City of Blades

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “That she could have been one of mine.”

  “Interesting. If I might ask—how does it make you feel?”

  “How I feel? Like I want to find out who did this.”

  “You feel a responsibility to her, then? More than you would any other person?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ve asked these kids to come all the way across the world to fight and labor for us. Someone has to look after them.” And yet, a tiny voice says inside of her, you walked away from the job that could have helped you do that the most.

  Shut up, thinks Mulaghesh.

  Does it feel better, being alone? Does it really?

  Shut up!

  “A thoughtful position,” says Rada as she works. “Few possess your capacity for self-reflection, General. We are beautiful, strange creatures of heat and noise, of sudden, inscrutable impulses, of savage passions.” She sets down a knife, grabs some kind of miniature saw. “Yet when we consider our own existence, we think ourselves calm, composed, rational, in control….All the while forgetting that we are at the mercy of these rebellious, hidden systems—and the elements, of course. And when the elements have their way, and the tiny fire within us flickers out…” An unpleasant cracking sound as Rada separates something from the body that should never be separated. “What then? A blast of silence, probably, and no more.”

  Mulaghesh can’t help but say it, as the subject weighs so heavily on her mind: “You don’t believe in an afterlife?”

  “No,” says Rada. “I do not.”

  “Sort of strange, a Continental who doesn’t believe in an afterlife.”

  “Perhaps the Divinities made one for us, once,” says Rada. “But they are gone now, aren’t they?”

  Mulaghesh does not voice her extreme concerns about this.

  “I wonder how cheated the dead must have felt when that afterlife evaporated around them,” says Rada. “It’s like it’s a game,” she says softly. “And no matter how you play it, it ends unfairly.”

  “The ending’s not the point,” says Mulaghesh.

  “Oh? I thought you were a soldier. Is it not your purpose, to make endings? Is it not your duty to make these”—she taps the corpse—“from the soldiers of the enemy?”

  “That’s a gross perversion of the idea of soldiering,” says Mulaghesh.

  “Then please,” says Rada, looking up. “Enlighten me.”

  She is not being sarcastic or combative, Mulaghesh realizes. Rather, she is willing to follow any string of conversation down the path it leads, much like she’s willing to follow a damaged vein through a desiccated corpse.

  The surgery room is quiet as Mulaghesh thinks, the silence broken only by the tinkle of Rada’s utensils and the soft hush of the rain.

  “The word everyone forgets,” says Mulaghesh, “is ‘serve.’ ”

  “Serve?”

  “Yes. Serve. This is the service, and we soldiers are servants. Sure, when people think of a soldier, they think of soldiers taking. They think of us taking territory, taking the enemy, taking a city or a country, taking treasure, or blood. This grand, abstract idea of ‘taking,’ as if we were pirates, swaggering and brandishing our weapons, bullying and intimidating people. But a soldier, a true soldier, I think, does not take. A soldier gives.”

  “Gives what?”

  “Anything,” says Mulaghesh. “Everything, if asked of us. We’re servants, as I said. A soldier serves not to take, they don’t strive to have something, but rather they strive so that others might one day have something. And a blade isn’t a happy friend to a soldier, but a burden, a heavy one, to be used scrupulously and carefully. A good soldier does everything they can so they do not have to kill. That’s what training is for. But if we have to, we will. And when we do that we give up some part of ourselves, as we’re asked to do.”

  “What part do you give up, do you think?” asks Rada.

  “Peace, maybe. Killing echoes inside you. It never goes away. Maybe some who have killed don’t know that they’ve lost something, but they have.”

  “That is so,” says Rada quietly. “Deaths of all kinds echo on. And sometimes, it seems, they drown out all of life.”

  And with those words Mulaghesh suddenly remembers that the woman before her was once trapped in a collapsed building with the corpses of her family, trapped in the dark with them for days and days. And when she does she realizes that, in some way, little Rada Smolisk might still be trapped in that darkness, and trying to free herself. The surgeries, the humanitarianism, the autopsy, even the taxidermy—all of this could be an effort to literally place her hands upon the raw stuff of life and sort through it, seeking some secret that might unlock her dark prison, and bring in light.

  Or perhaps, Mulaghesh thinks, Rada Smolisk feels at home only among the dead. She’s not stuttering at all now, and is actually bordering on erudition; whereas in the waking hours of life, with Signe and Biswal, she is a trembling, nervous thing, far from her normal surroundings. If death echoes, wonders Mulaghesh, perhaps one could get used to it, or even come to love its noise. Much like how Choudhry surrounded herself with sketches and images of this hellish country, and its history.

  Then she remembers….

  The charcoal sketch in Choudhry’s room—a landscape depicting a shoreline on which many people kneel, heads bowed, and a tower rising behind them…

  Mulaghesh sits forward. She saw it, she thinks suddenly. She saw it. She saw the damned City of Blades, just as I did.

  It must have been the Window to the White Shores, she realizes: the miracle Signe described. But it must have worked. Choudhry snuck into the statue yard and performed that ancient rite and glimpsed the very island Mulaghesh did; and perhaps the only reason Mulaghesh herself saw the City of Blades last night is because the ritual was still working, like a door left open for anyone to walk through.

  So how did she come to die? After all that, how did Sumitra Choudhry come to be murdered just as the other Voortyashtanis?

  “I’m s-sorry, General,” says Rada finally. “I’ve l-looked all I could, but I’ve found n-nothing.”

  “Nothing?” asks Mulaghesh, dispirited.

  “Nothing indicating anything, really. There’s j-just not much to g-go on. P-perhaps I am n-not up to the t-task.”

  Mulaghesh stands and walks to the table, surveying Rada’s grisly work. “I hate this so damned much, Rada. I hate it beyond words.”

  “D-Did you know her, G-General?”

  “No. Never saw her. Just heard about her. But to see someone reduced down to this…” She shakes her head. “We don’t even know it’s her, do we. We can’t even tell her family that she’s really dead. Just that we think so. And it’s not like we could have them look to tell us if it’s really…”

  She trails off, thinking.

  “G-General?” asks Rada.

  Silence.

  “Uh. General?”

  “She got a Silver Star,” says Mulaghesh quietly.

  “Um. What?”

  “She got a Silver Star. For heroism after being injured in the line of duty. She got shot, in the, uh…” She snaps her fingers, trying to jog her memory. “In the shoulder. In the left shoulder. I read her reports.”

  “Meaning…”

  Mulaghesh cranes over the body and gently pushes aside a drooping flap of skin to look at the left shoulder. “It’s smooth. It’s smooth, damn it. No scarring at all!”

  “So?”

  “So it’s not her!” says Mulaghesh, feeling relieved and baffled and furious. “It’s not her! I don’t know who in the hells this might be, but it’s not Choudhry!”

  “B-Because of a m-missing scar?”

  “She got shot in the shoulder, just above the collarbone, and she nearly died from it, Governor. It was grisly. They don’t give out the Silver Star for nothing. It’d have left a mark.” She looks up, thinking furiously. “Someone’s fucking with me.”

  “I’m…sorry?”

>   “Someone must…Someone must have known I was looking into Choudhry. They must have! Someone wanted me or us to think she was dead. I’ve got someone out there nervous and they don’t like it one bit. They’re rattled enough to go through the trouble of mutilating a totally different body and staking it out on the cliffs to try and throw me off the trail!”

  “Isn’t that, uh, a l-little bit p-paranoid, G-General?”

  “Maybe. But paranoia usually doesn’t harm, and often helps.” She only hates herself a little for quoting Signe. “Damn. What time is it?”

  “It’s 1900, G-General.”

  “Shit. Dark already. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to tell Nadar.” She shoves a thread of wet hair out of her face. “Well, Governor. This has been damn educational, I must say.”

  “Always a p-pleasure to, uh, assist,” says Rada, perplexed.

  “What will you do with, um, the body?”

  “Unfortunately, I am used to d-dealing with c-corpses,” she says. “It will b-be no tr-tr-trouble at all t-to make arrangements w-with the f-fortress.”

  Mulaghesh thanks Rada for her help, then braces herself for the cold as she exits Rada’s house. But, strangely, the shock never hits her. She realizes Rada’s house was freezing cold, perhaps inhumanly cold, so she was already accustomed to it. As she crests a wet cliff she looks back and sees Rada standing in the doorway, watching her with her great, sad eyes. Yet up above is her chimney, and from it flows a thick, steady stream of smoke, turned a glowing white by the moonlight.

  She wonders who could possibly want to fake Sumitra Choudhry’s death. Then she realizes that the most obvious suspect would be Choudhry herself.

  ***

  It’s late when she finally fumbles her key into her door and opens it. When she does she freezes, surprised by the roaring fire in her fireplace. Then she sees the mountain of greasy bones and crumbling crusts of bread on her tea table, behind which sits Sigrud je Harkvaldsson, stripped down to his shirtsleeves, his suspenders dangling from his waist, carving up a forearm-sized hunk of white cheese with his giant black knife. The only remnant of his kingly attire is the white glove on his left hand, concealing the injury he bore long ago.

  He jerks his chin at her. “I wondered when you would be back.”

  Mulaghesh stares at the mess and holds her hands out, aggrieved. “What…What the fuck?”

  “Signe said you wanted to see me.”

  “How the hells did you get in here?”

  “I picked the lock?” He picks up a clay jug, uncorks it, and takes a massive pull. “How else?”

  “By the seas…” She shuts the door and tosses her coat on the bed. “You couldn’t find anywhere else in this giant building for you to eat what looks like three whole chickens?”

  “Not anyplace where I wouldn’t get stared at. Or have servants fumbling over me, asking me if I needed things. They treat me like a bomb, waiting to explode. I much prefer your room. No one looks for me in here.”

  “Hells, I know I sure wouldn’t! Ah, look, you’ve gotten chicken fat all over the carpet….”

  “What was it you wanted to see me about?” He recorks the jug. “Signe mentioned the Ministry, but, to be honest, I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic.”

  She flops into a chair beside the fire. “I’m almost not even sure I want to say it aloud. You might think me a fool, or insane. Or, worse, I’d hear it coming out of my mouth and know I’m insane.”

  “Shara said that on our first few jobs,” says Sigrud, “tangling with the Divine.” He looks at her, eyebrow cocked. “Which makes me curious to hear what you are about to say.”

  There’s a silence. Mulaghesh holds up her hand. Sigrud, without a word, tosses her the jug. She catches it, pulls the cork out with her teeth, spits it into the fire, and takes a long pull.

  She shuts her eyes as she swallows. “Grain alcohol,” she says, her voice now raspy. “That shit’s not for the young.”

  “That shit is often not even for seasoned Dreyling sailors,” says Sigrud, watching as she takes a second enormous swig. “This makes me think whatever you say is, ah, very bad news.”

  “Yes. Yes it is.”

  There’s another silence.

  “I’ll need you to listen not as a chancellor of a foreign nation,” says Mulaghesh, “but as a former operative. And a friend.”

  “So you are saying, do not use this information against you or your country.”

  “Yeah, basically. Can you do that?”

  He shrugs. “I have always been good at compartmentalization. And, to be frank…I am not particularly interested in the work of a chancellor.”

  So she tells him. She tells him everything, from top to bottom, describing Choudhry, the murders, the mutilation of the bodies, her Divine encounter with that apparition that looked like Voortya, and her glimpse into what she now suspects was the Voortyashtani afterlife. And to her relief, he doesn’t look at her like she’s crazy, like she’s absolutely out of her gourd. Instead he just sits there, one eye blinking slowly, as if he’s just heard some rather disappointing gossip.

  “So,” he says slowly when she finishes.

  “So.”

  “You, ah…You believe that the Voortyashtani afterlife—this City of Blades—still exists. Somehow.”

  “Yes. Do…do you believe me?”

  He puffs at his pipe, releasing a huge cloud of smoke. “Yes. Why wouldn’t I?”

  In her relief she chooses not to give him the many, many reasons why a normal person wouldn’t. “I saw it, Sigrud. I saw it. It’s hard to describe what I saw, but…it was real, and I know it was real. They’re all there, all the Voortyashtanis that have lived and fought and died….It’s a…a fucking army, Sigrud! How it’s still around I don’t know, but they’re still out there.”

  “And now, you think they are, how shall I put this…coming through?”

  “That’s my suspicion. Just as I was, I don’t know, pulled through to them, they can maybe be pulled through to here.”

  “And it’s these sentinels who have committed these murders.”

  “Yes,” says Mulaghesh. “A whole family cleanly massacred, then butchered, and all such perfect cuts….It’s not something an ordinary person could do. But a single stroke of a sentinel’s blade, they say, was able to part the trunk of an old oak as if it were but a length of straw.”

  “But how are the sentinels coming through to here?”

  “The strange woman spotted at the charcoal kilns,” says Mulaghesh. “That’s my best guess. She must have found a way to open, I don’t know, a door of some kind and let them through. And I think she’s the same one who butchered that body to throw me off her trail.”

  “And though you have not said so,” says Sigrud, very slowly, “it sounds like you believe this woman to be Sumitra Choudhry.”

  Mulaghesh is silent. The wind slaps the windowpanes.

  “Yes,” she says quietly. “Yes, it seems that way. From the drawings in her room, which seemed so insane, and the way she drew the murder scenes on her very walls…She’s certainly the one person in Voortyashtan who would know the most about the Divine. And who else would want me to think Choudhry is dead besides Choudhry herself?”

  “You think she is mad? That that is why she is doing this?”

  “I don’t know why she’s doing this. But it’s the most obvious answer.”

  “What goal could she have in mind? Why do these things to these families?”

  “I don’t know what her endgame is. But it’s like she’s testing this process, figuring it out, getting better at it. She’s refining her technique, whatever ritual it might be. Something with thinadeskite, though, since we found it at the first murder scene.”

  “The material from the mines,” says Sigrud. “Which you said a Divinity caved in.”

  “Voortya, yes. Some version or rendition of her, at least, and I still don’t understand that one tiny fucking bit. And I don’t know why the sentinels don’t stick around, why they
don’t last, but…Maybe that’s why Choudhry keeps trying. She wants to pull them all the way through and keep them here. But damned if I know why.”

  Sigrud slowly sits back, absently carving at the block of cheese.

  “What’s your professional opinion?” asks Mulaghesh.

  “My professional opinion,” says Sigrud, “is that Voortya is dead. That is known. That is undeniable. Shara said Voortya proved the example of what happens when a Divinity dies. None of Voortya’s miracles work anymore.”

  “Yet I walked into one last night.”

  He scratches his eyebrow. “And how this is possible, I do not know. But…I have a troubling idea.”

  “What?”

  “Voortya was the Divinity of death, yes?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So, could it be possible for such a Divinity, who aided her own people in defeating death, to do the same for herself?”

  “What are you saying? That I saw Voortya’s ghost on the cliffs?”

  “Is it so mad? If you saw all those souls in the City of Blades, if they still exist, then why not Voortya? Perhaps whatever mechanisms that allow an army of dead warriors to persist could also do the same for a god. If it is really the afterlife of these lands, then the City of Blades must hold, what, millions of souls? Tens of millions? All the dead warriors from centuries and centuries…Many times larger than any standing army in existence today. Keeping them there is no small feat.”

  Mulaghesh goes still. Something in the fireplace pops.

  She sits up, feeling the blood drain from her face. Then she slowly turns to look at Sigrud.

  “What?” says Sigrud, wary.

  “An army,” says Mulaghesh. “An army, you said. And I said it myself not too long ago.”

  “Yes?”

  “And what do armies do?”

  “They, uh…”

  Mulaghesh stands. “That’s what this is all about. It must be! It’s like what Signe said about the Voortyashtani afterlife!”

  He frowns. “What does Signe know about the Voortyashtani afterlife?”

  “Like…everything? You do realize she was raised here, right?” Sigrud is so disconcerted he appears not to have heard her. She ignores him and continues, “Signe said that when Voortyashtani warriors died, their souls went over the ocean to a white island, the City of Blades. She said the Voortyashtanis believed that one day all the souls would sail back over from the City of Blades…and then they’d make war upon all of creation in the Night of the Sea of Swords.”