***
She collapses onto the mud, reveling in the feel of the cool, damp earth between her fingers, relieved to be free of that awful place.
“Was he there?” says Signe. “What happened? Did you get what you needed?”
Mulaghesh looks up. Signe is watching her with wide eyes, holding a grenade with one finger hooked around the pin. She smiles nervously and stows it away in her pocket. “Well. You did say thirty minutes.”
Mulaghesh coughs and spits to the side. “Motherfucker,” she says hoarsely.
“What’s the matter with you?” says Signe. “Are you all right?”
“No. No, I’m not fucking all right.” Mulaghesh stands on wobbly legs, then looks back at the dome of blades. “Get back. Get back behind the trees. Now!”
Signe starts backing away. “Why?”
Mulaghesh pulls a grenade from her belt, rips the pin out with her teeth—Signe shouts, “What!” behind her—and lobs it into the entrance in the dome of blades. Then she and Signe start running.
Mulaghesh sprints through the circle gate and slides down into a crouch on the hillside, covering her head. Then she waits. And waits.
Nothing. No blast, no bang.
She waits a little longer. Then she releases her head and looks up, finding Signe flat on her belly in the brush.
“A…A dud?” Signe asks.
“No,” says Mulaghesh furiously. She stands. “No, it wasn’t a dud. It won’t let him die, he said. That motherfucker. It won’t let him die!”
She walks to the circle gate and stares at the dome, trembling with rage. “Fuck you!” she screams at it. “Do you hear me in there? Fuck you!”
There is no answer. Just the trees swaying in the wind.
Signe stands up. “General Mulaghesh, I…I think we should leave.”
Mulaghesh wants to try again, to throw another grenade into that damned dome and hear the echoing crash, to just hurt that bastard a little…
“General Mulaghesh?”
“What?” she says dimly. “Huh?”
“We should go,” says Signe. “Come on. Let’s go. It was a mistake to come here.”
As if in a dream, Mulaghesh turns and begins walking down the Tooth with her. She’s nearly halfway down when she realizes she’s been crying.
***
Far out on the open seas, Mulaghesh sits on the deck and stares down at the face of the moon reflected in ocean. Signe’s at the tiller, deftly steering the yacht among the dark waves, but neither of them has spoken for over three hours.
Then, finally, Signe says, “You saw him, didn’t you?”
Mulaghesh doesn’t respond. She imagines how nice it’d be to slip off this deck and into those dark waters and feel herself being tugged downstream to the sea.
“You’ve looked terrible since you walked out of that place,” says Signe. “Like you’re ill. You haven’t talked about it at all. Did he…Did he do anything to you? Did he, I don’t know, poison you?”
“No. Hells, I don’t know. Maybe.” Signe slips down to sit beside her on the deck. Mulaghesh doesn’t look at her. “Maybe I poisoned myself a long time ago. Only I’m just now realizing it.”
She stares into the waters, then down at her false hand. Her elbow aches. Her head feels heavy, her eyes feel heavy. It suddenly feels so difficult to look at anything, to even move.
She starts talking.
She tells Signe about the March, and about Shoveyn, the little town in the middle of nowhere outside of Bulikov, forty years ago. She tells her about the camp the night after, butchering stolen hogs, the night filled with their squeals and the scent of blood. About the smoldering ruins of the town beyond.
She tells her about how she sat there, sharpening her knife outside of Biswal’s tent. And then Sankhar and Bansa walked by, entering the captain’s tent, and they spoke to him in quiet voices.
Biswal called to her. She came in, and he said, “Lieutenant Mulaghesh, these two young men here have decided they don’t wish to continue any farther.”
And she said, “Is that so, sir.”
“Yes, that’s so. They feel that what we’re doing here is…how did you put it, Bansa? Deeply immoral?”
And Bansa said, “Yes. Yes, sir, I…We just don’t think it’s right to keep doing this. We can’t do it anymore. We won’t. And I’m sorry, sir, but we simply cannot continue to cooperate with this, sir. You can try to lock us up, but if you do we’ll just try to escape.”
Biswal said, “That’s eloquently put. We don’t have the resources to imprison you, and I can’t waste the time to have you flogged. So I suppose we don’t have any other option than just to let you two go.”
How surprised they were. Just shocked. But as they left Biswal looked back at her and said only, “Try not to waste a bolt.”
And she understood. She’d known what this would lead to the second she heard Bansa speak.
They walked out, and Biswal stopped them outside the tent. He turned, smiling, and said to them, “Boys, just one more thing…”
His voice so chummy, so cheerful. But then he looked at Mulaghesh, his eyes glittering, and her knife was already out.
The night so full of squealing, and the scent of fresh blood.
They watched her do it. The whole camp. They didn’t react. Just listened as Biswal told them these two were deserters and cowards, which Yellow Company would not tolerate. Could not and would not tolerate, not at all. “Those who will not make war upon our enemies,” he told them, “are also our enemies.”
She wiped her blade on her sleeve. How bright the blood was.
“And we will treat them as such,” said Biswal. He turned around and went back into his tent.
Signe and Mulaghesh sit in silence in the boat.
Signe asks, “How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
“By the seas…”
But she tells Signe that that’s not an excuse. She knew it was wrong. These children trusted her. But if they’d deserted, and led the Continentals to Yellow Company, then it would have all been for nothing. Every awful thing they’d done would have been for nothing.
Or perhaps…Perhaps Mulaghesh simply didn’t want for the March to end. It was all she knew by then. If Bansa and Sankhar left, then the spell would break.
But the spell broke anyway, when the Summer ended.
How she wished to die then. Out of the service and adrift in the civilized world, she couldn’t tolerate what she’d done. She tried to bait the world to kill her, to do the thing she had no courage for. But it wouldn’t. Life went on; it just kept happening.
She tries to tell Signe what a curse that is, to keep living. To have nothing happen to you at all.
But then one day Colonel Adhi Noor was there, offering her a way back into the military in that rundown wine bar, the air full of the stink of smoke and moldering wood. And suddenly she thought she might be able to make it up to everyone. She couldn’t erase the past, but maybe she could keep it from happening again. Some young men and women, Continental and Saypuri, never made it home because of her. The least she could do was make sure others didn’t fall to the same fate. It’d be a way to make the dead matter. A way to put back some of what she’d broken.
Forty years of training. Forty years of trying. All smashed to pieces in the Battle of Bulikov. And then Shara Komayd whispering in the dark by her hospital bed, telling her about allies and generals and promotions….
Everything was supposed to change then. But it didn’t. The higher she went in the world, the more useless she felt. These analysts and officers and politicians described the spending of a life with the cold, clinical language of a banker. So far from the front lines, far from the churning, wet earth and the night full of screams. It all just kept happening, only now she didn’t see it in person.
But even though she was now so far away from it, she began to dream of it more and more, awakening in the night wet with sweat, the sounds of the Battle of Bulikov still ringing in h
er ears. And her arm ached and ached, yet no medicines would dull it. Some of the doctors suggested, somewhat politely, that perhaps the pain was not in her body, but in her mind. In other words, perhaps it hurt because she needed it to hurt.
One day she visited a military hospital—the first time she’d seen front-line troops in some time. And all those young men and women lay in bed, looking like they’d been chewed up by some machine….Yet every single one of them struggled to salute her. She was a general, after all.
And suddenly the pain in her arm was unbearable. As if she had knives in her elbow, sawing into the bone, needles grinding up through her marrow and splintering her humerus like termites. She knelt alone in the staircase of the hospital, white with pain, sweating and gritting her teeth and trying not to scream, not to call to the doctors and say cut it off, cut this thing off of me, cut it out of me now, now, now.
She passed out. Some orderly found her there, lying on the stairs, looking like a corpse. When he woke her he asked if something was wrong. She said yes.
Something was wrong. And now she knew what it was.
What a gutless lie it all was. The battles kept happening, and she was just as helpless as she’d always been. For all her medals and for all her power, she wasn’t making a lick of difference in the lives of those she commanded. Soldiers and civilians alike were still dying. And she couldn’t let herself forget.
“So I ran,” says Mulaghesh. “I didn’t know what else to do. It hurt to stay. I was lying to myself and to everyone else if I stayed. So I went and hid myself away on a beach.”
But it didn’t help. Every night she woke up with battle echoing in her ears, and every morning her arm hurt.
Until one day she got a letter from the prime minister. Deadly little Shara Komayd, the woman who brought down countless governments and officials—even those of her own country, in the end. And somehow Shara knew the three words that would bring Mulaghesh crumbling down too, that one wish Mulaghesh had fervently hoped to fulfill for so many years, the words scrawled on a piece of paper and brought to her by a sweat-soaked Pitry Suturashni…
“A way out,” Mulaghesh says. “She was offering a way to do what I’ve always meant to. To help make things change. And, by changing, to make everything matter.”
“Here? In Voortyashtan?”
Mulaghesh is silent as she stares out at the black waves. “Yes. I think so. If Voortyashtan can change, then anything can change. Right?”
Signe says nothing as she adjusts the tiller.
Nothing is everlasting. Nature has proved this to us again and again. Not even the Divinities were everlasting, for they too fell just as the mountains themselves surely will one day.
If I leave anything behind in this world, I hope it is my work. I hope the streets I helped pave and the water I helped pump and the stone I helped carve speak not my name, but the name of innovation, the name of progress, the name of hope.
The world may not go on forever. But that does not mean we cannot try to make tomorrow better.
—LETTER FROM VALLAICHA THINADESHI TO UNKNOWN RECIPIENT, 1652
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.”
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