City of Blades (5 page)

“It's under
water
?” she asks. “Wait…The wreckage that's blocking the Solda is the
city itself
? How have I never heard of this?”

“Because someone would have to survive to tell you,” he says. “This here bay is practically a minefield, ma'am—hence why we won't be going much farther—and once you make it ashore, and you're among those wild Continentals, why…I'm not sure if your odds improve any.” He stops when he spies a small cutter making its way through the forest of cranes. “Ah, here's your escort, ma'am. I've no doubt you and them'll have plenty to chat about.”

The cutter zips across the bay, ripped back and forth by the howling winds. Mulaghesh shields her eyes from the gales as they draw close. The area's not totally bereft of civilization, she sees: farther down the west coast stands a tall, beautiful lighthouse, its slow, revolving beam lancing out to dance over the waters. Beside it is a large, colorful wood-and-stone structure that feels very out of place amid dark, dreary Voortyashtan. Large banners festoon the stairs leading up to it, each embroidered with the letters “SDC.”

“They're certainly setting up shop, aren't they,” mutters Mulaghesh.

The cutter pulls up to a pier just east of the lighthouse, which is deserted except for one person, who stands at its end with a flick of glowing cigarette ash suspended in their shadow. Besides this, all she can spy is their thick, sealskin coat with its hood up, wrapped tight about their face.

Mulaghesh awkwardly descends the rope ladder to the pier, forced to compensate for her false hand. The figure at the end of the pier waves to her.

She remembers what Pitry said as the
Hjemdal
shipped out:
We've secured you a source, who will contact you when you arrive.

She asked:
Who is it?

The best possible resource, the chief technology officer of the whole of SDC. They should know absolutely everything about what's going on in Voortyashtan.
Though now that she thinks about it, Mulaghesh realizes he never actually told her the CTO's name.

Mulaghesh walks down the pier, her bag slung across her shoulders. “Are you here for me?” she shouts to the figure.

The figure just waves again. As Mulaghesh comes closer she sees another SDC badge on their breast, though this is of a bright yellow color with a gear insignia below, suggesting something different.

“Thank you for meeting me here,” says Mulaghesh as she approaches. “But it won't mean much if I drown to death in this rai—”

She stops as the figure pushes back their hood.

She expected to see some dour, red-faced, glowering Dreyling, a foreman or dockworker with an abundance of scars and burst blood vessels and a receding hairline. What she did
not
expect to see is an intimidatingly beautiful Dreyling woman in her mid-thirties, with high cheekbones, bright blond hair, and glacial blue eyes set behind a pair of austere spectacles. She's tall, over six feet, which means she towers over Mulaghesh. The woman takes a massive drag from her cigarette, flicks it into the sea—it sizzles angrily, begrudging its abandonment—and smiles at Mulaghesh.

And Mulaghesh sees many things in that smile. She sees charm, wit, and a roiling sea of cleverness; she sees a sharp, diamond-hard attention, recording everything that's witnessed; but what Mulaghesh sees most in that broad, white smile is an unshakable, concrete confidence that its owner is at any given moment the smartest person in the room.

The woman says, “Welcome, General, to the polis of Voortyashtan. I hope our crew treated you well?”

Mulaghesh stares into the woman's face. There is something familiar about her that she can't quite place….

In her mind, Mulaghesh removes one of the young woman's eyes, adds a brutal latticework of scars, and replaces her charming smile with a look of implacable, lethal menace.

“By all the hells,” says Mulaghesh. “If you're not the kin of Sigrud je Harkvaldsson, then I am a dead fucking dog.”

The charming smile evaporates. The young woman looks at Mulaghesh, astonished, but instantly recovers: she gives a delighted laugh, though her eyes can't quite match it.

“You have a head for faces, General!” she says. “You are correct. I am Signe Harkvaldsson, chief technology officer of the Southern Dreyling Company. And you, of course, would be the famous general Turyin Mulaghesh.”

“If you say so. You know, I feel like someone could have
told
me it'd be Sigrud's daughter I was meeting here. Why couldn't they get me someone at the military base?”

“Because that's where Sumitra Choudhry disappeared from,” says Signe coolly. “And I don't particularly think your minister trusts everyone there right now.”

Mulaghesh glances over her shoulder. “Why don't we find someplace else to discuss this?”

“Certainly. I've arranged for you to stay with us at the SDC construction headquarters, just outside of the city.” She points in the other direction, toward the SDC building beside the lighthouse. It's about a thousand times more hospitable-looking than Voortyashtan.

“That works fine for me.”

“Excellent! Then please follow me. The train to the SDC headquarters is waiting for us.”

“You have a train just for your headquarters?”

“More for the work on the bay itself. We can't ship resources to the river mouth—we're here to specifically
amend
that situation. So we ship them to an easier spot, outside of the city, and use a train to bring them here.”

“All to build a harbor for the Continent,” says Mulaghesh. “Seems like it'd be easier to just make a new one somewhere else.”

“But this isn't just a
harbor,
General. It's a gateway to the Continent itself!” She points to the two peaks above the Solda River. “Past those gates—or what's left of them—lies a water passage granting access to nearly the whole of the Continent! And no one's been able to use it in
decades
! Yet soon, in a matter of months, we'll be able to”—she opens the door to the train's sole passenger car—“well, throw the gates back open.”

Mulaghesh glances back at the peaks. “You keep calling them gates. Why?”

Signe smiles. “That's a very interesting question. Come aboard, and I'll tell you.”

The tattered cityscape of Voortyashtan slides by as the train picks up, replaced by tall white cliffs. Signe lights another cigarette—her fifth so far, Mulaghesh gauges. There's something distinctly mercantile about the Dreyling woman: her hair is tied back and parted in a fashion Mulaghesh knows is now quite chic in Ghaladesh, and she wears a close-cut, collarless black jacket with a flap that hides all buttons, paired with slim, dark trousers and glossy black boots. A tremendous gray scarf sits in piles around her neck, going right up to her chin. Mulaghesh feels Signe would fit right in at some high meeting of a company board, spitting out numbers and calmly allaying the fears of stockholders.
Which is probably exactly what she does,
Mulaghesh reminds herself.

But her hands are an anomaly: when Signe removed her gloves Mulaghesh expected to see smooth, soft, perfectly manicured digits. But instead her hands are hard, callous, cracked things suggesting years of brutal labor, and they're smudged and smeared with black ink, as if she's been handling cheap newspapers all day.

Mulaghesh shivers as a draft snakes into the train car.

“Late winter,” says Signe. “It's quite harsh here, as it is for the rest of the Continent. But Voortyashtan sits on the Great Western Current, ensuring its waters will never freeze over. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here.”

“What a pity that would be.”

“Perhaps so. It does bring with it a great deal of moisture. Did you know, for instance, that Voortyashtan is the flood capital of the world?”

“Another charming trait to recommend it. As if its history wasn't enough.”

“True. What do you know about Voortya, General?”

“I know she's dead.”

“
Besides
that.”

“I know I
like
that she's dead.”

Signe rolls her eyes. Smoke pours from her nostrils.

“Fine,” says Mulaghesh. “I know she was the Continental Divinity of war and death. I know she was terrifying. And I know her sentinels once essentially controlled the known world, shipping out of this very bay by the thousands.”

“By the
hundreds
of thousands,” Signe says. “If not more. And you are correct that she was the Divinity of war and death, but she was also the Divinity of the sea—something many forget. Likely because her martial exploits are…much more memorable.”

“If by that you mean her sentinels killed and maimed and tortured Saypuris by the millions, yeah. That's pretty memorable, for us. Maybe a little too memorable.”

“True. But what many forget is that, as the Divinity of the sea, most of her domain was
built
on the sea. The original Voortyashtan, as we understand it, was one giant, floating city, constructed on many docks and plinths, or perhaps floating on the sea itself. Either way, we've gleaned from its current position that, whatever its methods of support, they were definitely
miraculous
.”

“You mean because it's at the bottom of the bay.” This part of the story is familiar to Mulaghesh: there's hardly a part of the Continent that wasn't devastated when the Divinities were killed by the Kaj, which caused all the miracles that supported the Continent's way of life to abruptly vanish—an event known as “the Blink.” If the original city of Voortyashtan was allowed to float on the ocean by miraculous means, that would definitely explain why it's currently playing home to the fish of the North Sea.

“Correct.” Signe flashes her cunning smile.
How the hells does she keep her teeth so white,
Mulaghesh thinks, irritated,
if she smokes so much?
“What you see now of the city was
not
the city. Just the entrance portion of the Voortyashtan of old. Those two peaks east of the city aren't mountains, General—they're the frame of a
door
.”

Mulaghesh chews her cigarillo. “So modern Voortyashtan is built on ruins of the old city's
gates
?”

“Correct. And the original city now clogs up the Solda, causing massive seasonal flooding downriver and preventing one of the grandest rivers in the world from becoming a passageway of incredibly lucrative trade.”

Mulaghesh laughs wickedly. “So your job here is to give the whole of the Continent an enema, is that it?”

This doesn't even put a dent in Signe's smile. “That is one way of putting it, yes.”

“And you actually think you'll make this rendition of the schedule?”

“Oh, well…In truth, my current calculations suggest we'll beat the latest iteration of the dredging deadline by nearly three months.”

Mulaghesh stares at her, mouth open. “You…You think you'll
beat
it?”

“Yes,” says Signe mildly.

“You'll
beat
this deadline that keeps getting pushed back
years
?”

“Yes.”

“And you're not being completely and utterly
mad
?”

“Not to my knowledge, no.”

“How do you think you could possibly manage this?”

“I don't begrudge you your skepticism,” says Signe. “For years, SDC struggled with figuring out how to dredge the bay, how to rectify this decades-old damage done by sustained catastrophes. But eventually our engineering staff came up with a solution: modular component processing.”

“What?”

Signe smiles, and Mulaghesh realizes she's just given the expected reaction in Signe's little presentation. “We can't work from the outside in of the Solda Bay—there's a whole undersea city between us and, well, the city. So we decided to work from the inside out. We broke down the two main pieces of equipment—a crane, and a cargo ship—into their most basic components. Simple, cheap, functional components requiring the least amount of effort to put together and take apart. Then we made a small landing depot a few miles from Voortyashtan where we could get to shore”—she motions out the window toward the approaching lighthouse—“and built track that would allow us to ship the components closer to the bay. Once we could get the components to the mouth of the Solda, and once we got our first two cranes built, the game was over.”

Signe takes a nonchalant puff from her cigarette. Mulaghesh studies her, waits, and finally asks, “How was it over with just two cranes?”

“Why, get two cranes in the right places, and you can do anything. First they built ships and piers. Then they built four more cranes farther out in the sea, one on either side of each of them. Then those four cranes hauled up rubble, loaded up the ships, and built eight more cranes out into the sea, one on either side of each of
them
. Then the eight new cranes hauled up rubble, loaded up the new ships, and built sixteen new cranes…and then thirty-two, and sixty-four, and so on, and so on. This is a gross simplification, but you get the idea.”

Mulaghesh looks at the forest of cranes out the window. “So all that out there took…”

“The state of the project, as you see it today, took just under twenty months to produce.”

“Are you
serious
?”

“Yes,” says Signe, with a very slight pout of vanity. “We're told the Solda has already stopped flooding downstream—something your old station of Bulikov will be glad of. And one day, very soon, parts of the Continent that were once completely isolated and cut off will now be linked. Pretty soon the rejuvenation of the Continent will truly begin.”

“Whose brilliant idea was all this?”

“Oh, why, the credit belongs to a variety of teams, as each component and each step in the process required incredible oversight and planning, and—”