City of Blades (7 page)

Yes,
Pitry said.
Took a bolt to the left shoulder when a Continental charged a checkpoint, just above the collarbone. Nearly killed her. But she managed to get the shot off after
she'd been injured.

She pulled off a killshot
after
being critically injured? She's either a hard case or lucky.

From what I've heard of her, General,
he said mildly,
I rather think it's the former.

They park and Pandey leads her into the headquarters, whose interiors are dank and tomb-like, yawning hallways and tiny, tunnel-like stairways. This part of Thinadeshi, she realizes, was built mere years after the Kaj took the Continent, and is so out of date it's almost mind-boggling. As someone who's been part of the planning and construction of multiple installations, the many glaring flaws—this staircase too tight for evacuation, those windows too large and exposed—come leaping out to her, almost causing her to cringe.

“Where are we going?” asks Mulaghesh as they climb up a winding staircase. “I thought Biswal was here.”

“He is, ma'am,” says Pandey. “He's in the nest, just above us.”

“The what?”

“The nest. The crow's nest, sorry. General Biswal is, as he puts it, a visual thinker, so he likes a view.”

Mulaghesh is about to ask him to please clarify his damned self when gray light comes spilling in from above, and they emerge into a rounded, glass-walled room like something you'd find at the top of a lighthouse. She glances to the side and has a moment of vertigo when she realizes how high up they are, the battlements sprawling out three hundred feet below her.

“General Biswal,” says Pandey. “General Mulaghesh.”

Mulaghesh looks around. She realizes this chamber—which must be the topmost spire of Fort Thinadeshi—has been converted into something like a makeshift office, with a small desk facing east. Stuck on the windows before the desk are numerous maps of the region, many of which she finds familiar. The wall of colors and images confounds her eyes so much that it takes her a minute to realize there's someone seated at the desk, wearing a bright orange headcloth.

He grunts and slowly swivels in his chair, turning to look at them.

Mulaghesh's world seems to spin around her.

He is not the man she remembers. There's some remaining suggestion of the broad-shouldered, powerfully built man he was once, but he's got more around the middle now, his carefully manicured beard is now bone white, and small, delicate little spectacles now balance atop his nose.

But his eyes are still the same: still pale, pale gray and somewhat deep-set, as if viewing the world from deep within himself.

General Lalith Biswal smiles—a somewhat forced gesture—and stands. “By the seas,” he says. “By all the
seas,
Turyin! Turyin, is it really you? How many years has it been? Are you
really
somewhere in that old woman's body?”

“I could ask the same of you,” says Mulaghesh. “I remember now why I don't catch up with my former colleagues. They remind me of how damn old I've gotten.”

He shakes her hand and his grip is the same, the fingers of a person meant either to build things or break them. Then, to her surprise, he gently pulls her into an embrace—a gesture of affection she's never witnessed from him before.

“I don't care,” says Biswal. “I wish I'd seen you more often.” He holds her by the arms and stares into her face, like a father reviewing a child home from boarding school. “It helps me fight the feeling that I'm a fiddly old man wondering if the past ever really happened.”

Mulaghesh tries to return his affection, but it's difficult: her left arm hurts, and her right one is making a fist, something she can't stop. He somehow smells the same: a masculine but not unpleasant musk, dashed with the scent of juniper berries and pine. Yet the faintest ghost of this aroma brings a thousand memories with it: the smell of smoke, ash, rain, animal dung, rotten food, and putrid meat, and with the scents come the sounds, the distant screaming and the mutter of the flames.

Don't forget where you are,
thinks Mulaghesh.
Don't forget where you are.

Biswal releases her. “Sergeant Major Pandey, you're dismissed. It's not appropriate for the young to witness the commiseration of the old.” He smiles brightly at Mulaghesh. “How about some tea? After all, up here is the farthest we can get from the problems of this unsightly shithole.”

“As the wise man says,” Biswal says, pouring her a cup, “when the shepherd lies down with his goats, he finds himself listening to them. And soon, who are the shepherds and who are the goats?”

The wind rattles the windows. Mulaghesh tries to tell herself that the swaying sensation she's feeling is her imagination. She definitely doesn't want to believe that the tower they're in is actually moving. “You think of the Voortyashtanis as goats?” says Mulaghesh, watching steam languidly massage the brim of her cup.

“No,” says Biswal, pouring his own. “I think that's giving them too much credit.” His voice hasn't changed: it's still low and husky, like the low groan of a ship's timbers. He still talks the same way, too, like he's reluctant to speak but determined to carefully say his piece. Having a conversation with him was always like having a conversation with a bulldozer, slow and indomitable.

“So what's the situation?”

“It's simple on the surface. Minister Komayd wants to build a harbor, yes? Open up the Solda, change the Continent forever, yes?”

“Yeah?”

“The problem is, this plays into local politics, if I can even use such a civilized term. Old rivalries, perhaps.” He points to the maps on the glass wall. One features color-coded regions along the Solda and up in the highlands. “There are two types of Voortyashtanis here, Turyin. Those that live in the highlands and those that live along the river. The ones along the river are rich and fat and happy. They have the best pastures and charge everyone an arm and a leg to cross the Solda. Those in the highlands, well. They have it tough, they always have, and they've always fought for better land.”

“So?”

“You have the reasonable response. So? So what does this backwater nonsense have to do with the harbor? Who cares about these bumpkins? Well, unfortunately, if we want the harbor to work, we're going to have to live with these people. And if we open up the waters, who will we disturb?”

Mulaghesh grimaces and nods. “Ah.”

“Yes. The river tribes wish to acquire new lands in order to relocate their settlements and farmland. The only decent land available, however, belongs to the highland tribes—in fact, it's the only arable land they possess. So this leaves the highland clans very upset. The sort of upset that makes you raid military rail shipments, steal a bunch of riflings and explosives, and go to war. The sort of upset that makes you pillage and burn settlements along territorial boundaries. The sort of upset that makes you put a bullet through the face of the previous commander of this damned region. That kind of upset.”

“That's pretty fucking upset.”

“You have no idea,” he says. “I've been here about a year and a quarter now, and I've got upcoming negotiations with the tribal leaders to try and get them to stop killing one another. Not to mention us. My hopes are not high. Good choice wearing your fatigues, by the way. Don't distinguish yourself as an officer at all, if you can help it. Thinadeshi seems secure, but it's still a combat outpost. There are lots of hidden people in the hills all too happy to reward your decorum with a bullet.”

“So that's how you came to be here? The previous commander got shot, so they came to you?”

Biswal deflates a little. “No. Not quite. I was teaching. Military history, at Abhishek Academy. The shelf, in other words.”

Mulaghesh nods. “The shelf” is the military term for a state of disuse, when a soldier, operative, or officer is not dismissed but set aside and, likely, forgotten. One can get on the shelf for any reason: some fall out of favor politically, some screw up an operation or make some fatal career flaw….Still others just get old. Very few go to the shelf voluntarily—yet this is precisely what Mulaghesh herself attempted to do.
And I couldn't even get that right….

“No one else wanted the job, so they gave me another look,” says Biswal. “I should have known that if they were willing to give it to me, I shouldn't take it. This is a daunting task, and the number of souls on my shoulder weighs heavily.”

Mulaghesh glances at a map on the wall detailing the installations throughout Voortyashtan. “How many?”

“Seven thousand here in Thinadeshi. Four thousand in Fort Hadji, where the rails see a lot of action—just north of the highlands, you see. Thirty-five hundred at Fort Lok. More at the border with Jukoshtan. All in all, I find myself commander of twenty-three thousand soldiers here in Voortyashtan, Turyin. A lot, but not as many as we need.”

“No?”

“No. We're spread too thin. My predecessor tried to disrupt the insurgents' bastions in the mountains, and that was a miserable failure. Cost him his life. For now, the military council's orders are strictly to
hold on
. Fortify. Protect the harbor. As if it needs it. The Dreylings practically have their own army down there. They've even got a damned minigun.”

“Really.” Mulaghesh makes a note of this.

“And somehow all the shtanis manage to have firearms, too.” He gives the carousel in her holster the briefest of glances. “I hate them, Turyin. I hate these damned new guns, which suddenly seem to be everywhere.”

“I never figured you for a technophobe,” says Mulaghesh.

“I'm not,” he growls. “But these things make it damned easy to kill a man. With bolts, ammunition is so much more of a hassle. Too much wind and you can't use them at all. Short-ranged, too. With riflings…Overnight, we've gone from bolt-action to fully automatic and beyond. Dying has gotten a whole lot easier all over the world.”

“We've always been able to make them,” says Mulaghesh. “We were just never able to scale up production before.”

“Then perhaps we should have left them on the factory floor,” says Biswal. “Are you a convert, Turyin?”

“If you can't fight the future, you might as well learn the ropes quick as you can. Especially if you've got to climb them with a handicap.” She holds up her prosthetic left hand.

“Ah.” His eyes sadden. “I'd heard about that. I'm so sorry for what you went through.”

“And both of us know it wasn't much. I'm alive. That's more than most get.”

“Yes. That is true. You always did have a head for priorities, Turyin. It surprised me when I heard you'd walked out on the job. Why
did
you leave?”

She gives a neutral shrug. “They wanted me to be something I wasn't.”

“Ah. A politician, then?”

“Something like that.”

“And now you're here on the shuffle,” says Biswal. “I don't think
anyone's
ever done the touring shuffle in Voortyashtan. Why did they send you here?”

“I pissed on a lot of important shoes when I left,” says Mulaghesh. “They could've just waved the discrepancy off, but they didn't. I don't think they even wanted to give me the opportunity to get it taken care of, really. I think maybe they sent me up hoping I'd get buried here.”

Biswal's eyes dim and crinkle. “Yes. I…I wonder that, too. Perhaps they're just trying to mop us up. Me and you, still being alive—we inconvenience them, don't we?”

She hesitates. She feels nauseous. She hasn't discussed this with anyone in over ten years, and she never wanted to break the subject open like this, with the very man who led them all way back when.

She wanted to forget. She did a good job of it. It's downright obnoxious of the world to remind her that the Yellow March actually happened.

To her relief, they're interrupted by the sound of steps behind them. Mulaghesh turns to see a Saypuri soldier of about forty mounting the stairs, and from the chevrons on her uniform she's a captain, first class. But there is an unmistakable air of lethality about this woman that Mulaghesh finds striking: everything about her posture and bearing—jaw set forward, shoulders square, legs spread wide—seems intended to either take or deal damage. Her hair is tied back so tightly it seems to stretch the skin on her forehead, which has a curious whitish streak in the middle. It's a large scar, like she's had almost all of her scalp peeled off in some injury. This does nothing to affect her stony, still gaze, though: Mulaghesh only has to glance at her to see that this is a soldier who's seen a great deal of combat, probably the messy kind.

Once she's at the top of the steps, the captain swivels on her heel and smartly salutes. “General Mulaghesh. It's an honor to have you here at Thinadeshi.”

“Ah, you found me, Nadar,” says Biswal.

“When you're at Thinadeshi, General, you're almost always in the nest.” She glances around disapprovingly. “
Against
my advice.”

“Turyin, this is Captain Kiran Nadar, commander of Fort Thinadeshi. Nadar doesn't admire my makeshift office here. She thinks the shtanis are dangerous and could take advantage of it. But on the contrary, the reason I'm up here is
because
I know they're dangerous.” He gazes east, at the ragged, pink peaks of the Tarsil Mountains. “Where else can I get a better look at what we have to deal with?”

“I'm guessing this is something of an artifact,” says Mulaghesh, standing and looking around at the little room. “Built before artillery and small arms had quite the reach they do now.”

“Correct,” says Nadar. “And since we lost our last commander to a sharpshooter—may he find peace in his slumber—it makes me nervous that General Biswal chooses to take his tea up here.”