“What if they left something in the mines to go back for?”
“Then it’s crushed flat as a half-drekel coin under all that rock.”
“Oh. Good point.”
“Second.” Mulaghesh sticks out another finger. “It sounds like Choudhry isn’t the person behind all this. She was hot on the heels of whoever it was, and maybe that’s how she came to find out about the murders—though she doesn’t mention the murders at all here.”
“If her message is true, yes. That is the case.”
“Yeah, and let’s just assume it’s true for now. Because it also suggests that Choudhry left Voortyashtan to go…somewhere. To see someone, some old Voortyashtani who might know rituals and rites even the locals would have never heard of—and likely ones that even Shara wouldn’t know of.”
“Could it even be possible for someone to live that long?” says Sigrud. “The Blink took place almost ninety years ago.”
“Eighty-six, to be exact. The Blink and the Plague wiped out tons of people, but not all of them. Perhaps some survived, had children, passed along secrets. But she also makes him sound strange…an idea wearing the image of a man? What does that mean?”
They sit in silence, each hoping the other will suggest something.
“What we don’t know,” says Sigrud, “we don’t know.”
“True enough. Moving on. Third.” Mulaghesh sticks out her ring finger. “It sounds like Choudhry experienced the same visions I did down in the thinadeskite mines, visions of the most violent moments of her own past, only she saw it in the thinadeskite labs. She mentions shooting someone with a pistol”—she reaches across her desk and flips through Choudhry’s file—“and she did receive a distinguished service award for an ‘altercation.’ You know what that means.”
Sigrud points a finger to the side of his head and drops his thumb, miming the hammer of a gun, and mouths the word Pow!
“Right. So somehow…Somehow the thinadeskite reacts to people who’ve seen combat, who have been forced to take lethal action, reaching out to them and making them remember those moments. Pandey mentioned it, I saw it, and now Choudhry. None of them mention seeing the violence from other eras like I did, though.”
“Maybe,” he says, “it is because you have killed many more people than they have.”
“Mayb—” She stops and looks at him. “Why do you say that?”
“I was a Ministry operative. It was my job to know things. And I mixed with many soldiers.”
Mulaghesh watches him clean the bowl of his pipe, stopping briefly to dig something out from between two of his teeth.
“And…what did you hear?” she asks.
He examines the chunk of food on his thumb and flicks it into the fire, where it sizzles. He regards her with a cold, steady gaze. “Nothing that would make me blush.”
They look at each other for a moment, Mulaghesh concerned and mistrustful, Sigrud blank and indifferent.
“You’re an unusual person, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson,” she says.
“I feel the same of you,” he says nonchalantly.
“I see.” She clears her throat. “Well. To return to what’s at hand…After these experiences, Choudhry grew suspicious just as I did. Which makes me ask, what the hells is in thinadeskite that does this? And why isn’t it registering as Divine?” She’s reminded of what Rada said while operating on the corpse: Deaths of all kinds echo on. And sometimes, it seems, they drown out all of life. “None of Voortya’s other miracles work, right?”
“No. Voortya’s miracles are used as an example of how a Divinity’s miracles stopped working. That’s what I recall Shara saying. Voortya was, how did she say, the textbook example.”
“Except I saw the damned City of Blades. As well as whatever apparition of Voortya it was that destroyed the mines. And now we know Choudhry saw the city too—which makes me wonder if that’s where she disappeared to.”
Sigrud stops cleaning his pipe. “You think Sumitra Choudhry is in the Voortyashtani afterlife?”
“No one’s seen hide nor hair of her,” says Mulaghesh. “And besides the person she surprised coming out of the tunnel to the mines, I can’t see that she had any real enemies. She explicitly says in the message that she went somewhere. That’s the only logical conclusion, illogical as it may be.”
“So if she did go over to the City of Blades…why?”
“She came to the same conclusion I did—the Night of the Sea of Swords, the Voortyashtani apocalypse. She realized it might be coming, that someone might be trying to trigger it. Maybe Choudhry went there to try to stop it. But how she thought she could do that…I don’t know.” She tosses the decoded message back onto the desk. “Fuck. Not for the first time, I wish Shara were here. She’d know what to do.”
Sigrud packs his pipe until it is overflowing with what smells like abysmally poor tobacco. “Why don’t you just ask her?”
“She’s supposed to be hands-off with me. Industry forces looking over her shoulder, that kind of thing. The only means I have of contacting her is routing a telegram through Bulikov to Ahanashtan. It’d take days.”
“She didn’t tell you about the emergency line?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Her…emergency line. For contacting her.”
“You’re just repeating yourself. No. No, I have no idea what in the hells you’re talking about.”
He sticks his pipe in his mouth and screws up his face as he thinks about it. “Do you really want to talk to her?”
“Well…It’d be nice, sure, so—”
“Say no more.” He walks to the window and licks his finger. “Now…How did this stupid thing start? Ah, yes.” He then begins to draw on one pane of the window, his thick finger making delicate, graceful strokes on the glass.
“What are you doing?” says Mulaghesh. “Are y…Whoa.” She watches as his finger appears to dip into the glass, like it’s not a solid pane but is instead the surface of a puddle, somehow hanging there on the wall.
“It works here,” says Sigrud softly. “Good. It’s one of Olvos’s, who isn’t dead, so it should still work.”
She shivers. Something in the air changes: it’s like the shadows have all turned around, or perhaps the fire has grown larger but is now casting off dimmer light, or light of a hue her eye has trouble catching.
The pane of glass is now dark and opaque: Mulaghesh can see the harbor in the panes on either side of it, but in the one Sigrud touched she can now see nothing but black. She notices she can hear something new, too: a soft clicking, like that of a clock, though there is no clock in the room.
“I…think that worked,” he says slowly, not sounding at all convinced.
There’s the sound of someone muttering, “Hmm…Hunh?”
Mulaghesh looks around, trying to find its source. “What…What did you just do?”
Then the sound of something shifting, but it has a strange quality to it, as if the sound is bouncing up a metal pipe from far away.
“Shara?” says Sigrud. “Are you there?”
And then, somehow, there’s a woman’s voice saying, “What in the hells?”
There’s a click and the black pane changes, suddenly filling with golden light, which appears to be coming from a small electric lamp on a bedside table on the other side of the window.
This is, Mulaghesh knows, impossible: what is on the other side of the window is the harbor and the North Seas. Yet it’s like the pane of glass is a hole, and by looking through the hole Mulaghesh can see…
A bedroom. A woman’s bedroom. A very important woman’s bedroom, judging by the curtained, four-poster bed, the intricately wrought desk, the giant grandfather clock, and the countless paintings of very stern-looking officials wearing sashes and lots of ribbons and medals.
She’s seen this place before, she realizes. This is th
e prime minister’s mansion….
A face pokes through the curtains of the four-poster bed. It’s a familiar face, though it has far more lines and gray hairs than when Mulaghesh last saw it. It is also fixed in an expression of unspeakable, furious outrage.
“What…What!” says Shara Komayd. “What in hells are you doing, Sigrud?”
Mulaghesh says, “Ah, shit.”
* * *
—
“Turyin?” says Shara. Her voice is distant and wobbly, as if it’s not coming from her mouth but is being pulled out of her room, packaged up, transported to this room in the SDC headquarters, and unwrapped beside Mulaghesh’s ear. But it’s also much, much older and wearier than Mulaghesh remembers, as if Shara has done nothing but talk since they last met. “Turyin, are you mad? This is the one thing we absolutely cannot risk right now!”
“Okay,” says Mulaghesh. “Whoa. Hold on. I had no idea he was going to do that.” She looks at the pane of glass, as if trying to spot any hidden mechanisms. “This…This is a miracle, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s a damnable miracle! It is also three in the morning here! Are there any other obvious matters I need to confirm before you explain why you have interrupted me in a state of…of some serious undress? Assuming you have a reason, that is?”
Sigrud says, “Turyin thinks your officer has gone to the afterlife.”
Shara frowns. “What?”
“Um…Okay,” says Mulaghesh. “Let me start from the beginning here.” She tries to rattle off the current state of things—a much more rambling and disjointed version of the very conclusions she just went through with Sigrud.
Shara listens and grows so distracted she lets the curtains drop, revealing that she is wearing a set of bright pink-and-blue button-up pajamas. “But…But that’s not possible, Turyin,” she says when she finishes. “You can’t have seen her. Voortya is dead.”
“I know.”
“Very dead.”
“I know! You don’t think I’ve been thinking that every day since I’ve been here?”
“Yes, but…I mean, none of Voortya’s miracles work anymore. And I know. I tried them, all over the Continent. It was an easy way to determine if there were any alterations to reality in any given location, certain contortions of physical rules—”
“You’re losing me.”
“Fine. But the Divinity we know as Voortya is very, very much gone from this world.”
“I know that. But I saw what I saw.”
Shara sighs, fumbles with her nightstand, and puts on her spectacles. Then she walks to the window and says, “Press your translation of Choudhry’s message up against the glass. Hurry now. We can’t get caught like this…”
Mulaghesh does so. To her surprise, the surface of the pane of glass is quite hard.
She can’t see her, but she can hear Shara talk as she reads: “My word…Oh, my goodness gracious…What did that poor girl go through?”
“So you get the gravity of our situation.”
“Yes,” says Shara. Her voice sounds like she’s just aged ten years. “You may remove the message now, please.”
Mulaghesh takes it away. Shara is staring into space, blinking wearily. Then there’s a soft sound from the four-poster bed, a quiet coo, and Shara comes to life. She rushes back to the bed, sticks her head through the curtains, and shushes something. After a moment longer she returns to the window.
“You have company?” asks Mulaghesh.
“Something like that.” Her tone makes it clear that she’s not willing to discuss it.
“When’s the last time you got sleep?” asks Mulaghesh.
“Sleep?” asks Shara. She attempts to smile. “What’s that?”
“I take it things aren’t going well.”
“Oh, no. Not well at all. I fully expect this term in office will be my last.”
“What! But what about all your programs? What about the harbor?”
“Oh, well, they’ll be cut. The harbor they’ll keep—they’re contractually obliged to—but they’ll slash it to the bone. Unless whoever inherits the position from me chooses not to, of course, which seems unlikely. Anyway.” She rubs her eyes. “That is not the subject at hand. The subject at hand, I think, is one of sacrifice.”
“Of what?”
“Sacrifice. It grows clearer now. You know the story of Saint Zhurgut? How he fashioned Voortya’s sword from the arm of his son?”
“I’ve heard mention of it.”
“His son—his only child—fell in battle against the Jukoshtanis. This was before the Divinities united, of course. Anyway, instead of mourning and weeping, he struck off the hand of his son and presented it as a sacrifice to Voortya. This act of sacrifice was so great that it was transformed into a weapon for her, a tool of slaughter—the sword of Voortya.”
“Which is her personal symbol,” says Mulaghesh.
“Correct. But what many forget is that that act of sacrifice was done in mimicry of another, much older event—one that took place nearly one hundred years before. Because though it’s true Voortya was the first Divinity to create an afterlife, she could not do it alone. She was the Divinity of destruction. She could not build, or create. Such a capacity was beyond her. So she had to reach out to someone who could. Her opposite, as Choudhry mentions in her message—Ahanas.”
“Ahanas?” says Mulaghesh, confused. “The…the Divinity of plants?”
“Of growth, Turyin. Of fecundity, fertility, life—and creation. In other words, the very antithesis of Voortya in every way. In the very early days of the Continent, before the Divinities even united, it’s recorded that Voortya reached out to her opposite and asked for a truce. And, for a period, Voortya…courted her.”
“Courted her? Like as in—”
“As in romantically,” says Shara. “Sexually. Yes.”
“So Voortya was…”
“She was a Divinity. Which means our terms for whatever actions she might have taken do not have much application. Regardless, it became clear that Voortya had ends beyond romance. She used her relationship with the Divinity Ahanas to create the City of Blades, the ghostly island where her followers would wait for her after their deaths. The most common depiction of its creation has the two Divinities wading out into the sea and the white shores arising under their feet. It was, in some ways, both in accordance with and in complete contradiction to their own natures: life after death, creation beyond destruction. It was a powerfully self-contradictory act, and it required the two Divinities to become so entwined that, on some level, it wasn’t easy to tell one apart from the other. But once Voortya had gotten what she wanted—once she had secured an afterlife for her followers—she separated herself from Ahanas. Which was not an easy thing to do, at this point.”
Mulaghesh remembers the drawings on the walls of Choudhry’s room. “She cut off her own hand, didn’t she?” she says softly.
Shara cocks her head. “How did you know that?”
“Choudhry painted it on her walls. Two figures standing on an island, one severing her hand at the wrist. She cut off her own hand while Ahanas held it, didn’t she?”
Shara pushes her glasses up her nose. “Yes. Yes, she did. This is an interpretation of what, for we mortals, is an inconceivable act. But it is an apt one. Voortya was forced to mutilate herself in some fashion to strip herself away from Ahanas, to stay true to her nature and remain the Divinity her flock had chosen to follow. It was a tremendously traumatic event for both Divinities, and even after the Continent chose to unite, the two Divinities and two peoples refused to have anything to do with one another. But I suspect it was far more traumatic for Voortya.”
“Why?”
“She changed significantly. Before this event, Voortya was always depicted as a four-armed animal, a creature of tusks and horns and teeth. Not unlike a monster. After t
his, though, she began being depicted as a four-armed human woman dressed in the arrayments of battle: armor and sword and spear. And she never spoke again.”
“Never?”
“Never. There is a lot of speculation about this transformation. Some wonder if her trauma left her mute. But others suggest that her interactions with Ahanas changed her: she tasted, very briefly, life and love. She tasted an existence beyond one of torment and destruction. As a creature of war, she had never imagined that this could even exist. But then, suddenly, she did. She understood what was possible. And then she had to abandon it, and return to what she was.”
“Why did she do that?”
Shara shrugs. “I suspect it was because her people needed her. She had promised them an afterlife, and she was sworn to deliver. These things have a power of their own, you see. Voortya had never been defeated before this moment. She had never lost a battle, nor had her people. But in order to accomplish this victory, in order to win and create this life beyond death for her children, she had to defeat herself, to strike down her own being, to sacrifice herself. Again, the act of self-contradiction: life through death, victory through defeat. And, having done so, I think she never really recovered.”
“So what does this have to do with anything?”
“I suspect,” says Shara slowly, “that if the Voortyashtani afterlife still exists somewhere, then its persistence can somehow be traced back to this one act. A sacrifice is a promise, in a way, a symbolic exchange of power. Voortya gave up immense power to create the afterlife. I suspect that power escaped the wrath of the Kaj, and can still be found somewhere, anchoring her life beyond death to this world.”
“So…where is it?” asks Mulaghesh.
“Where is what?”
“This, I don’t know, power?”
“Oh, I’ve no idea,” says Shara. “We’re far beyond the realm of conventional knowledge here. Voortya’s interactions with Ahanas occurred before Bulikov was even founded. I suspect you’re dealing with something that took place back in the very early days of existence, before the Divinities understood what they themselves really were.”
The Divine Cities Trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles, With an Excerpt From Foundryside Page 75