City of Blades

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  But Mulaghesh doesn’t know a damn thing about Choudhry besides what she’s read. All she has are the few communications and requests she sent back to, to…

  “To Ghaladesh,” thinks Mulaghesh suddenly. She stops a passing private and asks, “Soldier—what’s the quickest way to your communications department?”

  ***

  The comms desk has the feeling of an ill-kept library, bookshelf after bookshelf of multicolored files. Mulaghesh searches the shelves for the sign of a white thumbtack, yet finds nothing. Dispirited, she’s about to ask the young private at the front desk if she perhaps saw Choudhry do something here, months and months ago, when she notices something.

  She looks at the front of the desk. Right at the bottom, just above the stone floor, is a white thumbtack pressed deep into the wood.

  Mulaghesh stares at the tack. Then she looks up at the young private, who’s watching her anxiously.

  “Can I…help you, General?” asks the private.

  “Uh, maybe.” She wonders what message the tack is trying to convey. Perhaps Choudhry put it here so that Mulaghesh or whoever would stand in this very spot and speak to the soldier at the front desk. “What can you tell me about your operations here, Private?”

  “Is there anything specific you’d like to know, General?”

  “I…suppose I’m looking for backups or copies of all communications sent out from this station, Private. Specifically sent back to Ghaladesh.”

  “Well, each communication that goes out has to be copied and placed into storage, ma’am. If the communication isn’t received, we have to have some record of what was sent so we can resend it.”

  “How long do you keep records of the communications?”

  “We keep records for up to three years, ma’am, in case of an incident,” says the private. “But only those sent or received within the year are readily available.” She nods at the bookshelves. “The rest are in deep storage.”

  “Can you show me the log?”

  “Certainly, ma’am. What time period would you be looking for?”

  She gives her six weeks on either side of Choudhry’s disappearance. This produces a considerable pile of paper, which Mulaghesh promptly sits down and starts poring through.

  Two hours later Mulaghesh is still digging through the logs of communications and telegrams. They’re all categorized by date, then by the last name of the officer who issued the communication. Choudhry’s name is nowhere to be found except for the handful of communications she sent requesting files, which Mulaghesh has already scanned for code, to no avail.

  After another hour Mulaghesh is about ready to give it up and try something new when she notices one officer’s name is different: ZHURGUT.

  Zhurgut, she thinks. As in Saint Zhurgut? The Voortyashtani?

  She looks closer at its log entry. The telegram destination is one she’s never seen before. Most of Fort Thinadeshi’s telegrams only went to five or six locations: Bulikov, Ahanashtan, and Ghaladesh, as well as the other installations throughout the region. This address is completely different.

  “Because it doesn’t exist,” says Mulaghesh aloud.

  “Pardon, ma’am?” asks the private at the front desk.

  “N-Nothing. Never mind. Talking aloud.”

  She looks closer at the line in the log. The name of a Voortyashtani saint…And the telegram’s destination doesn’t exist. Choudhry put the telegram through but she never intended it to go anywhere…so there was never anyone to call the comms desk and tell them they never got it!

  Mulaghesh walks into the shelves, looking for the failed communication. She feels impressed by her own brilliance, but even more so at Choudhry’s: the girl was clever enough to use the comms desk backup files as her own cache, duping the attendants here into copying down her message under a fictional officer’s name and storing it away. Unless you knew to look for it, you’d never know Choudhry was involved at all.

  She finds the file and glances around. The private at the front desk is busy recording something. Mulaghesh slides the file out, pulls out the transcription, and glances at the first line. It reads: “A13F69 12 1IKMN12…”

  She sighs. “Ah, for the love of…”

  It’s in code. But of course it would be, thinks Mulaghesh. She remembers Shara provided her with a Ministry codex when she first sent her out here. Now it’s just a matter of determining exactly which one Choudhry used.

  “Well,” Mulaghesh says. “I guess I know what I’m doing tonight.”

  ***

  She starts the long walk back down to the harbor, wishing she had Pandey here to drive her again. But she’s happy to steer clear of Fort Thinadeshi for a while, feeling certain she’s increasingly on Captain Nadar’s shit list. And it won’t do to have someone close to Biswal dislike her quite so much.

  She should feel excited, she knows. She just figured out Choudhry’s signals and found the one possibly genuine communication that this operative ever made. But everything she saw back there actually makes her more worried.

  Because you had to be pretty cunning to think up a scheme like that, and by all appearances Choudhry went the extra mile to make sure whoever came after her would find this. Not exactly the actions of a madwoman, then.

  She’s approaching the checkpoint down into Voortyashtan when she glances north toward the thinadeskite mines. The machines are still churning away, hauling rock out of the enormous pit. She glances across the cliffs, absently noting how isolated the mines now seem, and reflects on the tremendous amount of damage this region has taken. Cities collapsing, bays dredged, mines carved and then caved in—it’s as if all the violence the Voortyashtanis once inflicted on the world has been redirected toward their very lands.

  Then her eye falls on a little copse of trees about a quarter mile north of the mines.

  She pauses. Cocks her head.

  For some reason those tall pine trees suddenly seem familiar to her. Strikingly familiar, even.

  She walks around the mines and toward the copse, leaning against the wind. It takes a while to get to them, but the closer the pines get the more familiar they seem. There’s something about the way they stand, radiating out in a circle with a gap on one side, like an entrance.

  A memory flares inside of her: painting one palm with honey, waiting in the cold and the dark for the wind to carry its scent….

  I’ve been here before, thinks Mulaghesh. Haven’t I? But it was very long ago….

  The trees loom over her. Suddenly they seem just as ominous and strange as the statues in the SDC yard. She hesitates before walking into their shadows, then chides herself for being silly and steps inside.

  It’s surprisingly dark and still inside the copse of pines, as if their trunks and boughs form a solid wall. The vicious coastal wind doesn’t penetrate their perimeter. It’s so dark that she almost walks right into the stone before she sees it, despite its size.

  The stone sits in the center of the trees, about man-high and rounded, yet running from its top to bottom are countless thin slashes, as if the stone was put through a carpenter’s router over and over again. There are hundreds of slashes, even thousands of them, scoring it until it looks like some strange, giant nut with a curious shell. Despite these lacerations the stone is still strong: no matter how she pushes or pulls, no part of it crumbles or falls apart.

  She remembers it, she realizes. She remembers this stone, remembers coming here in the night, seeing this ritual. They’d take us up here, she thinks. They’d take us up here and show us what they could do with a sword, slashing through six feet of stone with a single stroke. And so precise was the stroke, so perfect, so smooth, that it never crossed over another slash, never damaged the stone so much it fell apart.

  She walks around it in a slow circle, fingers trailing over the marks on the stone, the gray light dappling its surface.

  Once every three years they took us up here, she remembers. Once every three years they slashed the stones. In gardens like th
is, all across the cliffs. It was a message to us, to all of us who wished to leave our clans behind: “Do this, and you will no longer be a person. You will be a device. You will be a weapon, perfect and merciless, wielded by Her hand.” And we gladly gave ourselves.

  She stops. Steps back from the stone.

  She stares around herself, confused and terrified.

  This memory she just recovered, she suspects, is over a hundred years old. And it is definitely not hers: this is the first time she’s ever been here in her life, she knows that.

  But she thinks she knows whose memory it is. She glances toward the tall, thick pine at the edge of the copse and thinks, I remember hiding in branches like those, my palm slick with honey, my knife in the other hand, and waiting for the stag….

  She saw this place when she was in the thinadeskite mines, the vision of the boy with the knife and the white stag, going through some test to prove himself to the sentinels. To imagine that this place is real, still here, and only a few yards away from the mines themselves is dumbfounding to her.

  She steps back, aware of her alien reverence for this place and disgusted by it. This awe, this reverence, is not her own. It belongs to some young Voortyashtani boy from hundreds of years ago, and it somehow became trapped inside of her during her short spell in the mines, like some kind of mnemonic transfusion. She wonders what else the mines could have done to her, as well as how they did it, and suddenly she no longer feels too upset that the mines have been obliterated. She keeps backing away, feeling tremendously violated.

  But she finds something else isn’t right. Her memory is telling her something here is…new.

  She fights against the feeling—she knows her memories of this place aren’t hers—but she can’t deny the sensation that something has changed here, something that shouldn’t have been changed.

  It takes her a while, but she finally decides that the small, black boulder about twenty feet to the left of the standing stone is new. It shouldn’t be here; they practiced swordwork around the stone—Not me, she thinks, but whoever’s memory this is—all of them pacing back and forth, and they’d never have placed a rock of such size in the area. It would have been dangerous.

  She walks over to the boulder. It could have just rolled here, certainly. But it’s strangely round and flat, as if it was carven. Maybe someone could have left it here…but why would someone do that?

  As Mulaghesh steps before it something changes in her footsteps: there’s a hollow thump, as if she’s standing on a wooden platform. Yet this couldn’t be, as she’s standing on dark green grass.

  She lifts up the boulder. To her confusion, underneath it is a loop of rope that rises out of the soft, thick turf. She stares at it a second, then shoves the boulder aside and tugs at the rope.

  It takes three tugs before a whole section of sod lifts clean up out of the earth. Underneath it is a large hole, about three feet wide and three feet tall.

  She looks at the chunk of sod in her hand, confused. It’s a perfect square. She flips it over and sees that it is actually a wooden trapdoor with sod cunningly tied onto the top, and a loop of rope in the center for its handle. It’s like a camouflaged sewer cap, in a way.

  “What in all the hells?” she says.

  She looks into the hole, wondering if this is some Voortyashtani grave site, but she sees it’s not a hole at all: it’s a tunnel, sloping down sharp and heading south. It’s no small feat, either: she sees wooden support beams lining the tunnel, supporting all those tons and tons of earth.

  She sits up and looks south, and sees the excavation machines working away on the mines.

  “Ah, shit,” she says. “The mines…”

  She sprints off toward the closest checkpoint, thankful that she maintained her running exercises in Javrat, and flags down a guard. “Get word to General Biswal at Fort Thinadeshi immediately,” she pants. “We’ve had a security breach at the mines. And have them bring a torch!”

  ***

  Nadar and Pandey shine a torch down the tunnel, craning their heads low to see. “Are we certain it goes to the mines?” asks Biswal, looking over their shoulders.

  “Hells, I don’t know,” says Mulaghesh. “When I encounter a strange hole in the woods my first instinct isn’t to jump down it.”

  Pandey sits back, sighs, and says, “If you would all please give me some room….” Then he stands, shifts the torch around so it’s hanging by his shoulder, and does a graceful hop into the tunnel, sliding down it feetfirst.

  Mulaghesh, Biswal, and Nadar watch as the luminescence of his torch grows smaller, until he finally reaches a bend and it vanishes entirely.

  “Does it go to the mines, Pandey?” Biswal shouts down.

  Pandey’s voice comes echoing up: “It’s…It’s not necessary to talk quite so loud, sir. The tunnel does amplify voices a good bit.”

  “Oh.” Biswal clears his throat. “Apologies.”

  “But, yes, sir…It does seem to run into the remnants of a cave-in down here, sir. So it probably once did go to the mines, sir.”

  “Damn,” mutters Nadar. “Damn it all, damn it all! Another breach! Another one!”

  “This, I would assume,” says Biswal, “is how they managed to bomb the mine.”

  “It must be, sir,” says Nadar. “That’s the only possible way. I suppose we didn’t find the entrance to the mine down in the tunnels because it must have been as well camouflaged as this damned trapdoor.” She kicks the door hard enough to send it pinwheeling through the glen.

  “Yes,” says Biswal. “How did you manage to spot it, Turyin?”

  “Sheer chance,” says Mulaghesh. “It’s a long walk back down to the city, and, ah, no lavatories along the way.” She hopes this sounds believable: she’s certainly not willing to tell them she miraculously received this memory down in the mines.

  “Ah,” says Biswal. “I see.”

  “And you just happened to spot it?” asks Nadar.

  “I tripped over it, frankly. Once I was here I came in to look at that.” She nods at the scarred stone. “Whatever the hells that is.”

  “Another damned relic,” says Nadar.

  Nadar and Mulaghesh squat to help Pandey out of the tunnel. He rises, dusts himself off—a useless gesture, considering the amount—and nods at them. “Thank you, Captain, General.”

  “How long do you think it took to make this thing?” Mulaghesh asks. She squats to peer inside. “Half a year? More? It’s no shallow hole in the ground, I’ll tell you that.”

  “True. What are you getting at, Turyin?” asks Biswal.

  “I’m just saying this took a long time to make,” she says. “And I don’t think they made it to be used once, to drop off one bomb. You saw those support beams in there, didn’t you, Pandey?”

  “I did, ma’am.”

  “This is a serious undertaking. They basically built their own mine, in secret, underneath our noses! And they built it to last.” She peers down into the darkness of the tunnel. “Whoever made this wanted frequent access to what we were doing down there, I think.”

  Nadar can barely suppress her scoff. “Why would they want that, General?”

  “I don’t know. But I wonder if that’s why we found thinadeskite at the murder scene in Ghevalyev, which took place months ago. They took it directly from the mines themselves.”

  “But again, General—why would they want that?”

  “Why would they murder those farmers? Why would they blow up the mines, as you suggested? I don’t hear anyone proposing any motivations for those two crimes.”

  “The reason is clear to me, General,” says Nadar. “They are savages. They seek to harm everyone that opposes them, ma’am, however they can. They think no more than that.”

  Mulaghesh stands. “Captain, you’ve had three serious security breaches in the past months,” she says. “Someone stole explosives from you, someone stole extremely sensitive experimental materials from you, and now someone’s dug a hole into your mine shaft
a quarter mile from your secured site. And you still have no idea who’s behind any of it! If anyone here isn’t thinking, Captain, it’s not the Voortyashtanis.”

  Captain Nadar opens her mouth, furious. Before she can speak, Biswal leaps in. “That’s enough, Captain. I will stop you there before you say something insubordinate. You are dismissed.”

  Nadar looks back and forth between the two of them before giving a ferocious salute, turning on her heel, and marching back to the fortress.

  Biswal nods to Pandey and says, “You too, Sergeant Major.”

  “Yes, sir.” Pandey salutes and sprints through the trees after Nadar.

  Biswal looks at Mulaghesh with the air of a man who has heard his quota of bullshit for today and is all too unwilling to hear any more. “You, Turyin, are riling up the natives. I wouldn’t mind so much if I didn’t have to live with them.”

  “Your captain might be an excellent officer, Biswal, but she’s still biased and single-minded. How long has she been rattling her saber in your ear, begging you to go after the shtanis?”

  “She’s not the only one,” says Biswal. “It’s the opinion of many of my advisers that we cannot be diplomatic with the insurgents.”

  Mulaghesh nods at the scarred stone behind them. “But you can’t look at that and tell me that isn’t the product of something Divine.”

  A pause.

  “You think…You think this all has something to do with the Divine?” Biswal looks at her side-eyed, as if waiting for the punchline. “That the Divine is still possible here, in Voortya’s backyard, the one Divinity we’re sure is dead?”

  Mulaghesh can’t tell him the truth, she knows that. But if she can get him to request backup from the Ministry, there’s a chance she could get more resources behind her investigation. “I think someone thinks they’re doing something Divine. Ritually mutilated corpses, with thinadeskite sitting next to them—and now we find a tunnel to the thinadeskite mines, in the shadow of that bizarre totem there. Whoever made this tunnel, I think, did not want the mines to collapse. They had free access to the thinadeskite—for unknown purposes, sure, but there’s plenty of unknowns when it comes to the Divine. Maybe this stuff was considered miraculous to them once. And even though now we know it’s no longer miraculous—you’ve tested it, after all—maybe they’re just choosing to act like it is, going through the motions. But I can’t get your captain to consider anything besides the insurgents.”