City of Blades

12. The Tooth

Two days later, three hours before the break of dawn, Mulaghesh—still stiff, still bruised, still aching—reviews the craft that Signe has bobbing beside a small SDC dock.

“So…are we sailing or going on holiday?” she asks.

“I take it you’re no sailor,” says Signe as she makes her preparations. Despite the impending voyage, she’s still dressed the same: same black boots, same scarf, though she is now wearing a life jacket. Mulaghesh tries very hard not to remember the proper young CTO in the state of undress she saw just days ago.

“Maybe not, but I’m not sure how keen I am to get on that thing in the open seas.” She walks the length of the craft. It’s a forty-foot white yacht labeled Bjarnadóttir, which Mulaghesh isn’t going to even attempt to pronounce, and it looks to her eye to be more suited for a jaunt across a still lake than navigating the rocky coastlines of Voortyashtan.

“Don’t doubt it,” says Signe. “I know a Dreyling who sailed one of these fifteen thousand miles single-handedly.”

“If you are talking about old Hjörvar,” says Sigrud, walking down the dock, “that man sailed slower than a cow gives birth.” He’s still moving gingerly, his right arm still in a sling. Mulaghesh shakes her head: firing a Ponja from an upright position would be like getting hit by a truck. But never was there a person more born to bear punishment than Sigrud.

“Hjörvar is one of the most accomplished seamen I know of,” says Signe, nettled.

“The reason we all thought Hjörvar was so slow,” says Sigrud, “is we assumed he kept masturbating in the cockpit instead of sleeping. He was known for that.”

“Anyway,” says Signe, “she is a good vessel, and she’ll take us where we need to go.”

Mulaghesh looks at Sigrud. “Is it a good vessel?”

He holds up a hand and wobbles it back and forth. “It will do.”

Signe scoffs as she carries more supplies on board. Mulaghesh eyes the crate as Signe walks past. “Four riflings, ammunition…and grenades? Why grenades?”

“You’ve not been to the Tooth, General,” Signe says over her shoulder. “I have. And if you think something Divine is awakening in Voortyashtan…I would prefer we be careful.” She slips through the hatch.

Sigrud and Mulaghesh stand on the dock, both slightly bent from their injuries. He says, “Take care of her.”

“I think she’s going to be taking care of me. I don’t know a damn thing about sailing.”

“She may know sailing. But she does not know combat. And she is going to a place that I think could be quite dangerous. We do not even know if Choudhry came back from this Tooth. We do not know what awaits.”

“I’ll try.”

Signe emerges from belowdecks. “We’ve got more shipments coming in shortly. If we want to depart, now’s the time.”

“Ah, hells,” says Mulaghesh. “Here we go….” She steps on board, her hip still complaining.

Signe shoves a second life jacket in her arms. “Wear this. And keep out of the way.”

“Fine, fine,” says Mulaghesh. She sits down before the hatch and slips the jacket on.

Signe turns to face her father, and for a moment Mulaghesh sees how their relationship could have been, had the world been different: Sigrud, tall, proud, stern, standing upon the dock with his arms crossed and the haze of early sunrise behind him; and before him his daughter, young and fierce, confidently balanced on the balls of her feet as the craft bobs up and down. They exchange some wordless moment that is inscrutable to Mulaghesh: perhaps each recognizes the competence of the other, and signals their pride; but then each acknowledges that there is work to do, and they must return to it.

“Safe sailing,” says Sigrud.

“Safe work,” says Signe.

And with that Sigrud bends low, unties the hitch, and throws the line aboard. Signe catches it one-handed, stows it aboard, then walks to the stern and starts the little diesel engine with a single jerk. Then, the engine sputtering and smoking, she guides the little yacht out to the open sea.

She does not look back once at her father. When Mulaghesh looks to shore, Sigrud, too, is walking away without a glance back.

For two days and two nights they sail southwest, and most of what Mulaghesh does is stay out of Signe’s way. That, and vomit.

She once mocked Shara for her weak stomach, but now that she’s on such a small craft on the open seas she regrets it: every bend of every wave is magnified a thousand times on this tiny vessel, and time and time again she feels sure the yacht will capsize, its mainsail plummeting into the dark waters of the North Seas, dragging her and Signe both down to a dark and watery grave.

This never happens, of course. Signe is far too skilled of a sailor. She’s a flurry of activity for nearly all of their voyage, scurrying over the bow and the hatch to adjust the tiller or the boom bail, checking the traveler rig or the becket block, or any other piece of nautical anatomy that sounds wholly made up to Mulaghesh. Signe pauses only to mention, “Watch the boom,” as the mainsail comes hurtling at her head, or perhaps, “Throw me that there.”

As the first night falls Signe says, “We’re in a good spot now. And were I a serious sailor, I’d have trained to sleep in twenty-minute shifts, waking up to see the seas ahead. But as I’m not, we’ll have to take shifts.”

“So what do I do?”

“Sit in the cockpit and shout if you see a damn thing, of course.”

“And what does a damn thing look like?”

“It looks like a big damned rock, General,” says Signe. “Or a big damned boat, if we stray into the shipping lanes—which we shouldn’t, if I’ve set the right course. But you never know.”

The first night is terrifying to Mulaghesh, alone in the dark with the sails fluttering gently and the moon shining down on her. The world hasn’t ever felt so empty to her before. She supposes she should be glad the weather is clear, but all she can think of is the sight of Voortya’s face bursting up through the reflection of the moon on the waves, and rising, rising, water pouring off her vast metal body….

There’s the soft click of the hatch opening. Signe silently walks across to sit beside her in the cockpit. For a moment or two, they say nothing.

“You ought to get some sleep, Skipper,” says Mulaghesh. “I can’t have you passing out on me at the tiller.”

“I won’t. Just…the purpose of our voyage weighs on me.”

“Me, too. Do you know anything about what’s over there? In the City of Blades itself?”

“Folklore,” says Signe. “And rumors. I’ve heard stories of Voortyashtanis contacting and, yes, passing over into the City of Blades. These instances were always highly controversial, and only done in extreme situations, when departed elders needed to be closely consulted.”

“Did those who came back say what was on the other side?”

“There’s supposedly a gatekeeper, of some sorts,” says Signe. “Some entity or…or something over there that only allows certain people in. When someone who wasn’t suitable arrived in the City of Blades, they were expelled.”

“Who’s considered suitable?”

“A great warrior. Someone who’s shed the blood of many.”

“That probably won’t be a problem, then,” says Mulaghesh grimly. “But if I’m wrong?”

“Depending on their stature or demeanor, frequently the expulsion was…lethal.”

“But not always?”

Signe shakes her head. “There were ways beyond this ritual to visit the City of Blades. If we had a Voortyashtani sentinel’s blade, for example, and if we were trained in the meditative arts of the sentinels, we could hold their sword and project our consciousness there.”

“Project your…What? I thought picking up a sentinel’s sword got you possessed,” says Mulaghesh. “That’s what happened to that poor guy at the harbor.”

“It’s a two-way street, in a way,” says Signe. “You could use their sword like a telephone, I suppose, directly communing and conversing with them in the City of Blades. It’s just that when Oskarsson picked up the blade, well, for one thing, he wasn’t skilled in the meditative arts—but more so, Zhurgut clearly had intentions other than education. Either way, back in the ancient days, this gatekeeper was also responsible for blocking or expelling these pilgrims, preventing the unworthy from projecting themselves into the City of Blades.”

“So if I can get past this gatekeeper,” says Mulaghesh, “then what’s after that?” She remembers her brief vision of the City of Blades, and the strange white citadel beyond. “A castle? A tower? The home of Voortya herself?”

“I don’t know, General,” says Signe. “You know more than I do. You’ve been there before.”

“Great,” says Mulaghesh.

Signe looks east, at the ragged gray coast of Voortyashtan. The cliffs look like the folds of a dark, crinkled tablecloth glowing silver in the moonlight. “I forget it can be beautiful, sometimes.”

Mulaghesh grunts.

“Vallaicha Thinadeshi’s son is buried out there, in that region there. Did you know that?”

“Huh?” says Mulaghesh. It takes her a moment to remember her history. “Oh, right. The baby.”

“I believe he was four years old when the plague took him. But yes.”

“It was mad for her to try and take her family with her.”

“Times were different then, and I don’t believe she intended to get pregnant out here. But you’re right. Ambition and responsibilities…Not very good bedmates.”

Mulaghesh looks side-eyed at Signe. She’s never seen her look so mournful and contemplative. “What do you see out there?”

“Besides the rocks? It’s complicated.”

“Try me.”

“Fair enough.” She points. “I see an excellent site for a hydroelectric dam. Numerous ones, actually. Megamundes’, gigamundes’ worth of power generation. I see fruitful sites for refineries, plants, berths for industries of all types and kinds. Water’s the lifeblood of industry, specifically fresh water—which Voortyashtan is rich in. Once we crack the river open…Oh, what a spark that will be, what a country this will make.”

“Sometimes I can’t tell if you hate this place or love it.”

“I love its potential. I hate its past. And I don’t like what it is.” She hugs her knees close to her chest. “The way you feel about the place you grew up in is a lot like how you feel about your family.”

“How’s that?”

She thinks about it for a long time. “Like isn’t the same thing as love.”

Mulaghesh is dozing in the cabin on the second afternoon, lulled to sleep by the rock and roll of the waves, when she hears Signe groan from the cockpit, a sound of deep dismay.

“What?” says Mulaghesh, sitting up. “What is it?”

“We’re nearly there.”

“Oh. So that’s good, yes?” Mulaghesh stands and joins her in the cockpit.

Signe’s eye is pressed to her spyglass, which is fixed on some insignificant bump on the distant horizon. “Yes. No. I wanted to come up on it during the day. And we won’t get there for several hours yet.” She lowers the spyglass. “Not at night…It’s a different place at night. Or it seems that way.”

“So what’s the move, Skipper? Are we just going to, I don’t know, drift and wait until tomorrow’s daylight?”

Signe shakes her head. “We can’t just drift. It’s part of a chain of islands….It’s too dangerous. But there is a primitive dock on the Tooth.” She grimaces and exits through the hatch. “Hold on.”

Mulaghesh sits beside Signe and watches as the islands approach, tiny pinpricks that grow and grow…

And grow.

And grow…

Her eyes widen. “By the seas…”

They are not just simple islands—not the rocky beaches she imagined, perhaps scattered with a few withered trees. Rather, these are huge, towering columns of gray rock, stacks and stacks of it, tottering and leaning like fronds of river grass nudged about by the wind. And on their sides…

Mulaghesh grabs the spyglass. “Are those faces?”

“Yes,” says Signe grimly. “Carvings of Saint Zhurgut, Saint Petrenko, Saint Chovanec, Saint Tok…Heroes and warriors with a hundred deaths to their name each.” She slightly adjusts the tiller, pointing the bow so that it threads them through the towering islands. “They are called the Teeth of the World. From the poem, you see. And at the very end is the Tooth. What name it originally had is forgotten, or so I am told. But it was the most important of them.”

Mulaghesh sits in awed silence as Signe pilots them through the forest of massive columns, their surfaces carved with faces and visages and bas-reliefs, many of them terrifying: images of soldiers, battle, churning tapestries of conquest, of raised blades and torrents of spears, skies black with arrows, horizons blocked out with endless banners, and tangled, twisted piles of the defeated dead.

The islands seem to have once had a purpose beyond decoration, too: a few have windows, or doorways, or stairways running up the sides, as if these were not rock formations but rather towers. Perhaps their interiors are as honeycombed and chamber-filled as the walls of Fort Thinadeshi, dark and cramped and secretive. She wonders what could have gone on in these towers. The thought sets her skin crawling.

Many of the columns are lined with torch sconces, and she imagines how the Teeth of the World must have looked a hundred years ago, covered with glimmering dots of firelight and the windows filled with faces, looking down on them as they sailed by.

“How is this still here?” says Mulaghesh.

“I don’t know,” says Signe. “Perhaps it doesn’t persist with any Divine aid. Perhaps they used Divine abilities to make them, but the rocks and the carvings themselves—they’re but simple matter. I can’t tell you, General.” Then, darkly, “That’s the Tooth.”

Mulaghesh looks ahead and sees a wide peak emerging from amidst the towering columns. It’s not at all like the other islands, which are more or less purely vertical: the Tooth is more akin to a small floating mountain, covered with tall, twisted trees and—though it’s hard to see in the dimming light—countless arches of some kind. Its summit is concealed by the tall, warped trees.

She’s suddenly aware of Signe breathing hard as they approach the Tooth—not out of exertion, but terror. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yes,” she says defiantly. Then she lowers the sails and starts the little diesel engine, piloting the boat toward the island’s south side. She flicks a switch in the cockpit, and the yacht’s tiny spotlight stabs out into the growing gloom, its beam bobbing up and down the distant shore.

Mulaghesh spies the dock, though it’s not like any dock she’s ever seen before. It looks like a massive rib cage made of antlers and horns blooming off the shore of the island, leaving a tiny gap just below what would be its sternum. Beyond the “ribs” she can see distant stone walls, cold and pale. It takes Mulaghesh a moment to realize Signe is aiming the boat toward the gap below the sternum, and she wonders if the yacht will be able to make it through. Then she realizes that the rib cage is much, much larger than she realized, and the boat slips through easily.

She stares up at the carven ribs as they pass underneath them. “Death worship,” she says. “What a morbid civilization this was.”

“I decided it was a memorial when I came here last,” Signe says quietly. “Maybe that’s what all of the Teeth of the World are. They are unusually bedecked in the images of death, after all.”

They approach the stone dock, its steps stained dark from decades of mold.

“The City of Blades is worse,” says Mulaghesh.

Signe expertly steers the boat up to the dock and moors it to an ancient iron ring beside the steps. Then the two women arm themselves, a process Mulaghesh has more guidance for: “Put your ammunition on the left side of your belt. No, your other left. You’re right-handed; that’s easier for you to reach.”

“I did receive training on this, you know.”

“Well, then they did a shit job of it.”

Mulaghesh readies herself, then steps onto the dock. She looks back at Signe, and perhaps it’s the light, but the Dreyling woman suddenly looks quite pale.

“What?” says Mulaghesh.

“I…I was fourteen when I came here last,” Signe says.

Mulaghesh just waits and watches.

“I’d hoped it’d all fallen into the seas, frankly. To come here now…it feels as if I’m stepping into a memory.”

“You haven’t stepped into it yet.”

Signe nods, then hops up onto the dock with Mulaghesh.

“Now to the ruin at the top?” says Mulaghesh.

“Yes. The dome of shields and knives. It feels like it was something out of a dream…but that’s what I remember of it.”

The stone path winds around and around the Tooth like a corkscrew, and each step is old and well-worn. Countless people must have been here during its life, Mulaghesh thinks—processions of warriors and dignitaries and kings and priests, all threading their way up the hill. About every twenty feet is an arch that stretches over the steps, and carved into each arch are images Mulaghesh doesn’t quite understand: a woman, presumably Voortya, firing an arrow into a tidal wave; a sword dicing a mountain as one would an onion; a man disemboweling himself upon a tall, flat rock before the setting sun; a woman hurling a spear at the moon, and showering in the black blood that spills forth.

The bent trees quiver and shake in the steady breeze, making the slopes shift and shudder just as much as the seas below. It’s an eerie place, Mulaghesh finds.

“It’s all the same as I remember,” says Signe quietly.

“The Voortyashtanis brought you here before?”

“Yes. A rite of passage. Twenty children, none older than fourteen. They brought us here and dropped us off with a pitifully small amount of provisions: a few loaves of bread, a few potatoes, some dried fruit. Barely enough for us to last. And then they…And then they left us here. Without a word. Without telling us if they’d ever come back. Alone in this miserable place.

“I’m not sure why I came,” Signe continues. “My mother didn’t want me to. They did not force us to come. I suppose I just wanted to prove myself to them, just like the rest of the children. To show I wasn’t just some princess.”

Mulaghesh stays silent as Signe talks. Every few steps she sees something odd in the dirt at the edges of the stone staircase: the imprint of a shoe with an intricate tread. A sort of shoe you would see in the modern world, not at all something you’d expect to find in ancient Voortyashtan. The imprint is deep in the mud, deep enough that the rains must not have completely washed it away.

“At first we tried to share,” Signe says. “But one of us—the son of some relative of a chieftain—he was bigger than the rest of us, more developed. Stronger. Crueler. He beat one of the other kids terribly badly, in front of everyone, to show us what he could do, I suppose. And he set himself up as the petty king of our little island, monopolizing our food and water, forcing us to do things to survive. Humiliate ourselves. Fight among ourselves, all for his amusement and that of his cronies.”

“Sounds like a real charmer.”

“Yes. Far from the surveillance and laws of society, not sure if you will live or die…Who knows what you will become?”

Mulaghesh does not tell Signe this is a sensation she knows all too well.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” says Signe. “But this place…It brings it all back.”

“All of us need confessions sometimes.”

Signe glances over her shoulder. “What makes you say this is a confession?”

“The same thing that makes me think I know why you wear scarves.”

Signe is silent for a few paces. Then she says, “He took an interest in me. I knew he would. Blond hair…it’s very rare on the Continent, you see.”

“I get it.”

“He told me that if I wanted to eat again, ever again…I would need to come to him at night. He’d set up something like a throne, behind one of the arches. We would be alone there. I would do as he told me. I agreed, and he was pleased.

“Before I went, I visited an old sparring ground here on the island, and in the earth there I found an arrowhead. And I sharpened it, and sharpened it, until it could cut flesh. I tested it on the back of my wrist. And then I hid it in my mouth.

“He was no fool. He made me strip bare before he took me into his privacy. Made me do it before everyone. I didn’t care; Dreylings don’t really care about things like that. We don’t have such arcane ideas of how the human body should be seen. But he never looked into my mouth.

“He took me behind a tall, flat stone. And then he tried to take me. Tried to pin me down. And as he readied himself, I spit the arrowhead out into my hand…and then I rammed it into his eye.”

She pauses, perhaps awaiting something, as if she expects Mulaghesh to gasp. When she doesn’t, Signe continues. “It was a foolish thing to do. I should have jammed it into his throat. He started screaming, shrieking in pain, flailing about. It was not a fatal blow. So I got up, and I took a nearby stone…and I hit him on the head. I hit him, and I kept hitting him. I kept hitting him until I could no longer recognize him at all.

“Then I went out. Cleaned myself up. Clothed myself. I went to our rations. I told the other children to come near. And then we ate—sparingly—in silence.”

They walk on. The peak is a few hundred feet above them now, the sea a distant, undulating darkness.

“I thought the elders would kill me when they finally returned. I’d killed a boy of serious standing. And I’d done it in cold blood, carefully preparing for it. But they didn’t. They were…impressed. I’d defeated someone larger and meaner than myself. It didn’t matter that I’d done it through deception—to Voortyashtanis, a victory is a victory, and to win through cunning is no small thing. So…they made me a full member of the tribe.” She uses one finger to pull down the neck of her shirt, revealing the elaborate, delicate, soft yellow tattoo there. It’s beautiful, really, artful and strange. “And from then on, when I spoke, they listened. It was a curious thing.” She pulls the collar back up. “But I still hated what I’d done. I still hated everything I’d gone through. And I hated, later, that I’d become like…him.”

“Him who?”

“My father. Who else? He’s killed more people than anyone, I think, except perhaps the Kaj and Voortya herself.”

Mulaghesh knows that, statistically, this is unlikely: odds are she and Biswal are responsible for many more deaths than Sigrud je Harkvaldsson could ever aspire to.

“I thought I was better than him,” says Signe. “More…I don’t know. Evolved.”

“People don’t get to choose what the world makes of them,” says Mulaghesh.

“And that is what you think this is? The world made him, made us? Or is there some cruelty in us that pushes us into such situations?”

“You aren’t born this way. None of us are. We’re made this way, over time. But we might be able to unmake some of what was done to us, if we try.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I have to,” says Mulaghesh.

There’s a bird cry somewhere out in the darkness. Signe shivers. They plod on.

“I don’t remember what my father looked like,” says Mulaghesh. “I thought I’d never forget it, once. We only had each other in the world. Then one night I ran away from home and joined the army. Off to serve my country and find my fortune. It seemed such a fun idea at the time, such a lark. Such a childish thought. When I first landed on Continental shores I wrote him a letter explaining what I’d done and why I did it and what I expected to happen. A bunch of naïve shit, probably. My life seemed like a storybook at the time. I don’t know if he ever got it.

“After the war was over I went home and I knocked on the door. I remember waiting in front of it, our red front door. It was so strange to see, it hadn’t changed a bit since I was a kid. I had changed, but the door had stayed the same. But then a stranger answered it, a woman. She said she’d been living there for over a year. The previous owner had died some time ago. She didn’t even know where he was buried. I still don’t know.”

They walk on for a moment longer in silence. Then Mulaghesh stops. Signe walks on a few steps, then pauses to look back at her.

“Hundreds would kill to be where you are, Signe Harkvaldsson,” says Mulaghesh. “And more still would kill to have what you have now that your father has returned: a chance to undo a wrong done to you long ago. Such things are rare. I suggest you treasure them.”

“Perhaps I should. Perhaps you’re right. Shall we continue?”

“No.”

“No? Why no?”

“Because the tracks I’ve been following have split off from the main stairs.” Mulaghesh points west, where a stone trail runs through the twisted trees. “That way.”

“What tracks? What do you mean?”

“I mean someone’s been here before us. Recently, too. I can see their boot imprint in the soil here and there.” She points at the ground. “It’s a modern shoe type, nothing that the Voortyashtanis would have used. It’s been consistent all the way up here. When you didn’t step on it and mar the prints, at least.”

“You think…maybe Choudhry?”

“Maybe.” She sniffs. “Let’s take a look, eh?”

The path is not stone like the staircase, but a rambling dirt trail that winds underneath the crooked trees. Evening is fading into night, and both of them are forced to resort to pulling out torches, which turn the woods into a shifting, spectral nightscape.

Mulaghesh carefully follows the footprints, gingerly taking each next step. “They’re old. Months old, perhaps longer. Someone came here a lot.”

“Perhaps the tribes are still bringing their children here for their rite of passage.”

“Maybe. If so, they brought a damned wheelbarrow.” She points at a tire tread running through the soft earth.

“That seems…unlikely,” says Signe. “I thi…Oh, my word.”

“What?” Mulaghesh looks up, and sees Signe is shining her torch ahead, its beam falling on…something.

It’s some sort of tomb or crypt—a tall, arching structure built directly into the cliff behind it, with a set of white stairs leading up to a stone door—or what would have been a door, were it not completely destroyed. Chunks of rubble are scattered on the dais before the door.

Mulaghesh walks up and shines her light over the structure before her. It’s an elegant, beautiful construction, pale and delicate in the rippling shafts of moonlight, and covered with engravings: whales, fish, swords, porpoises, and endless waves. “I’m guessing they came here for this. But what in hells is it?”

“A burial chamber, I’m guessing. We found a few like this in the silt at the bottom of the bay, but they were much smaller—little more than a box.” She walks up to the broken door and shines her light in. “Yes—it’s the same. Come look.”

Mulaghesh joins her. The interior of the tomb is much smaller than she expected, considerably smaller than the ornate stone dais before it. It’s about four feet by five feet, and it’s almost completely barren except for a small plinth in the center.

“No place for a body,” says Signe. “Just a weapon—a sword.”

“Maybe they didn’t bury bodies. Their souls were bound up in their blades, weren’t they? Why bother with the corpse when you have that? So you just stowed the sword away for safekeeping…”

“Until you needed it,” says Signe. “Then you made a sacrifice. Someone picked it up, and then…” She shudders.

“Maybe the Teeth of the World are a memorial, like you said,” says Mulaghesh. “A place to store the weapons and souls of their most revered saints. Only now…someone’s gone graverobbing.” She shines her light back out at the woods. “So maybe this is how someone got their hands on a functional Voortyashtani sword.”

“Maybe that was the one your culprit tried to send to you?”

“Maybe. Or maybe they found more.”

“That’s not comforting.”

Mulaghesh walks back out and examines the dais, looking for a name, a carving of a face, anything to identify the owner of the sword that might have been in that tomb. But beyond the ornamentation there are few identifying marks. “Someone so famous, perhaps,” she says aloud, “you didn’t even need to put their name on their grave. I guess this isn’t the tomb Choudhry was looking for back in the city?”

Signe exits the tomb, looking pale and shaken. “The tomb that held all the Voortyashtani warriors, ever? No, I presume not. It’d be a bit cramped in there.” She shivers. “I don’t especially want to search the rest of the Tooth to see if someone broke into any more tombs.”

“I don’t, either. Come on. Take me to the summit.”

The journey up begins to wear on Mulaghesh, but she wonders if it’s the path itself that’s the culprit: the farther they walk up the wet, gleaming cobblestones, the taller the trees seem, and the darker the air.

“Something doesn’t feel right,” says Signe.

“No, but it feels familiar. There were places kind of like this in Bulikov,” says Mulaghesh. “Places that were here, but…not here, at the same time. Like scars, I guess.”

“Scars in what?” asks Signe.

“In reality.”

Finally they come to the top. Massive trees crowd around the summit as if to create a wall, and a wide, perfectly round stone arch marks the end of the steps. Beyond it is some kind of structure.

Mulaghesh slows to a stop as it comes into view. It is like a dome—a broad, brown, curving structure nearly thirty or forty feet wide. But it is made entirely out of beaten and smelted-down blades: sword blades and axe blades, knives, scythes, the tips of spears and arrows, all mashed together and layered on top of one another until they form a brown, rusted tangle of sharp edges. The entryway to the dome is lined with sword blades, all pointed in like teeth in the maw of some great beast. It is the single most hostile thing Mulaghesh has ever seen in her life.

“That’s it, huh?” says Mulaghesh.

“That’s it,” says Signe.

“Did you ever go in there?”

Signe shakes her head. “We came near it, looked at it, but…we never stepped off the stairs. It was too wrong. One boy was bold enough to shout to it, to call the old man out—we ran away, terrified, and the boy came down later, saying he saw nothing. Do you really think this is the place Choudhry was talking about?”

“I guess.”

“And…are you going in there?”

Mulaghesh stares at the dome. She can feel it: there is a mind in there, something watching her in the darkness. She imagines a soft sigh from the depths of the dome, a gentle exhalation.

“I am,” she says. “I don’t like it, but I am. Are you?”

Signe pauses. Then she shakes her head and says, “Not my ship, not my rats.”

“That must be a Dreyling turn of phrase, because that doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to me.”

“I am saying this is your mission, General, not mine. I’ll be more than happy to keep watch.”

Mulaghesh walks through the gate. “Fair enough. I don’t blame you.” She stands before the entry to the dome, rifling held ready. “If I don’t come out in thirty minutes,” she says, “throw a grenade in.”

“What?” says Signe, startled. “And kill you?”

“If I’m not out in thirty minutes, then it’s likely I’m already dead,” she says. “And I don’t intend to let this damned place live longer than me.” Then she raises her rifling, stoops down low, and steps into the shadows.

There’s a moment of darkness. Then shafts of light filter through the gloom above. She realizes she’s seeing the moonlight shining through the gaps in all the thousands of blades hammered together above, but the color of the light is wrong: it’s dull and yellowed, like it’s shining from the wrong sky. She remembers how things looked during the Battle of Bulikov, when the Divinity appeared and forced its reality onto the city, changing the very sky: this is much the same, she finds—not true light but a crude approximation of it. It is as if the sky above this dome is different from the one she just left.

The light curls, coils, churns above her head. Then she takes a breath and realizes the dome is full of smoke.

The acrid tang unravels in her lungs and she’s overtaken with violent coughing. It’s a reek of a sort that she’s never smelled before, something oily and woody and putrefied. She blinks tears from her eyes, which are slowly adjusting to the darkness.

The floor of the dome is made of shields hammered flat, just like the blades that form the roof. Across the gloom, at the very end of the dome—she finds herself wondering, How big is this place?—she sees there is a human form sitting beside what looks like a pale, silvery shrub.

He’s real, thinks Mulaghesh, though she finds it hard to believe it. He’s really real.

The man is masked in shadow, but he appears to be holding an ornate pipe, long and white like a piece of coral. The pipe curls up from his crossed legs and over his shoulders and around to his mouth, winding around his neck like a noose. She watches as the shadowy figure sucks at it. The bowl in his lap flares a soft orange. Then he exhales an absolute thundercloud of roiling, reeking smoke.

“I take it you’re the man atop the Tooth,” Mulaghesh calls to him.

If this means anything he doesn’t show it. He just takes another huge draw from his pipe, leans back, and sends a stream of smoke up to the ceiling.

Yet this time his face happens to catch one of the rays of light.

She freezes, and thinks: Holy hells. He’s a corpse.

She watches as he lowers his head, the ray of light sliding across his features. His skin is gnarled and papery, covered with splotches of discolorations like mold blooming in the walls of an old house. His eyes are wide and white and blind, and his eye sockets and cheeks are so sunken and hollow it’s like he hasn’t eaten in…Well. Maybe ever. He is dressed in wraps of thin, wispy rags, and he seems incapable of completely shutting his mouth, so his narrow, blackened teeth are always visible, like the grin of a corpse.

Mulaghesh tightens her grip on her rifling. He doesn’t exactly look like a physical powerhouse, but he must be Divine, which means appearances can be deceiving.

She takes a step forward. “Who are you?”

He stares ahead blindly. The only sign that he heard is the slightest twitch of his head. Then a voice rattles up from his skinny chest, a voice like rocks and gravel being washed ashore.

“I,” he says slowly, “am not a who.” Each word he speaks makes a fog of coiling smoke.

“Okay,” says Mulaghesh slowly. “Then…what are you?”

“I am memory,” says the man. He sucks at his pipe and exhales again.

“What do you mean, you’re memory?”

“I mean,” he says, “I am that which remembers.”

“Okay. So you just…remember things?”

He sucks his pipe but doesn’t bother to answer.

“What kind of things?”

“My memory encompasses,” he says, “all the things that I remember.”

Mulaghesh frowns. His circular answers suggest a lack of basic human intelligence, or maybe she’s not asking the right questions. “How…How did you come to be here?”

There’s a pause. Then he smacks his lips and says in a measured chant, “I am the 374th memory vessel of the Empress of Graves, Maiden of Steel, Devourer of Children, Queen of Grief, She Who Clove the Earth in Twain. Upon this spot I took the place of the 373rd vessel, broke a leaf from the Tree of Memory, and inhaled all the knowledge of what the Great Mother had promised. Within me is the memory of all who have been lost, sacrificed, cut down. I contain villages, armies, generations. I remember the slain and the dead, the victorious and the defeated. I am memory.”

Mulaghesh glances at the silvery little shrub beside him. “Tree of Memory?”

“Yes.”

“What does that mean? What is the Tree of Memory?”

Again he begins to chant: “In honor of Her people swearing fealty to Her, the Great Mother stabbed a single arrow into the stone, and it flowered and became a great tree, a tree whose roots lie under all the stones of this land.” He gestures to the tiny, silvery shrub with one gnarled hand. “The tree is fed by the blood of the people, by their conflict and their sacrifice, and the memory of all that they have done flows through its vessels—and into me,” he says, smoke blooming from his lips, “into this thing I am, this creature of flesh and bone. I am the final vessel of all these memories. I am the pool fed by the many mountain streams.”

Mulaghesh looks over his bony wrists, his painfully thin ankles. “How…How long have you been here?”

He cocks his head, like he has to think about it. “I have, in my time here, borne witness to ninety-six winters.”

“How is that possible?” asks Mulaghesh softly.

“I am memory,” he says. Smoke curls up around his head like a ghastly crown. “I need nothing. All I must do is remember. Which I do.”

“But this is all…miraculous, isn’t it?” asks Mulaghesh. “Isn’t Voortya dead?”

Silence. Then: “The Great Mother is gone from this world. This I remember.”

“Then how are you still here?”

A pause, as if he’s accessing some hidden part of himself. “Pass from this world,” he says finally, “and your agreements will still exist. Your contracts and oaths and debts will carry on. Promises were made. And some of those promises are being kept. I am here to remember the dead. When those oaths are fulfilled, I shall fade also.” He shudders a bit. “I will finally pass on, out of this room, into the light. Into the light…Into the air of the world I once knew…” He closes his eyes.

Mulaghesh suppresses a shiver. Enough of this. “There was a woman who came before me,” she says. “She asked about a ritual. I think it was a ritual to cross over to the afterlife, to the…to the City of Blades. Is this so?”

“I remember this.”

“I need to know what you told her.”

A gray, dry tongue wriggles up from the depths of his mouth and runs over his tiny, discolored teeth. Mulaghesh nearly gags in disgust.

“What did you tell her?” she asks. “How can I get to the City of Blades?”

He reaches over to the tree, and pinches off one thin, silvery leaf. He places it in the bowl of his pipe, and takes a drag—yet then he freezes, as if an idea has struck him. His blank white eyes widen, and he turns to look at her—the first time she feels he’s actually looked at her yet, focusing on her with all of his energy.

He stares at her, then softly says, “I…I remember you.”

“You what?”

“I remember you,” he says. He takes another puff from the pipe, and this seems to fuel his memory. “Young and bright and filled with cold anger. I remember you. You swept across the land like a screaming storm. In one hand you carried fury and in the other you carried slaughter.”

Mulaghesh’s skin goes cold. “What are you talking about?”

“War incarnate,” he whispers. “Battle made flesh. This is how I remember you. This is how I remember you as you shed blood in the lands east of here. That blood took a long journey to reach the taproots of the silver tree….But when it did, you bloomed in my mind like the brightest of stars. How the Great Mother would have loved to have an arrow such as you in her quiver. What a prize you would have been.”

Mulaghesh fights the urge to retch. The idea of this thing—she can’t think of it as a man, by any means—knowing what she did during the Yellow March, and approving of it, is utterly revolting to her. “Shut your mouth! I didn’t ask about that!”

He sucks on his pipe and watches her with a strangely critical gaze. “You wish to find the City of Blades,” he says. “I remember this. Why?”

“To follow the woman who came here before.”

He shakes his head. “No. No, that is not so. I have watched your journey from the west countries. I remember your coming; I remember how you battled your way to me. You have shed blood upon my mountains, upon my country. And when you did, I glimpsed your secret heart.” He shuts his eyes. “I remember…I remember…” His eyes snap back open. “You wish to find the Victorious Army there, upon the white shores of the City of Blades. You mean to find them, and stop them, halt their final war.”

Mulaghesh does not speak.

“Why?” he asks. His tone is that of someone politely puzzled.

“Wh-Why?” says Mulaghesh. “Why would I want to stop an army from destroying the world? That’s your question?”

“You speak,” he says, “as if they were an aberration. A violation. As if warfare was a passing phenomenon.”

“I know I don’t want it on my damned doorstep!”

He shakes his head. “But this is wrong. Warfare is light. Warfare and conflict are the energies with which this world functions. To claim otherwise is to claim your very veins are not filled with blood, to claim that your heart is still and silent. You knew this once. Once in the hills of this country you understood that to wage war was to be alive, to shed blood was to bask in the light of the sun. Why would you forget this? Why would you fight them and not join them?”

“Join them?” says Mulaghesh, appalled. “Join the very soldiers who enslaved my people?”

“Do you not enslave people now?” asks the man. “Chains are forged of many strange metals. Poverty is one. Fear, another. Ritual and custom are yet more. All actions are forms of slavery, methods of forcing people to do what they deeply wish not to do. Has not your nation conditioned this world to accept its subservience? When you wear your uniform and walk through these lands, do the people here not feel a terrified urge to bend their knees and bow their heads?”

“We didn’t leave any fucking mass graves in our wake!” snarls Mulaghesh. “We didn’t torment and slaughter and brutalize people to get what we needed!”

“Are you so sure? You burned down homes in the night, and families perished in the flames. I remember. And now you look back, full of guilt, and say, ‘It was war, and I was wrong.’ ” He leans forward, his ancient face burning with intensity. “But this is a lie. You saw light. And now, when you have returned to the darkness, you wish to convince yourself the light was never there at all. Yet it remains. You cannot erase what is written upon the hearts of humanity. Even if the Great Mother had never walked among us, you would still know this.”

Mulaghesh feels tears spilling down her cheeks. “Times,” she says furiously, “have changed. I have changed. Soldiers no longer devote their lives to slaughter and conquest.”

“You are wrong,” says the man. His voice is low and resonant. The metal walls of the dome, all the knives and swords and spears, all seem to vibrate with each of his words. “Your rulers and their propaganda have sold you this watered-down conceit of war, of a warrior yoked to the whims of civilization. Yet for all their self-professed civility, your rulers will gladly spend a soldier’s life to better aid their posturing, to keep the cost of a crude good low. They will send the children of others off to die and only think upon it later to grandly and loudly memorialize them, lauding their great sacrifice. Civilization is but the adoption of this cowardly method of murder.”

The smoke is so thick about her it’s hard for her to see him. “Only a savage would think of peace that way!”

“No. It is the truth. And you know it. You were so much more honest when you slaughtered your own.”

Mulaghesh freezes. The smoke hangs still in the air. The old man slowly blinks his blank white eyes, and sucks at his pipe.

“What did you say?” whispers Mulaghesh.

“You know what I said,” says the man calmly. “Once those under your command did not wish to obey. And when that happened, you did what was necess—”

The rifling is on her shoulder and she’s striding forward, leaping through the smoke. The old man doesn’t grunt or make a sound as the muzzle of the rifling strikes his forehead, pushing him back against the wall of knives.

Mulaghesh leans close. “Keep talking,” she whispers. “Keep talking to me, old man, and we’ll see if I can spill the waters of your memory clean out of your fucking head.”

“You see what you are now,” he says serenely. “You see where your instincts lead you. Why do you deny what you are?”

“Tell me the damned ritual! Tell me how to get to the City of Blades!”

“The ritual? Why, you know it. You know the Window to the White Shores.”

“But that won’t let me cross over!”

“But you know the missing element that will augment it,” says the old man. “You’ve spilled so much of it in your time, and it flows through your own veins—the blood of a killer. What else?”

Mulaghesh pushes slightly harder on his head. “What do you mean? And if you speak another riddle then I swear, you will fucking regret it.”

“You saw a statue, once,” hisses the man. “A statue of the Great Mother, seated before a wide cauldron. Were you to fill this cauldron with seawater and the blood of a killer, enough blood to fill a goat’s bladder, and then perform the Window to the White Shores at the base of the cauldron, then you would be able to pass through—through the sea, through the world, and into the lands of the dead.”

Mulaghesh thinks back. She remembers that when she saw the City of Blades it was in the yard of statues, before the giant white statue of Voortya…and at her feet was what looked like a giant bathtub.

“The living essence of a life of death,” she says, “used to push a living person into the land of the dead.” She takes a step back, releasing him. “Ironic.”

The old man blinks his wide, blind eyes. “You think you are invading. You think you are assaulting enemy grounds. But you are not. You are going home. This life beyond death is one you deserve.”

“Fuck you,” says Mulaghesh. “Tell me about the swords, the sentinels’ swords. Someone’s found them and learned how to make them—who?”

“This I do not know,” he says quietly. “I do not know these things.”

“Someone’s been on this island robbing your damned sacred graves! They must have come to you!”

“I do not remember them,” says the man. “I do not have these memories.”

“Someone fucking resurrected Saint Zhurgut! Don’t tell me you don’t know who was behind that!”

“I remember those who have shed blood,” says the man. “I remember the dead. I remember the battle, the victors, the defeated. I remember what matters. All else is trivia.”

“Someone is trying to bring about the Night of the Sea of Swords! How is it going to happen? How does it work?”

“Work? As if it were some device, some machine? What you describe is inevitable. Ask why the stars dance in the sky, ask why water flows downhill. Ask the mechanics behind that.” He lowers his eyelids. “She promised it will happen. And thus, it will happen. This is the way of the world.”

“I’ll kill you, damn it!” cries Mulaghesh, raising the rifle. “I’ll do it if you don’t answer me!”

“If I could die,” says the man, “I would let you. I do not fear death. But you are in my world, and this place will not allow me to die.”

“I bet I can hurt you th—”

He shakes his head. “You think you have forced the truth from me. But you are wrong—I wish for you to see the City of Blades again, for you will see truth there. Truth about the world, and your secret heart. Now go—and see.” He opens his mouth wide, and a hot cloud of acrid smoke comes pouring out. It’s so much that Mulaghesh has to stumble out, covering her eyes with the crook of her arm. She spies a hint of flickering moonlight, goes reeling toward it, and takes a deep grateful breath when she finds herself in clear air.

She collapses onto the mud, reveling in the feel of the cool, damp earth between her fingers, relieved to be free of that awful place.

“Was he there?” says Signe. “What happened? Did you get what you needed?”

Mulaghesh looks up. Signe is watching her with wide eyes, holding a grenade with one finger hooked around the pin. She smiles nervously and stows it away in her pocket. “Well. You did say thirty minutes.”

Mulaghesh coughs and spits to the side. “Motherfucker,” she says hoarsely.

“What’s the matter with you?” says Signe. “Are you all right?”

“No. No, I’m not fucking all right.” Mulaghesh stands on wobbly legs, then looks back at the dome of blades. “Get back. Get back behind the trees. Now!”

Signe starts backing away. “Why?”

Mulaghesh pulls a grenade from her belt, rips the pin out with her teeth—Signe shouts, “What!” behind her—and lobs it into the entrance in the dome of blades. Then she and Signe start running.

Mulaghesh sprints through the circle gate and slides down into a crouch on the hillside, covering her head. Then she waits. And waits.

Nothing. No blast, no bang.

She waits a little longer. Then she releases her head and looks up, finding Signe flat on her belly in the brush.

“A…A dud?” Signe asks.

“No,” says Mulaghesh furiously. She stands. “No, it wasn’t a dud. It won’t let him die, he said. That motherfucker. It won’t let him die!”

She walks to the circle gate and stares at the dome, trembling with rage. “Fuck you!” she screams at it. “Do you hear me in there? Fuck you!”

There is no answer. Just the trees swaying in the wind.

Signe stands up. “General Mulaghesh, I…I think we should leave.”

Mulaghesh wants to try again, to throw another grenade into that damned dome and hear the echoing crash, to just hurt that bastard a little…

“General Mulaghesh?”

“What?” she says dimly. “Huh?”

“We should go,” says Signe. “Come on. Let’s go. It was a mistake to come here.”

As if in a dream, Mulaghesh turns and begins walking down the Tooth with her. She’s nearly halfway down when she realizes she’s been crying.

Far out on the open seas, Mulaghesh sits on the deck and stares down at the face of the moon reflected in ocean. Signe’s at the tiller, deftly steering the yacht among the dark waves, but neither of them has spoken for over three hours.

Then, finally, Signe says, “You saw him, didn’t you?”

Mulaghesh doesn’t respond. She imagines how nice it’d be to slip off this deck and into those dark waters and feel herself being tugged downstream to the sea.

“You’ve looked terrible since you walked out of that place,” says Signe. “Like you’re ill. You haven’t talked about it at all. Did he…Did he do anything to you? Did he, I don’t know, poison you?”

“No. Hells, I don’t know. Maybe.” Signe slips down to sit beside her on the deck. Mulaghesh doesn’t look at her. “Maybe I poisoned myself a long time ago. Only I’m just now realizing it.”

She stares into the waters, then down at her false hand. Her elbow aches. Her head feels heavy, her eyes feel heavy. It suddenly feels so difficult to look at anything, to even move.

She starts talking.

She tells Signe about the March, and about Shoveyn, the little town in the middle of nowhere outside of Bulikov, forty years ago. She tells her about the camp the night after, butchering stolen hogs, the night filled with their squeals and the scent of blood. About the smoldering ruins of the town beyond.

She tells her about how she sat there, sharpening her knife outside of Biswal’s tent. And then Sankhar and Bansa walked by, entering the captain’s tent, and they spoke to him in quiet voices.

Biswal called to her. She came in, and he said, “Lieutenant Mulaghesh, these two young men here have decided they don’t wish to continue any farther.”

And she said, “Is that so, sir.”

“Yes, that’s so. They feel that what we’re doing here is…how did you put it, Bansa? Deeply immoral?”

And Bansa said, “Yes. Yes, sir, I…We just don’t think it’s right to keep doing this. We can’t do it anymore. We won’t. And I’m sorry, sir, but we simply cannot continue to cooperate with this, sir. You can try to lock us up, but if you do we’ll just try to escape.”

Biswal said, “That’s eloquently put. We don’t have the resources to imprison you, and I can’t waste the time to have you flogged. So I suppose we don’t have any other option than just to let you two go.”

How surprised they were. Just shocked. But as they left Biswal looked back at her and said only, “Try not to waste a bolt.”

And she understood. She’d known what this would lead to the second she heard Bansa speak.

They walked out, and Biswal stopped them outside the tent. He turned, smiling, and said to them, “Boys, just one more thing…”

His voice so chummy, so cheerful. But then he looked at Mulaghesh, his eyes glittering, and her knife was already out.

The night so full of squealing, and the scent of fresh blood.

They watched her do it. The whole camp. They didn’t react. Just listened as Biswal told them these two were deserters and cowards, which Yellow Company would not tolerate. Could not and would not tolerate, not at all. “Those who will not make war upon our enemies,” he told them, “are also our enemies.”

She wiped her blade on her sleeve. How bright the blood was.

“And we will treat them as such,” said Biswal. He turned around and went back into his tent.

Signe and Mulaghesh sit in silence in the boat.

Signe asks, “How old were you?”

“Sixteen.”

“By the seas…”

But she tells Signe that that’s not an excuse. She knew it was wrong. These children trusted her. But if they’d deserted, and led the Continentals to Yellow Company, then it would have all been for nothing. Every awful thing they’d done would have been for nothing.

Or perhaps…Perhaps Mulaghesh simply didn’t want for the March to end. It was all she knew by then. If Bansa and Sankhar left, then the spell would break.

But the spell broke anyway, when the Summer ended.

How she wished to die then. Out of the service and adrift in the civilized world, she couldn’t tolerate what she’d done. She tried to bait the world to kill her, to do the thing she had no courage for. But it wouldn’t. Life went on; it just kept happening.

She tries to tell Signe what a curse that is, to keep living. To have nothing happen to you at all.

But then one day Colonel Adhi Noor was there, offering her a way back into the military in that rundown wine bar, the air full of the stink of smoke and moldering wood. And suddenly she thought she might be able to make it up to everyone. She couldn’t erase the past, but maybe she could keep it from happening again. Some young men and women, Continental and Saypuri, never made it home because of her. The least she could do was make sure others didn’t fall to the same fate. It’d be a way to make the dead matter. A way to put back some of what she’d broken.

Forty years of training. Forty years of trying. All smashed to pieces in the Battle of Bulikov. And then Shara Komayd whispering in the dark by her hospital bed, telling her about allies and generals and promotions….

Everything was supposed to change then. But it didn’t. The higher she went in the world, the more useless she felt. These analysts and officers and politicians described the spending of a life with the cold, clinical language of a banker. So far from the front lines, far from the churning, wet earth and the night full of screams. It all just kept happening, only now she didn’t see it in person.

But even though she was now so far away from it, she began to dream of it more and more, awakening in the night wet with sweat, the sounds of the Battle of Bulikov still ringing in her ears. And her arm ached and ached, yet no medicines would dull it. Some of the doctors suggested, somewhat politely, that perhaps the pain was not in her body, but in her mind. In other words, perhaps it hurt because she needed it to hurt.

One day she visited a military hospital—the first time she’d seen front-line troops in some time. And all those young men and women lay in bed, looking like they’d been chewed up by some machine….Yet every single one of them struggled to salute her. She was a general, after all.

And suddenly the pain in her arm was unbearable. As if she had knives in her elbow, sawing into the bone, needles grinding up through her marrow and splintering her humerus like termites. She knelt alone in the staircase of the hospital, white with pain, sweating and gritting her teeth and trying not to scream, not to call to the doctors and say cut it off, cut this thing off of me, cut it out of me now, now, now.

She passed out. Some orderly found her there, lying on the stairs, looking like a corpse. When he woke her he asked if something was wrong. She said yes.

Something was wrong. And now she knew what it was.

What a gutless lie it all was. The battles kept happening, and she was just as helpless as she’d always been. For all her medals and for all her power, she wasn’t making a lick of difference in the lives of those she commanded. Soldiers and civilians alike were still dying. And she couldn’t let herself forget.

“So I ran,” says Mulaghesh. “I didn’t know what else to do. It hurt to stay. I was lying to myself and to everyone else if I stayed. So I went and hid myself away on a beach.”

But it didn’t help. Every night she woke up with battle echoing in her ears, and every morning her arm hurt.

Until one day she got a letter from the prime minister. Deadly little Shara Komayd, the woman who brought down countless governments and officials—even those of her own country, in the end. And somehow Shara knew the three words that would bring Mulaghesh crumbling down too, that one wish Mulaghesh had fervently hoped to fulfill for so many years, the words scrawled on a piece of paper and brought to her by a sweat-soaked Pitry Suturashni…

“A way out,” Mulaghesh says. “She was offering a way to do what I’ve always meant to. To help make things change. And, by changing, to make everything matter.”

“Here? In Voortyashtan?”

Mulaghesh is silent as she stares out at the black waves. “Yes. I think so. If Voortyashtan can change, then anything can change. Right?”

Signe says nothing as she adjusts the tiller.