City of Blades

7. Out of the Deeps

In the white citadel the goddess opens her eyes.

She knows what she’ll see. She knows she’ll see the huge, white, cavernous halls, the crenellated white columns, and the endless, twirling white staircases. She knows she’ll see the cold white moonlight pouring in through the windows. And she knows if she goes to the windows she’ll see the endless beaches beyond, the massive white statues, and hear the slow murmur of the sea.

She knows she’ll see these sights because she has been in this white palace forever, since the dawn of time and all things.

She shakes herself. Her plate mail tinkles slightly with the motion.

This isn’t true, she tells herself. You haven’t always been here….Don’t you remember that?

She wanders the white halls, her metal boots clinking on the white stone floor. She wanders for what could be hours, or perhaps days, she isn’t sure. She sees no one, hears no one. She is alone here. Except for her, this enormous palace is utterly deserted.

At least, the interior is: what lies outside of the palace is an entirely different matter.

She can hear their thoughts even from far within the palace’s depths. They toy at her mind, these pained desires and plaintive, wheedling pleas, begging for her attention, for her action. She tries to ignore them, to keep them out, but they speak so much and there are so many of them….

Mother, Mother—give us what was promised to us. Give us what we need. Give us what we fought and died for….

She finds herself walking up the stairways, perhaps to flee them—she isn’t sure. She isn’t sure of much these days. She has faint memories of how things were before, and she knows that, in some fashion, she chose to be here—but it gets quite difficult to remember sometimes.

She comes to a window. She hesitates—she doesn’t want to see, she desperately doesn’t want to—but she knows she needs to look. They’re getting so much stronger that she can’t quite help herself.

She walks to the window and looks out. She’s high up, several hundreds of feet at least, looking down on a clutch of porcelain-white towers, shimmering and queerly organic, like sea sponges or lumps of coral. More disturbing are the statues, which stand among the towers and straddle the streets, massive figures that are only vaguely human, frozen in positions of combat: a raised blade, a thrusting spear.

These are not what disturb her the most. Because standing far below her, upon the shores of this island and along its many canals and in the streets, are…

Monsters. Abominations. Tall, horrific, glittering creatures with blank, primitive faces, their backs and shoulders covered in horns and tusks.

Their thoughts batter her mind like the winds of a hurricane upon a house:

Mother…Mother! Please, let us go! Please, give us what we were promised….

She shuts her eyes and turns away. Some part of her knows that they were once human, that they became these things only because it was asked of them. But was it she who asked it of them? She can’t quite remember.

She walks up the stairs to her throne room, and the great, hideous, red seat is waiting for her. It is like a living thing, in some ways: a creature she created, begging for her presence. To sit upon the red throne is to become more of herself.

It’s not yours, she reminds herself. Not really. Yet some part of her remains unconvinced.

But to be near the throne makes her stronger, somehow, and it helps her remember. It helps her remember the very strange thing she saw the other day: she came across a window to another world, and inside that window were men. They didn’t know she was there, that she was listening, listening as they described a mine they were building, a deep hole in the earth….And she’d realized with sudden fury and disbelief what they were doing, whether they realized it or not.

As she remembers this, standing there before her great red throne, her fists clench, and she is filled with horror and rage and disgust.

After what she did for them, they would do this to her? They would make all of her sacrifices count for nothing?

She knows she must do something. She must act. But to do so might kill her.

Is it worth it?

She thinks about it.

Yes. Yes, it is.

She focuses, holds out her hand, and reaches for the sword.

The sword is always there. It is never truly gone, because since the day she picked it up it’s been a part of her, or perhaps she’s a part of it, for she knows deep down that it is really so much more than a sword: to grip the black handle and see the flickering blade is to bear witness to a thousand battles and a thousand murders and a thousand years of brutal conflict, to hear the shouts of thousands of armies and see the skies darkened with thousands of spears and arrows and watch the ground grow soft and dark with the blood of thousands of lives.

She holds the sword in the white tower. You’re me, the sword whispers to her. You’re of me, and I’m of you….

This isn’t true, she knows. She thinks it isn’t true, at least. But she needs to believe it just a little longer. Cooperating with the sword lets her do so much….

Including the ability to cross over to the land of the living, and wreak almost limitless destruction.

She takes a breath, shuts her eyes, and listens to the sword.

During Mulaghesh’s seventeen-year tenure as polis governor of Bulikov, she oversaw 127 assemblies of the Bulikov City Fathers, 314 city hearings, 514 town hall meetings, and 1,073 Worldly Regulations trials for those who had dared acknowledge the Divinities under the surveillance of Saypur. She knows the exact number because after each one of these meetings—which sometimes lasted up to ten hours—she would go back to her offices, pull out her portfolio, and make a single, solitary tick mark on the very last page.

Just one. Because somehow making these little tick marks helped her compartmentalize all of her contempt and fury and frustration, bottling it all up and releasing it in that one tiny, contained motion, gouging the nib of the pen along the soft, vulnerable surface of the page. And she often had plenty to release, for another delightful feature of any meeting of civic-minded Bulikovians was the heaps and heaps of insults, scorn, and outright threats they hurled at her at the top of their lungs.

Yet as Mulaghesh watches the assembly of tribal leaders from the balconies of the Voortyashtani Galleries—the civic center of the city—she reflects that her stint in Bulikov was a leisurely stroll in comparison to this.

She watches, eyebrows raised, as an elderly, bearded man with a red band of a tattoo around his neck stands up from his bench, assumes a posture of deepest grief, and bellows, “I wish to lay deaths at the feet of the Orskova clan! I wish to hang the deaths of my tribe from their necks and their shoulders!” His comments are met with a chorus of boos and remarkably specific threats from about half the assembly.

Biswal, seated at the table at the front of the Galleries, rubs his temples. “Mr. Iska, you have been told twice now that the Laying of Deaths has been eliminated as a formal motion of the assembly. Please sit down.”

“Then how shall the wrongdoers and murderers in this room with me know guilt?” shouts the man. “Shall the names of my brothers and sisters and children who have died wrongly be forgotten, and perish into ash?”

More boos and catcalls. Mulaghesh thins her eyes as she watches the tribal leaders. They are all skinny, haggard things, dressed in robes and furs, their necks brightly tattooed and covered with curious patterns. Some are women, she sees, which surprises her: Bulikov strictly forbade women from doing anything more than firing out children as quickly and efficiently as possible.

But then, she thinks, Voortya probably wouldn’t have tolerated that bullshit.

“The persistence of the names of anyone,” says Biswal wearily, “dead or alive, is no longer part of the charge of the assembly. That was decided three meetings ago. Now may we please move on to the primary item on our agenda?” He raises a piece of paper for the assembly to see. “The murders at the town of Poshok, which Fort Thinadeshi is asking for any assistance on.”

“Murders committed by the Ternopyn clan!” shouts a woman at the back. “Butchers and thieves and liars!”

The Galleries fill up with bellowed accusations. Mulaghesh rolls her eyes. “Oh, for the love of…”

While Biswal deals with the commotion, Mulaghesh focuses on the unusual figure to his left: a small, mousy Continental woman of about thirty, with big dark eyes and a timid mouth, wearing clothes that look about three sizes too large for her. She sits hunched in a manner that suggests she wishes to fold up and disappear into the back of the chair. She scribbles madly on a large pad of paper as they talk, her fingers and wrists black with ink.

Biswal raises a hand in response to someone’s question. “I believe we might need to check with Governor Smolisk on this issue. Rada, would you happen to have last month’s minutes on hand?”

So that’s the Continental governor, thinks Mulaghesh. She watches as Rada digs frantically through a sack behind her chair, produces a sheaf of papers, flips through them, and reads aloud, “Th-The representative in que-qu-question s-s-said at the t-t-time, and I qu-quote…” She takes a deep breath, and reads, “ ‘M-may all the sons and d-daughters of the Hadyarod clan be g-g-gutted as rabbits and d-die upon the f-flames.’ ”

One of the tribal leaders crosses his arms triumphantly, as if his point has just been proven beyond a measure of a doubt.

“Thank you, Rada,” says Biswal. “Though this threat, Mr. Sokola, was indeed uttered at the last assembly, the victims at Poshok were not gutted, nor burned, nor were they members of your clan, the Hadyarod clan—as you surely know. And if I recall, that exact curse has been used at nearly every assembly of the tribal leaders, sometimes more than once per meeting. At the moment, I am not convinced that it is an indication of guilt, and I would prefer if we adhere to ways you all can cooperate with our investigation, or volunteer more pertinent informa—”

Biswal’s next words are drowned out by shouting. He sighs and looks to Rada, who shrugs in return and attempts to write down some of the more prominent shouts.

“This is a bit more energetic than most meetings,” says a voice.

Mulaghesh, who’s been slouching deep in her seat, looks up to see Signe standing above her. She’s wearing her usual scarf, but has opted for a leather jacket today rather than the sealskin, though it too bears the SDC insignia. “Oh?”

“Yes. Even Brursk there is getting into it.” She points at an obese man in a blue leather jerkin who is making a fist and screaming across the aisle at someone. “He’s usually as placid as a cow.”

“This doesn’t seem like very placid company.” She looks through their ranks again, trying to spy anything suspicious; but, in her opinion, the whole lot of them look like mad bombers. She can’t imagine what Biswal wanted her to do here. “Do you come to these things often?”

“I try to. Don’t let their tattoos and their crude threats fool you, General—some of these people are quite clever, and smell change in the wind. The more powerful leaders imagine the harbor and all of its profits to be a pie, and themselves the only ones authorized to do the cutting. Hence why I’m here.”

Something slowly clicks in Mulaghesh’s head. “Is that why the SDC headquarters is so permanent looking?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You keep claiming that the harbor will be done within two years. Why would you want to build something so permanent—unless you wanted to be here for a long, long while?”

“And what would you imagine us doing?”

“Taking your slice of the pie, of course,” says Mulaghesh. “The harbor’s a one-time deal. But if you’re the shipping company on the Solda—by the seas, you’d make billions of drekels every year.”

Signe smiles serenely. “Hm. You’re no fool, General, I’ll give you that. Though some of these damn tribes intend to milk us for all we’re worth, threatening to give away portions of the shipping rights to other companies….But they forget who it is who’ll control the mouth of the Solda itself.”

“I do wonder, CTO Harkvaldsson,” says Mulaghesh, “if it’s possible for you to even piss without some amount of skullduggery and plotting.”

“Well, I also take it upon myself to be an ambassador for the harbor.” She leans forward, listening. “Speaking of which…”

“…murders were committed by no clansman!” a thin woman is shouting below. “Nor committed by any human hand! No Voortyashtani that we know did such a thing, this I assure you! This is a curse, a Divine retribution for the sacrilege being committed to our ancient ancestral home!”

“I assume, Mrs. Balakilya,” says Biswal, “that you are referring to the harbor.”

“The Dreylings and their great machines grind up the bones of our very culture!” cries the woman. “They awaken many things that lie sleeping! The Divine will not tolerate this insult, and we shall all pay the price!”

Biswal nods. “Thank you for your opinion on the matter, Mrs. Balakilya. But I do believe CTO Harkvaldsson is present in the balcony, so perhaps she’d like to comment.”

All heads turn to Mulaghesh and Signe. Mulaghesh is used to being the focus of the ire of a crowd, but so many furious eyes make even her cringe a little. Yet one group of tribal leaders in the back—their necks dyed a soft yellow—stands and strikes a reverential pose, as if saluting them.

Or perhaps specifically saluting Signe, who stands at the railing and says in a loud, clear voice, “As I have testified to and even personally shown some of the assembly members, what the Southern Dreyling Company is hauling up from the floor of the Solda Bay is nothing more than rotting stone. We researched our undertaking carefully and concluded that no surviving architecture is present in the bay. What we drag up is sand and silt and rubble, and nothing more. If we were to find any artifact or item of cultural import, we would notify the assembly immediately.”

“These are lies!” cries the thin woman—Balakilya—but again, the assembly dissolves into shouts.

“I assure you,” says Signe calmly, “they are not.”

Yet then there’s one shout that rings out above the muttering: “Who is that there?”

Everyone stops, frowning, to see who’s shouting. It proves to be a bowlegged man at the back with a ratty beard, and he leaps up onto his bench and flings a finger at Mulaghesh. “Who is that beside you? Who is that with the wooden hand?”

“Ah, shit,” mutters Mulaghesh, sinking low in her chair.

Then someone else cries out: “It’s the soldier who was there when Kolkan was slain!”

Balakilya screams triumphantly, “You see? Do you see? Why would Saypur bring the lieutenant of the god-killer if they did not fear the retribution from the Divine? Why would she be here if not to defend them against the vengeance of Voortya!”

“I…think I’m going to back out on this one,” Mulaghesh says, standing. “I’m pretty sure my presence here isn’t helping much.”

“Leave now,” says Signe, “and you’ll only inspire more questions.”

“She leaves because it’s true!” shouts Balakilya, striding to stand in the central aisle. “She fears the truth, so she flees from it!”

“See?” says Signe.

“General Mulaghesh,” says Biswal, looking up, “perhaps if you could spare a few words for—”

“She’s come to murder whatever’s left of our culture!” cries Balakilya.

“She’s here to force us to bow to the whip of Saypur!” shouts another man.

“Oh, for the love of…” Mulaghesh walks to the railing. “You want to know why I’m here? Here of all places on this damned world?”

“Tell us!” shouts one of the men below. “Tell us!”

“Fine!” snarls Mulaghesh. “I’m on vacation, you dumb sons of bitches!”

A loud silence echoes over the Galleries. Mulaghesh turns and strides away. As she walks through the door she hears someone say, very quietly, “Did she say vacation?”

Mulaghesh sulks in the hallways of the Galleries as she waits for the assembly to end. The Galleries are a deeply strange place to her: the interior is like being inside the bones of a massive beached whale, its roof made of white, arcing ribs, topped with a line of vertebrae with spinous flowerings. The thunderous shouts from the assembly chamber begin to feel like the roar of water, and suddenly it’s not so difficult to believe that she’s trapped in the belly of some undersea leviathan.

Bored, she looks at the displays along the walls of the Galleries, which are curated like the walls of a museum. She strolls down the hallway, absently looking at each one—though she quickly sees these aren’t just art pieces.

The first display is a massive, rounded standing stone that—according to the sign beside it—was carved by Saint Zhurgut himself during his “elevation.” It looks to Mulaghesh as if the stone’s been run through a sawmill: it’s been hacked and slashed many, many times, yet never cracked. Whatever blade sank through this stone did so perfectly, like a knife through butter. The sign reads:

“What a tragedy,” mutters Mulaghesh. But she doesn’t feel really disturbed until she looks at the next display.

She stops and stares. She’s happy she’s alone, for she feels she might make a scene.

The exhibit is completely empty except for a stone mask standing on a thin steel pole. Unlike many of the other displays this mask is not large, though it is perhaps slightly wider and taller than the average human face. It’s also a little too round, as the normal human skull is somewhat oblong. But it’s the face that is the most disturbing part: the eyeholes are small and set both too far apart and far too low, leaving a prodigious brow above them with a single ridge-like seam running through their middle. The seam ends in a tiny, insignificant point of a nose with no nostrils, and below that are two short rows of needle-like teeth, a bad parody of a human mouth. Around the edges of the mask are many small holes through which, presumably, one once threaded string to tie the mask onto one’s face.

It’s not the real thing. Mulaghesh knows it isn’t. But she’s seen an abundance of sketches and paintings, for these masks haunt Saypur to this day. These masks—the real ones, the ones made of steel and bone—were present in Saypuri life for hundreds and hundreds of years, right up until the Night of the Red Sands.

For wasn’t every Saypuri terrified of waking up and finding such a face staring in through their window? Wasn’t every road and every river and every port watched by those blank, staring eyes? Mulaghesh was told that the people (if they could even be called such things) that wore those masks would go by Saypuri slums at night while everyone slept, and toss in little metal tokens through the open windows, tiny coin-like baubles fashioned to resemble their headgear. The Saypuri slaves would then wake up and find these distorted, grinning skulls no bigger than the palm of their hand waiting on their floors or on their tables, and they would understand the unspoken message: We were here. Walls mean nothing to us. Nothing can be kept from us.

Mulaghesh, breathing hard, looks at the sign beside the display:

There is nothing else. But of course there isn’t: there is nothing more to say about such things.

“Not an original, of course,” says Signe’s voice.

Mulaghesh turns to see her walking down the hall in her quick, efficient pace. “It had fucking well better not be.”

“They’re wrapping up in there,” says Signe. “Biswal and Rada should be out any time, if you’re waiting.” She stops and looks at the mask, then thinks and asks, “What do you see, General, when you look at it?”

“I see millions of my fellow citizens tortured and dead,” says Mulaghesh.

Signe makes a small hm sound and nods, as if understanding her sentiment.

“Why? What do you see?”

“A culture that worshipped death,” says Signe, “and particularly those who dealt it. Their ancestors, mostly. For instance, Voortyashtanis believed that if you picked up the sword of an ancient sentinel it would possess you, take you over—you’d become them, in essence, but cease being you.”

“Sounds like a raw deal.”

“Yes—to them, a sword was a vessel of the soul. To do such a thing would be to lose your soul entirely. But I’m told they only did it in desperate situations. They didn’t only admire their ancestors, though. They also respected their foes, if they felt they were worthy. Hence why things went so smoothly just now, after your outburst.”

“Huh? You mean I helped things in there?”

“Of course you did,” says Signe. “Voortyashtanis respect those who have tested themselves in battle. You’re not only a veteran, but you were in a battle against a god. They grudgingly admire you, General Mulaghesh. It put them on uneven footing. I thought that was why Biswal wanted you there in the first place?”

Mulaghesh cocks her head, turning this over. “Huh. You’re probably right. Speaking of admiration…Why did that one group stand up when you spoke? Some of them looked like they were saluting you, in some way.”

Signe is silent for a long while. “That would have been the highland Jaszlo tribe, General.”

“Ah. Your old family, then?”

“They are not my family.” Her voice is arctic. Not quite as cold as when Mulaghesh provoked her into talking about Sigrud, maybe, but close. “They hold to traditions that I no longer honor. But they gave us shelter when we needed it.”

Mulaghesh looks Signe over carefully.

“What?” says Signe, irritated.

“You said they respected those who dealt death,” says Mulaghesh. “And they seemed to respect you a whole lot in there, CTO Harkvaldsson.”

Something in Signe’s jaw flexes. Then she pulls out her beaming, perfect smile. “Have a good afternoon, General.”

Mulaghesh waits for the tribal leaders to file out before entering the assembly chamber. Biswal and Rada are quietly conversing, reviewing the notes.

“You know, Lalith,” says Mulaghesh as she approaches, “if you wanted me to put some scare in these people, you could have just asked.”

Biswal looks up at her over his spectacles. “Some scare?”

“That’s why you really wanted me here. To distract them, make them all hot and bothered. It’s easier to herd sheep when they’re skittish.”

His eye gains the slightest of twinkles. “They were much easier to handle when they realized you were here, that’s true. But if I’d asked you to come and be my celebrity guest, Turyin, I felt sure you’d turn me down.”

“Probably true.”

“You asked me to make use of you,” says Biswal. “Which I did. I hope you won’t hold it against me, but…the ends sometimes justify the means.”

Something in Mulaghesh curdles at that. This isn’t the first time she’s heard him say that. Then she slowly realizes that little Rada Smolisk is staring at her with giant, shocked eyes.

Biswal glances at her and says, “I’m sorry, I haven’t properly introduced you both yet. Governor Rada Smolisk, this is General Mulaghesh. Turyin, this is…”

Rada stands. Something in her posture makes her look even smaller when she’s on her feet. “P-Polis Governor R-Rada Smolisk,” she says. Her voice is almost less than an echo, and it’s as though she has to dig each syllable out from some deep, difficult part of herself.

Mulaghesh smiles thinly. She doesn’t like the idea of a Continental as polis governor—adders in charge of the chicken coop and all that—but she finds it hard to be worried by this small, shrinking creature. “Very nice to meet you, Governor.”

The two of them look at Rada, expecting her to carry on in the pleasantries. But instead Rada gets a faraway look on her face, as if just remembering an awful nightmare she had last evening.

“Rada?” asks Biswal.

Rada snaps to attention. “G-General Mulaghesh, I’m s-sorry, but…I w-would like to s-say this while I h-huh-have the chance.”

“Okay?”

She swallows and stares into the floor as she tries to assemble the words. “I—I am originally a n-native of B-Bulikov, and I—I was there in the B-Battle of Bulikov. And if it were n-not for you and y-your soldiers, I w-wou…Well. I most cer-certainly w-would have d-died.”

“Uh, thank you,” says Mulaghesh, surprised. This was about the last thing she expected to hear. “I appreciate the words, but we were just doing our jo—”

“M-my family’s house c-collapsed,” says Rada. “My wh-whole family d-d-d-perished. And I was tr-trapped in the ruins w-with them. For f-four days.”

“By the seas, child, I…”

“It was your s-soldiers that found me. They d-dug me out. They didn’t h-h-have to. There were th-thousands in n-need. But they d-did. They t-told me they had a p-p-policy of never leaving a-uh-anyone behind.” Rada looks up. “I have al-always wanted to th-thank you for what y-you and y-your soldiers did.”

“Your thanks are warmly received.” Mulaghesh bows. “I’m happy to hear we were of service. But how, if I could ask, did you wind up in Voortyashtan?”

“I was a m-medical student at Bulikov University. A-after the battle, I w-went to Ghaladesh on a Ministry program. I’d become interested i-in humanitarian a-aid—as you c-can probably u-uhh-understand.”

“Of course.”

“Th-then news came th-they were tr-trying to escalate th-their w-work here in V-V-Vv…” Rada trails off, her face bright red. She sighs, surrendering. “In this place. They n-needed a new p-polis governor, one w-with a m-more humanitarian f-focus. I applied.” Then she thinks and counts off on her fingers: “D-during my tenure here, w-we’ve reduced infant death by twenty-nine percent, maternal death by twenty-four percent, death by infectious disease by fourteen percent, child malnourishment by thirty-three percent, and I’ve personally performed seventy-three successful surgeries.” She looks up from her fingers and glances around, dazed, as if just remembering where she is.

“Sounds like you’ve got a pretty good record going,” says Mulaghesh. She notes Rada didn’t stutter a bit while firing off those statistics.

“Thank you,” she says meekly. Then she stoops and gathers up her papers. “I have to go and make formal copies of the m-m-minutes. I-I-eh-eh-uh, uhhh-i-it was a p-p-pleasure meeting you.” She bows.

“A pleasure,” says Mulaghesh, bowing back. She watches as Rada Smolisk scampers off, wondering if she was wrong to mistrust a Continental as polis governor. If anyone could have a desire to help Saypur reconstruct the Continent, it’d be a Bulikovian, someone who’s witnessed the Continent’s own gods wreak destruction on their very people.

“The girl is odd,” says Biswal, watching her go. “As anyone who went through that would be. But she is a brilliant doctor. Much cleverer than a lot of the medics we have up at the fortress.” He stops and looks around himself. “Now. What in the hells am I doing.”

“Giving me access to the mines.”

“Ah. That’s right. Pandey and you seem to get along, so I’ve given him the proper clearances to take you on a tour of the facility. His auto is waiting outside, which you can take. I’ll be going up to the fortress…” He sighs. “Well. Much later.”

“More to clean up here?”

Biswal signs a report with unusual ferocity, nearly slicing the paper in half with the nub of his pen. “Always more. I was taught that peace is the absence of war. But I wonder if these days we’ve simply replaced conventional war with a war of paper. I’m not so sure which is better.”

As Pandey drives her out to “the extraction site,” as they call it, she watches the wire fences out the window, running along either side of the road with a threatening tangle of razor wire lining the tops. “Seven miles long,” Pandey remarked when they first started out. “One hundred tons of aluminum, all stretched along the road. Though the fences are a little inconvenient now, as the road requires a lot of maintenance.”

“So you knew this wasn’t an expansion when you first brought me to the fort,” says Mulaghesh. “As you claimed.”

He coughs. “Ah, yes, ma’am. Cover stories and all that.”

“Well. I’m pleased to find you could dupe me so thoroughly, Pandey.”

“Always keen to impress, General.”

She sees tall forms up ahead: towering lights, another fence. Fences within walls, walls within fences, she thinks. It’s almost as bad as Bulikov. “We’re here, ma’am,” says Pandey.

They get out and approach the checkpoint. Another guard booth, another string of yellow and red warning signs. Pandey holds up their credentials, and the guards let them through.

“We call this the dock,” says Pandey. One side of the concrete structure has a retractable aluminum door, which is open. They walk inside the concrete structure, which is really just three concrete walls, a tin roof, and some bare bulbs. The floor is iron, and Mulaghesh notices there’s a seam running along it, forming a square.

Pandey walks to a small switch standing in the middle of the grated floor and says, “If you can, ma’am, please step closer.”

Mulaghesh does so. As she does she sees Pandey is pale and ashen. “Something the matter, Pandey?”

“Ah…Well. Not too keen on the mines myself, ma’am.”

“Why not? Do you have a problem with close, dark places?”

“Not that I’m aware of, ma’am. It’s just…” He pauses. “Well. You’ll see.”

“See what?”

“I hesitate to give you the wrong impression, ma’am. If you’re ready, ma’am…”

He flips a switch, and the floor drops out from underneath her. Well, not quite, but that’s what it feels like: as she steadies herself, she realizes that the center of the floor is like an elevator of some kind, made to bring up huge quantities of material.

Exactly how much thinadeskite do they plan on mining here?

At first the walls of the elevator shaft are sheer, smooth concrete. Then these begin to ripple and churn, turning into raw rock, dark granite with glinting silicates. Mulaghesh remembers Signe telling her about the tomb and inspects the shifting walls for any sign of architecture or civilization, but finds none. She cannot imagine there having ever been any ruin buried down here: it’s all just curdled stone and shadows.

A large tunnel rises up to them, its ceiling lined with oil lanterns. The elevator comes to a sharp halt. Ten feet before them is a guard seated on a stool. He nods at them.

“And these, ma’am,” says Pandey, “are the thinadeskite mines of Voortyashtan.”

He and Mulaghesh pace forward, then stop as she looks at the tunnel walls. They are still dark granite, but the walls are riddled with holes, as if giant termites have been laboring here for decades.

“So…how does it work?” asks Mulaghesh.

“I suggest we start at an active branch, ma’am,” says Pandey. “That’ll probably be more informative.”

They wind through the dark tunnels, ducking this way and that to avoid the dangling oil lamps. The air is cool and still, yet somehow Mulaghesh thinks she feels a breeze. She imagines the tunnels as the bronchi and alveoli of a giant lung, a vast underground mass of spongy tissue, gently flexing to push air through its endless corridors….

“I can see why you said this place was unpleasant,” she says. “There’s something odd about it.”

Pandey takes a sharp left. Mulaghesh hears a scraping and grinding up ahead. “Are you worried about it being Divine, ma’am? Like the Ministry is?”

“Well, yeah. Some. Can you imagine this stuff just naturally occurring?”

“Perhaps. Once when I was a child,” says Pandey, “I was walking along a dry creek bed. I walked it many times in my youth, but that day I saw one of the creek bed walls had fallen in, General. And inside this wall, in all the loose earth piled there, were dozens and dozens of crystals. Quartz, of course. I didn’t know that it was a commonly found thing, not then. I couldn’t imagine something like this just existing. You know? It was beautiful and wonderful to me, because I didn’t know any better. So now, faced with this strange stuff, I have to wonder if we just don’t know any better.”

“Maybe you have a point, Sergeant Major,” says Mulaghesh. “Maybe.”

“Imagine the first person to discover magnets. Or flint. Or milk! We Saypuris like to think we know so much about how the world works, ma’am, when in truth we’re as ignorant as anyb—”

Another breeze.

The lights fade around her.

The temperature drops—no, it plummets. Then everything goes full dark.

Mulaghesh keeps moving forward, arms and legs pumping.

What’s going on?

The ground is no longer hard stone, but soft.

Like moist grass…

A cold white light begins to seep through the darkness.

Mulaghesh squints and sees forms against the light, tall and thin.

Trees. It’s impossible—this can’t be happening—but she sees a small copse of trees ahead, the air heavy with mist and fog, the cold light of the moon shining through behind them. Pandey is nowhere to be found.

Somewhere there is the cheep of meadowlarks and wrens, and the soft sound of the ocean.

A stag slowly canters over the wet grass. A beautiful creature the color of pearl, its flanks shimmering in the moonlight. Its breath steams; its shanks are flecked with dark mud.

A young man emerges from the shadow of the trees. He is smeared with mud, the whites of his eyes bright against the earthen hues. Something in his hand glints: a small knife, made of bronze.

The stag looks at him, dark eyes watchful. It snorts, curious, distrustful. The young man extends his free hand to it. His palm is slick with something—honey.

She understands what will happen. No, it’s like she remembers: it’s like she’s always known that the white stag will come and sniff the honey on his palm, and he will leap forward and bury the knife in the stag’s neck, and he will ride it as it thrashes against him, leaking blood, and he will come back down to the waters from the cliffs anointed with steaming blood, fresh from his kill, and there he will face them, their helmets proud and regal and terrifying….

She thinks: How do I know this?

An image slips into Mulaghesh’s mind: seven Voortyashtani sentinels standing in a line, hands resting on the pommels of their massive swords, the vast, strange, twisting oceanopolis of Voortyashtan behind them—the Voortyashtan of old, like some sort of massive coral reef alight with candlelight. The sentinels will watch this blood-drenched young man, and he will kneel in the gravel before them, head bowed, and await their decree.

But for now, there is only the boy, and the stag, and the trees, and the soft moonlight.

How do I know these things?

The darkness fades.

The fluttering orange light of an oil lamp flares to life above her.

Pandey is saying: “…imagine how they figured out eggs. I didn’t trust them, when I was a boy. I wanted no part of them.”

Mulaghesh realizes she is still walking. She never stopped. She blinks and looks ahead, and sees only more tunnels and more oil lamps—certainly no trees.

“But I do eat eggs now, ma’am,” Pandey adds. “Of course I do.”

She looks down at herself—she seems to be the same. And it appears Pandey didn’t notice anything. Did she imagine it all? She can’t conceive how she could have: Mulaghesh does not consider herself a very imaginative person, but even so, a vision with so much depth and memory in it—the feel of the wet grass, the drip of the honey, the strange cityscape of ancient Voortyashtan—should be beyond even the most brilliant poet.

What in all the hells is going on?

“Here we are,” says Pandey. He gestures ahead. Three Saypuri soldiers are grinding at the walls with what look like gas-powered drills, gunning their engines over and over as the wall dissolves and falls to a metal container at their feet. A few yards behind them is a massive wheelbarrow. Mulaghesh expected there to be a railcar, like a coal mine, but it looks like the thinadeskite mines aren’t quite that established.

“Gentlemen,” says Pandey, nodding to them. “The thinadeskite isn’t really a solid ore, we’ve found. It’s more like a particulate, ma’am, a dust found in the soft loam cavities. Very unusual. We hollow out the recesses, like you saw back there, and after that it’s simply a matter of separating out the thinadeskite from the loam.”

Mulaghesh is still attempting to control herself after the…What can she call it? A vision? She clears her throat. “How far do the mines go, Sergeant Major?”

“Quite far, ma’am,” says Pandey. “The thinadeskite is somewhat erratically spread throughout the area. We use some specialized magnetized materials to detect it, though, and to separate it from the powdered loam.”

“Mind if we keep looking?”

“Certainly, ma’am.”

It’s plain he thinks Mulaghesh will only see more stretches of blank, dull rock. Which she very well might, of course. But she’s curious to see if she can spot any remnant of Choudhry visiting this place—and, now, to try to understand what just happened to her.

“How much thinadeskite has been mined so far?” asks Mulaghesh.

“About sixty tons.”

“Sixty tons?”

“That’s correct, General.”

“They need to experiment with that much?”

“Oh, no,” says Pandey. “That’s for when the project gets approved. Lieutenant Prathda believes that when the thinadeskite passes all its tests we’ll start scaling up manufacturing capacities immediately. The thinadeskite is currently stored in a small warehouse facility at the fort. There it sits until Ghaladesh gives us the go-ahead, General.”

“No security issues there, either?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Not that I’m aware of. We don’t have many issues at the fort direc—”

Again, the light dies and the tunnel fades away.

No, thinks Mulaghesh.

There is the clatter of metal armor, the creak of leather.

Not again. This isn’t real….

The scent of jasmine and river water. The whisper and snicker of a nearby stream.

She sees soft daylight; tall, bright green grass massaged by gentle winds; and impossibly high trees.

She knows where she is immediately. She’s in Saypur, of course. No other place in the world has such trees, such dense foliage. But though she recognizes it, it’s again as if she remembers it, like she always knew these details.

Someone is walking through the grass. Though it is day—she knows it is day—the light is still indistinct enough that she can only make out the shape of the figure’s head: it’s oddly swollen, as if their skull is far too large….

The light in the vision grows. She sees the frozen metal face, the fixed needle-teeth grin, the blank eyes….

The Voortyashtani sentinel ripples with movement as it walks. It is difficult to tell if its armor is metal, or bone, or both. Spikes and spurs adorn the armor’s shoulders, elbows, and knees, as if a forest of antlers is sprouting from its limbs. In some places the armor is held together by thick leather straps; in others it appears to have been grown, melded together over its wearer’s body. It is covered in old stains, some brown, some red: blood, obviously, from some past slaughter.

She looks at the antler-like growths and understands immediately: Their armor fed on bloodshed. That’s how it grew around them, how it became so strong. And this one has fed its armor well.

The sentinel cocks its head, listening, then continues on.

How do I know these things?

For all the ornamentation upon its armor, the sentinel’s sword is clean and unadorned, a four-foot, slightly curved blade as thick as a cleaver. It must weigh over seventy pounds, but the sentinel carries it as if it’s a switch of wood.

Another sentinel approaches from the stream. Both of them are huge, over six and a half feet tall. She remembers that all Continentals were much taller when they lived under the Divinities, as they were much healthier and well-fed. As the second sentinel nears it holds its sword aloft. The first sentinel does the same. And then…

It’s difficult to say what happens next. Mulaghesh knows what is happening the same way she knows everything about this moment: it’s as if it personally happened to her, long ago, and she’s just now remembering it. But the sensation is so strange and so otherworldly that she could neither imagine nor truly express what it is.

The swords talk to one another.

This isn’t quite true: it’s more like the swords act as antennae for the two sentinels to speak. But they speak directly into one another’s minds, with the second sentinel asking the first:

—The escapees?

The first answers:

—Discovered two.

—Slain?

The two sentinels—still using the strange connection between their swords—then share a memory: two Saypuri slaves, sprinting through the jungle, a mother and her son. The first sentinel, charging through the undergrowth, hacking whole trees out of its way. The child stumbles, the mother stops to help. The massive blade rises high, and then…

The memory acts as an answer:

—Yes.

The second sentinel says:

—Third cannot be far.

—No. Cannot be.

The two abruptly turn and march back into the jungle, slashing through the branches as they search for their final missing slave.

The vision grows dark. The lamplight returns, as does Pandey’s voice, casually discussing the fort:

“…tribal leaders has complained about the cannons, and though I can understand that it must be unnerving to live with them pointed at you day and night, they’ve been like that for decades.”

Mulaghesh stops and puts her hands on her knees. Nausea coils around and around in her stomach, like an infant snake trying to break out of its egg.

“General? Are you all right?”

The answer, of course, is no, absolutely not. She doesn’t understand what’s happening to her, but somehow she’s catching what seem to be glimpses of past lives and day-to-day proceedings—however ghastly—of how the Voortyashtanis of old lived.

Are they hallucinations? Is she ill? Suddenly Choudhry’s bizarre drawings on the walls of her room seem much more understandable.

“Must…” She swallows. “Must be an altitude change.”

Pandey is silent. When she looks up he is watching her with a queer look on his face.

“What is it, Sergeant Major?” asks Mulaghesh.

“Nothing. Would you like to see more, General?”

She certainly does not, but she knows she needs to. The two of them walk on through the pockmarked tunnels. At one point the lamps run out. “Work ended on this branch a long time ago,” Pandey remarks, and he has to lift one lamp off the ceiling to carry. He smiles at her and says, “Try not to sneeze if you can, General. Otherwise we’ll have to fumble our way back.”

“I had been told,” Mulaghesh says, “that you all found some strange materials in the mines here. Signs of tampering—a fire.”

“We found signs of someone starting a small fire, yes.”

“Where was this, Sergeant Major?”

He nods ahead. He leads her to a small, low tunnel. It’s hard to see in the dark, but the bottom and the walls appear scorched and smoked. “This was it, I believe.”

Mulaghesh extends a hand. Pandey passes the lantern to her, and she crouches and examines the scorch marks. The placement of the fire doesn’t seem to have anything special about it: it’s just another tunnel, like the dozens of other ones she’s seen down here. There are ashes and crinkled leaves lying in the divots and holes of the tunnel floor, but none of them suggest much to her. Wrapped in sackcloth, maybe, and set alight…

“And I assume you all conducted a search concerning this?” she asks.

“We did. Checked the fences and all the tunnels, General. No way in or out, except the fort.”

Mulaghesh grunts. It’s Choudhry for sure, she thinks. She got in here somehow. As a Ministry officer, there’s a whole lot of obfuscations and subterfuge Choudhry would have been trained in that Mulaghesh wouldn’t know the first thing about. She could’ve blackmailed a guard, maybe, or perhaps she just knew a way to get through fences without leaving any trace. From the stuff that she saw Shara randomly pull out of her pocket in Bulikov, nothing would surprise Mulaghesh. “Well. Then I’m as stumped as you are. I suppose I’ve seen all that I can see here.”

They start back up through the tunnels. Mulaghesh wasn’t aware of how far they’d walked: the tunnels seem to wind and wind and wind around, and soon she’s not aware if she’s walking up or down, ascending or descending.

“I heard rumors there was a Voortyashtani tomb down here,” says Mulaghesh. “No sign of it, I guess?”

“Nooo,” says Pandey, suppressing a laugh. “No, General, can’t say that I’ve seen such.”

“No stone walls, no arches?”

“No, no. Just rock and more rock. I would imagine that after Bulikov everyone would be very sensitive to mysterious, underground structures. A thing like that would get reported quite quickly, General.”

“I’d hope so.”

“Besides that little fire we found, we’ve had few issues, ma’am. The shtanis stay focused on their feuds; they seem to have forgotten us up here.”

They walk on in silence.

“So, I understand you’re staying with CTO Harkvaldsson, General?” he asks. “At the SDC headquarters?”

“Yes. Why?”

“No reason,” he says quickly. “I had to drive her around for a while, when the harbor was first starting. She was qui—”

The oil lamps blink out. Darkness comes rushing in.

No, thinks Mulaghesh. Get me out.

The sounds of their footsteps fade away.

Get me out of here….

She expects to see some other grim little scene from Voortyashtani life: perhaps an execution, or some horrifying moonlit rite conducted under the shadows of standing stones. But instead she sees something far more familiar, and far more upsetting.

The bones of a farmhouse, nestled at the foot of a hill. Its roof has fallen in and its walls are blackened and charred. The mortar, which once dammed back drafts of icy air, has turned to powder and crumbled away, revealing the warped ribs of the wide, flat structure. The floor is ashen and still smoking, narrow tendrils coiling across the morning sky.

A young woman kicks through the ruin, poking at the ashes with a slender sword. No, not a woman—a girl. A sixteen-year-old girl, large for her age. She wears a Saypuri uniform—the first generation of Saypuri Military uniforms ever made, in fact.

She stops. Lying before the house’s stone chimney, black and raw and half-submerged in the ashes, is a human form. A boy. Maybe not much older than she is.

She looks at it. She reaches forward with the sword point, uses it to lift the blackened hand a few inches. She lets it drop, and it falls back to the blanket of ash with a soft thump, sending a cloud dancing up to fill the tattered room.

A young soldier trots up and knocks on the remnants of the door. He calls out, “Lieutenant!”

She doesn’t answer, staring at the body.

“Lieutenant Mulaghesh?”

The girl steps away from the shrunken corpse. “Yeah?”

“Captain Biswal is gearing up to move out, Lieutenant. He’s requested confirmation regarding whether your team has discovered any supplies.”

The young lieutenant sheathes her sword. “No. No supplies, no rations. Everything here has burned to a crisp.” She strides out, kicking up clouds of ash. “On to Utusk next, I suppose. They won’t know what hit them.” She looks at the young soldier. He’s not much older than she is, but he still seems younger: there is a softness to his eyes, to his posture, as if always bracing for a blow. “Did you have any casualties?”

“No. No…Saypuri casualties, at least.” He hesitates, blanches.

“Something the matter, Private?”

“No, Lieutenant.”

“You don’t look well.”

He hesitates. “Sankhar and I…There was a farmhouse burning…”

“Yes?”

“A man came out. Tried to attack us. And we…We cut him down.”

“As you should have.”

“Yes, but…Then I looked up, and I saw a woman watching us from the farmhouse, holding a child. She saw me looking and she ran back inside, and…”

“And?”

“And the farmhouse kept burning, Lieutenant, but I never saw anyone come out. I never saw anyone come back out.”

Silence. The young girl brushes ash off the toes of her boot.

“You did your duty, Bansa,” she says. “Don’t forget, it was their choice to get involved in this war. And we are giving every home the opportunity to flee. Some do. Many don’t. But that is their choice. Do you understand?”

He nods and whispers, “Yes, Lieutenant.”

“Good. Now come on.”

The two of them turn and walk around the hill, where the smoldering ruin of a town sends a great column of smoke into the sky.

A string of lights glows through the smoke.

Please take me away, thinks Mulaghesh. Take me away from all this….

The darkness of the tunnels floods back in.

“—nough trucks for us to use,” Pandey is saying. “Terribly difficult getting around here, as I’m sure you noticed.” They round the corner, and the elevator up appears. “Well. Was it everything you expected, General?”

Mulaghesh does not answer. Pandey, a little troubled, flips the switch. The elevator begins grinding away, and they slowly rise.

When they come to the top, she says, “Excuse me for a moment, Sergeant Major.”

“Certainly, General.”

Mulaghesh walks out, slowly paces around the dock until she finds a spot where no guards can see her, leans up against the wall, and vomits.

The ride back to the fortress is quiet and solemn. Pandey is not half so cheerful anymore.

“Did you see Bulikov, General?” asks Pandey after a while.

“Did I what?”

“In the mines,” he says. “Did you see the…the Battle of Bulikov?”

She is silent for a long while. “No.”

“I…I see,” he says, embarrassed. “Never mi—”

“But I did see…something. Just not…that. This happened to you, too, Sergeant Major? You saw the Battle?”

“Y-yes. When I first went into the mines, yes, ma’am. I saw it happening again, like it was happening right in front of me. But I saw it outside of myself. Does that make sense? It was like I was watching myself. And you. You were there. Before the onslaught, and the flying ship…”

“I remember. Is this common? Have these…I don’t know, flashbacks happened to anyone else?”

He shakes his head. “Very rarely. I don’t think many wish to discuss it. But it only happens, I think, to those who have seen combat. A lot of it.”

They drive along in silence. Mulaghesh wishes she knew something of the Divine. Was there something of Voortya’s that made this possible, this…memory bleed? What is it down there that wakes up these images, these visions, and sends people plummeting down into them, forced to witness (or rewitness) horrors?

She watches as a shrike flits up to the top of the barbed wire fence and hangs the headless remains of a field mouse on one of the spikes. The image of corpses impaled on stakes flashes before her eyes. The thinadeskite in the charcoaler’s hut.

What’s the connection? What does thinadeskite have to do with all this?

“Mostly all I do here in Voortyashtan, General,” says Pandey, “is drive. But, do you know, somehow this is still my oddest assignment yet?”

Though she doesn’t say so, Mulaghesh fervently sympathizes.

Come 1800 hours that evening, General Turyin Mulaghesh—recipient of the Jade Sash, the Pearl of the Order of the Kaj, the Star of Kodur, and the Verdant Heart of Honor—is quite definitely very drunk, wandering the cliffs north of Voortyashtan with a half-empty bottle of wine and her stomach swilling with several foul concoctions she purchased at some sea shack in the city.

She isn’t the only one here: all along the narrow path she spies lovers, grumbling drunks, and tiny campsites crowded with silent, hollow-eyed men. She passes one old man leaning on a walking stick and staring out at the evening sky, and asks him what all these people are doing out here. He simply makes a wide gesture indicating the sea and the hills and returns to his silent watching.

Lonely places draw lonely people, she thinks as she walks farther north, the fort on her right. They echo inside us, and we cannot help but listen.

Mulaghesh keeps walking, past the tiny camps, past the couples lounging on their furs, past one man quietly sobbing in the shade of a tiny, leafless tree. She takes a deep sip of wine, tries to convince herself that it makes her feel warm, and keeps walking.

Perhaps I am still plodding on in the Yellow March, she thinks. Me and Biswal, wearily holding the banner…

She takes another sip of wine. Almost gone now. She doesn’t know where it came from, but she wishes she’d brought more.

She almost speaks aloud the familiar refrain: Woresk, Moatar, Utusk, Tambovohar, Sarashtov, Shoveyn, Dzermir, and finally…

“…finally Kauzir,” she finishes. The little town just outside the gates of Bulikov.

She remembers the names of the towns still. She always will, she knows. They’re written on the inside of her skull. She’ll go to her grave still knowing them, even though the towns themselves no longer exist. For Yellow Company visited each one of them during the Summer of Black Rivers. And every home, every building, every farm, every single sign of civilization in each of these villages was put to the torch.

She stares out to sea, remembering.

Biswal told them over and over again it was to be a civilized, strategic procession. “We’re here to eliminate resources,” he told them. “No more. Burn the farms and the Continental front lines will grow weaker and weaker.”

But it quickly became such a hard thing, executing a civilized war. The people in these villages did not evacuate quietly, no matter how much Yellow Company ordered them to. They did not simply watch as Yellow Company burned every last remnant of their lives. Rather, they fought: men, women, and children. And Yellow Company fought back.

She remembers waiting, crouched in a wheatfield, the sights of her bolt-shot trained on a window in the second story of a farmhouse. Just below, on the ground, one of her soldiers lay bleeding, a small arrow sticking from his collarbone, one hand pawing at it, trying to pull it out. She waited, waited, and then in the window a figure appeared with a short bow.

A girl. Maybe thirteen. Mulaghesh didn’t see, because her finger was already pulling the trigger, already sending eight inches of steel hurtling at the girl, who just…

Dropped. As if she never were.

She can’t remember what happened to the wounded soldier. Died, probably. A lot of them died, at first. Until somewhere around the town of Sarashtov, when Yellow Company stopped asking the Continentals to surrender and evacuate, stopped giving them warning at all. Too many of their own soldiers had been lost to a lucky farmer with an axe or a child with a bow and arrow. Yellow Company began simply sneaking in during the night, setting the thatched roofs alight, and rounding up the livestock in the ensuing chaos.

Mulaghesh remembers the sight of a four-year-old child standing alone in a field at night, his face alight with firelight and glistening with tears, screaming for his mother. They marched on and left him there, perhaps to live, perhaps to die. Such a thing did not matter to them.

Figures staggering from burning homes, their nightgowns ablaze, stumbling through the smoke like ravaged puppets. The screams of livestock as Yellow Company herded them through the streets to be slaughtered for their next meal. She remembers the monotonous butchery, killing those they couldn’t keep and leaving them to rot, the air so thick with flies. Better to rot than feed Continentals.

An errant memory skitters through her mind: a terrified horse charging into a child’s chain swing and hanging itself. This huge, graceful creature thrashing helplessly in the mud. She and the rest of Yellow Company walked on as if this occurrence were nothing of note.

In three weeks they destroyed eight villages, and once word got out that a rogue band of Saypuris was speeding through the heart of the Continent’s farmland, all the other villages quickly became abandoned.

By the time Yellow Company reached the gates of Bulikov, the city was slowly realizing that Biswal and Yellow Company had single-handedly destroyed two-thirds of their future food stores in a span of weeks. If a siege began now they could only last a handful of days. Their only hope was that the Continental army would return and crush Yellow Company.

Bulikov’s hopes rose when they saw the Continental army on the horizon. But the Continental forces were not returning to deal with Yellow Company: rather, the Continentals were in full flight, General Prandah at their heels. Over the past weeks the Continental troops had seen the columns of smoke north of them and understood that their homes were being destroyed. They’d begun to desert in droves, morale decaying with each passing day. Then General Prandah had pressed the advantage and pushed the wavering forces into a complete rout.

Sandwiched between General Prandah and Yellow Company, the Continental army was utterly destroyed. Within hours, Biswal stood before the gates of Bulikov and demanded that they open. And open they did, creaking and crackling.

But before he could take a single step in, Colonel Adhi Noor arrived, leapt off his horse, and struck Biswal on the chin.

Mulaghesh remembers it like it was only last week: Noor, sweating, stained with smoke and blood, standing over her fallen commanding officer and crying, “What have you done? By all the seas and stars, Biswal, what in all the hells have you done?”

Like all officers under Biswal, commissioned or otherwise, Mulaghesh was brought before General Prandah himself and questioned extensively.

“What was Biswal’s goal in his expedition?”

“To destroy the Continent’s resources, sir.”

“And is that why you killed the Continental villagers? Were they a resource too?”

“They were the enemy, sir.”

“They were civilians, Sergeant.” Prandah, of course, did not accept Biswal’s promotion of her to lieutenant.

“We felt it made no difference, sir.”

“Why do you say that? When was this decided? Who decided this?”

She was silent.

“Who decided this, Sergeant?”

She struggled to recall. The days were a blur, and she could no longer remember which decisions were hers and which ones were an unspoken choice by the whole of the Company.

“What do you mean, it made no difference, Sergeant?”

“I…I think I meant that there was no difference between the soldier and the civilian keeping that soldier on their feet, sir.”

“There is a difference, Sergeant. It is the same difference between a soldier and a raider, a murderer. And neither you nor Biswal have any right to decide otherwise.”

She was quiet.

“Did all of the soldiers agree to the March?” asked Prandah. “Did no one resist?”

She was aware of her face trembling. “N-No…”

“No? No what?”

“Some…some objected.”

“And they wouldn’t participate?”

She shook her head.

“What did they do, these soldiers who would not participate?”

She did not speak.

“What did they do, Sergeant?”

And suddenly she remembered, as if it’d all been a dream or something that had happened so long ago: Sankhar and Bansa, standing before Biswal and saying they would do no more, no more of this, and Biswal slowly looking them up and down, and suddenly calling her name.

And this realization, this bright, brittle memory, formed a tiny crack inside her, and suddenly she understood what she’d done, what they’d all done, and she burst into tears and sank to the ground.

From somewhere she heard Prandah’s voice, speaking in horror, “By the seas, she’s just a girl, isn’t she? This soldier is just a child.”

The Saypuri Military chose complete disavowal. Perhaps taking a page from the Worldly Regulations, the Saypuri commanders decided to simply never admit that the March had happened. Yellow Company was far too large to lock up and throw away the key, and Saypur desperately needed manpower to maintain their control of the Continent. In addition, some commanders commended Biswal’s accomplishments: he’d won the war, had he not? He’d ended nearly three years of bloody conflict in hardly more than a month.

Biswal was reassigned on the Continent to other, less-glamorous duties. Mulaghesh had no such privilege. She wondered what they would do with her when her service ended. Dishonorably discharge her? Abandon her on the Continent? But in the end their verdict, most likely inadvertently, was the cruelest one possible: they sent her home, with modest honors.

Home. She had never expected to ever see it during the Yellow March. But returning to Ghaladesh proved to be no different than walking the ruined countryside of the Continent: it was strange, intolerable, distant, and muted. She could not adjust to the easy, thoughtless way of living. Her mouth took issue with spices, with salt, with properly cooked food. It took her more than a year to learn to sleep in a bed again, or how to live in rooms with windows.

She tried her hand at jobs, at marriage. She proved to be a miserable failure at all of them. She began to understand, bit by bit, that the devastation she’d wrought did not end on the Continent: perhaps there was some secret place inside her that she’d never known was there, but she’d put it to the torch, too, and only now in civilian life did she realize what she’d lost.

And then one day, drunk in a wine bar in Ghaladesh, she was staring into her cup and thinking about how bitter the idea of tomorrow had become when a voice said over her shoulder, “I was told I’d find you here.”

She looked up and saw a Saypuri Military officer standing behind her, dressed in fatigues. She found she recognized him: he was the one who’d punched Biswal, who’d been there when Prandah had interrogated her. Noor, she thought his name was. Colonel Noor.

He sat down next to her and ordered a drink. She asked why he’d found her.

“Because,” he said slowly, “I think you, like a lot of veterans, are having trouble adjusting. And I wanted to see if you’d like to reenlist.”

“No,” she said violently. “No.”

“Why not?” he asked, though it seemed he’d expected the question.

“I don’t…I don’t ever want to go back. To go through that again.”

“To what? To fight? To kill?”

She nodded.

He smiled sympathetically. He was an unusual soldier, she thought: though there was a sternness in his face, there was something inviting there, too, something often lacking in the commanding officers she’d had. “Soldiers don’t just kill, Mulaghesh. Most don’t, in fact, these days. We support and maintain and build, and keep the peace.”

“So?”

“So…I believe you might jump at the opportunity to do some good. You’re not even twenty yet, Mulaghesh. You’ve a lot of years left. I suspect you can find better uses for them than filling your belly with cheap wine.”

Mulaghesh was silent.

“Well, if you’re interested, we’re implementing a new program, a…sort of governing system for the Continent. Military stations designed to provide support and keep the peace.”

“Like cops, sir?”

“Somewhat. Colonel Malini will be overseeing Bulikov, but he will need assistance. Would you be interested in perhaps returning to the Continent and assisting him? You know a lot about the region. But maybe this time you can put it to some good.”

Mulaghesh stares over the cliffs of Voortyashtan. Gulls nest in the rocks below, and they flit back and forth over the waves, snapping up moths, ghostly, porcelain flickers in the moonlight. Besides them, she is alone. There’s not a single soul for nearly half a mile around her.

The horizon flickers with roiling clouds and lightning. A storm coming—unwise to be out here now.

She wishes she’d grown, that she’d put the March behind her. But seeing those memories in the thinadeskite mine—young Bansa, hardly yet a man, knocking on the wall of the ruined farmhouse, not knowing what would happen to him mere days later—it was as if all the years since the March were just condensation on a pane of glass, wiped away with the flick of a hand, and on the other side was that ruined, scarred countryside, and she could not shut her eyes or look away.

She looks at the label on the bottle of wine. Some putrid Voortyashtani concoction. She drains it, walks to the edge of the cliff, and drops it over the side.

She watches it plummet, a glittering green teardrop falling to the dark ocean. It turns to dust against the face of the cliff. She never hears the crash.

She stares at the moon’s reflection on the face of the waves. She imagines that it’s a hole in the world, that perhaps she could dive out and fall through it and find a place where she could rest.

But then it changes, and suddenly the moon’s reflection looks like a skull to her.

She blinks. To her bafflement, she watches as the moon’s reflection changes, shifts: it’s not a giant skull, but a face, a woman’s face, still and blank, lying just below the waves.

“What the hells?” she says.

Then the ocean bursts up, something shooting up from its depths.

It rises, rises…

And Mulaghesh sees her.

She rises up astonishingly fast, like a whale breaking through the surface for a leap, water pouring off her enormous shoulders, pouring off her arms, pouring off her chin: a giant formed of metals, of steel and iron and bronze and rust. When she fully stands the cliffs are just barely at her breast, a vast, glittering creature standing against the frigid moon and stars. Her face is cold and still, an emotionless steel mask, her eyes dark and blank.

It is a helmet, Mulaghesh sees: she is not made of metal but is wearing armor—beautifully wrought, ornate armor, plate overlying mail—and depicted on this armor are a thousand terrifying images of unspeakable violence.

She is magnificent, terrible, beautiful. She is the sea, the moon, the cliffs. Warfare incarnate, violence never-ending.

“Voortya,” whispers Mulaghesh.

It is impossible—utterly impossible—and yet it is so.

One giant, mailed hand grasps the top of the cliffs, and she hauls her vast bulk up.

No, no, thinks Mulaghesh.

The gulls are shrieking, terrified. The ground trembles beneath Mulaghesh’s feet. Her hand fumbles for her carousel.

Voortya towers over Mulaghesh, dark and impossible and lovely and monstrous. With a whine of metal she turns her blank eyes to stare at the fortress. In her right hand is a flicker of light: a sword blade rendered in ghostly, pale luminescence.

I won’t let you, thinks Mulaghesh.

Mulaghesh pulls out the carousel and points it up and fires. She sees the muzzle flash reflected on the giant steel greaves, and is vaguely aware of herself screaming: I won’t fucking let you!

Mulaghesh feels her sanity unraveling—it is all too much, too much to see, to behold—but to her surprise, the Divinity reacts, recoiling as if in pain. Mulaghesh hears a voice in her mind, huge and terrible: “STOP, YOU FOOL! STOP!”

Then the stars wink out and she feels herself falling, and somewhere in the distance is the sound of thunder.