can.”

“We appreciate your assistance in this matter,” says Biswal. “Without your attention we wouldn’t have even known about this issue.”

Mulaghesh keeps her face still as she nods, though she doesn’t want his compliments. She doesn’t need Nadar being more frustrated with her than she already is, and she knows the captain doesn’t think of this as a “we” situation: this is Mulaghesh riding into Fort Thinadeshi and making everyone look bad, especially Nadar.

“It would take about four days for reevaluation, sir,” says Nadar. “And that’s a quick turnaround time.”

“Four days…and on the fifth, we’re talking to the tribal leaders.” He rubs his brow, groaning slightly. “General Mulaghesh can take her tour that afternoon, then, I suppose. I’ve no doubt you and I will have plenty to occupy us by then, Nadar.”

“We can make it work, sir.”

Biswal nods at Nadar. “Good. Dismissed, Captain. Thank you.” Nadar nods at him, then turns and trots down the stairwell.

“Take a seat, Turyin,” says Biswal. He reaches down, pulls out two small glasses, and pours some plum wine. “You know, when I said I could give you some problems to handle, I didn’t mean you needed to go out and find some new ones we didn’t know about.”

“You’d prefer I keep silent the next time?”

“Hells no. I just never figured you’d be one of those soldiers who spend their golden years banging around military halls, trying to find problems to fix.”

“Let’s watch it on the whole ‘golden years’ shit. And also, this is coming from a man who fought to take command here.”

“Fair point.” He slides a glass over, then picks up his own and holds it to his temple. He sighs. “But you’re getting some impression of all the problems we’re having here. All the problems I’ve inherited, in other words. And, if you can believe it, this new one isn’t even the most alarming.”

“I’ve got a feeling you’re about to ask me to do something, Lalith.”

“I do outrank you, remember.” He smiles sardonically and taps the bars on his collar. Biswal is a third-class general of the Saypuri Military, whereas Mulaghesh is fourth-class, the lowest class one could possibly occupy while still possessing the rank of general. Mulaghesh is well aware that the only reason she has the rank at all is that Shara wanted her on the military council, which is forbidden to anyone below the rank of general. But then, nepotism is so rampant in Ghaladesh currently that there are more generals and colonels in service than there are captains and lieutenants.

“True,” she says. She sips at her wine. It tastes like vinegar to her tongue. “I also know I don’t want to be in your seat, so you can keep outranking me all you want.”

He sighs. “You can say that again. When I brought up security breaches earlier, materials and resources mysteriously leaving the fortress…This wasn’t the first time.”

“I kind of got that impression.”

“A year and a half ago a supply train traveling from Fort Hadj to Fort Lok was hit by highland insurgents. They dragged a bunch of logs up onto the track so the train had no choice but to stop. And this particular train was carrying a great deal of weapons, ammunition—and explosives.”

“Shit.”

“Yes. My predecessor waged a vigorous campaign in response and managed to recover most of the weapons and ammunition, and all of the explosives—or so he thought. This would be, as a note, the very campaign that he wound up dying in. But last month we did an inventory check, and we found fifteen pounds of the explosives we recovered aren’t actually explosives at all. They’re sand and clay. Mock-ups.”

“Shit.”

“Yes. We don’t know when the switch took place, unfortunately. Maybe when the insurgents first took possession of it. But now that you’ve found what you’ve found, maybe someone switched it here, at the fortress.”

“You think that if someone helped secret thinadeskite out,” says Mulaghesh, “they might have done the same for your explosives.”

He nods, his steely gray eyes shining bright. “That’s correct. And I worry enough about what happens outside these walls and wire. To have a rat amidst us…”

“So where do I come in? I don’t want to horn in on Nadar’s command here any more than I already have.”

“I don’t want you to, either,” says Biswal. “Nadar is an exceptional officer in a difficult situation. No, I want you to talk to the CTO of SDC for me.”

“Ah,” says Mulaghesh. “Harkvaldsson. You’re worried about the harbor.”

“I am. Fifteen pounds of explosives in insurgent hands…That has me looking around, wondering exactly what’s vulnerable. And there’s a lot vulnerable down at the harbor. It wouldn’t be the first time they tried. A sharpshooter once took a shot at our ambitious, young CTO a few months ago. He missed and the SDC guards mowed him down pretty quick—but still.”

“Why not talk to her yourself?”

“We don’t have the…” He grumbles and stares out the window. “Well. The easiest relationship. She asks for a lot. I say no a lot. It’s a dance we do every time we meet. But I want her to respond to this threat adequately. It might help if the warning comes from someone else.”

“I hardly deal with her any better,” says Mulaghesh. “But I need to talk to her anyway. I’ll take care of it.”

“There’s also the tribal leader meeting in five days,” says Biswal. “They’ll know all about the murders at Poshok by now. I want you to be there.”

“What, to testify?”

“We don’t have anything to testify on yet. No, I just want another set of eyes. You dealt with people like this in Bulikov. See if you spot anything squirrelly. Odds are someone in that room will be the person responsible for stealing those explosives—and possibly the thinadeskite, too.”

“I’m not a mind reader, Lalith.”

“But you’re better than nothing. And nothing is what we have now.” He stares glumly into his wineglass, then drains it. “Harkvaldsson sent us new forecasts. Three months until the harbor and rivers are dredged. Then two years until the harbor itself is a functioning port. She says the dredging is the hard part—they’ve been at it for years already. And from an engineering standpoint, that might be true. But I’m concerned about what comes after.”

“After?”

“What’s it going to cost to keep the peace? And how long are we going to be here?” He looks at her balefully. “Not all of us are lauded heroes such as you, Turyin. We don’t get to hop from place to place. Some might be sailing out of that port soon. But I won’t. I expect me and the rest of the troops here will be in Voortyashtan for a long, long time.”