City of Blades

6. Rites and Rituals

Mulaghesh is in a cheerless mood when she walks into the SDC board club. She’s done nothing here but find more questions, each one more troubling than the last. And while at first she worried over how Sumitra Choudhry could have known about the murders before they happened, now she keeps thinking about what Gozha said at the charcoal maker’s shack….

A short woman, thinks Mulaghesh. Every inch of skin concealed.

Choudhry came here eight months ago. The murders at Ghevalyev took place seven months ago. Then Choudhry disappeared two months later. The timing’s right—Choudhry was in the region—though does anyone have any proof that Choudhry’s not in Voortyashtan now, hiding out?

Let’s not jump to conclusions, she thinks, shoving the door open. Even if they seem so easy to get to.

She sits, and the Dreyling boy with the wispy mustache slinks out of the secret door in the wall and places a platter before her: fried biscuits, a variety of smoked or pickled fish, and some sort of dark green concoction that Mulaghesh isn’t familiar with and doesn’t wish to be.

She checks the clock on the wall. Just past 1900. Yet there’s no Signe in sight.

She pulls out her portfolio and idly flips through the files she found in Choudhry’s room. She stares at the painting of Vallaicha Thinadeshi, wondering what grave she lies in in this country.

“Why are you reading about Thinadeshi?” asks a voice over her shoulder.

“Huh?” She looks up to find Signe standing over her, clipboard nestled under her arm, a gray scarf piled around her neck, and a tiny porcelain thimble of ink-black coffee in her hand. “Oh, ah…Well. Choudhry was reading about her.”

“Choudhry might have wanted a broad view of the region,” says Signe, sitting, “but I didn’t realize she wanted a view that broad. Thinadeshi disappeared here, what, fifty years ago?”

“Sixty some-odd, yeah.”

“Well, that I could’ve chatted to her about. She was a childhood hero of mine, you know. The great engineer. And we had something in common, of course….”

“And what was that?”

“Why, we both had a fucking miserable time here in Voortyashtan, didn’t we?” She smiles briefly, then checks her watch, a complicated, sleek contraption. “We have a little over fifty minutes. What is it you’d like to discuss with me, General?”

“Well, now I have something new to talk with you about. Something…delicate.”

“How delicate?”

“About as delicate as it gets.” She begins to outline Biswal’s briefing, but—as she expected—Signe doesn’t let her get too far into it.

“A bomb?” says Signe, appalled.

Mulaghesh holds up a hand as she chews a fried biscuit. “Well, realistically, it’s probably several bombs.”

“Several bombs?”

“Fifteen pounds of explosives…That’s quite a bang. Better to distribute it throughout your target. Or parcel it out and do a long, sustained, exhausting bombing campaign.”

Signe is so horrified she’s brought to her feet. “You…You can’t be serious!”

“I am. Biswal is requesting you allocate your security forces appropriately.”

“Requesting!” Signe hisses. “Requesting! How polite and considerate of him!”

“Sit down. And calm down. I’m about to say something that might ease your fears a little—but I still want to make sure you absolutely understand that this is a threat to be taken seriously.”

“Does it look like I’m not taking it seriously?” shouts Signe. Mulaghesh has to admit, this is the most rattled she’s seen Signe yet. Threatening the harbor, she thinks, is like threatening her child.

“Sit,” says Mulaghesh forcefully. “Once I’m done you can go tell your chief of security. But I want you to hear this first.”

Signe does so, her face pink with fury.

“Let’s look at the timeline,” says Mulaghesh. “A year and a half ago, the train gets raided. Biswal’s predecessor wages an extensive campaign to recover what was lost and loses his life in the process. And now, just in the past days, we discover that the explosives that were recovered were fakes, and the real explosives are still out there.”

“So?” says Signe.

“So whoever has the explosives hasn’t done anything with them for over a year and a half,” says Mulaghesh. “That doesn’t make sense. You steal something, you try and use it before the owner figures out it’s stolen. You wait too long and then the owner starts investigating and trying to make sure you can’t ever use it. Which is what we’re doing now.”

Signe lights a cigarette. “So?”

“So something doesn’t add up. This isn’t a ‘lull your enemy into a false sense of security’ situation. We’ve been in a false sense of security for months, and they didn’t do anything. Just glancing at the timeline, it almost makes me think those explosives aren’t in insurgent hands anymore. Haven’t the tribes been warring with one another for months?”

“Of course.”

“So you’re telling me that for nearly a year, the insurgents found no opportunities to use fifteen pounds of high-impact explosives against the people they despise?”

“I suppose that’s a good point….”

“And why would they come after the harbor?” says Mulaghesh. “Everyone’s squabbling over the money you and SDC are going to make everyone. It’s not like you’ve done anything to piss off the highland tribes, have you?”

At that Signe’s face does something interesting to Mulaghesh—nothing. Her mouth doesn’t purse, her eyebrows don’t wriggle, and her pupils don’t move one jot. She barely seems to even breathe.

Then, finally, she takes a languid drag from her cigarette and says, “The very idea is ridiculous.”

“Of course it is.” Mulaghesh looks her over. Signe returns her gaze, her arctic blue eyes staring back coolly through the veil of smoke. “Go talk to your security people. You’ll want to get started on this immediately. But when you’re done, come back to me. We’re not done here.”

“Oh, aren’t we?”

Signe wrinkles her nose as Mulaghesh stuffs half of a cured fish fillet into her mouth. “It was damned hard enough just getting you to sit down with me,” says Mulaghesh. “I’m not letting you walk away without getting what I need.”

Initially Mulaghesh is worried Signe won’t come back. She can’t blame her: a serious security threat isn’t anything to joke about. But to her relief, Signe comes walking back into the room just as Mulaghesh finishes her plate.

“So,” says Signe. “What is it that you wished to discuss with me?”

Mulaghesh wipes her mouth. “Voortya.”

“What?”

“I want you to tell me about Voortya.”

“Voortya? Why?”

She flips open her portfolio and slides it over to Signe. “Because that’s what was on the walls of Choudhry’s room. I’m no artist, but…It should give you a pretty solid impression of her situation.”

Signe pages through the drawings, disturbed. “She, what…She drew these on the walls?”

“Yes,” says Mulaghesh.

“Well…I did say she was peculiar. This sort of thing would get you arrested in a heartbeat before Komayd took office.”

“But now you can talk about it,” says Mulaghesh. “And you’re Voortyashtani. Kind of. So. Talk.”

Still transfixed by the pages, Signe produces her cigarette case, slips one out, strikes a match, and takes a drag. It’s such a fluid motion Mulaghesh suspects she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it. “Hm. Well. It’s interesting you’ve brought this to me now. It seems Miss Choudhry had been pestering more of my people than I thought. One of our surveyors read the alert I sent out and came forward. She’d approached him and been very friendly with him, though he never had any idea who she was—I actually think he was a little sweet on her. Though her being a Ministry intelligence officer, I suppose she would be skilled at manipulation….”

Mulaghesh grunts, knowing this to be quite true.

“Anyway. She was asking my people about the geomorphological features of the shore, like I told you before. But, I didn’t know why—yet it seems she discussed this with the surveyor.”

“And?”

“Choudhry said she was looking for a tomb nearby, or at least some sign of one, a suggestion that such a thing had once existed. And he, of course, knew nothing of a tomb—but I do.”

“Why would Choudhry care about a tomb?”

“That question is more complicated than you might think. It has a great deal to do with death, history, and the afterlife.” She ashes her cigarette into her cooling thimble of coffee. “At the very start of the manifestations of the Divinities, Voortya was perhaps the most exceptional.”

“Are you sure that’s not just regional pride speaking?”

“Oh, no. I studied at Fadhuri. They corroborated that belief. Voortya was the first Divinity to mobilize her people for warfare on a massive, unprecedented scale. This isn’t easy to do, as I’m sure you know. She was asking for her people to train for months, leave their homes, go to unfamiliar lands, and, very likely, perish. So she did something no Divinity had ever done before—she created an afterlife.”

“Huh? I thought every Divinity had dozens of those. There were hundreds of various hells or heavens or purgatories you could wind up in, right?”

“Toward the end, sure, and Kolkan alone produced, oh, about forty hells for his various followers. But Voortya was the first, and, unlike all the other Divinities, the nature of her afterlife remained consistent for all one thousand three hundred years—or however much it was—of her reign. If you were a follower of Voortya—if you ‘took up the sword’ and shed blood for her, yours or someone else’s, as she wasn’t particularly picky about that sort of thing—then when you died, your soul would sail across the ocean to a white island, a city, where Voortya would gather all of her flock: the City of Blades.”

“I thought Voortyashtan was the City of Blades,” says Mulaghesh. “That’s what everyone calls it.”

“An old confusion,” says Signe. “Traveling Voortyashtanis were prone to discussing their longing to go to the afterlife, describing this ‘City of Blades.’ They talked about it so much even the other Continentals began assuming they were describing their home city. The assumption stuck.”

Mulaghesh grunts and makes a note of it.

“Once she’d assembled the most righteous and the most powerful souls in the City of Blades, they would sail back across the ocean to the mortal realm, each returning to ‘where their swords fell’—where they fell in battle, or so the story goes—and make war upon the whole of the world, bringing down the stars and the sun and the skies and the seas, until all of creation was utterly annihilated. They called it the Night of the Sea of Swords.”

“Wait, wait,” says Mulaghesh. “You can’t tell me the other Divinities tolerated the threat of that?”

Signe shrugs. “Voortya’s afterlife started well before the Divinities united. And when they finally did unite…Well, these things have momentum. It’s tradition. You can’t just stop tradition, even if the world changes around it. And Voortya and her followers took it very, very seriously. It was a pact, you see, a promise Voortya made between herself and those who loved her. That’s another way Voortya is quite different from all the other Divinities—with the exception of Olvos, perhaps, no other Divinity brought themselves down to the level of their followers as she did, creating an agreement among equals. Or perhaps she gave herself to them, as if she’d made the afterlife from herself, pulled from her very body. It’s a little unclear—but all Divine things usually are.”

“So where does the tomb enter into this?”

“Well, theoretically, somewhere around here was a resting place for the Voortyashtani dead. All of them. Ever.”

Mulaghesh whistles. “That’d have to be some tomb.”

“One would assume. In The Great Mother Voortya atop the Teeth of the World, it’s described as filling the whole of the center of the world. Maybe. Poets have a tendency to get somewhat hyperbolic, I find. But imagine finding the tomb belonging to a culture that more or less worshipped death! I expect that would be a huge, huge find for someone at all interested in the history of the Continent.”

“But…why in the hells would Choudhry be looking for that?” asks Mulaghesh. “What does the tomb have to do with…well, anything?”

“Who can say? She did seem to go mad. This certainly suggests so.” She gestures to the portfolio.

“And what could drive her mad?”

She exhales smoke through her nose. “This place…This place affects a weak mind, I think. People find themselves changed by it. Bulikov might have controlled the world, certainly, but it was Voortyashtan that made that happen. Without the support of Voortyashtani sentinels, the Divine Empire would have collapsed. Even though almost all of Voortyashtan is lost, I think…I think the stones and the hills remember.”

That may be true, Mulaghesh thinks, but it seems unlikely that Choudhry would be a creature of a weak mind. Most of the Ministry intelligence officers she’s encountered have been harder than a coffin nail, despite their cultured appearances. Trained for all kinds of torture and interrogation scenarios, certainly. And from her file, Sumitra Choudhry was as straight as a straight arrow could get, the sort of soldier any officer would love to have under their command.

What could an ancient tomb, she thinks, have to do with Choudhry’s real mission—thinadeskite?

The obvious answer is that thinadeskite is mined from the ground, and tombs are underground…so perhaps the tomb could have affected or even caused the thinadeskite’s existence? But though this is the obvious answer, wouldn’t someone notice if they were mining directly into the walls of an ancient tomb? Especially the Saypuri Military, which still treats any whiff of the ancient Continent with extreme—and justified—paranoia.

And what possible interest could the tomb have held for Choudhry, anyway? Even if it was once Divine, shouldn’t all of its Divine and miraculous qualities have ended when Voortya took a shot to the face back in the Night of the Red Sands? However wondrous it might have been, now it’s certainly another damned hole in the ground.

“Is one officer worth all this?” asks Signe.

“Huh?”

“She’s just one officer. Surely the Ministry has hundreds of them, thousands of them. Is it worth dragging in a general to chase her down?”

Mulaghesh slaps her portfolio closed. “We asked for servants, and she agreed. We asked her to come to the ends of the world for us, and she agreed. We asked her to risk her life for us, and she agreed. I don’t care how many officers the Ministry has. She’s worth it.”

Signe raises her eyebrows, as if she didn’t realize how sensitive the subject would be.

“Biswal mentioned a tribal sniper once took a shot at you,” says Mulaghesh.

“Oh, that. Yes.”

“You seem pretty blasé about it.”

“He gave me quite a haircut,” says Signe. She taps her ponytail. “I turned my head at the right moment—or, for him, the wrong one—and he clipped off about an inch or two. My security detail more or less shredded the little shack he was in, which contained a chicken coop. Feathers everywhere. Quite a scene.”

“And was that worth it? You almost died. Is the harbor worth it?”

She nods, conceding the point. “Anything else you wish to ask me, General?”

At first Mulaghesh is about to say no, but then she gets an idea. “You certainly seem to know a lot about the Divine around here.”

“It’s difficult not to.”

“Because you’re Voortyashtani, right? Adopted, at least. What tribe did you live with?”

Signe pulls a face as if she’s just asked her something deeply distasteful.

“What? It’s not like I asked you your sexual preference or something.”

“By the seas…I’m not sure if you could find a way to be cruder.”

“What were you? Highland or river?”

Signe glares at her. “The Jaszlo tribe. Highland. They took us in.”

Mulaghesh thinks back to what the apothecary salesman said. “Pretty traditional, then, yeah?”

“Very.”

“So let me test your memory. If one were to have rosemary, pine needles, dried worms, grave dust, dried frog eggs, and bone powder…what Divine ritual would one be able to complete?”

There is a long pause as Signe considers it. For a moment Mulaghesh thinks she won’t tell her, but then she says, “I believe the frog eggs give it away—those are the reagents one once used to complete the Window to the White Shores.”

“The what?”

“The White Shores—the City of Blades itself. The rite would allow those that performed it to see across to the City of Blades and consult with their deceased friends and relatives.”

“How would this rite work?”

“If memory serves, the components were placed in a sackcloth, which was then tied up with dried seaweed and set alight. But it doesn’t work anymore, none of Voortya’s miracles do. I’ve seen them tried. Why? What could that possibly have to do with anything?”

Instantly Mulaghesh remembers Nadar telling her in the laboratory: Some of our operations crew noticed signs that someone had started a fire in one of the branches….It looked as though whoever had done it had been burning just…well, plants, I suppose. Leaves. Some cloth. Things like that.

Mulaghesh takes in a long, slow breath.

Choudhry snuck into the thinadeskite mines, she thinks. And performed this rite down there.

Which leaves the question: why? What did Choudhry think she could accomplish by going down to the mines and performing a Divine ritual that almost certainly wouldn’t work anymore? If Voortya’s miracles don’t work anymore, certainly the afterlife she created is gone, too. And—perhaps more damning—how did Choudhry manage to bypass security to do it?

Thinadeskite shows up in a shack miles away from the mine, thinks Mulaghesh. At the scene of a murder that Choudhry had some knowledge of. And now it seems Choudhry had some way of infiltrating the mines….

Suddenly things look quite bleak for the reputation of Sumitra Choudhry.

“Are you quite all right, General?” says Signe.

“No,” says Mulaghesh huskily. “No, I certainly am not.”

Over the next four days Mulaghesh’s work grinds to a slow, creaking halt. She pores over the communications Choudhry sent to Ghaladesh and back. Mostly it’s just requests for documents and references. She hauls out the codex of encryption keys and runs through any text of Choudhry’s she can get her hands on. None of them produce anything, but she didn’t expect them to: all of these messages would have been received by the Ministry, who would have done all this already, and then some.

If I were a Ministry operative, she thinks, would I spy countless codes hidden in the margins? Would I know all the tradecraft about infiltrating the mines? She has no idea, because she’s a far cry from a Ministry officer. She’s just a beat-up old military officer running into walls.

Mulaghesh spends her four days watching the SDC harbor works. Initially this was just an idle way to pass the time, checking to make sure Signe and her security people were reacting properly to the possible bomb threat. But as she watches them she notices something—something she’s seen in combat drills before, when commanders didn’t distribute their forces correctly.

She’s fairly sure she’s identified the most flagrant vulnerabilities in the harbor works so far: there’s the fuel yard, which the whole harbor draws from in order to run; and then there are three manufacturing yards that see a lot of traffic, trucks and forklifts pouring in and out from the break of dawn until late at night. What they’re manufacturing, she doesn’t know—something for the cranes and the ships, she assumes—but hitting any of these four yards would probably cripple the harbor works.

Yet only a handful of new SDC guards are stationed at these three sites. No more than four to five more people, from what she can see—three at the main entrances and two performing surveillance. It’s barely anything at all.

Instead the vast majority of any new security measures are stationed at Signe’s test assembly yard, which is on the other side of the harbor works, far away from most of the construction. Mulaghesh spends two days, mornings and evenings, watching as over a dozen new security employees—thuggish-looking Dreylings with riflings thrown over their backs—take up positions along all the lanes leading to the yard. Signe’s security chief Lem is almost always with them, glowering and scanning the streets, his hand close to his weapon.

On the evening before she has to attend Biswal’s meeting of the tribal leaders, Mulaghesh slinks through the harbor yard and finds a hiding place among a stack of pallets. The SDC workers have seen her with Signe, so most just accept her presence here; but seeing her watching the door to the assembly yard with a spyglass pressed to her eye would be another thing entirely.

For hours, there’s nothing. Then she watches as Signe strides up, clipboard in hand. Lem steps forward. They exchange a word or two. She nervously flicks away a cigarette, stops in front of the door, and checks something on her clipboard. She looks pale and ashen, like she’s eaten something foul.

She’s anxious, thinks Mulaghesh. No. She’s terrified….

Signe turns back around and nods to the guard posted at the test assembly yard door. He gives her a quick salute—a curious gesture, for what’s essentially a commercial operation—and he cranks a lever somewhere in his checkpoint booth.

The door must function with some kind of mechanism, for it slowly falls back. It’s almost like a bank vault door, now that she’s watching, and beyond its threshold she sees…

A second door. Much like the first door.

Signe walks in, turns, and watches as the first door slowly, slowly shuts. It’s only when it’s almost shut that she turns and begins to open the second door.

They really, really don’t want anyone knowing what’s in there, she thinks.

The first door slams shut with a faint boom.

Mulaghesh smirks. “Test assembly yard, my ass.”