City of Blades (27 page)

“Remarkably clean cuts,” she says quietly. “Almost surgical. Yet even surgical cuts, on this large of a scale, would leave…how shall I put this…sawing marks. It takes work, getting through so much tissue. And yet there's none here. It's as if she's been put through a mill saw.” She rummages about for some ghastly instrument to aid her.

She doesn't stutter while she works, Mulaghesh notes. It's as if such close interaction with the corpse transforms her into a completely different person, someone much more confident and focused than she is in waking life.

Mulaghesh herself can hardly focus at all. Through the hours of the autopsy—and it takes far longer than she expected—the echoes of her vision keep screaming in her head. Now that she's faced with yet another corpse—again, mutilated as a Voortyashtani sentinel would do—she feels as if the entire world is about to fall apart, and they shall all go plummeting into the inky dark sea, past columns of glimmering moonlight, to a strange white island on the other side of reality….

Are they coming through? Are the sentinels poking through bit by bit, to attack anyone they can find? And how is this even possible, if Voortya's dead?

“I very rarely have an audience for this,” Rada says absently. Her brow is wet with sweat. It must be hard work, Mulaghesh realizes, parsing through all the bone and muscle walls.

Mulaghesh rubs her eyes, trying to focus. “Does an audience make it any better?”

“Perhaps. It's something I feel better having a witness for, this sort of thing. It's remarkable, isn't it?”

“What? The corpse?”

“No. Well, yes, in a way. It's this…this opportunity to examine what we are, the many disparate and curious elements that make up our beings.” There is a
snap
of breaking bone. “So many systems, so many pieces…More complicated than the most complicated of clocks. I wonder, sometimes: are we truly one thing, one being, or many, many different things, simply dreaming they are one?”

“I guess that's a good point,” says Mulaghesh, feeling surprised, impressed, and somewhat discomfited. She wonders if Rada always pontificates during such procedures, either to her trapped patients or to the empty walls.

“What do you think, looking at her?” asks Rada.

“That she could have been one of mine.”

“Interesting. If I might ask—how does it make you feel?”

“How I feel? Like I want to find out who did this.”

“You feel a responsibility to her, then? More than you would any other person?”

“Of course I do.”

“Why?”

“We've asked these kids to come all the way across the world to fight and labor for us. Someone has to look after them.”
And yet,
a tiny voice says inside of her,
you walked away from the job that could have helped you do that the most.

Shut up,
thinks Mulaghesh.

Does it feel better, being alone? Does it really?

Shut up!

“A thoughtful position,” says Rada as she works. “Few possess your capacity for self-reflection, General. We are beautiful, strange creatures of heat and noise, of sudden, inscrutable impulses, of savage passions.” She sets down a knife, grabs some kind of miniature saw. “Yet when we consider our own existence, we think ourselves calm, composed, rational, in control….All the while forgetting that we are at the mercy of these rebellious, hidden systems—and the elements, of course. And when the elements have their way, and the tiny fire within us flickers out…” An unpleasant cracking sound as Rada separates something from the body that should never be separated. “What then? A blast of silence, probably, and no more.”

Mulaghesh can't help but say it, as the subject weighs so heavily on her mind: “You don't believe in an afterlife?”

“No,” says Rada. “I do not.”

“Sort of strange, a Continental who doesn't believe in an afterlife.”

“Perhaps the Divinities made one for us, once,” says Rada. “But they are gone now, aren't they?”

Mulaghesh does not voice her extreme concerns about this.

“I wonder how cheated the dead must have felt when that afterlife evaporated around them,” says Rada. “It's like it's a game,” she says softly. “And no matter how you play it, it ends unfairly.”

“The ending's not the point,” says Mulaghesh.

“Oh? I thought you were a soldier. Is it not your purpose, to make endings? Is it not your duty to make these”—she taps the corpse—“from the soldiers of the enemy?”

“That's a gross perversion of the idea of soldiering,” says Mulaghesh.

“Then please,” says Rada, looking up. “Enlighten me.”

She is not being sarcastic or combative, Mulaghesh realizes. Rather, she is willing to follow any string of conversation down the path it leads, much like she's willing to follow a damaged vein through a desiccated corpse.

The surgery room is quiet as Mulaghesh thinks, the silence broken only by the tinkle of Rada's utensils and the soft hush of the rain.

“The word everyone forgets,” says Mulaghesh, “is ‘serve.' ”

“Serve?”

“Yes. Serve. This is the service, and we soldiers are servants. Sure, when people think of a soldier, they think of soldiers taking. They think of us taking territory, taking the enemy, taking a city or a country, taking treasure, or blood. This grand, abstract idea of ‘taking,' as if we were pirates, swaggering and brandishing our weapons, bullying and intimidating people. But a soldier, a true soldier, I think, does not take. A soldier gives.”

“Gives what?”

“Anything,” says Mulaghesh. “Everything, if asked of us. We're servants, as I said. A soldier serves not to take, they don't strive to
have
something, but rather they strive so that others might one day have something. And a blade isn't a happy friend to a soldier, but a burden, a heavy one, to be used scrupulously and carefully. A good soldier does everything they can so they do not
have
to kill. That's what training is for. But if we have to, we will. And when we do that we give up some part of ourselves, as we're asked to do.”

“What part do you give up, do you think?” asks Rada.

“Peace, maybe. Killing echoes inside you. It never goes away. Maybe some who have killed don't know that they've lost something, but they have.”

“That is so,” says Rada quietly. “Deaths of all kinds echo on. And sometimes, it seems, they drown out all of life.”

And with those words Mulaghesh suddenly remembers that the woman before her was once trapped in a collapsed building with the corpses of her family, trapped in the dark with them for days and days. And when she does she realizes that, in some way, little Rada Smolisk might still be trapped in that darkness, and trying to free herself. The surgeries, the humanitarianism, the autopsy, even the taxidermy—all of this could be an effort to literally place her hands upon the raw stuff of life and sort through it, seeking some secret that might unlock her dark prison, and bring in light.

Or perhaps, Mulaghesh thinks, Rada Smolisk feels at home only among the dead. She's not stuttering at all now, and is actually bordering on erudition; whereas in the waking hours of life, with Signe and Biswal, she is a trembling, nervous thing, far from her normal surroundings.
If death echoes,
wonders Mulaghesh,
perhaps one could get used to it, or even come to love its noise
. Much like how Choudhry surrounded herself with sketches and images of this hellish country, and its history.

Then she remembers….

The charcoal sketch in Choudhry's room—a landscape depicting a shoreline on which many people kneel, heads bowed, and a tower rising behind them…

Mulaghesh sits forward.
She saw it,
she thinks suddenly.
She saw it. She saw the damned City of Blades, just as I did.

It must have been the Window to the White Shores, she realizes: the miracle Signe described. But it must have
worked
. Choudhry snuck into the statue yard and performed that ancient rite and glimpsed the very island Mulaghesh did; and perhaps the only reason Mulaghesh herself saw the City of Blades last night is because the ritual was still working, like a door left open for anyone to walk through.

So how did she come to die? After all that, how did Sumitra Choudhry come to be murdered just as the other Voortyashtanis?

“I'm s-sorry, General,” says Rada finally. “I've l-looked all I could, but I've found n-nothing.”

“Nothing?” asks Mulaghesh, dispirited.

“Nothing indicating anything, really. There's j-just not much to g-go on. P-perhaps I am n-not up to the t-task.”

Mulaghesh stands and walks to the table, surveying Rada's grisly work. “I hate this so damned much, Rada. I hate it beyond words.”

“D-Did you know her, G-General?”

“No. Never saw her. Just heard about her. But to see someone reduced down to this…” She shakes her head. “We don't even know it's her, do we. We can't even tell her family that she's really dead. Just that we think so. And it's not like we could have them look to tell us if it's really…”

She trails off, thinking.

“G-General?” asks Rada.

Silence.

“Uh. General?”

“She got a Silver Star,” says Mulaghesh quietly.

“Um. What?”

“She got a
Silver Star
. For heroism after being injured in the line of duty. She got shot, in the, uh…” She snaps her fingers, trying to jog her memory. “In the shoulder. In the
left
shoulder. I read her reports.”

“Meaning…”

Mulaghesh cranes over the body and gently pushes aside a drooping flap of skin to look at the left shoulder. “It's smooth. It's
smooth,
damn it. No scarring at all!”

“So?”

“So it's
not her
!” says Mulaghesh, feeling relieved and baffled and furious. “It's not her! I don't know who in the hells this might be, but it's not Choudhry!”

“B-Because of a m-missing scar?”

“She got shot in the shoulder, just above the collarbone, and she nearly
died
from it, Governor. It was grisly. They don't give out the Silver Star for nothing. It'd have left a mark.” She looks up, thinking furiously. “Someone's fucking with me.”

“I'm…sorry?”

“Someone must…Someone must have
known
I was looking into Choudhry. They must have! Someone wanted me or us to think she was dead. I've got someone out there nervous and they don't like it one bit. They're rattled enough to go through the trouble of mutilating a totally different
body
and staking it out on the cliffs to try and throw me off the trail!”

“Isn't that, uh, a l-little bit p-paranoid, G-General?”

“Maybe. But paranoia usually doesn't harm, and often helps.” She only hates herself a little for quoting Signe. “Damn. What time is it?”

“It's 1900, G-General.”

“Shit. Dark
already
. I'll have to wait until tomorrow to tell Nadar.” She shoves a thread of wet hair out of her face. “Well, Governor. This has been damn educational, I must say.”

“Always a p-pleasure to, uh, assist,” says Rada, perplexed.

“What will you do with, um, the body?”

“Unfortunately, I am used to d-dealing with c-corpses,” she says. “It will b-be no tr-tr-trouble at all t-to make arrangements w-with the f-fortress.”

Mulaghesh thanks Rada for her help, then braces herself for the cold as she exits Rada's house. But, strangely, the shock never hits her. She realizes Rada's house was freezing cold, perhaps inhumanly cold, so she was already accustomed to it. As she crests a wet cliff she looks back and sees Rada standing in the doorway, watching her with her great, sad eyes. Yet up above is her chimney, and from it flows a thick, steady stream of smoke, turned a glowing white by the moonlight.

She wonders who could possibly want to fake Sumitra Choudhry's death. Then she realizes that the most obvious suspect would be Choudhry herself.

It's late when she finally fumbles her key into her door and opens it. When she does she freezes, surprised by the roaring fire in her fireplace. Then she sees the mountain of greasy bones and crumbling crusts of bread on her tea table, behind which sits Sigrud je Harkvaldsson, stripped down to his shirtsleeves, his suspenders dangling from his waist, carving up a forearm-sized hunk of white cheese with his giant black knife. The only remnant of his kingly attire is the white glove on his left hand, concealing the injury he bore long ago.

He jerks his chin at her. “I wondered when you would be back.”

Mulaghesh stares at the mess and holds her hands out, aggrieved. “What…What the fuck?”

“Signe said you wanted to see me.”

“How the
hells
did you get in here?”

“I picked the lock?” He picks up a clay jug, uncorks it, and takes a massive pull. “How else?”

“By the seas…” She shuts the door and tosses her coat on the bed. “You couldn't find anywhere else in this giant building for you to eat what looks like three
whole
chickens?”

“Not anyplace where I wouldn't get stared at. Or have servants fumbling over me, asking me if I needed things. They treat me like a bomb, waiting to explode. I much prefer your room. No one looks for me in here.”

“Hells, I know
I
sure wouldn't! Ah, look, you've gotten chicken fat all over the carpet….”

“What was it you wanted to see me about?” He recorks the jug. “Signe mentioned the Ministry, but, to be honest, I wasn't sure if she was being sarcastic.”

She flops into a chair beside the fire. “I'm almost not even sure I want to say it aloud. You might think me a fool, or insane. Or, worse,
I'd
hear it coming out of
my
mouth and
know
I'm insane.”