City of Blades

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  There’s a collective intake of breath as the ship emerges from the night, a tower of rippling sails on the waves. Some of the sails are rent and tattered, as if the ship’s gone through one hell of a fight.

  “It’s him,” whispers one of the Dreylings. “It’s him!”

  “What has happened to the ship?”

  “Are you a fool? Have you forgotten that the dauvkind swore to drive piracy out of our shores? What else would he be doing?”

  Mulaghesh can’t help but share their anticipation. Sigrud’s one of the few people besides Shara who survived all of Bulikov’s madness with her, and he’s the one person in the world who might believe that she actually saw a long-dead Divinity last night. But she knows she can’t speak to him, not yet. I have other ugly little deeds to do, she thinks, and begins walking back toward the harbor works.

  As someone who spent the last half decade in the shadow of Shara Komayd, Mulaghesh rarely gets to feel clever. But as she watches the various Dreylings streaming down to the SDC headquarters, she gets to feel a rare flash of brilliance.

  Of course the Dreylings are eager to catch the slightest glimpse of their dauvkind, their lost (or used-to-be-lost) heir to the throne. Of course that’ll make them distracted and reluctant to attend to their duties. And if Mulaghesh ever wanted to sneak behind the iron walls of Signe’s test assembly yard, now would be the chance.

  Her pulse quickens as she enters the harbor yards. She stands in the shadow of a crane and watches, marking when and where the patrols make their rounds. Moving calmly and smoothly, she dances around the patrols, passing through prep yards, girder yards, cable yards, and finally the pallet yard.

  Mulaghesh pauses only once, as she walks beneath the guard tower with the PK-512. She’s acquainted enough with that behemoth of a weapon that she checks it out every time, wondering if it might come alive with its hellish chatter. As usual, though, it’s unmanned and dormant. She continues on.

  The test assembly walls swell up before her. It’s quite dark here, as this area is not well lit like the others. She crouches in the shadow of the walls and slowly makes her way down toward the checkpoint. She stops when she sees a Dreyling guard sitting in the booth, smoking anxiously, his rifling slung over his back. He’s short for a Dreyling, somewhat rotund, and looks quite irritated.

  A second Dreyling approaches, trotting up the path, this one with a closely cropped red-blond beard. “His ship’s pulling in now!”

  The short Dreyling in the checkpoint booth glowers at him. “Don’t tell me that! I don’t want to hear about that.”

  “Surely you can get away for a minute? Löfven and his team are all shutting down for the occasion. They’re pulling all their trucks up at the fuel yards.” He points northeast, almost right at Mulaghesh. She shrinks up against the wall.

  “Would you shut up? You know I cannot leave my post!”

  “But certainly yo—”

  “You know what’s in here,” says the short Dreyling. “The CTO would drown me if I walked away.”

  “Ach,” says the red-bearded Dreyling, “I suppose that’s true. Well. I will see for you, and tell you all about it!” With an excited good-bye, he sprints off for the SDC headquarters.

  Mulaghesh thinks, then sneaks back along the walls in the opposite direction. When she hears the roaring of truck engines, she slows.

  It’s the loading dock of the diesel fuel yard, which happens to back right up into the iron walls. She watches as a dozen large fuel trucks park, their hulking forms lumbering into their spots. It takes nearly twenty minutes for them all to go still. Mulaghesh watches carefully as the drivers hop out and toss their keys into what seems to be a checkout box. Then the supervisor—this Löfven, perhaps—locks the checkout box and follows them down the road.

  She looks at the trucks. They’re about fifteen, sixteen feet tall. Then she looks at the walls, which are a little more than twenty feet tall.

  “Hm,” she says.

  She waits, then sprints across the loading dock to the checkout box. She never learned to pick locks, and she certainly couldn’t do it now, one-handed. So she grabs a nearby prybar, slots it behind the lock’s bolt, and gives it a hard shove.

  All those one-handed press-ups come in handy, and the lock pops off with a screech. A lock is only as good, Mulaghesh thinks, as whatever it’s bolted into. She grabs a numbered key, finds the right truck, and starts it up.

  The fuel truck is a beast to maneuver. She’s always hated driving automobiles, especially now that she’s one-handed, and she’s intensely aware that she’s probably now piloting several hundred gallons of highly flammable fluid. But despite all this she slowly, uncertainly backs the truck up to the iron walls. She stops only when the bumper of the truck actually touches the walls themselves.

  She jumps out, grabs an oil-stained rope from a trash heap, and clambers up on top of the truck. She runs to the back end where the bumper is up against the wall. The wall is still about seven feet higher than the truck, but she can make it. She ties the rope to a handle on the back of the truck, then hurls it over the wall. It lands on the canvas roof with a plop.

  She pauses, thinking about how she’s going to do this.

  “I fucking hate being one-handed,” she mutters.

  She readies herself, leaps up, and hits the wall high enough to hook her elbows over its top. The canvas is taut but still gives a little, allowing her a good hold. She hangs there for a moment longer, then hitches her right leg up until her ankle can get over the top as well. Then she pulls herself upright, straddling the wall, and breathes for a moment.

  She makes sure she’s steady, then pops out her combat knife and carves a hole in the canvas wide enough for her to fit through. She glances down into the hole but can see nothing but darkness below. She’s glad she brought a torch, even if it does weigh nearly ten pounds.

  She throws the rope down. Then she maneuvers the torch around, flicks it on, and shines it down to see if the rope hangs low enough for her to drop down. It does, she sees, but there’s…something beside it.

  Something…wrong.

  “Oh, what in the hells,” whispers Mulaghesh.

  She grabs the rope with her one hand and slowly, slowly slides down. Once she’s inside she flicks the torch back on, turns around, and looks.

  “Holy shit,” she says.

  ***

  The closest one is fifteen feet tall, a flawless statue of a man seated on the ground, cross-legged. He is perfectly bald and hairless, and his demeanor and posture are calm, relaxed: he sits with his back straight and his palms resting on his knees. Yet there are nine longswords thrust into his sides, back, and stomach, almost to the hilt, their blades poking through in all directions, certainly passing through countless vital organs; but the man stares ahead calmly, serenely, as if holding his breath. He is wrought, she sees, of pale white stone, perhaps marble, but his many crevices have played home to countless crustaceans and barnacles and other sea creatures. His serene face, for example, is marred by a colony of barnacles creeping up his neck and onto his cheekbone, as if he has a skin condition.

  In the center of his forehead is a carven insignia: the severed hand grasping the sword blade, the sigil of Voortya.

  She stares at this sight, white and ghostly in the light of her torch. He’s sitting uneven in the mud, one knee higher than the other, as if dumped here. The mud is covered in track marks, like huge pieces of machinery have been here time and time again.

  Mulaghesh gets ahold of herself and looks beyond the statue. The canvas ceiling doesn’t allow much light in: the moonlight strikes it and filters through just enough to make it feel like she’s in a giant drum, or an animal-skin lantern of some kind, the crisscrossing seams giving it the feeling of veins. As such, she can’t see much beyond the light of her torch, but…it looks like there are dozens of forms in here with her.

  Maybe more than dozens. Maybe hundreds.

  Mulaghesh shines the light beyond the white statue of the
pierced man to the next object, which appears to be a massive stone table shaped to look like it’s made of antlers, bone, and tusks. The table also sits askew in the mud, and its sides are spattered with a thick coating of sand and silt. It’s a queerly beautiful sight, and she immediately understands its ritualistic significance: she can see where devotees would kneel before it, the hundreds of tiny stone stanchions intended for tiny candles. There’s a basin in its center; maybe someone would wash there, or drink from it.

  She walks on, the beam from her torch bouncing over the mud and the other…things. Statues, she supposes, but they somehow seem more than statues, as if they are machines or devices with functions hidden to the eye, defying logic.

  A column made to look like it’s composed of human teeth. A doorway carved to resemble two massive swords leaning together. A throne that seems to have been grown out of coral reef. All of the statues bear clusters of anemones or barnacles or mussels. Many are adorned with drapes and drapes of seaweed, dried and curled against their forms. It gives the statues a queerly somber look, as if in mourning. But nearly all of them are perfectly whole, not a chip or a scratch in them, as far as she can see.

  “They’re from old Voortyashtan,” says Mulaghesh aloud. “They dredged these up from the bottom of the ocean, didn’t they?” She remembers Signe saying that the only thing they were dredging up was silt and rubble. Yet these look perfect, as if they were carved just years ago. Why hasn’t anyone heard about this? Mulaghesh wonders.

  She suspects she knows why. As she passes by a sculpture of a black sphere standing, in full defiance of physics, on a narrow column of marble, all the hair on her arms rises up. She can see handprints worn into the sphere, as if it had been gripped in countless places, and some part of her mind irrationally tells her it’s still being gripped, that whoever held it is still holding it, though they’re now doing so in some unseen, secret manner.

  This all stinks of the Divine, she thinks. And there’s nothing that the civilized world would fear more than rumors of the Divine in Voortyashtan.

  The next one strikes pure terror into her heart: a white statue of a massive, hulking Voortyashtani sentinel carrying a giant sword. Its back and shoulders are covered in antlers and bones and horns, and its face is the common Voortyashtani sentinel mask, the primitive approximation of human features. The sight of it makes the visions she had in the thinadeskite mines come rushing back to her. She remembers seeing the sentinels’ armor, how it seemed queerly organic, intermeshed, and she remembers knowing instantly that their armor fed on blood, that the more they killed the greater their armor became. She takes careful note of this specimen before her, whose armor has grown until it’s well out of human proportions, possibly distorting the body within. She hopes its size is an exaggeration: it’s nearly four feet taller than a normal man.

  She looks at the wide plinth it’s standing on. Carved there is the word Zhurgut.

  She thinks, then takes out her portfolio and looks up the note from Choudhry’s room, written by Efrem Pangyui himself.

  The blade and hilt of Voortya each had individual meaning to Voortyashtanis. The blade was attack, assault, aggression, but the hilt, fashioned out of the severed hand of the son of Saint Zhurgut, was a symbol of sacrifice.

  “This thing was a saint?” she asks herself. The idea appalls her. This behemoth, bristling with horns and bones and teeth and antlers, is the sort of thing that should haunt dreams. She can’t imagine what it would be like to see such a thing in the real world. It would be like glimpsing a…

  “A nightmare,” she whispers.

  She remembers Gozha saying, He cut a fearsome figure, that thing. Like something from a nightmare.

  She switches her torch off, shuts her eyes, lets them adjust, and then opens them.

  She looks at Zhurgut’s silhouette—a human-like form covered in points.

  “A man made of thorns,” she says quietly.

  Could it be? Could the man Gozha spotted at the charcoal kilns have been dressed like a Voortyashtani sentinel? Mulaghesh herself thought that these murders were part of some ritual, and being dressed like a sentinel could be a part of whatever ritual it might be.

  But Gozha also said the man she saw was huge and fearsome, the sort of person one would notice, uncommon in Voortyashtan. People like this don’t exist anymore. No one gets this big naturally, not without the aid of the Divine.

  She thinks about the mutilation of the corpses at the farmhouse, performed in the exact same manner that sentinels did over eighty years ago to Saypuri slaves.

  Are you honestly considering, Mulaghesh says to herself, that a real, live Voortyashtani sentinel committed these atrocities? How could one have possibly survived?

  Mulaghesh jumps as a loud clank echoes across the statues. Bright white light comes spilling in from everywhere. She looks around and sees a handful of electric bulbs fluttering to life along the walls. “What the…?”

  There’s the groan of metal far back behind her. She turns and sees the giant iron door slowly start to swing open.

  “Fuck,” she mutters. She finds cover behind the sculpture of Saint Zhurgut, shrinks down behind its plinth, and waits, listening.

  She can hear voices, footsteps. Two sets, she thinks, squelching in the mud.

  She hears Signe’s voice saying, “…unsure what the material makeup is. It is not conventional stone. Whatever it is, it’s clearly different from the statues that line the shore of the Solda. We’re presuming for now that the two types of statues had two very different purposes, one utilitarian, one decoration. The ones on the shore of the Solda were decoration, and thus were made of ordinary stone, which hasn’t held up well to the change in climate. These are much…Well. More durable. Much more dense. Our dredgers didn’t even make a dent in them. We can’t even chip off a piece for sample. They must have used some kind of craftsmanship that we’ve never experienced before. We assume it must not have been Divine, because if it was then these should have all turned to dust when Voortya died. It seems the Voortyashtanis of old had many secrets, even beyond those of their Divinity.”

  Mulaghesh pokes her head around the statue of Zhurgut. She sees Signe talking to a richly dressed Dreyling, a man in dark red robes wearing a ceremonial fur hat with lots of gold embroidering. Signe looks very pale, very still, and very awkward, which is unusual, as her ample charisma has always filled any room.

  Mulaghesh can’t imagine why this man upsets her, in his white fur gloves and white fur boots and white fur belt. He’s an absolute fop, if Mulaghesh must say so; but it isn’t until he turns to scratch his cheek that she sees the bright gold eye patch covering up one eye.

  Oh, by the seas, she thinks. It’s Sigrud.

  She keeps watching, dumbfounded, staring at his rich, ridiculous clothing, the rings on his fingers, the chain dangling from his neck.

  Holy hells, she thinks, he looks like a fucking parade float!

  ***

  It takes all of her effort not to burst out laughing. She could never have imagined Shara Komayd’s most trusted assassin dressed in such a manner in her life.

  Then he speaks, and his voice is the same, tremendously low and scratchy, as if it’s been marinating in dark ale. “And what,” he says slowly, “were they used for?”

  “What?” says Signe, irritated. “The statues?”

  “Yes,” he says. “You said they were utilitarian. What was their use?”

  “We have no idea. No idea what they did, or if they’re doing anything now.” The answer is curt, impatient, even downright rude. Signe seems to realize this, for she continues: “We’ve noticed a name carved on each of the statues, sometimes in an unobtrusive place. Some of us believe that these are memorials, of a sort—works of art commissioned in honor of the departed. Some are different—we found some that were small chambers, resembling little tombs. You can see one there, a modest little box of a structure—but they contain nothing that appears to have supported a body. Only…weaponry.”
/>   “Weaponry?”

  “Well, one weapon apiece. There is a plinth inside each little tomb that seems designed to hold a sword. But we’ve found no swords. Perhaps they too vanished in the Blink, or were washed out to sea when old Voortyashtan fell apart.”

  Sigrud stares around at the statues, quiet. Perhaps provoked by his silence, Signe goes on: “We have used our contact at the fortress to procure a list of Divine tests. Methods that can be used to determine the Divine nature of any…phenomenon, or object, or whatever. All the statues tested as negative. That should suffice, shouldn’t it?”

  He is silent.

  “Shouldn’t it?” she says again, angrier.

  “I heard,” he says quietly, “that someone once shot at you.”

  “What?”

  “Someone shot at you. Clipped your hair. Is this true?”

  “Oh. That. Yes, that happened some time ago. We’ve taken extra security measures since.”

  “And the bombing? The explosives? You considered this a threat as well?” He looks at her, his one eye shining strangely.

  “Yes,” says Signe, her words harsh and clipped. “But such fears proved unfounded. So. Back to the issue at hand. Our security here has thus far been airtight. If it wasn’t, the tribal leaders would be all over us to force us to hand the statues over. As it is, my current intent is to use these statues as collateral to force the tribal leaders to give us shipping rights on the harbor. Otherwise we will report their existence to the Ministry, and, this being Voortyashtan, I have no doubt the Ministry would wish to confiscate and review them. Extensively. They’d stay in Saypuri hands indefinitely.”

  Silence.

  “Do you think our current strategy is wise?” she asks. “Or do you wish to…correct it for me?”

  Sigrud is quiet for a long, long time.

  “Well?” says Signe.