City of Blades

13. The City of Blades

Over the years, General Lalith Biswal has developed quite the delicate nose for smoke, an olfactory palette more refined and developed than the tongues of the most accomplished oenophiles. He can tell in one sniff, for example, if the smoke he’s smelling is coal smoke, charcoal smoke, or wood smoke; and from there he can determine the wood type, be it teak or oak or ash, as well as if the wood in question has been seasoned properly or if it’s green wood.

Right now, as he walks through the smoldering ruins of the insurgents’ camp, he smells rather a lot of wood smoke, most of it green—but it would be, as the woods are now alight in the east. But he can smell other aromas in the smoke as well—paper and hot metal, broiling soil and gunpowder.

And flesh. Possibly mutton, as the camp is now flooded with sheep that broke free of their pens—but he doubts it. He knows that somewhere in this camp, a body is burning. Probably more than one.

He surveys the cavalry’s work, hand on his sword—a nervous tic he acquired on the battlefield. They did a clean job of it, riding around the forest to come up on the north side of the encampment, then attacking in the dark, driving the insurgents south, where they were met by the guns of the 112th Infantry.

They’d lost a lot of soldiers by then. Picked off in the woods by the shtanis, little bands of fleeing fighters. So the 112th was eager to make someone pay, at least.

He stares out at the burning tents. An honest war, a real war. A far better thing than the miserable secret wars of spies and diplomats and trade ministers. I wonder, he thinks, if the world will ever see a real, true war again?

He feels he will. Lalith Biswal believes with all his heart that peace is but the absence of war, and war itself is almost always inevitable. But when it comes, will our politicians admit it is war? He steps lightly over a body. What must I do to wake them?

How alone he feels, how betrayed. Abandoned by his nation for the second time in his life.

I will not be shamed like this again.

He hears a rustling beside him and stops. There’s a twitch from a collapsed tent, just to his right.

He waits and watches. It could be one of his own soldiers, after all, perhaps wounded.

The canvas flies back and a Voortyashtani boy leaps up, pistol pointed at Biswal’s chest. The boy hesitates just a little too long, his dark eyes blinking behind his sandy-colored curls.

There’s the click of Biswal’s sword sliding out of its scabbard. He’s trained for this so much that he’s hardly aware of what he’s doing, his elbow extending and his tricep flexing, wrist rotating just so….

The boy’s chest and throat turn into a red flash. A fan of hot blood splashes across Biswal’s face. The pistol fires, the round thumping into the soil at the boy’s feet, and the boy tumbles backward into the wreckage of the tent.

Biswal stands over him and watches silently as the boy’s panicked eyes search the night skies, blood pouring from his neck.

“General Biswal!” cries a voice behind him. “General Biswal, are you all right?”

Captain Sakthi appears at Biswal’s elbow, pistol in his hand. He does a double take when he sees the dying Voortyashtani boy, who lies gurgling at his feet.

“Nothing to worry about,” says Biswal calmly. He takes out a handkerchief and wipes off his sword. “Just another insurgent. Didn’t have the sand to pull the trigger. What are you doing here, Captain? I ordered you to fortify the roadways.”

“Yes, sir, but I received a message from Fort Thinadeshi, General. Some…strange information about the harbor.”

“That damn thing? Has someone finally blown it up, too?”

“Ah, no, sir.” Sakthi cringes. “You have a little…you have some blood on your face, sir.”

“Mm? Oh. Thank you. Such a mess…” He wipes his face with the already bloody handkerchief. “Well, if it’s not blown up, then what is it?”

“An anonymous tip, sir, sent to the fortress…Here, I’ll let you see it.”

He hands Biswal the envelope, then uses a small torch to illuminate it for him.

Biswal frowns as he reads. Then he reaches into the envelope and pulls out a small stack of black-and-white photographs. He flips through them, looking at each one. Then he stares into space, thinking.

“So…someone is claiming that the Dreylings,” he says, “have a secret storeroom full of Divine artifacts?”

“Yes, and…this anonymous source also seems to claim that General Mulaghesh had full knowledge of the situation, and has abstained from informing us. The photographs are…Well. They are very convincing. Those statues do look Divine.”

Biswal’s face darkens. He begins slowly folding up the paper. “How did we receive this anonymous tip?”

“It was mailed to Major Hukkeri at the fortress. It might have been a Saypuri, sir, as they certainly knew the correct mailing protocols.”

Biswal is silent.

“If we were to do any sort of investigation, sir,” says Sakthi nervously, “if we were to take any kind of action, we’d…we’d need your approval, sir. But it’s an international matter, and the boundaries of authority aren’t implicitly clea—”

“Aren’t they?” says Biswal. “If the question is what to do about Divine artifacts on the Continent, then we do not need treaties or any diplomatic overtures to establish authority. If I am there, then I am the authority.” He stows the message away in his coat. “And I do plan to be there.”

“You…You mean to withdraw from the counterattack, sir?”

“No, no. The work here will continue, Captain, of course it will. But this requires my personal attention.” He gets a faraway look in his eyes. “She talked about how worried she was about the Divine….” He looks back at the photos, staring into those cold, white stone faces. “And why would she do that, unless she knew something I didn’t?”

It’s late afternoon by the time Signe and Mulaghesh return to the SDC dock, exhausted and sunburned but still alive. Either Signe signaled ahead or they were seen coming, because Sigrud awaits them on the dock, waving to them. “Was it a success?” he asks as he helps Signe moor the yacht.

“That depends on your idea of success,” she says, glancing at Mulaghesh, who has dark rings of fatigue under her eyes.

She clears her throat. “Yeah. Yeah, it was a success. It’s the next part I’m worried about.”

As they leave the dock Mulaghesh describes the ritual as told to her by the old man from the Tooth: the basin, the seawater, the materials from the Window to the White Shores, and the goat’s bladder of killer’s blood. And with them together, the passageway through to the City of Blades.

“A whole goat’s bladder?” says Sigrud.

“That’s what the man told me,” says Mulaghesh. “Why? How much is that? I don’t know my goat’s biology.”

“Two to three pints,” says Signe. “At least.”

“That much?”

Signe nods. “Old Voortyashtanis used them as water bags. They were big enough to keep a man on his feet for days. I suppose that was their standard amount of measurement.”

“I guess we don’t know any killer’s corpses we could drain,” says Mulaghesh. “Or any murderous prisoners sentenced to death.”

“No,” says Sigrud. “Though one wonders how Choudhry got any, in order to perform it herself.”

Mulaghesh has been wondering the very same thing during her journey back, but it isn’t until she sees Sigrud that she has the idea. “Wait, we talked about this….Choudhry’d been in the military briefly before she joined the Ministry. She’d had to use lethal force once when someone tried to charge through a checkpoint.”

“Lethal force?” says Signe. “So…you’re saying Choudhry was a killer herself?”

“Which means she could have used her own blood,” says Sigrud. He pulls a face. “Two or three pints of blood…Very difficult for someone to manage that.”

“What if she did it over time?” says Mulaghesh. “Bloodletting every couple of weeks?”

“Still quite difficult, I would imagine,” says Sigrud. “A lot of recovery time needed. Either way, that doesn’t fix our problem. How are we to do this? I suppose you and I could do it, Turyin, but that wouldn’t be an easy thing to split between us.”

“What if you could split it three ways?” says Signe.

“That might work,” says Sigrud, “but who would be our third?”

“I would,” says Signe.

“You wo…” Sigrud slows and comes to a stop as he processes what Signe said. “You…You would?”

She meets his gaze. “I would. Yes. I would be able to.”

Sigrud stares at his daughter for a long time, his face a mix of confusion and anguish as he comes to understand what his daughter is saying. “I did not know.”

“I know,” she says. “And…I know there’s a lot I don’t know about you.” She puts a hand on his shoulder.

Sigrud looks at her hand and then at her, his one eye blinking rapidly. “If the world had been different.”

“If it had been, yes. But it wasn’t.”

“I hate to interrupt, but,” says Mulaghesh, coughing awkwardly, “split between three—that should be doable, yes?”

“Maybe,” says Signe. “It’s still a lot. And you’d still be going through into the City of Blades weakened. You’re already exhausted, I can tell. Are you sure you still want to try?”

“No, I definitely fucking don’t want to try,” says Mulaghesh. “But I don’t see another way. You’d better swing by the SDC infirmary, because we’re going to need some bloodletting tools.”

“Why not just get Rada Smolisk to help us?” asks Signe. “She’s a doctor.”

“Because I don’t want anyone else knowing about this beyond us. Doing this would mean taking her to the yard of statues. That’s not safe by a long shot. I know some field medicine, so that should be enough—at least, I hope it will be enough.”

“So do I,” says Sigrud.

Evening is falling as Sigrud and Mulaghesh wait in the yard of statues. Despite Mulaghesh’s recent interactions with the Divine, they’ve still lost none of their menace: the countless carvings and alien forms disturb her even when she’s not looking at them, like they turn to watch her when she’s not looking.

The basin to her left is filled with cold seawater, hauled up bucket by bucket by SDC workers. Mulaghesh has already been to the apothecary shop and paid what felt like a few months’ salaries for the reeking, shriveled reagents: rosemary, pine needles, dried worms, grave dust, dried frog eggs, and bone powder, not to mention the sackcloth. Mulaghesh is pretty sure the apothecary sensed her desperation and overcharged her.

Voortya’s pale white face hangs just over Mulaghesh’s shoulder. She tries to ignore it. She especially tries to ignore how the face seems to be looking into the basin of seawater, where Mulaghesh herself will likely be going very shortly, if all goes to plan. She’s outfitted herself with her carousel and a rifling, though she’s very aware that, if the other sentinels are at all like Zhurgut, these armaments won’t make a dent in them. She’s packed a decent field medical kit as well, though again, from seeing what Zhurgut did to the Dreylings, she doubts she’d be able to self-apply much after tangling with a sentinel. Her primary strategy is to move as undetected as possible. Though in the situation that she is detected, she’s also brought four grenades, but she’s a little reticent to use them: hand grenades are far easier to operate when the user possesses both hands.

“I’m getting antsy,” she says. “Where’s your daughter? I don’t want to try to bleed myself unless I have the right tools.”

“She’ll be here. One question on my mind, though, is what do you plan to do once you get to this City of Blades?”

“Find Choudhry. Find out how the Night of the Sea of Swords works. Then find out how to stop it.”

Sigrud thinks about it, then shakes his head. “You have picked up Shara’s ability,” he says, “to produce elaborate plans that happen to lack the most important part.”

“Well, what the hells do you suggest?”

“Me? Blow it up. Bring explosives over there and mine the place. Then…Ktch.” He mimes pushing down a plunger. “Boom.”

“You want me to blow up the afterlife.”

Sigrud shrugs. “It worked for me in Bulikov.”

The metal door squeaks open and Signe walks in, a small leather satchel hanging from her shoulder. When she sees them she nods and breaks into a run. “Biswal is coming,” she says breathlessly.

“Eh?” says Mulaghesh. “Retreating from the highlands already?”

“No, Biswal is coming, and he’s on the warpath. More so than when he left, I mean. He’s making a beeline for here, though I’ve no idea why—though the rumor has it he’s heard about, well…” She glances around at the statues. “This.”

“He knows about the yard of statues?” says Mulaghesh. “How in hells could that have happened?”

“Didn’t someone infiltrate this place just days ago?” says Sigrud. “After Zhurgut?”

“Yeah…But…You think whoever is trying to start the Night of the Sea of Swords is behind the tip-off?” asks Mulaghesh. “Why would they go to Biswal all of the sudden? They haven’t exactly behaved lawfully so far.”

“Well, it certainly is fucking us over right now, isn’t it?” asks Signe, furious. “If that was their goal, then they are wildly succeeding. What are we going to do?”

“The same thing we were going to do before,” says Mulaghesh. “Only now we’ll need to hurry. If Biswal gets here we’ll never get the chance to try this again.”

“You still want to move ahead with your plan, General?” asks Signe.

“I don’t have a choice. Are you with me?”

Signe and Sigrud glance at each other. Then, finally, they nod.

“Good,” says Mulaghesh. “Roll up your sleeves.”

Mulaghesh does Sigrud first—she knows he probably won’t show any pain, so he’s a good practice subject before moving on to Signe—and soon she has three needles with three tubes spurting out viscous blood into the basin of seawater.

“So…you go over there,” says Signe, “wherever there is. And what do we do if you don’t come back?”

“If I don’t come back, then the apocalypse happens,” says Mulaghesh. “And if that happens, you and your dad here need to evacuate everyone in Voortyashtan.”

Sigrud nods. “Once you’re over there, I will go to the lighthouse and coordinate.”

“How’s your arm?”

“Painful. But mobile. It will do. Much like your hip. We ask much of our bodies.”

They stand around the basin, staring at the muddy red waters.

“So…how do we know when it’s done?” asks Sigrud, watching the arrhythmic gush of his own blood. “I frankly would like to have this thing out of me as soon as possible.”

“You’re the Voortyashtani, Signe,” says Mulaghesh. “You tell me.”

“You forget that I’ve never seen a miracle performed, General,” she says. “Besides the resurrection of Zhurgut. I’m well out of my league.”

“We’re all out of our league.” Mulaghesh kneels—keeping her left arm raised awkwardly so her own blood continues to pour into the basin—and lights the bundle of sackcloth at the foot of the plinth. She blows on it a little to get it going. “The miracles I’ve seen varied in showiness. Some you didn’t notice, some made sure you couldn’t help but notice. Are we going to see any rays of light, or chorus of singing, or—”

“—or swirling waters?” says Sigrud.

“Right, or that.”

“No,” says Signe. “He means the water’s swirling. Right now.”

Mulaghesh stands up. The reddish seawater in the basin is slowly circling, creating a small funnel in the center, like it’s draining away—but the level never lowers.

“Huh,” says Mulaghesh. “Is this…it?”

The more the sackcloth burns, the faster the water swirls, spinning more and more until it begins to make a low rumble as it rushes along the edge of the basin. Finally the sackcloth is just a heap of ash, but the waters keep accelerating.

“Is it done?” asks Signe. “Finished?”

“I believe it is just beginning,” says Sigrud.

They watch, forgetting their bloodletting, as the water spins faster and faster until it’s a cyclone of bloodstained water, whirling so fast that the very air above it starts to spin with it. Somehow not a drop of it flies out, despite the shallow basin: Mulaghesh and the rest remain as dry as they were when they started.

A cool breeze filters through the yard of statues. Then there’s a familiar sound: a soft, droning om, much like the sound the whole of Voortyashtan heard whenever Saint Zhurgut hurled his massive blade. And somehow, in some intangible way, there is the unmistakable feeling of a door being opened nearby.

They all shiver. “I think…I think that is enough,” says Sigrud.

“Yes,” says Signe. She looks up and peers around the yard as if she’s heard a curious noise. “Something’s changed. Something’s different now, though I can’t quite tell what.”

Mulaghesh stares down into the roaring tunnel of water. “By the seas…I’m going in there?”

“That seems to be the case,” says Sigrud, removing his syringe and applying a bandage. He walks over to assist Signe. “Are we so sure Sumitra Choudhry wasn’t beaten to death by the waters themselves?”

“Thanks for the confidence boost,” says Mulaghesh. She winces as she slides the needle out of her arm and wraps her elbow up with bandages.

Signe asks, “Are you going in?”

“I guess.” Mulaghesh sits on the edge of the basin, like a deep-sea diver about to drop herself in the ocean. She looks up at them. “Are we all ready?”

“Is it possible for any normal human to be ready for this?” asks Signe.

“Fair point.” Mulaghesh grips the edge of the basin, then freezes, suddenly seized with terror. This could be the last moment she has in this world, the last second of genuine waking life. “I didn’t think I’d make it to this age,” says Mulaghesh. “If…If I don’t come back…Tell them…Tell everyone I said I’m sorry. Okay? Just tell them that.”

“We will,” says Signe. “I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them that, and I’ll tell them the truth.”

“You had better,” says Mulaghesh. “Someone needs to.” Then without another thought, she pitches herself backward into the whirlpool.

She expects to fall down a tunnel. That’s what it was, after all, when she saw it: a whirlpool of rushing, roaring water, with a narrow tunnel leading straight down into the center of the basin.

But when she falls backward that’s not what she experiences at all. Instead it’s like she’s fallen into the surface of a still lake: the water embraces her all at once, a solid, flat surface rather than a raging whirlpool, and it’s not a narrow column of water but a vast, dark ocean with a single hole of light at the top. She’s not being whipped around by a cyclone of water; she’s just…falling. It’s like she’s fallen through a hole cut in ice, and she can see the rippling faces of her two comrades looking in at her.

Most disconcertingly, though, she’s sinking. Fast.

Her instincts kick in: she needs to swim up, back up, now. She kicks her feet, trying to gain traction, but she’s weighed down by her gear, which itself is strapped to her body very tightly, so she can’t let go.

She plummets down into the darkness, feeling the inexorable pressure of all that water gripping her whole body. It’s like she’s in the hand of a giant, tightening its freezing grip. The hole of light above her is just a pinprick now. She knows she shouldn’t—she’s been trained on drowning—but she starts panicking, kicking wildly, flailing about in the icy depths. One trickle of water penetrates her lips, and suddenly all the air comes flooding out of her, crystalline bubbles bursting from her nose and mouth and spiraling up to the tiny white pinprick above.

She’s drowning. She’s drowning and she knows it. She’s going to die in this damned big bathtub and there’s nothing she can do about it.

But then the world…tips.

The pull of gravity spins about her.

Suddenly she’s not falling, but rising, rising up toward the surface, her legs pointed toward what looks like a pool of stars below her—no, above her.

She awkwardly flips herself over and looks up, lungs screaming for air, as she flies up toward the pool of stars. Then she realizes it’s not quite a pool, exactly, but a hole, just like the one she fell through…except the stars in the sky she’s seeing aren’t right at all.

She punches through the surface of the water and launches herself up, surging for air, gasping hugely.

Her fingers find stone. She grabs onto it and clings tight like a child first learning to swim. Once she catches her breath she looks around herself.

She stares.

“What the…What the fuck,” she breathes.

She’s in what looks to be a gazing pool set in a courtyard between two giant, towering buildings, each of which resembles a flowering anemone. The ground of the courtyard is covered with white gravel, upon which sit broad, white marble tiles, forming a grid. Golden light flows from nearby doorways, creating honey-colored slashes across the gravel, and standing at odd angles on the tiles are statues of…

Wait. Those aren’t statues at all.

Her skin crawls as she realizes six Voortyashtani sentinels are standing in the courtyard with her, their massive, hideous armor flexing ever so slightly as they breathe. Mulaghesh tries to stay perfectly still in the water of the gazing pool. She’s made a lot of noise so far, but none of them stand or react to her—just like when she had her vision before.

She waits. Nothing happens. Then she stirs up her courage and says, “Hey—hey!”

None of them move. Warily, she climbs out of the gazing pool, then scurries over to the wall for shelter. Her breath produces an incredible amount of condensation, even though her skin doesn’t feel cold. It’s as if there’s just something frigid about this place that can’t react correctly to the living.

She looks herself over, mostly to make sure her ammunition is still secured to her rig. The cartridges should still work—she’s seen these damned things fire underwater before. And Signe’s brace has held, so she’s still gripping the rifling. It’s then that she notices that she’s now stained a dark red from head to toe: her clothes, skin, and even her hair are all a dusty crimson. It’s like she’s been marinating in blood, even though her time in the basin was hardly more than a minute or so.

She licks her fingers and rubs her skin, assuming it will wash off. It doesn’t.

“Shit,” she mutters. This will make her easy to spot in this colorless place.

She considers what to do now. She looks up at the two massive towers above her, riddled with windows glowing white or gold. The starry sky above is beautiful and strange, featuring some stars that are both the wrong size and the wrong color. Every once in a while a shooting star blazes bright against the dark. It’s a hauntingly beautiful place, albeit strange and ghostly.

She looks at one group of sentinels, then walks closer until they’re about ten feet from her. She can see variations in their armor now: some feature more aquatic ornamentations, others have more antlers, and some have only teeth of all shapes lining their shoulders and backs. They’re like different uniforms, she thinks. Maybe from different military units, different regions of Voortyashtan…or different eras in history.

She walks closer, rifling at the ready. The closest sentinel still faces away from her, but if it was conscious or alert, it’d hear her footfalls. Then she realizes that the sentinel is speaking, mumbling. She leans closer, listening, until she can hear its words:

“I threw down the bridges, threw down the walls, leapt among the fleeing flock and struck them down like wheat before the scythe. I did this for you, Mother, I did this for you….”

She walks to the next two, and hears:

“I stood upon the prow of my vessel and my heart leapt forth and I struck down their ships one by one, dashing them to flotsam and jetsam, and as we sailed by they clutched to the debris and cried out for help and we laughed at them. I did this for you, Mother. We did this for you….”

“We laid siege to the city for three weeks and four days, and when they opened the gates to admit defeat our swords fell upon them like rain upon a rooftop. They had thought we would be kind, that we would sanction their lives in return for their submission, but oh what fools they were, Mother, what fools they were….”

She listens to them, hearing each brutal story, each horrific victory. They’re reliving them over and over, she realizes, reliving their accomplishments, celebrating the deeds that won them their place here in the afterlife. But always they tie each story back to their “mother,” and each time they do there is a note of recrimination in it: as if they did these things for her, and secretly they did not wish to do them at all, and now she has somehow betrayed them.

She listens to them mumbling, then looks ahead into the gold-lit hallway leading away from the courtyard.

“Now…,” she whispers. “Where in hells is Choudhry?”

She wanders through the corridors and streets of the City of Blades, trotting over bridges and along canals and through cavernous tunnels. The streets are not all white stone: many of them are battered or rent shields hammered flat, just like in the dome atop the Tooth. She keeps an eye on the horizon, trying to spy that giant tower she saw in her vision, but the buildings and statues are so impossibly tall that it’s difficult to see anything behind them. She can only look straight up, really.

The streets are dotted with clumps of sentinels, all of them dormant and muttering like the ones she saw in the courtyard. They barely seem aware of their own presence, let alone Mulaghesh’s. But then she notices that no matter where the sentinels are standing, they’re all staring in one direction, as if they can see something behind the towering walls and statues.

So—what are they looking at?

Following this hunch—and completely ignoring common sense—she starts to run toward the sentinels, moving from small clumps to large groups and teeming crowds of sentinels, as they all seem to be magnetically drawn to something, clustering around some fixed point deep in the city.

As she dodges between two tall, muttering sentinels standing on a narrow, ivory-colored bridge, she suddenly stops. Then she backs up and looks down the canal.

The City of Blades seems to be riddled with canals, and the one she’s currently standing over looks like one of the biggest. As she looks down its length she can see countless other bridges straddling it, bridges of many shapes and sizes.

But on one bridge, about a quarter mile down the canal, she can see something lying on its stairs.

No—not something. Someone. A human form, limp and lying there, stained red just as she is.

“Ah, shit,” says Mulaghesh quietly.

She navigates through the crowd of sentinels and runs along the canal to the other bridge.

Not like this, she thinks. It shouldn’t end like this.

But when she emerges from one group of sentinels, and sees the body’s dark hair spilling over the white stairs, her shoulders slump.

She knows what this is, who this is.

She slowly walks over to the body.

It’s a woman. She’s dressed in civilian clothes, but the bandolier, the grenades, and the satchel hanging from her shoulder all suggest access to military supplies. Mulaghesh uses her toe to open the satchel. Inside is a bundle of brown tubes tied together, each capped with metal: TNT.

Packed for one hell of a pop, thinks Mulaghesh.

“So this is what happened to Biswal’s missing explosives,” she says aloud. “The Voortyashtanis never stole them. You did.” She almost wants to laugh at the sheer stupidity of it all.

Then she sighs, steels herself, and turns the body over.

She isn’t sure what she was expecting. All this time Mulaghesh has only had a picture and a file to go on, an idea of a person more than a person themselves. Yet when she sees the corpse of the young Saypuri woman, stiff and cold, she feels a pang she wasn’t expecting.

“Sumitra Choudhry,” says Mulaghesh. “Damn it.”

She’s not terribly decomposed, Mulaghesh notes, which suggests that time doesn’t work too well here, as Mulaghesh suspected. There’s a scab on her brow, left over from her fight outside the tunnel to the mines, probably. She looks terribly, terribly young to Mulaghesh’s eyes, not yet thirty. There’s a trace of irritation or discomfort to her large, dark eyes, as if she can’t believe this is happening to her, that she should come so far just to die here, alone on a bridge over ghostly waters.

“I’m sorry,” says Mulaghesh to her.

The only answer is the trickle of the waters below.

She looks closer at the satchel of TNT, wondering what Choudhry planned to use it on. Probably to blow up the citadel, Mulaghesh thinks, just as Sigrud proposed. Mulaghesh considers taking the TNT herself, but she’s never been a fast hand with explosives, and she doesn’t want to try now with so much at stake. She definitely doesn’t want to run around with a bunch of friction-sensitive explosives on her back as a just-in-case measure, either.

Mulaghesh wonders why it hurts as much as it does to see Choudhry here. But she realizes she’s been thinking of Choudhry primarily as a soldier: a soldier operating on her own, trying to stop a threat to her country before it gained momentum, a soldier willing to lay down her life in the line of duty. To see she finally made that ultimate sacrifice is saddening, despite everything that’s happened so far.

“For so long I thought you were dead,” Mulaghesh says to her. “I don’t know why I’m so surprised to find out I was right.”

Then a strange, singing voice says over her shoulder, “It’s odd she even got here.”

Mulaghesh whirls around, rifling at the ready. Then she realizes that the voice came from nearly fourteen feet above her, and slowly looks up.

Towering over her is what looks like the figure of an enormous woman, or perhaps a sculpture of a woman made of metal: she is silvery and glimmering, her arms and shoulders smooth like chrome. There is an artfulness to her that is both beautiful and yet repellent—Mulaghesh immediately senses that this thing was made by someone—and her limbs are terribly distorted, far too long and thin for a normal human. There’s something blade-like about them, the way they narrow and thin at the middle, then expand outward at the ends. Her hands and fingers are nothing but knives, long and curved and thin—so thin it’s hard to tell how many fingers she actually has. She wears a ragged skirt that starts high above her waist and then drifts down to coil around her narrow legs. Her feet, Mulaghesh sees, are clawed, like those of a bird, and the woman’s face is hidden behind a veil made of woven hair, long and silky and somewhat translucent.

Mulaghesh thinks she can glimpse the features behind that veil, the eyes and the mouth, but…but she doesn’t want to.

The voice comes again, soft and strangely fluting, as if it’s not being spoken from a human mouth but rather echoing through many pipes, like a pipe organ: “I know you. You’ve been here before.”

Mulaghesh tries to maintain her composure as she keeps her rifling pointed at this…whatever it is. It doesn’t seem to be a threat: it just impassively stares down at her. After all, if it wanted her dead it could have just stepped on her. “What?”

“You were here before,” says the creature. “Only you fell through. Just a shade of you. A piece of you. Not the whole you.” The creature looks back over the canal, its posture wistful, thoughtful. “I would remember. We get visitors so rarely these days. Just the few recent ones, really.”

Mulaghesh thinks rapidly. She remembers the voice from her vision: Are you supposed to be here?

She asks, “You’re the guardian, aren’t you?”

The giant head swivels back to look down at her. “I am the Watcher,” she says. “I watch and guard these shores.”

“Did…Did you kill her?”

“Her?” The Watcher cranes her head to the side to survey Choudhry’s corpse. “If I had killed her, she’d hardly be in one piece.” She holds up one hand and flexes her numerous bladed fingers. “Would she?”

“Then what happened?”

“Hm,” says the Watcher. Her tone suggests she’s intrigued that Mulaghesh would imagine she’d be interested in something so disinteresting. She looks again at Choudhry’s corpse, cocks her head, and says, “Dehydration.”

“D-Dehydration?”

“Yes,” says the Watcher, bored. “She came the same way you did, activating the tribute. But she used only her own blood, and when she came through she was weak and panicked. She ran too hard, too fast. Overexerted herself, poor thing. Not enough blood and fluids in that little body to keep it going, you see. I can tell. I am part of this place, so I know. I saw.”

“What do you mean, activating the tribute?”

The Watcher carelessly flicks a finger at the horizon. “You came from the city, didn’t you? The flesh place? The place filled with idols, statues, carvings, each attributed to the memory of a great warrior, a great deed? But the carving of the Mother…That is carefully linked to here.”

“So each one of those white statues memorializes the dead?” asks Mulaghesh.

The Watcher waves her hand, bored: Of course. Then she looks at Choudhry and cocks her head again. “That one there did not truly belong here. She had slain but one in her life, and that was a panicked, fretful deed. But you…” The Watcher bends down to look into Mulaghesh’s face—her giant body moves with a horrifying silence—and extends one long, needle-like index finger. Mulaghesh stiffens, terrified, and nearly fires, but the Watcher simply brushes a stray hair away from her face with astonishing delicacy. “You belong here. More than most, in my own humble opinion….But you know that already, don’t you?”

“What’s going on here?” asks Mulaghesh. “How are the dead even still here?”

“Because the two worlds are tied together,” says the Watcher. “Once they were very, very closely tied.” She demonstrates with her massive, bladed hands, folding all the countless serrated fingers together. “One never forgot about the other. Each was impossible without the other. The living made war because they knew the City of Blades was waiting for them, and the City of Blades existed because the living made war. But then they broke apart—yet not completely apart.” Her fingers snap apart with astonishing speed, leaving only two fingers touching. “Some threads remained. This place persisted, a ghost of itself, but still here. But just a bit ago, someone on the other side started renewing the bonds.” Slowly her fingers extend, until more and more and more begin to touch. “The two worlds grow near again, like a fisherman reeling in a catch. The dead awake, very slowly. And when they wake enough…Well. I doubt I’ll have much of a job anymore. Because then this city will be empty, won’t it?” There’s a bored tone of indifference to her words. Mulaghesh is reminded of an employee whose supervisor has left for the day.

“How can someone do that?” asks Mulaghesh. “How can someone just…reknit the world like that?”

“How should I know?” says the Watcher. “I simply watch. I refuse access or I grant it. That is my function, my role. It’s always been this, since time before time.”

“And what have you seen recently? Has there been anything…strange?”

“Strange? No. This place is always the same. It always has been this way. Though for so long we had no visitors, no new arrivals, no victorious dead. And then…”

“And then?”

She cocks her head again. “And then three came. There’s you, of course; you’ve been here, now and before. And then that one.” She flicks her finger at Choudhry’s corpse. “She came many times, bursting in through the Window, over and over again….It eroded her mind; I felt it. Each time she came here, she was a little worse, a little stranger. And then there was the acolyte.”

“Who?”

“The student of old Petrenko, the ancient smithy.”

“Wait,” says Mulaghesh. “Did you say smithy?”

“Yes. It was Petrenko who developed the method that the old ones first used to make their swords. He brought an acolyte here, once—I felt their spirit barge into this plane of existence—but because I found them unworthy and unlearned, I banished them and sent them back. Foolish old creature, I’ve no idea what he was playing at….”

“Their spirit…You mean they used a sword to project themselves here?”

“Yes. Of course. How else?”

Mulaghesh’s heart feels like it’s about to hammer its way out of her rib cage. “Wh-Who was this? Do you know?”

The Watcher looks down at her. “When they project themselves here, I see no face and hear no voice. I only see their thoughts and deeds. And that one was no warrior.” She looks down at Mulaghesh. “You belong here. I assent to your presence. You have killed many, and I sense in your heart, in your spirit, that you will yet kill more. Perhaps many more.” The Watcher draws a single bladed finger across her smooth stomach, creating a high-pitched squeal that sets Mulaghesh’s teeth on edge. “May my mutterings do you well, little warrior. Go and perform your function, as I should do so now. Farewell.” The Watcher turns and begins striding back across the beaches, picking her way among the countless Voortyashtani sentinels.

“Wait!” cries Mulaghesh.

The Watcher halts, turning her head very slightly to look back at Mulaghesh.

“Where is Voortya?” she asks. “Where can I find the citadel?”

“The citadel?” asks the Watcher. “Oh. Why it’s that way, of course. It always is—isn’t it?” She stabs a finger in one direction, then resumes her journey, humming atonally to herself.

Mulaghesh heads in the direction the Watcher pointed. She can’t even tell if she’s going the right way or not: there’s no real point of reference for her to use here. But the groups of sentinels grow thicker and larger.

She moves on, and on, and on. Maybe only one mile, maybe forty. She can’t tell. Then it emerges from the swamp of white stone and immense structures, which appear to fall away like supplicants parting before their monarch.

The citadel seems to unfold or calcify in the very air, growing on the hill before her like coral forming deep underwater, a great, curving, castellated construction blooming in the moonlight. It is osseous, ivory, an alien amalgamation of bone and frills and strange, aquatic apertures, all building to one tall, slender tower in its center, a shard of white rising into the sky. And there at the tip—a window, perhaps?

Mulaghesh watches the window. Then the light from inside it blinks, blacking out from left to right, as if someone’s pacing before it.

“So someone’s home after all,” says Mulaghesh. “Goody.”

But the question remains—who?

She trots off toward the chaotic base of the structure, full of loops and arches and staggered columns. The sand under her feet turns to stone, or perhaps marble. Smooth, hard steps descend into the belly of the structure, then down into a long tunnel. Mulaghesh checks her surroundings before entering, critically aware she is a bright red splotch in this ivory-colored palace. But it seems to be deserted.

She isn’t sure what she’s looking for here. Choudhry couldn’t help her, and the Watcher sure as hells couldn’t. But there must be something in here, even if it is Voortya, or perhaps a shadow of Voortya. But what to do when she finds her?

She exits into what looks like a courtyard and finds she’s in the center of a tangle of staircases. There are so many stairs up and down and some even to the side that they hurt her eyes. For a second she feels like she’s back in Bulikov. More importantly, though, she doesn’t see anyone on the staircases. Again, she’s all alone here.

This isn’t right, she thinks. This is a damned palace, after all: Where are the servants, the staff? Who lives here? Who works here?

She screws up her mouth, picks the staircase that seems to go up the highest, and starts off.

Time seems soft here, so she isn’t sure if she spends a few minutes or a few hours pacing up staircases, stalking from ivory-colored room to ivory-colored room, pausing before each doorway to check the corners. Her legs begin to ache and throb. She feels like she’s climbed up a whole damned mountain.

Finally she comes to a window. It’s tall and oblong, and lined with carvings that look very much like some kind of carapace growth. But she still stops and looks out, and sees…

“Holy hells,” says Mulaghesh.

The whole of the City of Blades lies below her, a forest of towers and statues, the streets tiny and insignificant at their feet. Yet in the streets and the alleys and along the canals are thousands upon thousands of sentinels, perhaps millions of them—more human beings, if they could even be called such, gathered in one place than she’s ever witnessed before.

But she can also see the edge of the City of Blades from here, the pale white shores sinking into the dark seas. And on those seas she can see something…strange. The surface of the waters are dotted with shapes, long and thin and curiously formed, with one end covered in spears and points, and in their centers a tall, thick pole of some kind.

They’re boats, she realizes. Voortyashtani longships, each with a weaponized prow for ramming other boats. Yet they seem somewhat ghostly and unreal, as if they’re not quite there, or not quite there yet: they seem to flicker, as if they haven’t made up their minds as to whether or not they exist.

As such, it’s hard to count them. But she would guess the fleet would be larger than twenty thousand vessels. Enough to sink every Saypuri dreadnought five times over.

It’s unimaginable. But she doesn’t have to imagine it, because they’re all right there, right in front of her.

“If those things set sail,” she says quietly, “we’re doomed.”

She steels herself, grips her rifling harder, and turns to the nearest staircase up. Then she begins ascending again.

The spiral of stairs narrows, tighter and tighter. She’s going up, in smaller and smaller loops. She thinks she’s in the center tower now, finally.

About a hundred steps up she spots a tiny splash of color in this endless white place: a splotch of blood, right in the center of one of the stairs. It’s crusted over, but she can tell it’s fairly recent. She crouches and peers at it, then looks up the stairs.

Divinities don’t bleed, she thinks. Not since the last time I checked.

She continues up the stairs. The droplets of blood increase. Mulaghesh is perversely reminded of a lover leaving a trail of rose blossoms to their bed.

Finally the stairs end at a large foyer—one that seems far too big for the narrow white tower she saw from the ground. Its ceiling is arched and is covered in what appear to be stone swords, all carved at strange angles, like stalactites dangling from the roof of a cave. Empty, dusty lanterns hang along the wall. She guesses they haven’t seen use in years, maybe decades.

She walks in, mindful to move quietly. Then she sees the throne.

It’s difficult for Mulaghesh’s mind to determine exactly how big it is: sometimes it seems to be merely fifteen or twenty feet tall, but then the room will shift and warp, bending at the edges of her vision, and it will seem as if the throne is hundreds of feet tall, even miles tall—a giant, terrible construction that looms over her like a storm cloud. But no matter the size, its features remain the same: a bright red chair formed of teeth and tusks, all crushed or melted together, sticking out at strange angles. Wide arcs of horns and antlers sprout from the throne’s back, curving to form something like a rib cage around the chair. Mulaghesh imagines Voortya taking her place in this terrible seat, her plate mail gleaming and her silent, still face staring out from the cage of antlers like a cold, dark heart.

She shivers. Then she notices something at the feet of the throne: a pair of shoes. Normal ones, women’s shoes. They’re of a very old fashion, small and brown, featuring a modest heel. She can’t help but get the impression that their owner thoughtlessly kicked them off while taking her seat on the throne.

What in the hells?

She takes stock of the room. The door on the opposite side is far, far too large for a person, nearly four times as tall as the tallest man. Still not big enough for the Divinity she glimpsed on the cliffs, but couldn’t a Divinity change their size at will? Couldn’t they do more or less anything at will, really?

Mulaghesh looks down. The trail of blood leads across the receiving room and through the giant door to the chambers beyond.

She looks at it for a long time, thinking. Then she slowly stalks through the columns and through the door, rifling raised. The trail of blood droplets leads through a large door on the other side, then around the corner and down the hall.

She hears someone talking, or rather muttering. They’re cursing, it sounds like. And there’s a quiet clanking, too, as if they’re wearing armor.

Mulaghesh puts her back to the wall and slowly creeps through the doorway, rifling trained on the space ahead.

She reflects that this is possibly an incredibly bad idea. The only thing she knows about anything Divine is to stay away from it, as far away from it as one possibly can. As this person (if it is a person) seems to be occupying Voortya’s throne room, or private chambers, or something very personal to that Divinity, then all logic suggests she should back away now.

But she doesn’t. Something is moving down the hallway. Mulaghesh abandons all protocol and puts her finger right on the trigger: she’s willing to abandon trigger discipline in a situation like this.

She thins her eyes, watching. The person paces into view, then back out.

It’s a woman, she sees, a human woman, or at least she appears to be. The first thing Mulaghesh notices is that she’s both wounded and unarmed, clutching her left shoulder. Blood drips from her fingertips in a slow leak. But the second thing Mulaghesh sees is that she’s dressed…well, like Voortya: she wears the ceremonial plate armor Mulaghesh glimpsed days ago on the cliffs outside of Fort Thinadeshi, covered with horrific images of conquest and sacrifice. It’s just that this suit of armor is about one one-hundredth the size of that one, and there appears to be a bullet hole drilled into the left pauldron.

The woman is turned around so that Mulaghesh can’t see her face. A tall window is on her opposite side, allowing the pale moonlight to pour in, making it even harder for Mulaghesh to see, but she can make out that the woman’s hair is dark, as is her skin.

A Saypuri? How could that be?

What in all the fucking hells, thinks Mulaghesh, is going on in this mad place?

Whatever this woman’s story is she’s definitely no god, no Divinity, and certainly no sentinel. And she can bleed, which means Mulaghesh’s rifling might be an actual threat.

The next time the woman paces into view, Mulaghesh barks, “Freeze. Hands where I can see them.”

The woman nearly jumps out of her skin. She cries out, as this jolt obviously hurts her shoulder.

“Hands where I can see them!” says Mulaghesh again. “And turn around!”

The woman stiffens, then slowly does so, rotating on the spot.

Mulaghesh’s mouth opens, and she almost drops the rifling.

The woman’s face is familiar, but of course it is: Hasn’t Mulaghesh seen that visage in paintings and murals in schools and courtrooms and city halls, staring out with steely eyes on any number of estimable proceedings? Hasn’t she seen this woman in countless history books, the face that emblematizes one of the most important periods in the history of Saypur? And, more recently, hasn’t Mulaghesh seen this woman’s face every single time she paged through Sumitra Choudhry’s files?

“Holy hells,” says Mulaghesh. “Vallaicha…Thinadeshi?”

Thinadeshi glares back. It’s unmistakably her: the high, aristocratic cheekbones, the sharp nose, the piercing eyes, the face of the woman who in so many ways built Saypur itself, and tamed much of the Continent.

Thinadeshi looks her up and down. “You!” she says angrily. “You’re the one who shot me!”