City of Blades

8. She Who Clove the Earth in Twain

Somewhere there is screaming. The cough and sputter of engines. The scent of smoke. No gunfire, though: her half-functioning brain makes a note of this, saying only, Possibly not combat.

Then a flash, a crash, a bang. She’s slapped with rain, and awakes.

She is lying on wet earth. Rain patters her back. She remembers, slowly, that she has limbs. She turns herself over, shoulders complaining, and looks up.

Voortya is gone. A driving rain hammers the clifftops, runlets of water carving through the moist grass to go spiraling off into the sea.

She hears more shouting, the groan of machinery. She sits up—her whole body hurts as if she’s just fallen out of the sky—and looks behind her.

A thick plume of smoke is rising from the earth a few miles west of Fort Thinadeshi. It takes her no time at all to realize it’s the thinadeskite mine.

There are shouts, screams, cries. Automobile lights slash through the swirling dust and smoke. She can see figures sprinting back and forth, pointing, waving their arms. Machinery being set, started, juddering into action. It all has the look of a disaster to her.

She looks around and sees her carousel lying in a mound of bracken. She picks it up, fingers still dull and stupid, and confirms that it’s empty: she fired all five rounds. She feels the barrels—still warm—which means she fired them recently.

Though the question remains, she thinks, looking back at the sea, fired them into what?

She holsters the carousel, stands, and staggers toward the thinadeskite mine, her feet sloshing in the wet earth. As she gets closer she sees there’s an immense hole in the ground, like a sinkhole after a torrential rain, dozens of feet deep. The wire fences have collapsed, allowing her to cross through. One of the figures running around the rim of the hole is unusually agitated, pointing, screaming orders, darting back and forth with their hands clasped around their head. She doesn’t need to get close to know it’s Lieutenant Prathda, head boy of the thinadeskite project.

“No, no!” he’s crying. “That stone there! It’s clearly blocking the aperture! No, not that one, the one with the orthoclase striations, on the left!”

One of the soldiers working at the machinery turns to look at Prathda, bewildered.

“The granite, Private!” he shrieks at the soldier. “The granite slab! Move it, move it!”

Mulaghesh wipes rain out of her eyes as she approaches. “What the hells happened here?” It looks like someone’s just carved a gigantic trench in the earth. There’s no sign at all that this was once a functioning mine.

Prathda does a double take. “Where did you come from? The mine’s caved in somehow, the whole damnable mine has just caved in! In the middle of the night! With no warning!”

“It collapsed?”

“Yes! Yes! And damned if I know how! We’d done countless integrity reports, brought in all kinds of mining experts to analyze the density of the soil, and now this! This, when we need it least! It’ll flood in minutes if the rain keeps up!”

“Was anyone inside?”

“Of course there were! We’d be fools to leave this place unguarded! But…” He looks back at the ruined mine.

Mulaghesh understands what he’s thinking. “The odds are slim that they’re alive.”

She steps back to let the emergency crews by and takes stock of her surroundings, doing all she can to defy her whirling head and capture every possible detail. Lightning flickers in the sky, giving her a sliver of illumination. She tries to imagine what could have done this. The only thing she’s ever seen in her life create this kind of destruction is an artillery shell.

“I guess that solves it,” says a voice over her shoulder.

She looks around to find Biswal sitting on a stone nearby, staring into the chaos.

“What?” asks Mulaghesh.

“The collapse. It answers the question that’s weighed so heavily on my mind.” Biswal still hasn’t made eye contact with her: he just watches as the crews try to haul rubble out of the way. There’s something off-putting about his expression, as if he always expected this calamity, or perhaps some calamity; and now that he’s been proven right, it fills him with a strange energy. “What were the insurgents going to do with all those stolen explosives?”

“You think they bombed the mine?”

“You heard Prathda. He’s right. They did countless studies when constructing this thing, took every measure of safety. The only reason it’d collapse is if someone forced it to. And all the damage is in a straight line. That’s no coincidence, and this is no collapse.”

“Why would they attack the mines?”

“Why does a rabid dog attack a bull? Don’t give these people too much credit, Turyin. They don’t have strategies, they don’t have goals. That’s why they seem to win.” One of his lieutenants waves to him. Biswal watches him for a moment, his eyes heavy-lidded and face inscrutable. Then he stands. “Whatever happened here, it’s not over yet.” He brushes off his pants and strides away into the chaos.

Mulaghesh watches him go, then turns to look at the collapsed mine. Then she walks away, climbs a nearby hill, and looks down on the damage.

It is all in a line, as Biswal said. But somehow she gets the impression the destructive force did not come from within but rather from above, as if a tremendous weight struck the earth above the mine with enough power to crack through yards and yards of soil and stone.

She remembers the sight of Voortya, and the huge sword glinting in her hand.

Did a Divinity climb up on these cliffs, she wonders, lift her sword high, and bring it down on the mine?

She jumps down and starts walking toward the cliffs, searching for some sign of a Divinity’s passage, or really anything’s passage. She finds nothing. And besides, this region is covered with patrols, any one of which would have noticed a ten-story metal woman walking around with a sword, which is the kind of thing you mention to your CO.

She looks back at the mines. If it was indeed Voortya herself who stood here and looked out at all of Voortyashtan, what went through her giant, steel head?

If she did destroy the mines, why? Why bother with them at all? Wouldn’t Fort Thinadeshi be a much better target for the Divinity of war, sitting there upon the hill, huge and lit up and covered in cannons?

Was Voortya driven to stop them from mining the thinadeskite? But why would Voortya care about what by all accounts is simply a new type of electromagnetic ore? Are they violating some kind of sacred rule by drilling deep into the earth?

Even if she saw something, Mulaghesh reasons, it couldn’t have been Voortya. For one thing, the Divinity Voortya had four arms. Mulaghesh doesn’t know much, but she knows that. In every instance when she presented herself, the Divinity of war had four giant, muscular arms, two to a side. And yet the thing she witnessed here on the cliffs had two. It also seemed to react in pain when I popped off some rounds at it, she thinks. Though Saypur’s made some striking breakthroughs in weapon technologies, she doesn’t think small arms fire would make a Divinity pause. Hells, six-incher cannons only stunned Kolkan and Jukov back in Bulikov, but didn’t seem to injure them any.

And last but certainly not least: it couldn’t have been Voortya, because Voortya is stone-cold fucking dead. A couple hundred Saypuris witnessed the Kaj blow her head clean off her shoulders in the Night of the Red Sands.

More questions, and no new answers.

Mulaghesh comes to the cliffs where she dropped the bottle off the edge. She sees nothing: no giant finger marks in the rocks, no footsteps, no churning of the earth. There is no sign, save for her empty, warm carousel, that what she experienced was anything more than a dream.

Am I going mad?

The gulls are still shrieking, still wheeling and dipping through the air. They cry to one another in terror, communicating some terrible threat, some passing predator. But Mulaghesh can see no sign of what disturbed them so.

Three hours later Mulaghesh, wheezing and gasping, staggers back through the gates of Fort Thinadeshi. She is not at all happy to be parted from the disaster site: though she is ostensibly here as a tourist, she pitched in as much as she could in the recovery effort, trying to locate the bodies of the three guards trapped inside. But then a tremulous Saypuri messenger came up, tapped her on the shoulder, and gave her the request.

When she gets to the main conference room everything’s in chaos. Runners—Saypuri and Dreyling, mostly, though there are a few Continental ones—keep darting in to deliver messages. The table is an utter mess, covered in cups, papers, pencils, balled-up napkins. It’s clear this has been a point of activity for some time.

Biswal, Captain Nadar, and Signe are all shouting over one another. Rada Smolisk sits quietly in the corner, attempting to take notes. Nadar, unsurprisingly, looks like shit: red-eyed, soaking wet, with a bandage around her right hand. Her face is flushed, which makes the white scar on her forehead glow white. Biswal grips the edges of the table like he’s about to break it in half over his knee, and stares straight into it as he issues a steady stream of orders. Signe is pacing along the long side of the table, a frenzy of smoke and ash and frantic gestures, pointing to the wall of maps and describing access points.

For a moment Mulaghesh just watches this scene and drips on the floor. The topic of discussion appears to be throwing up roadblocks, barricades, and traffic stops in order to try to catch whichever perpetrators could be responsible for this.

“…very few weak points at the harbor,” Signe is saying indignantly. “The entirety of the harbor works is self-contained.”

“Per your testimony,” says Biswal. “You have not permitted Saypuri officers to tour the harbor works in over four months, so we have no way of knowing that for ourselves.”

“This is because we are at the height of the dredging operations!” says Signe. “We can’t stop now to allow a top-to-bottom security assessment!”

“Well, you may have to, CTO Harkvaldsson,” growls Biswal. “I have three dead soldiers and a caved-in installation on my hands. I expect your full cooperation.”

“And I would expect yours,” says Signe. “You tell me that this is an ‘installation’ or an ‘expansion,’ but it’s clear to everyone that it’s some kind of mine! But what you’re mining you won’t say.”

“I cannot say,” says Biswal. “That is privileged information. And it should not affect how we conduct the search in the harbor works.”

Nadar shakes her head. “We can throw up as many dragnets as we’d like, General, but I am convinced the perpetrators are long gone. It cannot be a coincidence that the very day we allow all the tribal leaders into the city is the same day that the mines get bombed. Whoever did this left early today, with the procession out of the city.”

“Your suspicions are noted, Captain,” says Biswal. “But we still must at least try.”

So far, Mulaghesh seems to be invisible. She waits, then pulls out a chair and sits. The scrape of the chair leg makes the four of them jump, and they turn to look at her as if she just appeared out of thin air.

“Don’t mind me,” she says, taking out a cigarillo. “I’d hate to interrupt.”

“General Mulaghesh,” says Biswal, suddenly formal. “Kind of you to join us. You were with us at the scene just after the cave-in, correct?”

“You saw me, General Biswal,” says Mulaghesh. “Unless you’ve already forgotten.”

“I haven’t. But your appearance on the scene was quite quick, by my estimation. Word had hardly broken out before you were there. My question is—where were you when the collapse occurred?”

“What, am I a suspect?” says Mulaghesh. She lights her cigarillo. She’s suddenly very aware of Rada Smolisk in the corner scribbling down her words.

“We have no witnesses, General,” says Nadar. “If you were in the area, ma’am, we’d appreciate hearing anything you have to say.”

Mulaghesh sucks on her cigarillo, flooding her mouth and nose with the pungent aroma of tobacco. She swallows, thinking what to say.

She can’t tell them what she saw, she decides. Not after Choudhry already went mad up here, painting up the walls with her visions. They’d think her a lunatic and block her out from the investigation. And besides—she herself doesn’t know what to make of what she saw.

So what to tell everyone now?

“I was sitting on the cliffs,” says Mulaghesh, “watching the storm rolling in, and drinking wine. Probta wine, specifically,” she says, remembering the label.

Signe pulls a face. “Ugh. You know there’s fish oil in that, right?”

“It got me pretty drunk,” says Mulaghesh, “so I can’t fault it.”

“So you were drunk while the mines exploded, General?” says Nadar. She does a good job of keeping some contempt out of her words, but not all of it.

“I figured I’d take a day off,” says Mulaghesh. “I wasn’t the only one out there, so you can ask them. I fell asleep. I woke up with the rain and thought I heard thunder. It didn’t take long to realize what it really was.”

“So you did not see anything suspicious in the area after the explosion?” asks Biswal.

“No. I saw what happened and came running. I’ve been pitching in at the site ever since.” She glances around. “So you think insurgents snuck in with the tribal leaders and did this?”

“It’s the only theory that makes sense, General,” says Nadar.

“How many tribal meetings have you had since the explosives were stolen?”

Biswal frowns as he considers it. “A dozen, maybe. More.”

“So they’ve had a dozen opportunities to pull this off, and only just managed it now?”

“There’s a lot of speculation here, ma’am,” says Nadar. “If I may say so. The explosives might have been passed throughout the tribes until the right person got ahold of it. Or perhaps they needed the right timing device, or the right access. Or the explosives were only recently stolen from the fortress. There are many reasons why they could have waited so long.”

“Are there any reasons why they’d target the mines?” says Mulaghesh. “And not the fortress, or the Galleries, or the harbor? Or any of their enemy tribes?”

“We can’t discuss this in front of CTO Harkvaldsson or Governor Smolisk,” says Biswal. “The nature and value of the mines is classified.”

“So you’re telling me that it was valuable enough,” Signe says languidly, “that the insurgents might know it’d hurt you if they blew it up?”

Biswal glares at her.

“If you’re not convinced the insurgents did this, General,” says Nadar, “do you have any alternate theories?”

Mulaghesh hesitates. She still has no desire to tell them about her vision. “I’m just saying we might need to keep an open mind he—”

The door bursts open and Sergeant Major Pandey sprints in. Without a word of apology he trots up to Biswal and hands him a note. Biswal, frowning, takes it, opens it, and begins to read. In the time it takes him to do so, two more runners sprint in—one Voortyashtani, one Dreyling—and each hand off messages to Rada and Signe, respectively.

Some big news just came down the pipeline, thinks Mulaghesh.

The room is almost completely still as the messages are opened and read. Pandey glances at Signe, who looks back as she opens her envelope. There’s a queer moment of connection between the two: Signe’s brow arches, as if asking a question, and Pandey gives the tiniest shake of his head, as if saying, Not now.

Mulaghesh frowns. What the hells was that?

“What’s this?” says Biswal. “This doesn’t make sense. Harkvaldsson is already here. She’s sitting right there, for the seas’ sakes.” He nods at Signe.

Pandey coughs a little, leans down, and mutters, “If you’ll read the preceding part of the message, sir, it does not concern CTO Harkvaldsson….”

Biswal angrily adjusts his tiny spectacles. “Well, then who the hell is supposed to be showing up on our doorstep?”

Rada is reading her own message. “W-Wait,” she says, horrified. “Ch-Chancellor je Harkvaldsson is g-going to be here? Tomorrow night?”

“Who?” demands Biswal, furious.

Signe’s voice is like an arctic wind: “My father.”

Everyone turns to look at her. She’s opened her own letter and is reading it with furious eyes, fingers clutching the paper as if imagining a throat. “My father is coming.”

There’s a pause.

“Oh, shit,” says Mulaghesh. “Sigrud?”

Pandemonium ensues. To Mulaghesh’s confusion—and terrific amusement—they keep referring to “Chancellor je Harkvaldsson” as a high-level diplomatic personage. The message, Mulaghesh understands, suggests that Sigrud is pulling into Voortyashtan within a matter of hours because his ship took some damage pursuing Dreyling pirates, and is in need of repairs. This is slightly plausible—a damaged ship would be desperate to dock anywhere, including Voortyashtan. But no one seems to believe it. Everyone assumes Sigrud’s arrival has something to do with the harbor’s construction schedule or the collapse of the thinadeskite mines.

What a minefield this little polis is, Mulaghesh thinks. So many sensitive subjects.

It’s hard not to laugh: she knew Sigrud took some political office up in the brand-new United Dreyling States, but she hadn’t expected him to be walking around with a word like “Chancellor” swinging in front of his name. She tries to imagine him sitting in some bureaucratic office, reading reports. As she has, in her time, seen Sigrud je Harkvaldsson nude, covered in blood, and, on one occasion, both, the idea is downright hilarious.

She watches Signe and Pandey as the discussion mounts. There’s something off about them. They don’t quite look at each other, but look toward each other. They have the air of two people trying very hard not to acknowledge one another.

Something’s up, she thinks. And I don’t like it. She thinks back to what Biswal just said: Signe hasn’t let anyone from Fort Thinadeshi tour the harbor works in months. Maybe it’s because their schedule’s too tight, sure…Or maybe it’s because Signe doesn’t want anyone sniffing around her “test assembly yard,” or whatever it really is.

Biswal brings the meeting to a close. Mulaghesh waits for him outside while everyone finishes up and files out. Pandey is one of the first ones out, and he joins her, waiting for Nadar.

Mulaghesh looks at him side-eyed. It’s difficult to tell—Pandey’s beard is rather prodigious—but his cheeks look a little pink. “You all right, Sergeant Major?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am?” he says, startled.

“You seem somewhat…bothered. Are you ill?”

“No, General. I’m weary, as we all are, but I’m perfectly fit and able.”

Mulaghesh smiles cheerlessly. “How pleasant to hear.”

The door opens again, and she watches closely when Signe charges out. She and Pandey exchange a glance, and Mulaghesh can read the message clearly on her face: You will not believe this bullshit when I tell you.

Signe stomps down the hall, her scarf flying like a flag. CTO Harkvaldsson has entirely too many secrets, Mulaghesh thinks. I may have to remedy that, and soon.

Next comes Nadar, whom Pandey anxiously follows down the corridor. Then Biswal, slow and grumbling, hauls himself out of the cluttered meeting room. He gives a surly glance to Mulaghesh, as if she’s orchestrated this new complication. “This Harkvaldsson fellow…The new Harkvaldsson, I mean. You knew him, yes?”

“I did. I was stuck in the hospital with him for a couple of weeks after this.” She holds up her false hand.

“What’s he like?”

She considers it. “Have you ever heard the term ‘hard operator,’ General?”

“Yes. Referring to troops who specialize in busting heads.”

“Well…when I knew him”—she stares off into space—“Sigrud was about the hardest operator you could hope to find.”

“Is he going to be trouble?”

“Maybe, maybe not. He’s a government official now, and he’s got family.”

“There’s a but in there, somewhere.”

“But, back in the day, he tended to attract trouble like a candle flame does moths.”

Biswal sighs. “Fantastic. Will you be there with us when we receive him tomorrow night?”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” says Mulaghesh. “I’ve got an appointment then that I can’t miss, after all the madness tonight.” She holds up her false hand again. “Adjustments.”

“Oh. I see. Well, I’d be keen to get your reading on the situation when you get a chance.”

“Certainly, Lalith.”

She keeps her arm close to her side as she exits the fortress. It’s true that it’s been hurting all night, ever since she stood in the rain and witnessed the Divinity on the clifftops. But adjusting her prosthetic won’t help it any for what she’s planning for tomorrow night.

She thinks about the tall, cold walls of Signe’s test assembly yard, and the canvas roof. Now, she thinks. How to crack that particular nut?

Mulaghesh isn’t alone the next evening when she stands on the seawall road, watching the waters. Small clumps of Dreylings dot the path, all watching for the arrival of Sigrud—lost prince to a faded royal line, instigator of the coup that ended the pirate kings’ clutch on the Dreyling Republics, and one of the founders of the nascent United Dreyling States. The Dreylings gossip quietly, wondering if the wind will be behind him, if his ship is in a bad state, if he’s come to inaugurate the next step of their expansion. They mostly ignore Mulaghesh, who’s wearing her black leather greatcoat over her fatigues, hiding the monstrously large electric torch hanging from her shoulder. Saypur has advanced many technologies, but lead acid batteries aren’t one of them yet.

There’s a collective intake of breath as the ship emerges from the night, a tower of rippling sails on the waves. Some of the sails are rent and tattered, as if the ship’s gone through one hell of a fight.

“It’s him,” whispers one of the Dreylings. “It’s him!”

“What has happened to the ship?”

“Are you a fool? Have you forgotten that the dauvkind swore to drive piracy out of our shores? What else would he be doing?”

Mulaghesh can’t help but share their anticipation. Sigrud’s one of the few people besides Shara who survived all of Bulikov’s madness with her, and he’s the one person in the world who might believe that she actually saw a long-dead Divinity last night. But she knows she can’t speak to him, not yet. I have other ugly little deeds to do, she thinks, and begins walking back toward the harbor works.

As someone who spent the last half decade in the shadow of Shara Komayd, Mulaghesh rarely gets to feel clever. But as she watches the various Dreylings streaming down to the SDC headquarters, she gets to feel a rare flash of brilliance.

Of course the Dreylings are eager to catch the slightest glimpse of their dauvkind, their lost (or used-to-be-lost) heir to the throne. Of course that’ll make them distracted and reluctant to attend to their duties. And if Mulaghesh ever wanted to sneak behind the iron walls of Signe’s test assembly yard, now would be the chance.

Her pulse quickens as she enters the harbor yards. She stands in the shadow of a crane and watches, marking when and where the patrols make their rounds. Moving calmly and smoothly, she dances around the patrols, passing through prep yards, girder yards, cable yards, and finally the pallet yard.

Mulaghesh pauses only once, as she walks beneath the guard tower with the PK-512. She’s acquainted enough with that behemoth of a weapon that she checks it out every time, wondering if it might come alive with its hellish chatter. As usual, though, it’s unmanned and dormant. She continues on.

The test assembly walls swell up before her. It’s quite dark here, as this area is not well lit like the others. She crouches in the shadow of the walls and slowly makes her way down toward the checkpoint. She stops when she sees a Dreyling guard sitting in the booth, smoking anxiously, his rifling slung over his back. He’s short for a Dreyling, somewhat rotund, and looks quite irritated.

A second Dreyling approaches, trotting up the path, this one with a closely cropped red-blond beard. “His ship’s pulling in now!”

The short Dreyling in the checkpoint booth glowers at him. “Don’t tell me that! I don’t want to hear about that.”

“Surely you can get away for a minute? Löfven and his team are all shutting down for the occasion. They’re pulling all their trucks up at the fuel yards.” He points northeast, almost right at Mulaghesh. She shrinks up against the wall.

“Would you shut up? You know I cannot leave my post!”

“But certainly yo—”

“You know what’s in here,” says the short Dreyling. “The CTO would drown me if I walked away.”

“Ach,” says the red-bearded Dreyling, “I suppose that’s true. Well. I will see for you, and tell you all about it!” With an excited good-bye, he sprints off for the SDC headquarters.

Mulaghesh thinks, then sneaks back along the walls in the opposite direction. When she hears the roaring of truck engines, she slows.

It’s the loading dock of the diesel fuel yard, which happens to back right up into the iron walls. She watches as a dozen large fuel trucks park, their hulking forms lumbering into their spots. It takes nearly twenty minutes for them all to go still. Mulaghesh watches carefully as the drivers hop out and toss their keys into what seems to be a checkout box. Then the supervisor—this Löfven, perhaps—locks the checkout box and follows them down the road.

She looks at the trucks. They’re about fifteen, sixteen feet tall. Then she looks at the walls, which are a little more than twenty feet tall.

“Hm,” she says.

She waits, then sprints across the loading dock to the checkout box. She never learned to pick locks, and she certainly couldn’t do it now, one-handed. So she grabs a nearby prybar, slots it behind the lock’s bolt, and gives it a hard shove.

All those one-handed press-ups come in handy, and the lock pops off with a screech. A lock is only as good, Mulaghesh thinks, as whatever it’s bolted into. She grabs a numbered key, finds the right truck, and starts it up.

The fuel truck is a beast to maneuver. She’s always hated driving automobiles, especially now that she’s one-handed, and she’s intensely aware that she’s probably now piloting several hundred gallons of highly flammable fluid. But despite all this she slowly, uncertainly backs the truck up to the iron walls. She stops only when the bumper of the truck actually touches the walls themselves.

She jumps out, grabs an oil-stained rope from a trash heap, and clambers up on top of the truck. She runs to the back end where the bumper is up against the wall. The wall is still about seven feet higher than the truck, but she can make it. She ties the rope to a handle on the back of the truck, then hurls it over the wall. It lands on the canvas roof with a plop.

She pauses, thinking about how she’s going to do this.

“I fucking hate being one-handed,” she mutters.

She readies herself, leaps up, and hits the wall high enough to hook her elbows over its top. The canvas is taut but still gives a little, allowing her a good hold. She hangs there for a moment longer, then hitches her right leg up until her ankle can get over the top as well. Then she pulls herself upright, straddling the wall, and breathes for a moment.

She makes sure she’s steady, then pops out her combat knife and carves a hole in the canvas wide enough for her to fit through. She glances down into the hole but can see nothing but darkness below. She’s glad she brought a torch, even if it does weigh nearly ten pounds.

She throws the rope down. Then she maneuvers the torch around, flicks it on, and shines it down to see if the rope hangs low enough for her to drop down. It does, she sees, but there’s…something beside it.

Something…wrong.

“Oh, what in the hells,” whispers Mulaghesh.

She grabs the rope with her one hand and slowly, slowly slides down. Once she’s inside she flicks the torch back on, turns around, and looks.

“Holy shit,” she says.

The closest one is fifteen feet tall, a flawless statue of a man seated on the ground, cross-legged. He is perfectly bald and hairless, and his demeanor and posture are calm, relaxed: he sits with his back straight and his palms resting on his knees. Yet there are nine longswords thrust into his sides, back, and stomach, almost to the hilt, their blades poking through in all directions, certainly passing through countless vital organs; but the man stares ahead calmly, serenely, as if holding his breath. He is wrought, she sees, of pale white stone, perhaps marble, but his many crevices have played home to countless crustaceans and barnacles and other sea creatures. His serene face, for example, is marred by a colony of barnacles creeping up his neck and onto his cheekbone, as if he has a skin condition.

In the center of his forehead is a carven insignia: the severed hand grasping the sword blade, the sigil of Voortya.

She stares at this sight, white and ghostly in the light of her torch. He’s sitting uneven in the mud, one knee higher than the other, as if dumped here. The mud is covered in track marks, like huge pieces of machinery have been here time and time again.

Mulaghesh gets ahold of herself and looks beyond the statue. The canvas ceiling doesn’t allow much light in: the moonlight strikes it and filters through just enough to make it feel like she’s in a giant drum, or an animal-skin lantern of some kind, the crisscrossing seams giving it the feeling of veins. As such, she can’t see much beyond the light of her torch, but…it looks like there are dozens of forms in here with her.

Maybe more than dozens. Maybe hundreds.

Mulaghesh shines the light beyond the white statue of the pierced man to the next object, which appears to be a massive stone table shaped to look like it’s made of antlers, bone, and tusks. The table also sits askew in the mud, and its sides are spattered with a thick coating of sand and silt. It’s a queerly beautiful sight, and she immediately understands its ritualistic significance: she can see where devotees would kneel before it, the hundreds of tiny stone stanchions intended for tiny candles. There’s a basin in its center; maybe someone would wash there, or drink from it.

She walks on, the beam from her torch bouncing over the mud and the other…things. Statues, she supposes, but they somehow seem more than statues, as if they are machines or devices with functions hidden to the eye, defying logic.

A column made to look like it’s composed of human teeth. A doorway carved to resemble two massive swords leaning together. A throne that seems to have been grown out of coral reef. All of the statues bear clusters of anemones or barnacles or mussels. Many are adorned with drapes and drapes of seaweed, dried and curled against their forms. It gives the statues a queerly somber look, as if in mourning. But nearly all of them are perfectly whole, not a chip or a scratch in them, as far as she can see.

“They’re from old Voortyashtan,” says Mulaghesh aloud. “They dredged these up from the bottom of the ocean, didn’t they?” She remembers Signe saying that the only thing they were dredging up was silt and rubble. Yet these look perfect, as if they were carved just years ago. Why hasn’t anyone heard about this? Mulaghesh wonders.

She suspects she knows why. As she passes by a sculpture of a black sphere standing, in full defiance of physics, on a narrow column of marble, all the hair on her arms rises up. She can see handprints worn into the sphere, as if it had been gripped in countless places, and some part of her mind irrationally tells her it’s still being gripped, that whoever held it is still holding it, though they’re now doing so in some unseen, secret manner.

This all stinks of the Divine, she thinks. And there’s nothing that the civilized world would fear more than rumors of the Divine in Voortyashtan.

The next one strikes pure terror into her heart: a white statue of a massive, hulking Voortyashtani sentinel carrying a giant sword. Its back and shoulders are covered in antlers and bones and horns, and its face is the common Voortyashtani sentinel mask, the primitive approximation of human features. The sight of it makes the visions she had in the thinadeskite mines come rushing back to her. She remembers seeing the sentinels’ armor, how it seemed queerly organic, intermeshed, and she remembers knowing instantly that their armor fed on blood, that the more they killed the greater their armor became. She takes careful note of this specimen before her, whose armor has grown until it’s well out of human proportions, possibly distorting the body within. She hopes its size is an exaggeration: it’s nearly four feet taller than a normal man.

She looks at the wide plinth it’s standing on. Carved there is the word Zhurgut.

She thinks, then takes out her portfolio and looks up the note from Choudhry’s room, written by Efrem Pangyui himself.

The blade and hilt of Voortya each had individual meaning to Voortyashtanis. The blade was attack, assault, aggression, but the hilt, fashioned out of the severed hand of the son of Saint Zhurgut, was a symbol of sacrifice.

“This thing was a saint?” she asks herself. The idea appalls her. This behemoth, bristling with horns and bones and teeth and antlers, is the sort of thing that should haunt dreams. She can’t imagine what it would be like to see such a thing in the real world. It would be like glimpsing a…

“A nightmare,” she whispers.

She remembers Gozha saying, He cut a fearsome figure, that thing. Like something from a nightmare.

She switches her torch off, shuts her eyes, lets them adjust, and then opens them.

She looks at Zhurgut’s silhouette—a human-like form covered in points.

“A man made of thorns,” she says quietly.

Could it be? Could the man Gozha spotted at the charcoal kilns have been dressed like a Voortyashtani sentinel? Mulaghesh herself thought that these murders were part of some ritual, and being dressed like a sentinel could be a part of whatever ritual it might be.

But Gozha also said the man she saw was huge and fearsome, the sort of person one would notice, uncommon in Voortyashtan. People like this don’t exist anymore. No one gets this big naturally, not without the aid of the Divine.

She thinks about the mutilation of the corpses at the farmhouse, performed in the exact same manner that sentinels did over eighty years ago to Saypuri slaves.

Are you honestly considering, Mulaghesh says to herself, that a real, live Voortyashtani sentinel committed these atrocities? How could one have possibly survived?

Mulaghesh jumps as a loud clank echoes across the statues. Bright white light comes spilling in from everywhere. She looks around and sees a handful of electric bulbs fluttering to life along the walls. “What the…?”

There’s the groan of metal far back behind her. She turns and sees the giant iron door slowly start to swing open.

“Fuck,” she mutters. She finds cover behind the sculpture of Saint Zhurgut, shrinks down behind its plinth, and waits, listening.

She can hear voices, footsteps. Two sets, she thinks, squelching in the mud.

She hears Signe’s voice saying, “…unsure what the material makeup is. It is not conventional stone. Whatever it is, it’s clearly different from the statues that line the shore of the Solda. We’re presuming for now that the two types of statues had two very different purposes, one utilitarian, one decoration. The ones on the shore of the Solda were decoration, and thus were made of ordinary stone, which hasn’t held up well to the change in climate. These are much…Well. More durable. Much more dense. Our dredgers didn’t even make a dent in them. We can’t even chip off a piece for sample. They must have used some kind of craftsmanship that we’ve never experienced before. We assume it must not have been Divine, because if it was then these should have all turned to dust when Voortya died. It seems the Voortyashtanis of old had many secrets, even beyond those of their Divinity.”

Mulaghesh pokes her head around the statue of Zhurgut. She sees Signe talking to a richly dressed Dreyling, a man in dark red robes wearing a ceremonial fur hat with lots of gold embroidering. Signe looks very pale, very still, and very awkward, which is unusual, as her ample charisma has always filled any room.

Mulaghesh can’t imagine why this man upsets her, in his white fur gloves and white fur boots and white fur belt. He’s an absolute fop, if Mulaghesh must say so; but it isn’t until he turns to scratch his cheek that she sees the bright gold eye patch covering up one eye.

Oh, by the seas, she thinks. It’s Sigrud.

She keeps watching, dumbfounded, staring at his rich, ridiculous clothing, the rings on his fingers, the chain dangling from his neck.

Holy hells, she thinks, he looks like a fucking parade float!

It takes all of her effort not to burst out laughing. She could never have imagined Shara Komayd’s most trusted assassin dressed in such a manner in her life.

Then he speaks, and his voice is the same, tremendously low and scratchy, as if it’s been marinating in dark ale. “And what,” he says slowly, “were they used for?”

“What?” says Signe, irritated. “The statues?”

“Yes,” he says. “You said they were utilitarian. What was their use?”

“We have no idea. No idea what they did, or if they’re doing anything now.” The answer is curt, impatient, even downright rude. Signe seems to realize this, for she continues: “We’ve noticed a name carved on each of the statues, sometimes in an unobtrusive place. Some of us believe that these are memorials, of a sort—works of art commissioned in honor of the departed. Some are different—we found some that were small chambers, resembling little tombs. You can see one there, a modest little box of a structure—but they contain nothing that appears to have supported a body. Only…weaponry.”

“Weaponry?”

“Well, one weapon apiece. There is a plinth inside each little tomb that seems designed to hold a sword. But we’ve found no swords. Perhaps they too vanished in the Blink, or were washed out to sea when old Voortyashtan fell apart.”

Sigrud stares around at the statues, quiet. Perhaps provoked by his silence, Signe goes on: “We have used our contact at the fortress to procure a list of Divine tests. Methods that can be used to determine the Divine nature of any…phenomenon, or object, or whatever. All the statues tested as negative. That should suffice, shouldn’t it?”

He is silent.

“Shouldn’t it?” she says again, angrier.

“I heard,” he says quietly, “that someone once shot at you.”

“What?”

“Someone shot at you. Clipped your hair. Is this true?”

“Oh. That. Yes, that happened some time ago. We’ve taken extra security measures since.”

“And the bombing? The explosives? You considered this a threat as well?” He looks at her, his one eye shining strangely.

“Yes,” says Signe, her words harsh and clipped. “But such fears proved unfounded. So. Back to the issue at hand. Our security here has thus far been airtight. If it wasn’t, the tribal leaders would be all over us to force us to hand the statues over. As it is, my current intent is to use these statues as collateral to force the tribal leaders to give us shipping rights on the harbor. Otherwise we will report their existence to the Ministry, and, this being Voortyashtan, I have no doubt the Ministry would wish to confiscate and review them. Extensively. They’d stay in Saypuri hands indefinitely.”

Silence.

“Do you think our current strategy is wise?” she asks. “Or do you wish to…correct it for me?”

Sigrud is quiet for a long, long time.

“Well?” says Signe.

Finally he shrugs. “I trust what you are doing.”

She stares at him, surprised and suspicious. “You…do? You…You think this is a good idea?”

“I did not say that. If it were me I’d throw all this shit back in the ocean. I hate everything Divine, dead or not. But it is not me. It is you. And if you think this is a good idea, then I will let you do as you see fit.”

Signe is so taken aback by this that she’s lost for words. Then: “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you willing to let me do this, if you think it’s a bad idea?”

“Because…” He gives a great sigh. “I think you are good at this.”

“You don’t seem too happy about it.”

Sigrud is quiet yet again.

“I get quite sick of your silences,” says Signe. “They aren’t nearly as clever as you think they are.”

“I am not being clever. I just do not know what to say.” He pauses. “I want to ask…How…How many times has someone tried to kill you here?”

“Why?”

“Because I wish to know.”

“I don’t think that matters.”

“I do.”

She snorts, contemptuous.

“More than once, then. Do you think this is worth it?” he asks. “Is it acceptable, to risk your life to build this? If you died here, on the shores of this country, below these cranes, would you feel you spent your life well?”

Signe crosses her arms and looks away. “This is an abrupt change in your disposition.”

“Why? Should I not be concerned about my daughter’s welfare?”

“Do you have any idea,” says Signe, suddenly furious, “how many times someone tried to kill me and mother and Carin when we lived here? Do you know how many times we almost starved to death? Yet I did not see any sign of your concern then.”

A long pause.

“We…” Sigrud struggles for words. “We have had this conversation. We—”

“We had your conversation,” says Signe. “The conversation you wanted to have with everyone, in front of everyone. How absolutely absurd it is that you—the man who has risked his life for all kinds of murderous, horrible reasons—are suddenly asking if it’s wise for me to do the same for somewhat decent ones!”

Sigrud is torn, it seems, between frustration and shock. “I forget how young you are sometimes.”

“No,” she says. “What you forget is that you don’t really know me at all.” She checks her watch. “I need to confirm with Biswal and Nadar that they’re ready to receive you. You may stay here if you like, and see yourself out as soon as you see fit.” Then, without so much as a glance back that Mulaghesh can see, she strides away from her father through the forest of statues and out the iron door, which shuts with a clang behind her.

Sigrud gives a great, sad sigh. He stares up at the canvas roof, contemplative and melancholy. Then he says aloud, “All right, Turyin. You can come out now.”

Mulaghesh pokes her head up. “How long have you known I was here?”

“From the start,” says Sigrud. His scarred, battered face is still doleful. “Your boot polish…You use too much of it. I’d recognize the smell anywhere.”

“It always creeped me out, how you could catch a scent like that.” Mulaghesh stands, wipes some of the mud off of her pants, and walks over to him. “Thanks for not ratting me out, I guess.”

He shrugs. “It is no affair of mine. I assume Signe did not wish to tell you what was in these walls?”

“Yeah. I chose to come see for myself.” She pauses, feeling fiercely awkward. “I’m sorry I overheard all that.”

“Yes…My adjustment to public life”—he holds out his arms and looks at his clothing—“is not quite as easy as I’d hoped it’d be. For anyone.”

“Yeah, you look…” She holds back a cringe. “You do look different.”

“These damned things…Pah!” He rips off his fur hat and eye patch and tosses them away. When he turns back his left eye is once again the familiar hooded, empty socket. “I feel more like a human without them.”

“That was probably, like, a two-hundred-drekel hat.”

“These old specters can have it.” He looks up at the giant stone images, leaning over them like predators. “By the seas. Look at them. To imagine my country would one day spend blood and treasure to haul such things from the ocean…”

“Your girl’s got a pretty cunning idea, though,” says Mulaghesh. She walks up to Saint Zhurgut, strikes a match on the statue, and lights a cigarillo. “Blackmailing the tribes might work. And she has some damned brass in her blood, too. Hiding these things right under the nose of Fort Thinadeshi…I’d be impressed if I wasn’t so pissed.”

“She is a very cunning, clever thing. As I said, she is very good at what she does.” There’s another uncomfortable pause. He looks her over. “You seem to be doing well.”

“As do you. You must have done pretty good for yourself during the coup.”

“Ah,” says Sigrud, waving a hand. “It was hardly a coup for me. I barely struck a blow. It was like a courtly dance, so many pre-arranged steps, and I merely had to move from one to the next. Shara did all the real work, though no one knew.”

“As usual.”

“As usual, yes. What about you, have you seen any action?”

“Not a jot. They stuck me behind a desk. Then after I quit I stuck myself behind a bottle. So no new scars or limbs lost, or at least not yet. You look like you’re all in one piece, or at least what I can see above those kingly robes does.”

“Eh. Not quite.” He pulls his left lip down, revealing an utter dearth of back molars on the left side of his jaw. Mulaghesh can see extensive scar tissue around the lip, suggesting a broken jawbone.

“Holy hells. Did you try and catch a cannonball with your face?”

“A carpenter’s hammer. Makes eating soup difficult these days, and drinking even more so. Three years ago, we boarded the ship of the pirate Lindibier…do you know this man? Lindibier?”

“ ’Fraid not.”

“Well.” He considers it thoughtfully. “He was a real piece of shit.”

“Okay.”

“Anyway, we board, we kill, well, almost everyone, and then there’s just the cabin boy, hiding down in the aft. I walk over to him, he’s, what, fourteen? I take pity on him. I ask him, ‘You need food? Water?’ And he looks at me, and he leaps at me, and then…” He taps the side of his head. “He could swing a hammer, for a boy.” He looks away, wistful. “I strangled him and threw his body in the ocean. Let the fish turn him to shit as fast as they could. It took time for me to recover. That was when they made me a chancellor. Or my wife did. To save my life, she said.”

“Your wife?”

“Hild. Yes. She’s…” He is quiet for some time. “…like Shara. Or Signe. A very, eh, cunning person. She’s a chancellor, too. Just a more important one than me—the sort of chancellor that makes other chancellors. Which she did, to me. But I know what I’m good for. I just want to hunt meat and chase pirates. But they’ve had me behind a desk. Stuck me in a big, nice office where I never see anyone, and no one ever sees me. Though I insisted I come out when Kvarnström attacked a village. Do you know him? The pirate Kvarnström?”

Mulaghesh shakes her head.

“Oh. Well. He is a real piece of shit.”

“I’m sensing a theme.”

“Yes. We had been so caught up in this harbor thing, our dicks big and hard thinking of money, we had forgotten how to deal with pirates. The pirates took us, what, two years to get under control? Three? And then we forget it all, stumbling all over ourselves to do this job. Anyway, I hopped on a ship and took pursuit. We almost caught him, about sixty miles from here. But he damaged our mast with a chainshot, a cowardly way to fight.”

“I heard something about that,” she says, suspecting why Sigrud’s wife might not want someone who casually uses the phrase “dicks big and hard thinking of money” in the public eye. “So you’re actually here because your ship got damaged?”

“Partially. Some months ago Signe sent a signal to the UDS asking if she had approval to move forward with this tactic. I wanted to see what was going on, and a damaged ship is a good excuse. Besides, what are you doing here? This is a strange place for you to be, isn’t it?”

“Shara,” she says, as if that explains everything.

“Ah. Was you quitting part of her game?”

“No. That was my choice. She just dragged me back in.”

“A bad thing, to haul an old warrior back onto the field. What game is she playing now?”

She’s relieved Sigrud doesn’t ask about the circumstances of her exit, as she’s so tired of fielding questions about it. “They discovered some kind of ore or metal or whatever up near the fort. Shara’s concerned it might be Divine.”

The two of them sit on the plinth of Saint Zhurgut, and she summarizes the generalities of Sumitra Choudhry’s investigation and disappearance. He listens intently, smoking his pipe—his old pipe, she notices, not a fine little ivory piece but the filthy, scarred, oaken thing he was always carrying around. And suddenly Mulaghesh feels more relaxed and more open than she’s felt in weeks. It takes her a moment to realize she might be being more honest with him than she should, but she doesn’t care. She and Sigrud passed through fire and death together, and spent weeks recuperating in a hospital outside Bulikov, trapped in their beds. Though she still holds a grudge against him for making a fast and mostly full recovery—which astonished the doctors, who had all written him off as either permanently crippled or, much more likely in their opinions, soon to be dead. Mulaghesh’s recuperation was far longer and far more excruciating, fighting infections and trying to keep what was left of her arm.

He thinks for a long while when she’s finished. “What kind of ore is this, again?”

“It’s an electrical conductor. Like, what they use to make the electric lights work. They think they can use it to…I don’t know, power more of them, do it easier, faster.”

Sigrud stares at her blankly. “Faster? How would they make light…faster?”

“Hells, I don’t know. It’s some engineering shit. I told them they were sending the wrong person, but they squeezed my plums, so to speak.”

He shakes his head, staring around at the statues and the form of SDC peeking just over the walls. “Look at this world they shoved us into.” He looks up at a bone-white arch. “Maybe they should leave us in here, with this graveyard of relics.”

“Hey, it might not all be new. I saw something last night….Something that’s probably only familiar to Shara, you, and m—”

Before she can speak further the iron door swings back open. They both look up to see Signe walk through.

Signe sees them and stops in her tracks. Then she gives a savage little nod, as though to say, As I expected, all along. She resumes walking toward them. “Well,” she says. “Isn’t this a delight.”

Why is it that, despite us being decades older than her, thinks Mulaghesh, I feel like we’re two children caught causing mischief? She stands and says, “Evening, CTO Harkvaldsson. Lovely night, isn’t it?”

“I will presume it was you that broke into the fuel yard checkbox, stole a truck, and vaulted over the walls.”

“Is it really stealing if you never take it off the lot?”

“I could have you shot, you know.”

Sigrud stands. “Well, n—”

“Try it,” says Mulaghesh. “Then try explaining where I was shot. Looking around me it seems like you’re in a much more vulnerable position than I am, CTO Harkvaldsson.”

“As a Saypuri, I would imagine you’d be quite concerned about keeping Divine artifacts like this closely watched.”

“True, and as a Saypuri, I think it was damn shitty of you not to tell us you had these. Though I can understand you wouldn’t want us taking your trump card. Then what would you play against the tribes?”

Signe’s brow creases, wondering how Mulaghesh understood her intent.

“I was hiding over there,” Mulaghesh says, gesturing with the cigarillo. “I heard everything.”

Signe turns bright pink. “How dare you! That…That…” She looks to her father. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

Sigrud shrugs, bewildered. “What do you wish me to say?”

“Something authoritative and helpful, to start! How ridiculous it is that you must ask me what to say when this woman has breached our personal privacy!”

“This isn’t some family secret,” says Mulaghesh. “Or a company trick of the trade. All this shit is a national security threat, CTO Harkvaldsson.”

“They’re just statues,” says Signe indignantly. “We’ve tested them for any trace of the Divine and found none. If they registered as Divine I would have alerted the fortress immediately.”

“Right, if they registered using the tests you procured from Thinadeshi,” says Mulaghesh. “Do you want me to go sniffing around up there for your source?”

Signe pales a little at that. “This has nothing to do with Sumitra Choudhry.”

“Are you so sure? Are you hiding any other secrets from me now, Signe? Or is this the only one? Because a fine way to search your operation top to bottom would be to tug on Biswal’s coat about this and have him take the harbor apart out of sheer paranoia.”

Signe opens her mouth, aghast, then looks at her father. “This…This woman is putting our nation at risk. Everything will fall apart if the harbor project isn’t finished. Are you going to idly stand by?”

“You are a cunning creature, Signe,” says Sigrud. “Smart enough to know when you’re backed into a corner. If you have something to tell her, tell her.”

Signe sighs, exasperated. “I have told you everything I know about Choudhry. I have always been aboveboard on that subject!”

“Look me in the eye,” says Mulaghesh, stepping closer, “and tell me that.”

Signe’s glacial eyes burn brightly. “I promise. I promise, General.”

Mulaghesh holds her gaze for a moment, then nods. “All right. I believe you. For now.”

“And…And the statues…Will you, ah…”

“Tattle? Maybe. I haven’t made up my mind yet. I have fatter lambs to cook at the moment, and doing something like that would just complicate things.”

“I suppose I’ll have to accept that for the time being. If we are all done threatening one another, can I please escort my father to meet with Biswal? And where is your hat?”

Sigrud shrugs. “The wind took it.”

“Oh, well. We’ll find you a replacement. Come on. Let’s go.”

The three of them begin to exit the yard. Sigrud coughs and mutters about how after this he’ll be happy to return to the headquarters for a night’s rest.

“Your rooms are already prepared for you,” says Signe curtly. “You will have the lighthouse suite.”

“Oh,” he says.

“It’s the nicest suite in the building,” she says. Mulaghesh isn’t sure how, but Signe manages to pack a lot of animosity into this statement.

“I do not need that,” says Sigrud. “I have slept in far worse pla—”

“I know you have,” she says. “That’s not the point. The point is that you are the dauvkind, and everyone here will expect you to be treated as such. If I stuck you in one of the laborers’ quarters they would think I was being disrespectful.”

“Then…I will tell them not to think these things!” says Sigrud, bristling. “I will tell them to mind their own business!”

“And you can’t do that, either! Then it will look as if you’re trying to cover for me. You aren’t just a nobody anymore! People expect things from you!”

“You sound like your mother,” says Sigrud.

“If by that you mean I sound intelligent, then yes, I do, and I will take it as a compli—”

Mulaghesh stops listening. She hasn’t been to this part of the yard yet, so she hasn’t seen the massive, fifteen-foot statue that rests up against the iron wall. The very sight makes her stop where she stands and sends a shard of ice shooting into her heart.

She knows it immediately. Of course she does. Did she not see a much larger version of that carven figure just last night, rising from the sea to place her giant hand upon the cliffs? Weren’t every one of the ghastly illustrations on that plate mail burned into Mulaghesh’s memory, a solid wall of unimaginable violence?

“Voortya,” whispers Mulaghesh.

She stares at the statue. It’s so pale the light almost seems to filter through it, like it was made from the purest of snows. The statue stands on a plinth, but set before it is a wide bowl, almost like a claw-footed bathtub. Carved into the bottom of the plinth are many titles:

She wonders how anyone could ever come to love and worship such a thing. But then she realizes: Because they won. It’s as Biswal once said to her, during the gray, savage days of the Yellow March, outside Dzermir: “War is a hell beyond anything the Continentals and their gods could ever dream of. It behooves us to act accordingly. Those who accept it for what it is will be the victor.”

And the Voortyashtanis, perhaps, were all too happy to accept it for what it was. They embraced it, made a nation out of it, a whole culture birthed out of the willingness to inflict the unimaginable horrors of war. And, having done so, they won, over and over again. They survived the Divine Wars and went on to conquer nearly every piece of territory in the world.

Of course they loved her. No matter how cruel or indifferent, she helped them win.

Mulaghesh wanders forward, staring into that cold, still face. She remembers hearing that Voortya never spoke, not to the other Divinities, nor to her followers. But she wouldn’t need to, would she? Just look into that face, and you’ll understand all you need….

She notices something moving before the statue. It’s a tremor in the air, like a heat haze, like there’s a fire on the ground but she can’t see it. She squints at the disturbance, trying to track its source.

But was there a fire on the ground once? The mud below the tremor still bears charred sticks and a smattering of gray ashes, as if someone once camped here.

Mulaghesh’s brain starts whirring. Just like in the thinadeskite tunnels. Did Sumitra Choudhry come here to perform her miracle, too?

She walks over, eager to see if there’s any sign of burned rosemary or dried frog eggs.

But as she rushes over, things…change.

Mulaghesh stops and looks up into the face of Voortya.

The world goes still.

There is someone in the statue. It’s the strangest of sensations, but it’s undeniable: there is a mind there, an agency, watching.

“There’s someone in there,” she whispers.

“What?” says Signe’s voice, faraway.

She stares deeper into the empty, vacant gaze. “There’s someone behind those eyes. There’s someone…looking back.”

The statue of Voortya seems to lean forward to her. And then she sees the sea.

Dark waters churn under the light of the yellow moon. She plunges down into the sea, down, down, through the rippling depths and the glimmering spears of moonlight, the swirls of bubbles and the flick of distant fish.

The light changes below her, as if there is a second moon and a second sky at the bottom of the sea, and this moon is not yellow but white, white, the purest white.

She bursts through dark waters, rises up into this second sky, and sees…

An island resting on the horizon, surrounded by mists. Strange peaks cut through the clouds gathered about it, like the growths of coral.

There are voices in the night: Mother, Mother. Why did you leave us?

The island speeds up to her. Beaches white as bone, delicate as mother-of-pearl, and rising from those strange sands is a mass of enormous structures, massive towers that have the look of chitin and claw. Some of the buildings, she sees, are not buildings at all, but statues, bigger than the biggest skyscraper in Ghaladesh, so vast she can hardly see their tops….

Mother. We loved you. We love you. Please, give us what you promised us.

Mulaghesh floats through the white city. The cold white moon fills the dark sky above her. She thinks: Am I really here? Have I been brought here? She finds she cannot say. She simply drifts through this strange, bloodless world of bulging structures that rise to become curling, delicate towers, a world of massive, silent giants concealed by the clouds.

Yet then she realizes she is not alone.

The streets and beaches ahead are filled with people….But not normal people. She needs only glance at the hundreds of points on their shoulders and backs to see what they really are.

Thousands and thousands of Voortyashtani sentinels stand perfectly still in the moonlight, shoulder to shoulder in the streets and the city squares and on the distant beaches. Mulaghesh nearly screams, terrified, certain that these monstrous creatures will turn and tear her to pieces. But they do not. Instead they watch the horizon, their thorned hands resting on the pommels of their massive swords, staring at something high up above them.

Please, Mother, they whisper. Please, speak to us.

Mulaghesh drifts among these malformed warriors, staring at their skeletal masks and their hideous armor, half antlers and half seashell. Then she slowly follows their gaze.

They are staring at a tall, white tower at the center of the city. At the very peak of the tower is a balcony, and though she knows that in waking life her eyes would never be this clear, she can see someone up there, pacing back and forth.

Mother, they say. Come to us.

Then one of the massive statues ahead of her…shifts. Just the barest of movements, the tiniest twitch, yet she knows she saw it. The statue is turned away from her, but she recognizes this figure, gleaming in the moonlight—didn’t she pour all of her carousel into that very thing no more than two nights ago?

Voortya, she thinks.

Beautiful and terrible and resplendent, cruelty incarnate, Voortya stands up straight in the mist. To see such a massive figure move so silently fills Mulaghesh’s heart with pure terror.

Then the goddess slowly turns, twisting her head around as if she heard someone mention her name.

No, no, thinks Mulaghesh. No, please, no…

The dark, blank eyes turn to face her.

Mother, whisper the sentinels. Mother, Mother…

Then there’s a voice just over Mulaghesh’s shoulder: “Are you supposed to be here?”

She turns to see something huge standing over her, a towering creature of chrome and metal. Before she can open her mouth to scream she’s suddenly plunging into the ocean again.

Up, up, up. Back through the swirling dark waters, rocketing up to the fluttering light of the yellow moon.

She bursts through, and the world spins around her.

“Turyin?” says Sigrud’s voice. “Turyin!”

She feels cold mud on the back of her neck and realizes that the back of her head hurts. She draws breath into her lungs and is suddenly racked with coughs.

“General Mulaghesh?” says Signe’s voice. “Are…Are you all right?”

She opens her eyes and sees, to her horror, pale white statues standing over her…but they’re the ones from the harbor yard, not the massive, terrifying things she glimpsed in the other place.

But what was that other place?

I know what it was, she says to herself, terrified. I know where I just went.

Sigrud’s face appears above her. He kneels to help her. “Turyin? Say something, if you can.”

“It’s still there,” she says, gasping. “It’s real….”

“What? What is?”

She feels herself growing weak, as if what she saw bruised her very mind. Before she passes out she tries to shout to them, “The City of Blades! It’s still there! The City of Blades is still there!”

But before she can, darkness takes her.