City of Blades

by Robert Jackson Bennett

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

  And grow.

  And grow…

  Her eyes widen. “By the seas…”

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

  Mulaghesh grabs the spyglass. “Are those faces?”

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

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

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

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

  “How is this still here?” says Mulaghesh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What?” says Mulaghesh.

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

  Mulaghesh just waits and watches.

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

  “You haven’t stepped into it yet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “The Voortyashtanis brought you here before?”

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

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

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

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

  “Sounds like a real charmer.”

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

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

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

&
nbsp; “All of us need confessions sometimes.”

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

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

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

  “I get it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Him who?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I have to,” says Mulaghesh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “No.”

  “No? Why no?”

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

  “What tracks? What do you mean?”

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

  “You think…maybe Choudhry?”

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

  ***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Maybe. Or maybe they found more.”

  “That’s not comforting.”

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

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

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

  ***

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

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

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

  “Scars in what?” asks Signe.

  “In reality.”

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

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