City of Blades

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Finally he shrugs. “I trust what you are doing.”

  She stares at him, surprised and suspicious. “You…do? You…You think this is a good idea?”

  “I did not say that. If it were me I’d throw all this shit back in the ocean. I hate everything Divine, dead or not. But it is not me. It is you. And if you think this is a good idea, then I will let you do as you see fit.”

  Signe is so taken aback by this that she’s lost for words. Then: “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you willing to let me do this, if you think it’s a bad idea?”

  “Because…” He gives a great sigh. “I think you are good at this.”

  “You don’t seem too happy about it.”

  Sigrud is quiet yet again.

  “I get quite sick of your silences,” says Signe. “They aren’t nearly as clever as you think they are.”

  “I am not being clever. I just do not know what to say.” He pauses. “I want to ask…How…How many times has someone tried to kill you here?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wish to know.”

  “I don’t think that matters.”

  “I do.”

  She snorts, contemptuous.

  “More than once, then. Do you think this is worth it?” he asks. “Is it acceptable, to risk your life to build this? If you died here, on the shores of this country, below these cranes, would you feel you spent your life well?”

  Signe crosses her arms and looks away. “This is an abrupt change in your disposition.”

  “Why? Should I not be concerned about my daughter’s welfare?”

  “Do you have any idea,” says Signe, suddenly furious, “how many times someone tried to kill me and mother and Carin when we lived here? Do you know how many times we almost starved to death? Yet I did not see any sign of your concern then.”

  A long pause.

  “We…” Sigrud struggles for words. “We have had this conversation. We—”

  “We had your conversation,” says Signe. “The conversation you wanted to have with everyone, in front of everyone. How absolutely absurd it is that you—the man who has risked his life for all kinds of murderous, horrible reasons—are suddenly asking if it’s wise for me to do the same for somewhat decent ones!”

  Sigrud is torn, it seems, between frustration and shock. “I forget how young you are sometimes.”

  “No,” she says. “What you forget is that you don’t really know me at all.” She checks her watch. “I need to confirm with Biswal and Nadar that they’re ready to receive you. You may stay here if you like, and see yourself out as soon as you see fit.” Then, without so much as a glance back that Mulaghesh can see, she strides away from her father through the forest of statues and out the iron door, which shuts with a clang behind her.

  Sigrud gives a great, sad sigh. He stares up at the canvas roof, contemplative and melancholy. Then he says aloud, “All right, Turyin. You can come out now.”

  ***

  Mulaghesh pokes her head up. “How long have you known I was here?”

  “From the start,” says Sigrud. His scarred, battered face is still doleful. “Your boot polish…You use too much of it. I’d recognize the smell anywhere.”

  “It always creeped me out, how you could catch a scent like that.” Mulaghesh stands, wipes some of the mud off of her pants, and walks over to him. “Thanks for not ratting me out, I guess.”

  He shrugs. “It is no affair of mine. I assume Signe did not wish to tell you what was in these walls?”

  “Yeah. I chose to come see for myself.” She pauses, feeling fiercely awkward. “I’m sorry I overheard all that.”

  “Yes…My adjustment to public life”—he holds out his arms and looks at his clothing—“is not quite as easy as I’d hoped it’d be. For anyone.”

  “Yeah, you look…” She holds back a cringe. “You do look different.”

  “These damned things…Pah!” He rips off his fur hat and eye patch and tosses them away. When he turns back his left eye is once again the familiar hooded, empty socket. “I feel more like a human without them.”

  “That was probably, like, a two-hundred-drekel hat.”

  “These old specters can have it.” He looks up at the giant stone images, leaning over them like predators. “By the seas. Look at them. To imagine my country would one day spend blood and treasure to haul such things from the ocean…”

  “Your girl’s got a pretty cunning idea, though,” says Mulaghesh. She walks up to Saint Zhurgut, strikes a match on the statue, and lights a cigarillo. “Blackmailing the tribes might work. And she has some damned brass in her blood, too. Hiding these things right under the nose of Fort Thinadeshi…I’d be impressed if I wasn’t so pissed.”

  “She is a very cunning, clever thing. As I said, she is very good at what she does.” There’s another uncomfortable pause. He looks her over. “You seem to be doing well.”

  “As do you. You must have done pretty good for yourself during the coup.”

  “Ah,” says Sigrud, waving a hand. “It was hardly a coup for me. I barely struck a blow. It was like a courtly dance, so many pre-arranged steps, and I merely had to move from one to the next. Shara did all the real work, though no one knew.”

  “As usual.”

  “As usual, yes. What about you, have you seen any action?”

  “Not a jot. They stuck me behind a desk. Then after I quit I stuck myself behind a bottle. So no new scars or limbs lost, or at least not yet. You look like you’re all in one piece, or at least what I can see above those kingly robes does.”

  “Eh. Not quite.” He pulls his left lip down, revealing an utter dearth of back molars on the left side of his jaw. Mulaghesh can see extensive scar tissue around the lip, suggesting a broken jawbone.

  “Holy hells. Did you try and catch a cannonball with your face?”

  “A carpenter’s hammer. Makes eating soup difficult these days, and drinking even more so. Three years ago, we boarded the ship of the pirate Lindibier…do you know this man? Lindibier?”

  “ ’Fraid not.”

  “Well.” He considers it thoughtfully. “He was a real piece of shit.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway, we board, we kill, well, almost everyone, and then there’s just the cabin boy, hiding down in the aft. I walk over to him, he’s, what, fourteen? I take pity on him. I ask him, ‘You need food? Water?’ And he looks at me, and he leaps at me, and then…” He taps the side of his head. “He could swing a hammer, for a boy.” He looks away, wistful. “I strangled him and threw his body in the ocean. Let the fish turn him to shit as fast as they could. It took time for me to recover. That was when they made me a chancellor. Or my wife did. To save my life, she said.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Hild. Yes. She’s…” He is quiet for some time. “…like Shara. Or Signe. A very, eh, cunning person. She’s a chancellor, too. Just a more important one than me—the sort of chancellor that makes other chancellors. Which she did, to me. But I know what I’m good for. I just want to hunt meat and chase pirates. But they’ve had me behind a desk. Stuck me in a big, nice office where I never see anyone, and no one ever sees me. Though I insisted I come out when Kvarnström attacked a village. Do you know him? The pirate Kvarnström?”

  Mulaghesh shakes her head.

  “Oh. Well. He is a real piece of shit.”

  “I’m sensing a theme.”

  “Yes. We had been so caught up in this harbor thing, our dicks big and hard thinking of money, we had forgotten how to deal with pirates. The pirates took us, what, two years to get under control? Three? And then we forget it all, stumbling all over ourselves to do this job. Anyway, I hopped on a ship and took pursuit. We almost caught him, about sixty miles from here. But he damaged our mast with a chainshot, a cowardly way to fight.”

  “I heard something about that,” she says, suspecting why Sigrud’s wife might not want someone who casually uses the phrase “dicks big and
hard thinking of money” in the public eye. “So you’re actually here because your ship got damaged?”

  “Partially. Some months ago Signe sent a signal to the UDS asking if she had approval to move forward with this tactic. I wanted to see what was going on, and a damaged ship is a good excuse. Besides, what are you doing here? This is a strange place for you to be, isn’t it?”

  “Shara,” she says, as if that explains everything.

  “Ah. Was you quitting part of her game?”

  “No. That was my choice. She just dragged me back in.”

  “A bad thing, to haul an old warrior back onto the field. What game is she playing now?”

  She’s relieved Sigrud doesn’t ask about the circumstances of her exit, as she’s so tired of fielding questions about it. “They discovered some kind of ore or metal or whatever up near the fort. Shara’s concerned it might be Divine.”

  The two of them sit on the plinth of Saint Zhurgut, and she summarizes the generalities of Sumitra Choudhry’s investigation and disappearance. He listens intently, smoking his pipe—his old pipe, she notices, not a fine little ivory piece but the filthy, scarred, oaken thing he was always carrying around. And suddenly Mulaghesh feels more relaxed and more open than she’s felt in weeks. It takes her a moment to realize she might be being more honest with him than she should, but she doesn’t care. She and Sigrud passed through fire and death together, and spent weeks recuperating in a hospital outside Bulikov, trapped in their beds. Though she still holds a grudge against him for making a fast and mostly full recovery—which astonished the doctors, who had all written him off as either permanently crippled or, much more likely in their opinions, soon to be dead. Mulaghesh’s recuperation was far longer and far more excruciating, fighting infections and trying to keep what was left of her arm.

  He thinks for a long while when she’s finished. “What kind of ore is this, again?”

  “It’s an electrical conductor. Like, what they use to make the electric lights work. They think they can use it to…I don’t know, power more of them, do it easier, faster.”

  Sigrud stares at her blankly. “Faster? How would they make light…faster?”

  “Hells, I don’t know. It’s some engineering shit. I told them they were sending the wrong person, but they squeezed my plums, so to speak.”

  He shakes his head, staring around at the statues and the form of SDC peeking just over the walls. “Look at this world they shoved us into.” He looks up at a bone-white arch. “Maybe they should leave us in here, with this graveyard of relics.”

  “Hey, it might not all be new. I saw something last night….Something that’s probably only familiar to Shara, you, and m—”

  Before she can speak further the iron door swings back open. They both look up to see Signe walk through.

  Signe sees them and stops in her tracks. Then she gives a savage little nod, as though to say, As I expected, all along. She resumes walking toward them. “Well,” she says. “Isn’t this a delight.”

  Why is it that, despite us being decades older than her, thinks Mulaghesh, I feel like we’re two children caught causing mischief? She stands and says, “Evening, CTO Harkvaldsson. Lovely night, isn’t it?”

  “I will presume it was you that broke into the fuel yard checkbox, stole a truck, and vaulted over the walls.”

  “Is it really stealing if you never take it off the lot?”

  “I could have you shot, you know.”

  Sigrud stands. “Well, n—”

  “Try it,” says Mulaghesh. “Then try explaining where I was shot. Looking around me it seems like you’re in a much more vulnerable position than I am, CTO Harkvaldsson.”

  “As a Saypuri, I would imagine you’d be quite concerned about keeping Divine artifacts like this closely watched.”

  “True, and as a Saypuri, I think it was damn shitty of you not to tell us you had these. Though I can understand you wouldn’t want us taking your trump card. Then what would you play against the tribes?”

  Signe’s brow creases, wondering how Mulaghesh understood her intent.

  “I was hiding over there,” Mulaghesh says, gesturing with the cigarillo. “I heard everything.”

  Signe turns bright pink. “How dare you! That…That…” She looks to her father. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  Sigrud shrugs, bewildered. “What do you wish me to say?”

  “Something authoritative and helpful, to start! How ridiculous it is that you must ask me what to say when this woman has breached our personal privacy!”

  “This isn’t some family secret,” says Mulaghesh. “Or a company trick of the trade. All this shit is a national security threat, CTO Harkvaldsson.”

  “They’re just statues,” says Signe indignantly. “We’ve tested them for any trace of the Divine and found none. If they registered as Divine I would have alerted the fortress immediately.”

  “Right, if they registered using the tests you procured from Thinadeshi,” says Mulaghesh. “Do you want me to go sniffing around up there for your source?”

  Signe pales a little at that. “This has nothing to do with Sumitra Choudhry.”

  “Are you so sure? Are you hiding any other secrets from me now, Signe? Or is this the only one? Because a fine way to search your operation top to bottom would be to tug on Biswal’s coat about this and have him take the harbor apart out of sheer paranoia.”

  Signe opens her mouth, aghast, then looks at her father. “This…This woman is putting our nation at risk. Everything will fall apart if the harbor project isn’t finished. Are you going to idly stand by?”

  “You are a cunning creature, Signe,” says Sigrud. “Smart enough to know when you’re backed into a corner. If you have something to tell her, tell her.”

  Signe sighs, exasperated. “I have told you everything I know about Choudhry. I have always been aboveboard on that subject!”

  “Look me in the eye,” says Mulaghesh, stepping closer, “and tell me that.”

  Signe’s glacial eyes burn brightly. “I promise. I promise, General.”

  Mulaghesh holds her gaze for a moment, then nods. “All right. I believe you. For now.”

  “And…And the statues…Will you, ah…”

  “Tattle? Maybe. I haven’t made up my mind yet. I have fatter lambs to cook at the moment, and doing something like that would just complicate things.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to accept that for the time being. If we are all done threatening one another, can I please escort my father to meet with Biswal? And where is your hat?”

  Sigrud shrugs. “The wind took it.”

  “Oh, well. We’ll find you a replacement. Come on. Let’s go.”

  The three of them begin to exit the yard. Sigrud coughs and mutters about how after this he’ll be happy to return to the headquarters for a night’s rest.

  “Your rooms are already prepared for you,” says Signe curtly. “You will have the lighthouse suite.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  “It’s the nicest suite in the building,” she says. Mulaghesh isn’t sure how, but Signe manages to pack a lot of animosity into this statement.

  “I do not need that,” says Sigrud. “I have slept in far worse pla—”

  “I know you have,” she says. “That’s not the point. The point is that you are the dauvkind, and everyone here will expect you to be treated as such. If I stuck you in one of the laborers’ quarters they would think I was being disrespectful.”

  “Then…I will tell them not to think these things!” says Sigrud, bristling. “I will tell them to mind their own business!”

  “And you can’t do that, either! Then it will look as if you’re trying to cover for me. You aren’t just a nobody anymore! People expect things from you!”

  “You sound like your mother,” says Sigrud.

  “If by that you mean I sound intelligent, then yes, I do, and I will take it as a compli—”

  Mulaghesh stops listening. She hasn’t been to thi
s part of the yard yet, so she hasn’t seen the massive, fifteen-foot statue that rests up against the iron wall. The very sight makes her stop where she stands and sends a shard of ice shooting into her heart.

  She knows it immediately. Of course she does. Did she not see a much larger version of that carven figure just last night, rising from the sea to place her giant hand upon the cliffs? Weren’t every one of the ghastly illustrations on that plate mail burned into Mulaghesh’s memory, a solid wall of unimaginable violence?

  “Voortya,” whispers Mulaghesh.

  She stares at the statue. It’s so pale the light almost seems to filter through it, like it was made from the purest of snows. The statue stands on a plinth, but set before it is a wide bowl, almost like a claw-footed bathtub. Carved into the bottom of the plinth are many titles:

  EMPRESS OF GRAVES

  MAIDEN OF STEEL

  DEVOURER OF CHILDREN

  QUEEN OF GRIEF

  SHE WHO CLOVE THE EARTH IN TWAIN

  She wonders how anyone could ever come to love and worship such a thing. But then she realizes: Because they won. It’s as Biswal once said to her, during the gray, savage days of the Yellow March, outside Dzermir: “War is a hell beyond anything the Continentals and their gods could ever dream of. It behooves us to act accordingly. Those who accept it for what it is will be the victor.”

  And the Voortyashtanis, perhaps, were all too happy to accept it for what it was. They embraced it, made a nation out of it, a whole culture birthed out of the willingness to inflict the unimaginable horrors of war. And, having done so, they won, over and over again. They survived the Divine Wars and went on to conquer nearly every piece of territory in the world.

  Of course they loved her. No matter how cruel or indifferent, she helped them win.

  Mulaghesh wanders forward, staring into that cold, still face. She remembers hearing that Voortya never spoke, not to the other Divinities, nor to her followers. But she wouldn’t need to, would she? Just look into that face, and you’ll understand all you need….

  She notices something moving before the statue. It’s a tremor in the air, like a heat haze, like there’s a fire on the ground but she can’t see it. She squints at the disturbance, trying to track its source.