City of Blades

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Biswal sighs deeply. He shuts his eyes, and she sees there’s something starved to his face now, as if all his worries have scored away layers of his flesh. Then he squats and sits on the ground, groaning as his lower vertebrae rebel. “Come on. Let’s take a seat.”

  “Um. Okay.” Mulaghesh sits beside him.

  He reaches into his pocket and takes out a flask. “I think I might have actually funded some piracy, buying this,” he says. “Rice wine.”

  “What brand?”

  “Cloud Story.”

  Mulaghesh whistles. “Shit. I only ever drank that twice, and both times it was my birthday.”

  “Who gave it to you?”

  “Same person each time. Me.”

  He hands her the flask. The rice wine is like milky gold, and it makes her head thrum pleasantly. “Better than I remember.”

  “It’s your palate. You’re too used to the shit food and shit drink we get up here. It could be boat fuel and it’d still taste like a prized vintage.” He sighs again and looks at her. “Nadar is not alone in mistrusting the shtanis. Other officers have lost friends and comrades here. We’re in a war, Turyin. Maybe the first of many, as the Continent grows stronger. Ghaladesh might not want to admit it. The prime minister might not want to admit it. But the shtanis are fine with doing so. And someone in command must have the courage to admit it as well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve seen some movements from the insurgents. Watching us, trying to find weaknesses. They keep withdrawing whenever we respond.” He sighs. “But you don’t think that this”—he nods to the tunnel—“and the murders have anything to do with the insurgents?”

  “Maybe not nothing. But not as much as Nadar wishes.”

  “I must be insane. But I’m willing to let you keep following this lead, wherever it goes. You’ve found out a lot of things no one else has, Turyin. I just hope you don’t find something that brings ruin down on our heads.”

  “Me, too.”

  Biswal looks down at the bottle of wine. “I wonder who they’ll replace me with. When I catch my own bullet here.”

  “If you keep getting melancholy, Lalith, I’ll have to take that bottle away.”

  “I’m not joking, Turyin. They boxed up my predecessor quick as a flash and replaced him—him and a dozen other officers here. It’s like the world just forgot them.” His eyes have a curious light to them, one Mulaghesh has only seen once here, when Biswal danced around the topic of the Summer of Black Rivers. “The least they can do is remember us. Remember those who took on the sins of our nation to keep it safe. Not all of us get a Battle of Bulikov, Turyin—a battle our people acknowledge and glorify. We’re not all so lucky as you. The rest of us are like the cartridge of a bullet, cast away once used. And we are asked to silently bear that burden. Which we, as patriots, do gladly.” Then he stands, turns, and walks back to the fortress.

  What is a blade but a conduit of death?

  What is a life but a conduit of death?

  —EXCERPT FROM “OF THE GREAT MOTHER VOORTYA ATOP THE TEETH OF THE WORLD,” CA. 556

  Mulaghesh burns with anxiety as she walks back into SDC, but no one looks twice at her while she walks through the halls and up the stairs to her room. She opens the door and begins fumbling with her pockets, reaching for the letter, when she spots the washroom door inching open over her shoulder.

  She’s not sure how she moves so fast, but suddenly her carousel is in her hand, pointed at the washroom door. Sigrud slowly sticks his head out of the bathroom and cocks an eyebrow at the pistol. “You seem…nervous. Was it a success?”

  “That depends on your idea of success,” says Mulaghesh, sighing with relief. “Fuck, Sigrud. I almost shot you! Why don’t you knock or, I don’t know, start the evening outside of my room.”

  “Because then my daughter will force me into some other duty: shaking hands, listening to workers.”

  “I thought you wanted to get closer to her.”

  “I do. She brings me to the people I need to see, then dumps me there, walks away as they begin talking. It is…impolite. But enough of that. You found something of Choudhry’s?”

  “A message. In code.” She slides the paper out of her pocket. Sigrud walks forward—she notes that he seems to move silently, even though he’s nearly twice her size—takes it, and moves to the desk in the corner.

  “I have laid out the materials we will need,” he says, sitting. “Lots of paper. Lots of pen and ink.”

  “Nice to see you’ve set up shop. Shara gave me a codex of all the various encryption metho—”

  “That will not be necessary.” Sigrud sits, pulls out a pen, and unfolds Choudhry’s message. “They made me memorize so many codes in my day….This I could do in my sleep. And that is a complaint, not a boast.”

  He looks over the codes, then begins making small marks on the paper with a pencil, underlining a stray H or I or 3 or an M. He moves with a quiet, thoughtless grace, as if proofreading a letter.

  “That’s not the only thing I found up there.” She groans as she takes off her coat, her back popping and crackling unpleasantly. “Whoever it is we’re hunting drilled a damned hole right down to the thinadeskite mines.”

  Sigrud’s brow wrinkles ever so slightly as he mutters numbers to himself. “Mm? What?”

  “Someone made a second mine entrance, basically. A little one. Looks like the kind of thing people would carve to escape a prison camp. Biswal and Nadar are convinced the Voortyashtani insurgents used it to bomb the mines, but…”

  “But you are still convinced it was a Divinity, or something Divine.”

  “Yeah. There’s an ulterior use for thinadeskite besides conducting electricity, or you can have the head off my fucking shoulders.”

  He purses his lips, continues writing. “Anything on Choudhry? Besides this?”

  “I’m no longer so sure she was mad. Or that she’s behind this, even. She worked her ass off to get this message to me, or someone from the Ministry. That’ll depend on what it says, though…which, we’re making progress on? Right?”

  “Progress, yes. It’s a code used for trade delegates in Ahanashtan. Probably the least likely code to be known here. Which is why she used it, to be sure.”

  “I don’t like this. I prefer my madwomen to be absolutely fucking stark mad, thank you very much. This takes thinking.”

  “There is rice whisky in the washroom,” says Sigrud, “if you would like some.”

  “Mm? What? You hid booze in my room?”

  “I have booze hidden all over the place. Dead drop training has its uses beyond espionage.”

  Mulaghesh finds the jug of whisky—cleverly squirreled away under the sink—and sits and drinks as Sigrud decrypts the message. He shakes his head sometimes, as if what he’s writing confuses him, but keeps going. Then, with something like a cringe on his face, he puts his pen down.

  “Finished?” says Mulaghesh.

  “I…do not know.”

  “How can you not know if you’re finished?”

  “Because I am not at all sure what I translated. Perhaps it is in code again, but…If so, it is one I do not know. Come and see.”

  Mulaghesh stands and looks over his shoulder, reading:

  Listen, listen, little priests

  Coming now the bright white shores and all the flock there weeping

  Orphans, the disused and forgotten, the chaff of many wars, like snow upon an endless plain

  Listen, listen

  I’ve spent too much time there. Put too much of myself through. My mind, my thoughts, some part of me, it’s unraveling, and I can’t keep the threads straight. I can feel myself losing myself and I don’t know what that means

  No, I do. I know what it means.

  I did not kill enough. One confirmed kill, one measly little murder, not enough, not enough to go there. It only accepts the warriors, you see, those whose hands have spilled oceans of blood, lakes of blood

  I am trying, I
am so sorry

  The ore was strange, so peculiar, so odd, and something was amiss. When I neared it, when I sat in their labs and studied it for hours, I dreamed of things, of awful moments of my own past

  the pistol barrel trembling as I raised it, her face dumb with surprise, the jolt as the bolt tip pierced my body and then the crack of my weapon in my hand

  So I watched the mines. I did not know why. Something was wrong and I had nothing else to watch. I watched and watched and watched.

  Saw a lantern. Then gone. Then a lone figure creeping across the hills, to the trees, to the ancient place. Then gone.

  gone

  I found the secret entrance, the tunnel. I waited to catch them when they exited. I tried to, at least. Fought them. But they struck me, hard, in the head. Lucky hit, lucky

  I almost died

  I think I almost died then

  did I die

  how could one even tell

  I could go into the tunnels now but I could find no sign of who it was or what they were doing there, so I tried the ritual, the last one that I thought might work. I had sensed it almost working before, almost almost almost, like a key in a lock, all the tumblers almost falling into place

  I could sense it wanted to. I just needed to try it in the right place

  The mines

  I saw them there, the lost army

  They’re still there, across the deeps, down in the dark

  with Her

  someone must stop it, stop what’s coming

  There is a man I have learned of, an ancient man who knows the ways of this place from long ago

  They say he is a man but others say he is not a man but an idea that wears the image of a man

  But perhaps

  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps he knows the songs of Voortya’s opposite, the songs of sacrifice

  He knows the rituals never written, never recorded, he knows the secret ways in and out of this world and the next world

  He knows the way things were

  The flow of life to death and death to life

  Memory, old and withered, waiting upon the isle

  I must find him

  I must find him and find the ways across, so I can end them all, kill them all, stop what’s coming before it starts

  Remember

  Remember me, remember this

  Remember that I tried

  Sigrud and Mulaghesh are silent while they reflect on this. The room suddenly feels quite small and dark, the fire in the fireplace a low glimmering that gives off barely any light.

  “Um,” says Mulaghesh. “Okay. So. Let’s try and extract whatever tangibles we can from this.”

  “Good luck,” says Sigrud, standing. He walks to the fireplace and taps his pipe out onto the coals.

  Mulaghesh holds up an index finger. “Okay. Um. One—it was not Choudhry who made the tunnel to the thinadeskite mines. Someone else made it, and Choudhry got the jump on them, but they got away. That would be how she received the head wound I’ve been hearing about, and it’s how she got into the mines to perform the Window to the White Shores. Unfortunately, odds are that whoever made the tunnel stopped using it the second they were found out, so I don’t think I can pull off another stakeout, like Choudhry did.”

  “What if they left something in the mines to go back for?”

  “Then it’s crushed flat as a half-drekel coin under all that rock.”

  “Oh. Good point.”

  “Second.” Mulaghesh sticks out another finger. “It sounds like Choudhry isn’t the person behind all this. She was hot on the heels of whoever it was, and maybe that’s how she came to find out about the murders—though she doesn’t mention the murders at all here.”

  “If her message is true, yes. That is the case.”

  “Yeah, and let’s just assume it’s true for now. Because it also suggests that Choudhry left Voortyashtan to go…somewhere. To see someone, some old Voortyashtani who might know rituals and rites even the locals would have never heard of—and likely ones that even Shara wouldn’t know of.”

  “Could it even be possible for someone to live that long?” says Sigrud. “The Blink took place almost ninety years ago.”

  “Eighty-six, to be exact. The Blink and the Plague wiped out tons of people, but not all of them. Perhaps some survived, had children, passed along secrets. But she also makes him sound strange…an idea wearing the image of a man? What does that mean?”

  They sit in silence, each hoping the other will suggest something.

  “What we don’t know,” says Sigrud, “we don’t know.”

  “True enough. Moving on. Third.” Mulaghesh sticks out her ring finger. “It sounds like Choudhry experienced the same visions I did down in the thinadeskite mines, visions of the most violent moments of her own past, only she saw it in the thinadeskite labs. She mentions shooting someone with a pistol”—she reaches across her desk and flips through Choudhry’s file—“and she did receive a distinguished service award for an ‘altercation.’ You know what that means.”

  Sigrud points a finger to the side of his head and drops his thumb, miming the hammer of a gun, and mouths the word Pow!

  “Right. So somehow…Somehow the thinadeskite reacts to people who’ve seen combat, who have been forced to take lethal action, reaching out to them and making them remember those moments. Pandey mentioned it, I saw it, and now Choudhry. None of them mention seeing the violence from other eras like I did, though.”

  “Maybe,” he says, “it is because you have killed many more people than they have.”

  “Mayb—” She stops and looks at him. “Why do you say that?”

  “I was a Ministry operative. It was my job to know things. And I mixed with many soldiers.”

  Mulaghesh watches him clean the bowl of his pipe, stopping briefly to dig something out from between two of his teeth.

  “And…what did you hear?” she asks.

  He examines the chunk of food on his thumb and flicks it into the fire, where it sizzles. He regards her with a cold, steady gaze. “Nothing that would make me blush.”

  They look at each other for a moment, Mulaghesh concerned and mistrustful, Sigrud blank and indifferent.

  “You’re an unusual person, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson,” she says.

  “I feel the same of you,” he says nonchalantly.

  “I see.” She clears her throat. “Well. To return to what’s at hand…After these experiences, Choudhry grew suspicious just as I did. Which makes me ask, what the hells is in thinadeskite that does this? And why isn’t it registering as Divine?” She’s reminded of what Rada said while operating on the corpse: Deaths of all kinds echo on. And sometimes, it seems, they drown out all of life. “None of Voortya’s other miracles work, right?”

  “No. Voortya’s miracles are used as an example of how a Divinity’s miracles stopped working. That’s what I recall Shara saying. Voortya was, how did she say, the textbook example.”

  “Except I saw the damned City of Blades. As well as whatever apparition of Voortya it was that destroyed the mines. And now we know Choudhry saw the city too—which makes me wonder if that’s where she disappeared to.”

  Sigrud stops cleaning his pipe. “You think Sumitra Choudhry is in the Voortyashtani afterlife?”

  “No one’s seen hide nor hair of her,” says Mulaghesh. “And besides the person she surprised coming out of the tunnel to the mines, I can’t see that she had any real enemies. She explicitly says in the message that she went somewhere. That’s the only logical conclusion, illogical as it may be.”

  “So if she did go over to the City of Blades…why?”

  “She came to the same conclusion I did—the Night of the Sea of Swords, the Voortyashtani apocalypse. She realized it might be coming, that someone might be trying to trigger it. Maybe Choudhry went there to try to stop it. But how she thought she could do that…I don’t know.” She tosses the decoded message back onto the desk. “Fuck. Not for the first time, I wish Shara were h
ere. She’d know what to do.”

  Sigrud packs his pipe until it is overflowing with what smells like abysmally poor tobacco. “Why don’t you just ask her?”

  “She’s supposed to be hands-off with me. Industry forces looking over her shoulder, that kind of thing. The only means I have of contacting her is routing a telegram through Bulikov to Ahanashtan. It’d take days.”

  “She didn’t tell you about the emergency line?”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “Her…emergency line. For contacting her.”

  “You’re just repeating yourself. No. No, I have no idea what in the hells you’re talking about.”

  He sticks his pipe in his mouth and screws up his face as he thinks about it. “Do you really want to talk to her?”

  “Well…It’d be nice, sure, so—”

  “Say no more.” He walks to the window and licks his finger. “Now…How did this stupid thing start? Ah, yes.” He then begins to draw on one pane of the window, his thick finger making delicate, graceful strokes on the glass.

  “What are you doing?” says Mulaghesh. “Are y…Whoa.” She watches as his finger appears to dip into the glass, like it’s not a solid pane but is instead the surface of a puddle, somehow hanging there on the wall.

  “It works here,” says Sigrud softly. “Good. It’s one of Olvos’s, who isn’t dead, so it should still work.”

  She shivers. Something in the air changes: it’s like the shadows have all turned around, or perhaps the fire has grown larger but is now casting off dimmer light, or light of a hue her eye has trouble catching.

  The pane of glass is now dark and opaque: Mulaghesh can see the harbor in the panes on either side of it, but in the one Sigrud touched she can now see nothing but black. She notices she can hear something new, too: a soft clicking, like that of a clock, though there is no clock in the room.

  “I…think that worked,” he says slowly, not sounding at all convinced.