City of Miracles

5. All I Had Left

Captain First Class Kavitha Mishra walks across the empty lots, hands in the pockets of her greatcoat. The wreckage of the slaughterhouse beyond is still steaming, ribbons of vapor unfurling from its depths. The Ahanashtani police have the area cordoned off, and she notes all the officers look very serious, frowning and shaking their heads, their cheeks and noses bright red under those tall, crested helmets. A couple of them have the glitter of gold about their shoulders—lieutenants, maybe, or perhaps a captain or two. A very serious affair, indeed.

The constable ahead holds up a black-gloved hand as she approaches. “I’m sorry, miss, this is a crime scene, and I—”

Mishra pulls out her credentials and holds them up. “Good morning,” she says.

He reads her credentials. Then his eyes widen and he takes a step back. “I see, ma’am,” he says. “Ah. Would you like me to get the lieutenant, ma’am?”

“If that’s who’s in charge—then yes, please.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He trots off. Mishra waits, casting an eye over the ruins of the slaughterhouse. She could walk into the scene if she wanted—no matter how much gold bedecks those uniforms, her position thoroughly trumps theirs—but she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to do anything especially memorable beyond appear and then depart.

The Ahanashtani lieutenant, his giant white mustache rippling with each indignant huff, strides across the pavement to her. “Yes, yes?” he asks. “How can I help you?”

She shows him her credentials. He, like the constable before him, is cowed, but he’s a lot more resentful about it.

“I see,” he says. “Well. How nice of you to join us, Captain Mishra. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is it? What would this have to do with military intelligence? Unless…it has something to do with Komayd?”

The lieutenant looks uneasy at that, because the Ahanashtani authorities are under a lot of scrutiny right now. Allowing the former leader of the world’s most powerful nation to get assassinated in your backyard has that effect.

“We’re not sure yet,” says Mishra. “We’re still assessing the situation. Do you have any reason to believe it’s connected?”

“No,” he says, surprised. “Not yet, at least. Though I certainly hope not.”

“You said you had another series of deaths at another location, downriver?”

“A coal warehouse, yes. Professionally done. Very professionally done.” He looks her over. “I do hope you’re not about to tell me that Saypur had something to do with it, though. I thought the days of murderous conflict taking place at our back door without any warning were behind us.”

“There’s little I can tell you now. But one thing I absolutely can tell you is that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had absolutely nothing to do with this. Though it does worry us. Have you identified any of the bodies?”

“Not a one. It’s early yet.”

“And…” She nods ahead at the burned-down slaughterhouse. “No body found here?”

“Not yet. Though it’s in a poor state. It’ll take some time to search.”

“And nothing washed downriver?”

“No.” He gives her a hard look. “Who exactly might I be looking for, Captain?”

“Someone tall,” says Mishra. “Hair cut very short. A Dreyling. With a false eye.”

He shakes his head. “We’ve found no body matching that description, ma’am. Can you give me any more?”

“If I knew more, Lieutenant, I would give it. Just an unsavory character that has been identified at another recent incident.” She pulls out her card and hands it over. “If you happen to learn of anything, can you notify me, please? We’d like to keep abreast of this situation.”

“I would be happy to, ma’am,” he says, though he smiles icily enough that it’s obvious he means quite the opposite.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” says Mishra. She nods to him, then turns and walks back to her auto.

She takes a short breath of relief. She expected someone from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would have already paid him a visit—someone who would have had official orders to be there—and that could have been awkward. For while Mishra did have orders to check in on the scene, they didn’t come from the Ministry.

She drives north, away from the industrial neighborhoods, passing all the mills and the refineries and the plants belching up steam. She tools around until she comes to the traffic tunnels connecting east Ahanashtan to all the north-south thoroughfares—tiny, cramped arteries carved into the hillsides. She drives into one tunnel and pulls over about halfway through, guiding her auto onto the shoulder. Then she sits for a moment, watching the other autos. She looks in the rearview mirror, her amber-colored eyes narrow and watchful. Once she’s confirmed she wasn’t followed, she pulls out the envelope.

The envelope is thick and very formal-looking, closed by a string tied around a brass button. Mishra checks her surroundings again, then opens the envelope and pulls out what appears to be a piece of black paper.

She’s done this before, many times. But she still can’t help shuddering every time she touches the paper. She knows it’s not really paper, it’s something else: its surface feels as soft as sable, yet if you push on it it’s as hard as glass….Whatever it is, her skin recognizes it as something alien.

And it is simply too black. Far too black.

She takes out a pencil and begins to write on the paper. She can’t read what she’s writing—gray on black is too tricky for her eyes, in any light—but she knows it won’t matter to him. The controller, as he prefers to be called in casual conversation, can see in any darkness.

She writes:

She folds up the paper and steps out of her car, wincing as a large, rattling truck goes cruising by, spewing exhaust. Though Mishra’s a Saypuri, she’s a country girl at heart, and much prefers a horse and cart over all these new autos.

She walks to a small service door on the side of the tunnel, checks her surroundings again, and opens it.

Inside is a small cement closet, just four bare walls and a floor. There’s a broken broomstick standing in the corner, along with an old dusty glass bottle. Besides that, there’s nothing.

She places the paper in the middle of the closet floor, then shuts the door, watching as the door’s shadow falls across the paper.

Mishra checks her watch—Five minutes to go—leans up against the tunnel wall, and lights a cigarette.

She doesn’t wonder if it will work. She knows it will work. All the bits of shadow paper find him quick enough, if placed in deep enough darkness. No matter where that darkness happens to be, for all darkness is one to him.

She watches the traffic, making note of the models of cars, the colors, the faces of the drivers. He’s protected her, blessed her, given her defenses—but after last night, who knows if they’ll work. What mad risks I take, she thinks, for a creature I can barely understand.

But she knows that’s wrong. She does understand him. And he understands her.

She remembers when he first came to her—1729, she thinks it was, almost ten years ago. Four years after Voortyashtan. Four years after her brother Sanjay had died in combat there, stabbed by a shtani girl hardly older than fifteen. He’d been battling insurgents, trying to save the girl, but the girl didn’t understand that—or perhaps she did, but didn’t care. Who knows what these degenerates think?

And what did Saypur get for her brother’s sacrifice? What was earned by his death? After Komayd left power, Mishra couldn’t tell. The Ministry and the military were in tatters. Public trust in the national forces was at an all-time low. The merchants were spilling into government and treating generals and commanders as if they were simple bureaucratic officials, pencil pushers and seat-fillers. Mishra, like a lot of other loyalists, found herself disgusted with her nation.

She thought she kept her disgust a secret. But it soon became clear that she hadn’t. Because one day, while she was stationed here in Ahanashtan, someone slipped a letter under her apartment door.

This disturbed her. Mishra’s residential address was a carefully kept Ministry secret. Direct correspondence was strictly forbidden.

But another thing that disturbed her about this letter was the color of its paper.

It was black. Not dyed black, like a shirt—but black, as if someone had taken the idea of blackness and cut a perfect square from it.

Mishra opened the letter. And though she couldn’t understand how, she could see writing on it, letters in black, but it was in different shades of black.

…or perhaps the letter did something else. Perhaps when you looked at it, rather than seeing the words there, the paper wrote words upon your mind.

The letter said:

And at the bottom of the letter was a name.

Mishra stared at the letter. Not just because all of this was so odd, but because the words spoke to a deep dread that had been metastasizing within her, this idea that perhaps no state or nation could ever truly succeed in this world. The Continent had been an abomination, and now Saypur, the world’s best chance at a fair, proud, and free democracy, was being ruined by mercantilism and vain, fruitless quests for peace. Ten years into her military career she’d found herself waking up and thinking: We’ll never get it right. We’ll always find a way to cock it all up. Every time. And as her comrades fought and suffered and died, she found herself doubting the point of it all.

To see these thoughts written down before her, no matter how strangely they arrived, was a powerful sensation for her. It felt, for the first time in many years, like she was not alone.

So she took a breath, and read the name aloud.

And then the boy came—he still looked like a young boy back then—and they talked for a long, long while.

Captain First Class Kavitha Mishra has done a lot of odd things for the controller in the years since. There are other members of the Ministry who work for him too—she knows this because she personally recruited some of them—but none of them work as closely with him as she does. He wouldn’t have picked anyone else to send to Bulikov, for example, when they needed to trap that laughing boy, the one who could seemingly appear out of thin air. And though that was her oddest job yet, she suspects he’ll have stranger ones for her in the future.

Especially after Komayd, and Khadse, and whatever in hells happened last night.

Standing in the tunnel, Mishra checks her watch. She takes a breath, then opens the door.

The piece of black paper is still on the floor of the closet. She picks it up and unfolds it.

There are new words on the letter. Just like that first time in her apartment, they seem to be written in black—or perhaps they write themselves on some deeper, hidden part of her mind:

She sighs.

Then she takes a match, lights it on the wall of the closet, and holds the flame to the corner of the paper.

The flames slowly crawl across the black page, turning it into ash. She blows on it a little to help it spread, then stamps it out when it’s finished. Then she climbs back into her auto and drives away.

“Shit,” she says. She hates mirror duty. But an order is an order.

In some ways the modern world now seems very new and advanced to Sigrud. In his day, autos were a rarity, telephones even rarer than that, and pistols and riflings were expensive exoticisms.

Yet in some ways, to his disbelief, it remains absolutely the same. For example, if you were to tell Sigrud that in this very modern, very advanced society, one could still use a forged labor visa—one of the stalwart fallbacks of the intelligence industry, when he was active—to cross the South Seas to Navashtra in Saypur, he would think you a fool. Surely the bureaucracies and authorities must have closed the various loopholes that made such forgeries possible? Surely this new generation, swimming in so much technology and innovation, must have found a way to eliminate this common deceit?

But it appears that the wheels of government move even slower than Sigrud imagined. For he, along with dozens of other scruffy Dreylings and Continentals, is able to painlessly book passage across the South Seas and sail to Navashtra without incident. The various Saypuri officials barely even glance at him. Perhaps Saypur is so hungry for skilled labor that it doesn’t particularly care if a few of those laborers are malicious agents.

From Navashtra, it’s a shockingly simple thing to make it down the coast to Ghaladesh. All forms of transportation, whether roads or boats or trains, inevitably curve toward Ghaladesh, second-largest city in the world, but the undisputed capital of civilization. And though the checkpoints and security measures are higher in Ghaladesh than anywhere else, they’re still not as high as what Sigrud had to go through in service to Saypur’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs—so, to his surprise, they pose no threat to him.

Perhaps this is a world I could have never imagined, he thinks. Perhaps this is a world that is, more or less, at peace.

And then, suddenly, he’s there. He’s walking free and unthreatened in Ghaladesh, the city that, in many ways, has decided his life and the lives of countless others. Because the choices made here, whether about war or commerce, have surely had millions of consequences and casualties apiece.

Sigrud tries not to stare around himself as he walks through Ghaladesh. He is mostly struck by how clean the city is, how organized. Bulikov was a schizophrenic, crumbling mess, Voortyashtan was hardly more than a savage outpost, and Ahanashtan was built specifically to serve the shipping channel, creating a half-industrial, half-urbane hybrid of a city.

But Ghaladesh is different. Ghaladesh, unlike all the other cities he’s ever seen, is intentional.

You can see it when you walk from block to block. From the graceful wooden posts that so many houses sit on to the drains in the street to the curves of the elevated train, you can see how this was not just done well but done just—so. Ghaladesh, he sees, is a city of engineers, a city of thinkers, a city of people who do not act rashly.

Or at least act rashly within their own territory. The rest of the world, well, that he knows is a different story.

He can’t help but marvel at how it flows, how it breathes. How the old stone, commercial buildings downtown flow into the graceful residential sections, where all the houses sit on poles or posts in case of flooding—for Ghaladesh is a city built on the sea, and thus is at constant war with the waters. Perhaps that’s why so much of the city feels planned and designed to a fault. Or perhaps Saypuris, who after all served as slaves to the Continent for centuries, are incredibly, intensely sensitive to the possibility of ever infringing on the life of another. After glancing at the papers, it seems that if someone ever proposes constructing a new building of apartments, Ghaladeshis immediately hold a giant debate about the ramifications and effects of such a building, and whether such effects are acceptable. It is a little too civilized for Sigrud, who was raised in a culture where the person who yelled the loudest was usually considered to be in the right.

He goes to work right away. In this highly organized metropolis, it takes no time at all to find the address. It’s close to the heart of Ghaladesh, in one of the richest and most exclusive areas available. When he gets there he can’t see the house behind the tall wooden walls, but he can tell he’s come to the right place by the Saypuri guards out front—plainclothes, certainly, but he knows soldiers when he sees them.

Sigrud waits for evening, then skulks through the yards of the adjoining houses. No one sees him, no one raises an eyebrow. These are civilized people. They have no need to be watchful of their properties.

He waits on the other side of the walls, listening for a footfall or a sigh. He hears none. They must only put security out front, he thinks. Which is…remarkably stupid. He readies himself, then hops the fence.

He lands in a very austere garden in the back of the house. Mostly just grass and rock and the odd shrub, pruned within an inch of its life. There’s a sliding glass door in the back, and he finds nothing remarkable about the lock on it. He picks it in less than a minute and a half, then slips inside.

He checks his pocket watch. It’s late evening now. She should be getting home soon.

He pads through the house, finds a deep bit of shadow on the balcony above the foyer, and waits.

After about an hour, there’s the clink of keys. The door opens. Then the old woman walks in.

She is slightly bent, her hair gray and white, her skin lined with years of sun and stress. She has a cane now, which she uses with a great air of reluctance, as if someone glued it to her hand and she’s not sure how to get it off. He watches as she walks to the coat rack and sticks the cane in the bottom, muttering, “Fucking thing,” as she does, and then she begins the long, slow, complicated process of removing her coat. Such a thing takes time, for not only are her joints clearly paining her, but her left arm is a prosthetic, shining metal from the elbow down.

Sigrud goes totally still at the sight of her, not even breathing. Not because he fears her, but because he never could have expected how old she’s gotten. She is not at all the striding, powerful creature he once knew, the person who seemed like she could punch through the hull of a battleship if she but willed it. In thirteen years, she’s become someone else.

He watches as she limps over to the kitchen, where she pours herself a glass of brandy. She stands there at the sink, sipping it. But he can tell something’s different about the way she moves. It’s too stiff, too careful…

She puts down the brandy. “If that’s not you, Sigrud,” she says, “I’m going to turn around and start shooting.”

“It is,” he says, emerging from the shadows. “How could you tell I was here?”

“Because you smell,” she says. “Very bad. Smells like you’ve been stuck in the hold of some ship for weeks. Which you probably have. Turnabout’s fair play, isn’t it? You smelled me out in Voortyasht—”

General Turyin Mulaghesh trails off as she turns around and looks up at him. Her face goes slack with shock. “By the seas, Sigrud,” she whispers. “Look at you. Just look at you.”

Sigrud looks down at her from the balcony, unsure what to do.

“You haven’t aged a day, Sigrud,” she says softly. “Not a single, solitary day.”

Sigrud waits in the reading room, the spacious bay windows framing the rambling spill of downtown Ghaladesh beyond. He can’t stop staring out the window at them.

“Ah,” says Mulaghesh, returning with a bottle of wine and two glasses. “First time in Ghaladesh?”

He nods.

“Very nice city,” says Mulaghesh. “If you can afford to live here. Most can’t. This damn house they have here for me, I’d have to live my life ten fucking times over to be able to ever afford it.”

He smiles politely, not sure what to say.

“So has anyone told you yet,” says Mulaghesh casually, pulling the cork out of the bottle of wine with her teeth and spitting it out on the floor, “how absolutely fucking stupid you are to come here?”

“Yes. Including myself.”

“But it didn’t work.”

“No. Circumstances.”

“Those must have been some fucking circumstances. You’re still a wanted man, Sigrud. Lots of military brass want to see your head on a platter for what you did.” She glances at him as she pours him a glass. “And I’d be hard pressed to blame them.”

“Yes. I understand.”

“Where have you been for the past decade or so?” she asks, pouring her own.

“Nowhere good.”

She laughs sullenly. “Doubt it was any better than where I was. Sitting in the Parliament chambers for over a decade, dealing with these little-minded fools…”

“It was probably better,” he says. “You probably had a toilet.”

“Ah. Well, yes. That certainly puts things in perspective. Now how, exactly, did you get in here without alerting any of my security team?”

He shrugs. “Quietly.”

She grunts and hands him a glass. “Well. You were always one creepy spook, Sigrud. It’s nice to see at least one thing hasn’t changed. But I suspect I know why you’re here.”

He picks up the glass and smells it. He won’t drink tonight. He needs to be on his toes. “Yes. Shara.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah.”

Mulaghesh eases herself into a chair beside him, groaning as she does. He watches her movements, watches her give her left hip a little more time to adjust than her right—arthritis, probably.

“Ah,” she says, seeing his face. “Has time not been kind to me? Or is it kind to anyone, really?”

Sigrud isn’t sure what to say. He’d imagined so much of how this would go, but now that he’s here, words fail him.

“It certainly seems to have been kind to you,” she says, sipping her wine. “You look exactly—exactly—as I remember you, Sigrud. And if you got in here without anyone noticing, you must be moving pretty good too.”

“My mother aged very well,” he says. “Or so I am told.”

“If anyone ages as well as you have,” says Mulaghesh, “It’d be a medical fucking miracle.”

The mention of the word “miracle” makes him cringe. His left hand throbs. To be so close to the woman who was there when his daughter died…It all comes rushing back to him, too much, too fast.

“How are you doing, Turyin?” he asks, wishing to think about anything else.

“Good, or so I’m told. Now that Shara’s policies have really kicked in during the past, what, five or six years, I’m hearing a lot less ‘no’ and a lot more ‘how may we assist you, Minister.’ Quite an about-face. Turns out people like opening up borders, if it makes them money. Maybe they’ll thank Shara, now that she’s dead. If it doesn’t put their seat at risk, that is. That’s politicians for you.”

“You are…the minority leader?”

“Mm,” she says, sipping her wine. “Of the Upper House of Parliament. But next year, they say, I’ll be the majority leader. Won’t that be fun? I expect I’ll have to talk to a lot more foreign delegates then.” She glances at him. “Speaking of which…Do you want to know how Hild is doing?”

Sigrud blinks, startled at the mention of his wife. “You’ve been in contact with her?”

“She was the trade chancellor for the United Dreyling States. I couldn’t avoid talking to her.”

“I…suppose.”

“She just stepped down, actually. They’re doing quite well up there, so they don’t need her on the watch anymore, or so she said.” She glances at him. “She’s remarried. I suppose you should know that.”

“I see. I had wondered.” He rubs his mouth, his face slightly puzzled. How odd it is to hear of the lives of your loved ones in a briefing. “Is she…I don’t know. Happy?”

“I think so. There are more grandbabies now.”

Sigrud swallows. “Carin’s?”

“I would assume so. You only had her and…and Signe, right?”

He nods, feeling strangely alien, as if someone else is wearing his body.

“Carin has had five now,” says Mulaghesh. “Four girls and one boy.”

He lets out a breath. “That’s…that’s quite a brood.”

“Yes. It would be.” She pauses, then asks kindly, “Would you like to see if I could get their pictures for you?”

He thinks about it for a long time. Then he shakes his head.

“No?”

“No. It would make what I am about to do much harder.”

“What do you mean?”

“Saypur will not let me go back,” he said. “So there is no need for me to know of such things. Because I will never have them.”

There’s an awkward silence. Mulaghesh sips her wine. She says, “Did she ever contact you, Sigrud?”

“Who? Hild?”

“No. Shara, of course.”

“No,” he says. “I only learned she was dead secondhand.”

Mulaghesh nods slowly. “So…You don’t know what she was doing on the Continent.”

“No.” He sits up. “Why? Do you?”

She smiles mirthlessly. “No. Not a whit. Wish I did. And I did ask. She wouldn’t tell me. Seemed to think it’d put my life in jeopardy. Which, considering what happened to her, might have been true. The only thing she told me was that it was…how did she put it…Ah, yes. She said it was, quote, ‘increasingly likely that Sigrud will visit you one day.’ ”

Sigrud blinks, surprised. “She told you I would come to you?”

“Correct. I didn’t understand it. You were a gods damned criminal. But she said that, if you were to come to me, I was to give you a message—but I assume you have no knowledge of this message, do you, Sigrud?”

He shakes his head, stunned. He hadn’t anticipated this at all.

Mulaghesh stares into space, thinking. “She must have known,” she says. “Must have known there was a chance she’d be killed. Must have known you’d find out. And that you’d come to me. Eventually.” She laughs hollowly. “Clever little woman. She finds such delightful ways to make us all do her dirty work for her, even beyond the grave.”

“What is the message?”

“It was very simple,” says Mulaghesh, “and very confusing. She said that if you ever came to me, I was to tell you to protect her daughter. At all costs.”

Sigrud is still for a moment. Then he shakes his head, exasperated. “But…But that’s what I’m already here to do,” he says. “I came to you to find out where Tatyana Komayd is!”

“You didn’t let me finish,” snaps Mulaghesh. “Because no one knows where Tatyana Komayd is. And apparently no one has for months.”

“What?”

“Yes. After the assassination, finding Tatyana was a national priority—and yet the Komayd estate was utterly empty. Apparently Shara had been circulating the idea that her daughter was staying behind at the Komayd estate…yet that was far from the truth. But now is where it gets confusing,” says Mulaghesh, sitting forward with a pained grunt. “Fucking arthritis…It’s just bullshit, how your body rebels against you. Anyways. Shara told me to tell you to protect her daughter—but she also told me that her daughter could be found with the only woman who ever shared her love.”

Sigrud stares at her, bug-eyed. “What?”

“That’s what I thought too,” says Mulaghesh. “I never really thought she was, you know, that kind of a person. I try not to assume anything, since lots of people have assumed things about me over the years, none of which I’ve exactly appreciated, and I—”

Sigrud holds up a hand. “No. I don’t think this is right.”

“Well, hells, Sigrud. What right do you have t—”

“No. I mean, that sort of message, Turyin. I think it is intended to be confusing, to anyone but me. Perhaps she is referring to someone both she and I knew, once.” He sighs and grips the sides of his skull. “But…I don’t know who that could be.”

“Why wouldn’t she just tell me who it was?” asks Mulaghesh. “Wouldn’t that be easier?”

He remembers the pale Continental girl saying that Nokov would pull every secret out of his guts. “Your address is publicly listed,” he says. “And your security is not very good, as I have proven. I think she believed she could take no chances. Even with you, Turyin. But wait…When she told you this, did you not do anything? Did this not alarm you?”

“It alarmed me plenty,” says Mulaghesh. “But by then I was already pretty alarmed.”

“By what? What had Shara done?”

Mulaghesh sighs, sits back down, and drinks the rest of her wine in one giant gulp. “Now, that is a very interesting question.”

“It was early 1733,” says Mulaghesh. “I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Shara in, what, two years? She left office in 1726, and though we’d stayed in touch it’d been a damned while, I’ll say that. But then one day my assistant lets me know that a woman left a message for me, and this woman was quite insistent—said she was a friend of Captain Nesrhev, from Bulikov.”

Sigrud smiles. “The police captain you were involved with.”

“Right. But it was only a few times,” says Mulaghesh defensively. “At least, by my standards it was only a few. Anyways. So I’m damned curious to find out who this woman is, and I show up at the restaurant mentioned in the message, and who is it but Shara. I was surprised. I mean, the former prime minister can get a meeting with anyone she wants, right? But she wanted to keep all of it a secret. She couldn’t be seen meeting with me, couldn’t be seen asking me what she was about to ask.”

“Which was what?”

“It was about an intelligence compartment, an operation. One she didn’t have access to, had never had access to throughout her career in the Ministry, even when she was prime gods damned minister. One called Operation Rebirth. You know it?”

“I have been forced to do a lot of remembering in the past few days, Turyin, but this I do not know.”

“I’d never heard of it either. She asked me to look into it. She looked shaken too. Paranoid. It was odd—she’d been living on the outskirts of Ghaladesh with her daughter, just…keeping quiet. But then there she was, coming out of nowhere with this. Said it’d be a pretty old operation—back when Vinya was running the show, maybe during the 1710s, while you and she were just young pups and barely knew how to slit a throat.”

Sigrud was actually very much aware of how to slit a throat by 1710, but refrains from correcting her.

“So I did some checking. Reached out to some trusted sources in the Ministry, in the archives. And all they came back with was a file with one piece of paper in it. Just one. A report on a Saypuri dreadnought, the SS Salim. Know it?”

Sigrud shakes his head.

“Me neither. It was lost in a typhoon in 1716. That was all I had to give her. But it seemed to excite her plenty. She suggested she’d discovered something ratty, and it smelled pretty ratty to me too. ‘I see Vinya’s fingerprints all over this,’ I told her, and she…suggested that was right but said she wouldn’t tell me more. Again, for my own safety.”

“What happened then?”

“After I gave her that file she stopped living so quietly. Threw herself into her charity work, started visiting the Continent more and more, arranging shelter and foster homes for orphans. Seemed like the usual charity shit. But I wondered—was it really a charity? It couldn’t have been a coincidence that I’d told her about this operation and then suddenly she starts practically living on the Continent. And then, three months ago, she makes a surprise visit to me, tells me the bit about you and Tatyana—and then…” She trails off. “I had to identify the body, you know.”

Sigrud sits up and looks at her, alarmed.

“They found parts of it,” she says. “Of…her, I suppose. And it was odd to ask me to see her. She was the fucking prime minister, everyone knew what she looked like. But I guess you have to be formal in such situations. I thought maybe she’d faked it all, up until that moment. But maybe that’s just what one does in reaction to such things. The unreality of death. Hoping it was a dream. You know?”

Sigrud shuts his eyes. He sees Signe standing on a pier, staring out to sea, watching all her astonishing contraptions going to work, forging a new age.

“Yes,” he says softly. “I know.”

“Did you come straight here once you heard about her?”

“No,” he says. “And I am here to tell you that you were right, Turyin. Shara was not just involved in some charity. I think when she went to the Continent, she was going to war.”

Mulaghesh listens as he tells her about the past month of his life. When he tells her what happened in Ahanashtan, she drops all pretense of polite attention and instead grabs the bottle of wine.

By the time he finishes talking the bottle of wine is almost gone. Mulaghesh, rolling her eyes in dismay and sighing heavily, keeps pouring glass after glass of it, tossing each one down her throat with a weary resignation. The one piece of information he withholds is Nokov’s name: he’s not willing to take the chance that she could repeat it and bring that creature down on her head.

When he’s done, Mulaghesh takes a deep breath and says, “Okay, first off—you are the stupid asshole who left seven bodies in a coal warehouse in Ahanashtan last week?”

“Oh. You heard about that?”

“Gods damn it, Sigrud, a former prime minister got assassinated in Ahanashtan a month ago! If so much as one body hits the ground in the whole of that province, I get briefed about it, let alone seven!”

“Well. If it is any consolation, things mostly went to plan….”

“Except for the part where it sure sounds like a gods damned Divinity showed up and nearly killed you!” says Mulaghesh, furious. “Not to mention you telling me that the streets of Ahanashtan are apparently riddled with what sounds like some damned Divine booby traps. And fuck knows if I can understand what that’s all about!”

“You will need to keep your voice down,” says Sigrud. “Your guards have ears.”

Mulaghesh rolls her eyes again and tosses herself back in her chair.

“I do not think,” he says, “that the things I met were Divinities.”

“Oh? And what makes you say that?”

“In…In Voortyashtan…When you held the Sword of Voortya. What did it feel like?”

“What are you digging up that awful memory for…?”

“Turyin. Please.”

She stares out the window, her eyes wide and haunted. “Like I could have…could have done anything. Anything. Cut the world in two if I wanted to.”

“Yes. Even a shred of a true Divinity’s power is incomprehensible to the human mind. They can warp reality without even thinking. But the two beings I encountered…They struggled. They had limitations. The world was filled with boundaries and limits for them.”

“So, what are they? Divine creatures? Living miracles?”

“I’ve no idea,” says Sigrud. “But I think Shara knew. They both knew Shara, I suspect. Though one fought against her, and the other with her. And it sounds as if all of what she did on the Continent was started by the file you found….”

“Operation Rebirth.”

“Right.” Sigrud breathes deep. “So. This is…a lot to take in.”

“You’re telling me, asshole. What I can’t figure is, if Shara was tangling with these things that sure as hells acted like Divinities, why not use her black lead on them, just as she did Kolkan? Why not use the one thing she knew could kill them?”

“I don’t know,” says Sigrud. “I assume she still had it. She did not even trust it with the Ministry, after Bulikov. Such weapons, she said to me, should not be trusted with governments.”

“As someone who’s been trying to lead one for a while, I can understand that.”

“I think she trusted nothing and no one,” says Sigrud darkly. “The Shara I knew would have at least written a message for me. Something encoded, something secret. But a spoken word, passed along verbally…Such methods speak of desperation.”

“I don’t like the idea of Shara desperate.”

“Nor I,” he says. “Especially when her enemy, whoever he is, seems to be after her daughter.”

“I don’t understand that at all. She’s just a kid.”

“Khadse said his employer was targeting Continental youths,” says Sigrud, thinking. “Children. Adolescents. First their parents were killed, then the children vanished.”

Mulaghesh’s face grows grave. “Then you…You think Tatyana might already be…”

“I don’t know. It sounded as if Shara’s enemy had just gotten that list of Continentals. So there might still be time.” He pokes at his false eye, trying to get it into a better position.

“Can you please not do that?” says Mulaghesh. “It’s creepy.”

“Sorry. Tell me. I only saw her the one time. What do you know of Tatyana?”

“Not much,” says Mulaghesh. “Shara zealously guarded their privacy after she left office. I suppose she put her Ministry skills to good use there. People barely even knew she’d adopted a daughter, let alone a Continental. I met her only once. She was young. And she was obsessed with the stock markets.”

“The…the what? The stock markets?”

“Yeah. She was a weird kid, I’ll be honest. Read a lot of economics books. But being around Shara probably makes anyone weird.”

Sigrud sits back in his chair, thinking. “Where did Shara live? Before she died, I mean.”

“Her ancestral estate. Eastern Ghaladesh.” She gives him the specific address. “It’s a huge place, belonged to her aunt. Why?”

“Because I think, yet again, that there is something I need to remember,” he says, “and I need something to jog my memory.”

Mulaghesh frowns at him. Then her mouth falls open. “Whoa. Wait. Are you saying you’re thinking of breaking into Shara’s estate? Just to jog your memory?”

Sigrud shrugs. “That is where I was going originally. I don’t know where to go otherwise. Shara was trying to make me think of someone, but we knew so many people….If I can see her records, see what she was doing, it would help me understand.”

“Are you mad? Sigrud, that place is part of an international investigation! A Ministry investigation! It’ll be watched!”

“Then I will have to be careful.”

“Shara’s house won’t be like mine,” says Mulaghesh. “She was beloved, hated, and now she’s dead. They’re taking this fucking seriously, Harkvaldsson! It’s not something for you to go gallivanting into. They’ll have soldiers and guards!”

“I will not do any gallivanting,” says Sigrud. “I will be very good.”

“Are you even listening to me?” says Mulaghesh. “I don’t want you killing any more innocent people, people who are just trying to do their jobs!”

There’s a long, awkward silence.

“You know,” Sigrud says quietly, “that I did not mean to do any of that.”

“I know those soldiers in Voortyashtan are dead. I know that people who tangle with you tend to wind up that way. And I don’t like the idea of pointing you toward any other dumb kids who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“It was thirteen years ago,” says Sigrud. His voice shakes with a cold fury. “And my daughter had just died.”

“Does that justify it? Some other parents are still mourning their kids, because of you. You’re a hard operator, Sigrud, that’s the truth. Are you willing to play hard for this operation? Are you willing to react lethally if you need, to get what you want?”

Sigrud doesn’t meet her eyes.

“That’s what I thought,” says Mulaghesh. “We trained you to do one thing, Sigrud. And you’re good at it. But I think maybe it’s all you know how to do anymore. Looking at you now, it’s downright disturbing—because you don’t seem worried about this at all.”

“I am worried,” says Sigrud, confused.

“Yes, but not about yourself,” snaps Mulaghesh. “When most people talk about going up against what sure sounds like a Divinity, they at least mention that they’re anxious. But I’ve heard not a peep of that from you, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson. You don’t seem to care about whether that thing can kill you.”

Sigrud sits in silence for a moment. “She was all I had left,” he says suddenly.

“What?” says Mulaghesh.

“She was all I had left. Shara was. For thirteen years, for thirteen miserable years, I waited for her, Turyin. I waited for word from her, waited for her to tell me that…that things were going to go back to normal. But it never came, and now it never will. It has been thirteen years and I am still here, still alive, my hand still hurts, and I…I am still exactly that wretched fool that Shara dug out of prison so many years ago. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. Except now I have no hope that things could ever change.”

Mulaghesh glances at his left hand. “Your hand still hurts?”

“Yes.” He opens it up, shows her the grisly scar there. The sigil of Kolkan: two hands, waiting to weigh and judge. “Every day. Sometimes more than others. I thought it would stop, after Shara killed Kolkan. But it never did.” He laughs weakly. “It is the one thing I still have. Everything else has been taken from me. Everyone else. This is all I am now. I am scrabbling for memories and pieces of the people I have lost. Trying to save the fragments that are left. If I can keep Shara’s daughter alive, keep a bit of her burning in this world with me, then maybe…Maybe I can…”

He trails off, and bows his head.

“Sigrud…Sigrud, listen to me. Signe…” She grabs his shoulder and squeezes it. “Signe’s death was not your fault. You know that. You know that, don’t you?”

“Even if I believed that,” says Sigrud, “it would not make me any more whole, Turyin. So much has been taken from us. I must do something about that.”

They sit in quiet for a long time. The scar on his left palm aches and throbs. Mulaghesh shifts in her chair, her metal prosthetic clicking softly.

Sigrud softly asks, “Can I see your hand?”

“My hand?”

“Yes. Your prosthetic.”

“I…Sure, I guess.”

She holds it out to him. Sigrud gently takes it, holding it as if it were some holy relic, and adjusts its fingers, feeling the movements of its thumb, touching every dent and scrape and scar in its metal surface.

“Still holds up,” he whispers.

“Signe did a good job making it,” says Mulaghesh. “She did a good job on everything she made.”

Sigrud holds the index and middle fingers of the prosthetic a little longer, perhaps imagining the grasp of the young woman who once created it.

“It’s not the only thing left of her in this world, Sigrud,” says Mulaghesh.

He looks at her, brow creased.

“She changed Voortyashtan,” says Mulaghesh. “She changed Bulikov. She changed your country. Those things are all still here. And all those things are worth saving. As are you.”

He shuts his eyes and lets her fingers go. “Thank you for your help,” he whispers. “I’ll leave now.”

They walk back downstairs to the sliding glass door. “It was good to see you again, Turyin,” he says.

“It was good to see you too,” says Mulaghesh. “Listen…I suspect you don’t have too many friends in this world now, Sigrud. But if you need anything—anything—you tell me. I owe you that much. Send a telegram to this address with a telephone number on it.” She writes a note and hands it to him. “I’ll call the number you give me from a secure line.”

“But what if I’m very far away?”

She smiles gently. “Oh, Sigrud. How long have you been in the wilderness? Telephones can call very distant places now.”

“Oh.” He looks at her. “There is one thing you can do.”

“What?”

“Find the SS Salim.”

Mulaghesh sighs. “I was wondering when it’d come to that. I didn’t find much the first time, you know.”

“There’s more. There has to be more. Hidden in nasty places.”

“You’re asking me to turn over a bunch of very classified stones, Sigrud.”

“Shara must have found it, or something about it. If you find that, it can help me understand what her war was about. I would not ask if I did not think you could do it.”

“I’ll try. I promise nothing. But I’ll try.” She looks into his face, exploring its scars, its bruises, its wrinkles. “Be safe, Sigrud.”

“I promise nothing,” he says. “But I’ll try.”

He slips out the door. When he reaches the wall, he readies himself to jump it, but looks back. He thought she’d still be there, watching him, but she isn’t. Instead, Turyin Mulaghesh has sunk to the ground and now sits, one hand still absently resting on the handle of the sliding door, her eyes staring into space, as if she’s just heard the news about the death of a very dear friend.

He watches her for a moment longer. Then he leaps over the fence and slinks into the night.