City of Blades (19 page)

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.”