City of Blades (61 page)

She waits until she knows he's out of earshot to finally begin to weep again. It takes her more than an hour to summon the strength to walk out.

The next day Mulaghesh walks the cliffs in the morning air, reveling in the sunlight. A front has blown in out of the south, pushing the clouds away and bringing warm air with it. Noor has given her a new uniform and has allowed her time to clean herself up and seek first aid, and all of this makes Voortyashtan feel like a different world to her.

She wanders the copses and woods atop the cliffs, walking north of the fortress and the city. It takes only a few minutes to lose her tails—two of them, both plainclothes Saypuri officers, neither of them very good. Then she turns toward the coast.

She finds it almost immediately: the hidden place where the tiny, terrifying stairs wander down to the shore. She remembers sitting on the cliffs and watching Pandey rowing out to sea, and the girl in the boat who met him.

Mulaghesh climbs down the stairs. It would normally terrify her, but it doesn't anymore. Having been death itself for a little bit, she's no longer much afraid of the idea.

She pauses when she's almost at the bottom. She calls out, “Sigrud? I'm coming down! Don't…Don't fucking kill me or anything!”

A silence.

Then, quietly, “Okay.”

She climbs down the rest of the way and finds him hiding in a cut-in up under a shallow roof of stone. He looks like shit: he's starved, filthy, and he's set his own broken arm, albeit poorly.

“Gods be damned,” she says. “How did you survive the past couple of days?”

“Not well,” he admits. He looks at her balefully with one sunken, exhausted eye. “How did you know where to find me?”

She walks over and sits beside him on the gravelly shore. “I thought you would want to come somewhere you could remember her.”

He bows his head, but says nothing.

“Is all well?” he says after a while.

“No. I told them the truth,” she says. “About what happened. About what you did to those soldiers.”

“And the harbor?”

“What, your lie about how it was all your idea? Well…That I didn't contradict.” She looks at him sadly. “Did you not want to disparage the memory of her?”

“I…I wanted to keep one last part of her alive,” he says. “The one thing she devoted her life to. But now that you've found me…Will you tell them? Will you allow them to arrest me, to cast down all the things my daughter built?”

“No. That I won't do. I'm already arranging meetings with the tribal leaders before I ship out of here about that.”

“About what?”

“About how if they fuck up all that Signe did for them, and fail to make a nation out of this place…Well. Then I'll come back and kill every single one of them.”

He looks at her. “Do…Do you think that they'll believe you?”

She thins her eyes. “I was their god the other night, Sigrud. Just a little bit, and just for a little while. But I was still Voortya. They'll fucking listen.” She sniffs. “But first I'm going to talk to Lem at SDC.”

“About…what?”

“About leaving Signe's yacht at this location along the shore,” she says, handing him a map. “It'll be there tomorrow morning.”

He looks at the map, confused, then slowly takes it. “You…You're letting me get away?”

“No. I'm giving you a head start.”

“But…I killed those soldiers.”

“Yeah. And that's a hard thing, and I damned well hate it.” She watches as the waves grasp at the stones at her feet, trying but never quite managing to tug them away. “But I did something similar once. And people gave me a second chance. I'd be a shit to deny that to others.”

“I don't deserve such kindness.”

“Ah, there's that word.” She looks out at the ocean. “ ‘Deserve.' How preoccupied we are with that. With what we should have, with what we are owed. I wonder if any word has ever caused more heartache.” She watches as he folds the map, his fingers trembling, his face pinched like a child not to cry. “I'm sorry about Signe.”

He stows the map away. “Will I be able to see her?”

“No, Sigrud. You can't.”

“Please, I must. Just…give me one thing more. Just this one thing.”

“Sigrud…”

He looks at her, his face resolute. “I want to see her funeral.”

“Her
funeral
? Sigrud, I can't…”

“Even if it is far away…I must see this. I must see her at rest.”

“You don't want her buried at home?”

“Buried? Dreylings do not bury their dead.” Then he looks west, along the shore, to where the SDC cranes sit. “And this is her home. She devoted her life to this place, this work. If that doesn't make a home, Turyin Mulaghesh, then nothing does. I was never there for her in life, so please…Please just let me be there for her for this.”

It's a brisk evening, the sun painting the skies with cherry-red swathes. Mulaghesh has pulled out her parade dress uniform for the first time in what feels like ages, and the town below is lit with torchlight as the reconstruction resumes. Yet despite the beauty, Mulaghesh's heart is dull and leaden.

The rifling is heavy in her hand. She wishes Sigrud hadn't asked this of her. But once he did, she couldn't refuse.

She looks up as the smaller gates to the fortress's west wall open. The litter comes rattling out, pulled by a single big draft horse. Noor walks beside it, also in his parade dress, and he gives Mulaghesh a single nod. There's a small retinue of officers in tow, not large, just enough to be tasteful: this is, after all, not their moment. She waits until the litter draws close before she puts the rifling to her shoulder and walks beside Noor.

She glances up at the litter. It's a hastily prepared thing, nothing like a decent hearse, and she can glimpse inside to the fur-wrapped figure within.

“Seems a damned odd ritual,” says Noor as they walk down to the city. “Burning the dead is one thing, but in a
ship
?”

“It's symbolic,” says Mulaghesh.

“Seems a waste of a ship,” says Noor. “But then I guess the Dreylings have vessels to spare.”

“They feel they owe it to her, I suppose.”

It's a long way down to the city, but it's a familiar one now. Mulaghesh eyes the wooden frames rising along the streets, promises of sturdy Dreyling structures to come, though they've halted work for this.
In three weeks,
she thinks,
I won't even be able to recognize this city.
But the biggest change is what's happening down at the harbor, where the seawall and the lighthouse appear to be glowing a soft, shimmering gold.

“My word,” says Noor as they near it. “What is that?”

It takes Mulaghesh a minute to understand it, but then she sees that the seawall and every balcony of the lighthouse is lined with lights, and above each light is a face, grim and sad.

“Lanterns,” says Mulaghesh. “It's all the workers. They've come to see. They're holding lanterns, every one.”

“For…her? I thought she was just an engineer.”

The litter turns away from the harbor, south toward the northern shore of the Solda. “She did the impossible,” says Mulaghesh. She nods ahead to where the Solda is now flowing somewhat freely. “She freed the waters, she built the harbor. And by doing that, she kept their country afloat. The United Dreyling States can make good on all their loans.”

“The
dauvkind
's daughter did all that, you think?”

“One big push, I suppose.”

The little boat lies on the shores ahead. It's a small wooden craft, though perhaps in defiance of Signe's tastes, as it's also of a somewhat ornate design. SDC Security Chief Lem stands beside it, dressed in his SDC uniform, grim and downcast.

Mulaghesh walks up and sees the boat is empty, except for a small layer of kindling, which she didn't expect. Lem gives her a guilty look. “We considered lining it with some of her old blueprints,” he says. “The ones she didn't use. But we didn't think she would have wanted that. She would have wished us to make use of them.”

“She had no time for creature comforts,” says Mulaghesh. “I doubt she drew much comfort from them, really. So…how does this work?”

“We set her in the boat,” says Lem softly. He lifts a tall, thick glass jar of yellow-orange oil. A candle sits in a small glass cup beside it. “We put the oil in the prow. Then we push it into the water, light the candle, and someone cuts the rope. And when it's out to sea, it's set alight. Traditionally it'd be with a flaming arrow, but…” He gives her rifling a guilty look. “Not too many skilled with a bow at the moment.”

“I see,” says Mulaghesh.

Mulaghesh steps to the side as Lem and another SDC worker gently reach in and lift the body out of the litter. They treat their burden as delicately as if it was a bundle of lily petals.

They gingerly lay her inside the boat. Lem reaches for the knot at the top of the furs, and he plucks at it and it falls apart. As it does the furs slide away to reveal the face beneath.

She looks as Mulaghesh expected: colorless, distorted, slightly swollen. Not like Signe, not like the person Mulaghesh knew in life, so filled with hunger and delight. But Mulaghesh has seen corpses before, so she knew what she'd see.

“Good-bye, Signe,” she says softly.

She and Noor turn and slowly make their way down to the seawall beside the Solda. The SDC workers there salute her solemnly, their faces lit with golden light from their lanterns. She salutes back and turns to look upstream.

How many times have I done this before?
How many children's funerals have I been to?

She looks upstream. Lem kneels, lights the candle, whispers something, and slashes the rope. The little boat bobs a bit, then slowly wanders downstream, picking up speed in the weak current. It's going at a good clip when it passes Mulaghesh, and she snatches the barest glimpse of the still, pale face within.

I'll wait,
she thinks.
I want her to see as much of what she built as I can allow before I do it.

The little boat passes the seawall, then drifts out beneath the cranes, which sit dark and hunched in the waters. Mulaghesh scans the horizon. Far in the distance, only a half a mile or so past the lighthouse, she thinks she can discern the slightest hint of a boat's sail.

There,
she thinks.
Now he can see….

She kneels, places the rifling on the edge of the seawall—her left arm is still wounded from her duel with Pandey—and draws a bead on the little boat and the glimmering glass jar at the brow.

The rifling jumps. There's a spark and suddenly the boat is alight. Within seconds it's a bright, clean yellow flame, drifting out to sea.

And as the light filters across the bay, a strange sound accompanies it. It sounds like a wave or perhaps a roar, starting low and growing the farther the boat drifts to sea. Slowly Mulaghesh realizes the Dreylings are shouting, starting at the lighthouse and rushing down the seawall until all the men around her are shouting as well, a long, sustained cry.

It's not a cry of grief, she finds, nor one of pain or loss or sorrow; rather, it's a shout of triumph, of victory, of good-bye and farewell, a shout of love, love, defiant love.

When it's over she and Noor trudge back up to the fortress. “Do you think it will be any different, Turyin?” he asks. “Do you really think the Voortyashtanis can ever truly be civilized?”

She shrugs. “Why only doubt the Voortyashtanis? I'm not even sure if we can civilize ourselves.”

Sigrud lies in the dark in the hatch of the yacht, unable to sleep. The waves toy with the boat mercilessly, but it took almost no time at all for his head to readjust, learning to move with the waves and the vast ripples of the ocean. He narrowly avoided a storm this morning, which was lucky as he doubted not only his arm but the quality of the ship's jibsail. He's not sure how his daughter managed to pilot this thing out to the Teeth of the World so well.

He does some calculations in his head about the time. Then he rolls over to the tiny porthole beside him, licks his finger, and begins to write upon the glass.

Frost creeps across the window, then recedes, leaving behind the moving image of a woman seated at a desk, staring at a sheet of paper in her hands.

She looks old, worn, and yet blearily noble, the look of a woman prepared to speak but no longer quite capable of believing what she's about to say.

Shara Komayd glances at him, then does a double take. “Sigrud?
Sigrud!
What are you…My word, you look
terrible
.”

“Hello, Shara,” he says hoarsely.

To his surprise she appears to pick up the edges of the image and carry it away with her. He must have wound up appearing in a hand mirror of hers by mistake, rather than a windowpane. “You can't do this, Sigrud. You can't contact me, not now. They're looking for you, all of them! And I can't intervene, not this time!”

“I know,” he says. “I…I just wanted to talk to you.”

She carries him into her bedroom and sets him down on the bedside table. It's evening there. The four-poster bed sits behind her, its curtains drawn. “I'm…I'm so sorry about what happened, Sigrud. Your daughter…Her presence in the city was wholly incidental to why I sent Mulaghesh in the first place. Are you healthy? Are you safe? Don't tell me where you're going.”

“I won't. I am…I am all right. I can't tell you where I'm going, because I don't know. But I will take your counsel. Shara…what should I do?”

“I'm afraid you must hide, Sigrud. I'm sorry, but…I don't have the clout anymore to change the minds of the military. To attempt something like that after what I've done so far—it would cause considerable problems.”