City of Blades

by Robert Jackson Bennett

“I can order food from my room?”

  “What else did you think the button in the corner with the sign RING FOR SERVICE is for?” She looks back at Mulaghesh, who has not yet lowered her gun. “Please stop pointing that at me.”

  “What did you hear?” asks Mulaghesh.

  Signe glances around the room. Looking, Mulaghesh realizes, for the third person she heard. “Nothing.”

  “That’s a pretty bold lie.”

  “I didn’t come here to eavesdrop!”

  “Maybe. But that’s what you wound up doing.” Mulaghesh lowers the carousel and sets two chairs up facing one another. She sits in one and gestures to the other. Signe slowly sits. “So. What’d you hear?”

  “You can’t shoot me, you know,” says Signe. “This is my company’s property. I could stand up and leave right now.”

  “Try it,” says Mulaghesh. “I might have one hand, but I still know how to restrain someone and not leave a mark.”

  Signe looks to her father. “Are you going to allow this?”

  “I remember today,” he says, “when you introduced me to the welders here, then abandoned me, leaving me with them. It is no fun, being stuck in a difficult spot.”

  “I…I swear,” says Signe, “you two are the most frustrating, useless people alive! But of course you’d gang up on me; you both know each other so well.”

  Mulaghesh says simply, “The afterlife.”

  With those two words Signe freezes, just for a second, her pale blue eyes flicking away and then back.

  “Yeah,” says Mulaghesh. “You heard. I’m betting you heard a lot. Why don’t we have a civil conversation about this?”

  Signe considers her options. Then she takes out her silver box filled with her tiny black cigarettes. She lights a match with a thumbnail—a trick Mulaghesh feels like she’s been sitting on for a while—takes a long drag, and exhales, a seemingly endless river of smoke flowing from somewhere deep inside of her. “All right. I will be direct. You…You think Sumitra Choudhry—poor little mad Sumitra Choudhry—has somehow traveled to Voortya’s City of Blades?”

  “She seems to say that’s what she was intending to do,” says Mulaghesh.

  “And I assume that what is—or was—being mined up by the fortress was this…thinadeskite you mentioned?”

  Mulaghesh grimaces. So much for state secrets. “Yes.”

  “And both you and Choudhry believe this material has some kind of connection to the Voortyashtani afterlife?”

  “Jury’s still out on that one.”

  “At the very least,” says Signe, “you think it is connected to Voortya…whom you said you saw. That you…you saw.” Mulaghesh feels Signe’s bright, hard gaze poring over her, studying her every feature, and she is suddenly aware of how intensely, furiously bright this young woman is. “Do you really believe that?”

  “I don’t know what I believe. But I know what I saw.”

  Mulaghesh doesn’t like the condescending, dismissive smile creeping into Signe’s face. “You’re mad,” says Signe. “The two of you, if he believes it. The three of you, if Choudhry did too. I’m glad I heard what I did, because now I know I’m dealing with absolute loonies, rather than merely suspecting it!”

  “I’ve been there,” says Mulaghesh quietly. “I’ve seen it. Remember when I almost fainted before the statue of Voortya in your yard? It took me there. It showed me something. Sumitra Choudhry had been at that spot before me, performed some rite, and I walked right into its aftereffects.”

  “But even the Voortyashtanis believe the afterlife’s gone!” says Signe. “Everyone accepts that now, when you die, you just rot in the damned ground! If these people don’t believe it, why should you?”

  “They haven’t seen gods before,” says Mulaghesh fiercely. “And I have. I almost died facing them. You are young and clever and brash. But I have seen so, so much more of life than you have, child. I have been so close to the Divine before, I could smell it. And I smell it again, right now.”

  Signe grows sober at this. She looks back and forth between Mulaghesh and Sigrud, who is still facing away. “Do…Do you really believe what you’re saying?”

  “I do,” says Mulaghesh. She sits back and watches Signe coldly. “And I also believe that if the Voortyashtani afterlife is possible, the Night of the Sea of Swords is possible as well. I also believe that that makes investing in this harbor a damn stupid idea, isn’t it? And you know there are forces in Saypur just itching to rebuke the prime minister, cut her pet project loose, and walk away from it, leaving it to die. I believe they’re looking for any excuse to scrap it. And I believe I could tell them the CTO of SDC was hiding Voortyashtani artifacts in order to blackmail the locals. I could tell them anything because frankly, Signe, they’re just waiting for an excuse. If one of Shara’s own trusted deputies says it’s over, then it’s over.”

  Signe stares at her in horror. “You…You wouldn’t.”

  “I wouldn’t? I just told you what I saw, what I believe. This is my greatest nightmare come to life, Signe Harkvaldsson. Do not trifle with me as I try to amend the situation.”

  “What is it you want?” asks Signe, panicked. “To scare me into silence? What would I gain from telling anyone what you believe?”

  “I don’t want to scare you. I want you to help, damn it.” She grabs the decoded message and shoves it into Signe’s hands. “You’re Voortyashtani. You were raised here. Look at this and tell me if you see one damn thing that sounds familiar, that means anything. Anything.”

  Signe stares at Mulaghesh, confused, then turns to the message. “I have never been told to read something so mad with quite so much pressure. It’s absolut—”

  She trails off. Then all the color slowly leaves her face.

  “What?” says Mulaghesh.

  “Oh, no,” Signe says quietly. “Oh, oh, please no.”

  Sigrud turns around, now concerned. “Signe? What is wrong?”

  Signe sits frozen for nearly half a minute, then shuts her eyes. “I hoped it wasn’t there. I hoped it’d just disappeared somehow, swallowed by the seas.”

  “What are you talking about?” says Mulaghesh.

  She says softly, “The Isle of Memory.”

  “It’s real?” says Mulaghesh. “This island is real?”

  “Of course it’s real,” says Signe. She sounds terribly sad and weary. “I know it is. I’ve been there before.”

  “Can you take me there?”

  Signe bows her head, and it’s shocking to see someone who is usually the picture of confidence crumple so thoroughly. Then, very quietly, she says, “Yes.”

  ***

  The aluminum roof of the SDC guard booth plinks and plonks with countless fat raindrops, which sound more like a rain of marbles. Lennart Björck, cursing, maneuvers all his pots and pans so they catch each tiny waterfall. This small armada of crockery is his constant and unwelcome partner during his guard shifts, for though he tries to patch the roof after each torrential downpour, there’s always something he missed.

  He does a double take as he dumps one of the larger pots out of the booth window. Someone is walking down the road to them, slipping and sliding in the muck. It seems to be a woman, from their size and the tendrils of wet hair peeking out of their heavy cloak, but he can’t see much else about them. Not that he would expect to in this weather. You want as much between you and the atmosphere in Voortyashtan as you can manage.

  He squints. The woman is carrying something very curious: a very large pine box, about four or five feet long. It’s also quite flat, not more than three or four inches thick.

  He puts his rifling close, leaning it against the wall. Then he stands at the window and waits for her. She struggles up and maneuvers the pine box around so she can speak to him. It looks like the box is immensely heavy. “Delivery for General Mulaghesh from the fortress!”

  “General Mulaghesh?” he says. “The Saypuri?” He looks closer at her. Her face is bound up in a scarf, and he can’t make much out
about her. “Who is it from?”

  “Captain Nadar.”

  “Oh. Well then. Here, hand it here.”

  She hesitates. “I’m told it’s a very sensitive item.”

  “I can’t allow any items to enter the harbor works without a proper inspection first, miss. We’re at a high security alert.”

  She hesitates some more, then reluctantly hefts up the pine box. “It is a very old item, they told me. Not to be touched. Especially with the naked skin. Oils, you see.”

  “Yes, yes,” says Björck. He takes the pine box—it easily weighs over fifty pounds—places it on a table, and opens it. He gasps softly. “Oh-hoh.”

  Inside is a massive, glimmering sword, over four feet long and thick as a butcher’s cleaver. Its handle is beautiful yet disturbing, featuring patterns of tusks and teeth and chitin. And the blade shines so strangely, as if it’s not a sword but a mirror. He checks the lining—being careful not to touch the sword, following the woman’s instructions—but he sees no hint of explosives or hidden detonation devices.

  He stares into his reflection in the blade. He likes what he sees, for some reason. His eyes flash handsomely; his shoulders look broader. Somehow he looks stronger in the blade. Fiercer. Powerful.

  “It is not to be touched, they said,” says the woman again.

  “Mm?” says Björck, startled. “Oh. Yes, of course.” He shuts the box and rehooks the clasp. “Due to the increased security, I’ll have to be the one to bring the package to her. Unless you have written approval from the fortress…”

  “Captain Nadar did not give me any,” says the woman. “But…provided you do not touch it…it should be no issue.” She bows. “Thank you. And good day,” she says, and she turns and walks up the road.

  Björck watches her, thinking this all very queer. Then he puts the box under his arm and flags over his supervisor. Upon hearing that it’s from the fortress for the general, he’s given permission to go ahead.

  The rain begins to let up as he walks down the seawall road. With each step the box feels a little heavier and a little heavier, as if begging to be dropped, to taste the glint of moonlight, and be held.

  I wonder, Björck thinks, why it is I think such things?

  ***

  “Signe…,” says Sigrud. “Are…Are you sure you—”

  “We need to go to my office,” Signe says suddenly. She stands, and suddenly all the fear and anxiety is gone from her. “I’ll need maps.”

  “O-Okay,” says Mulaghesh.

  “Just one moment, first.” Signe goes back to the secret door, opens it, and grabs a briefcase that was sitting on the stairs. Mulaghesh pauses to wonder exactly what brought Signe to her room in the first place.

  Signe’s office lies deep in the recesses of SDC headquarters, which comes as a surprise to Mulaghesh. Someone as high-powered and valuable as Signe Harkvaldsson should surely have an office on the top floor with huge windows. Yet her office is almost in the basement, and resembles a loading dock converted into a loft.

  But the room is obscured by what looks like, to Mulaghesh’s eye, racks and racks of clothing, each one labeled with numbered tags, starting at 1.0000 and going up to…well, the biggest number she sees is 17.1382. As she passes one rack Mulaghesh cranes her head to get a look at it, and she sees that they’re not clothes but blueprints, thousands and thousands of plans of things that, from what she sees, never got built.

  Signe leads them to a large table in the center, an austere block of white stone that’s covered in yet more blueprints. At the table’s center are square stone cups filled with a variety of drafting materials: pens, pencils, rulers, abacuses, set squares, magnifying glasses, and several types of compasses. Next to these are three ashtrays, all quite full. Signe tsks as she approaches. “I’ll have to remind my assistant to dump these out.”

  She makes them wait as she rolls up the blueprints and files them away. “Don’t touch anything!” she warns as she paces away through the racks.

  Sigrud stares around himself in awe. “My daughter,” he says slowly, “lives here?”

  “I don’t see a bed,” says Mulaghesh. “But yeah, I get that impression.”

  Signe returns with a large, colorful map fluttering in her hands like a flag. “Here we are,” she says. She lays the map out. It’s a map of the coastline, including the flow of the oceanic currents, though there have been some alterations to where the Solda passes Voortyashtan: dozens of little red blocks are clustered together in a manner that reminds Mulaghesh of a child’s strategy game, like Batlan.

  “What am I looking for here?” says Mulaghesh.

  “This is an SDC map of all the coastlines and currents of the region. But what we’re looking for…” Then she says, “Ah!” and points to a flicker in the thousands of tiny blue lines a few dozen miles southwest of Voortyashtan. “There.”

  Mulaghesh peers at where she’s pointing. “There’s nothing there.”

  “I know,” says Signe. “But that’s where it is.”

  “The Isle of Memory?”

  “Yes. It’s real. That’s where it lies.”

  “Then why isn’t it on the map?”

  “Because I removed it.”

  Mulaghesh and Sigrud slowly turn to look at her.

  “Some places aren’t worth going to,” says Signe quietly. “Some places deserve to be forgotten. And that’s one of them.”

  “What is it?” asks Sigrud. “What is there?”

  “It is part of a chain of small islands,” she says. “The last, and the largest. It was a place where the highlanders conducted a…a rite of passage for adolescents. They’d take children down out of the mountains, along the river, and to the shore, where boats would be waiting. Then we’d sail southwest, along the coast, through the islands, until we found it.” Her face is grim and haunted. “They called it the Tooth. At its top was a ruin—an ancient old place made of metal and knives. It was rumored a man lived in it, an old man who remembered everything—a man of memory, in other words—but I thought it was just a story, a myth. We saw no man, and no one seemed to expect us to. I thought at the time that it was a place that once had been Divine and held some specific purpose that was lost—but the highlanders, being traditional, kept coming back, kept fulfilling their oath. Those islands…they are a very strange place.”

  “What did they do there?” asks Sigrud. “The highlanders?”

  Signe purses her lips and takes out a cigarette. “Bad things.”

  Mulaghesh clears her throat. “So that’s where Choudhry went, yes? Then how exactly am I going to get to this Tooth? I don’t know how to sail, and I sure as hells can’t swim that far.”

  “You don’t need to know how to sail,” says Signe, lighting yet another cigarette. “Because I do.”

  ***

  Björck trudges up the muddy pathway to the SDC lighthouse, the seawall tapering off to his left. Someday soon, they say, this will all be paved over and landscaped, a place worthy of being an international embassy, the world’s first impression of SDC’s accomplishments as they begin to sail up the Solda. But for now, it is—like everything in Voortyashtan, in Björck’s opinion—soaking wet and covered with gritty mud.

  He hears a shout behind him and awkwardly turns, the heavy pine box slipping down his arm. He frowns when he sees who’s running up.

  “Ach, Oskarsson,” he says to himself, dismayed. “Of all the filthy dogs who had to catch me now…”

  “Björck!” says the young Dreyling, trotting up. “What in the hells are you doing up here? Why aren’t you at the gate?”

  He glowers at Jakob Oskarsson, fifteen years his junior and yet several positions his superior. Björck is keenly aware of the rumors that Oskarsson is the son of one of the Dreyling city leaders who helped drive out piracy, and thus was instrumental to the formation of the United Dreyling States; but Björck is also keenly aware of the other rumors suggesting Oskarsson’s father was in league with the pirates, and only backstabbed them when he saw
the writing on the wall. Whatever the cause, Jakob Oskarsson’s father was powerful enough to get his son into a good place at SDC, despite Oskarsson having no experience in construction or seafaring, and certainly no personal virtues of his own.

  “Delivery for the general,” says Björck gruffly. Then he adds, “Sir.”

  “Delivery?” says Oskarsson. He bites at a fingernail. “How peculiar. Did you check it?”

  “Of course I checked it, sir. It is a sword, just a sword.”

  “A sword?” says Oskarsson, agog. “Who is sending the general a sword?”

  “It comes from the fortress.” Björck shrugs. “I know better than to question that.”

  Oskarsson leans back on his heels and scratches his chin, thinking. “A special sword then, from the fortress, for the general…You know, Björck, perhaps I should be the one to deliver this to the general. It would be more befitting of someone of my rank, yes?”

  Björck chooses to fix his gaze on a light pole four feet to Oskarsson’s right, fearing that if he were to look at this impudent creature’s face he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from breaking it. “As you wish, sir.” He hands it over. “She did say not to touch it.”

  “Who did?”

  “The messenger. That is what she said to me. Do not touch the contents.”

  Oskarsson thinks about this, then shrugs, laughs, and places the box on the seawall. “Let me at least see what kind of sword this is.” He opens it up and, like Björck, gasps at its beauty. “My word…What a creation of a thing this is.”

  “Yes,” says Björck dourly.

  “Yet who could possibly wield it? It must almost be too heavy to lift.”

  Oskarsson stares down into the mirrored blade, transfixed. Then something changes in his eyes, and Björck realizes what he’s thinking.

  “She…She did say not to touch it, sir,” says Björck.

  “And this woman, is she deputy security chief? Or better? Is she the CEO of SDC?”

  “N-no, sir.”

  “And if the deputy security chief wishes to place security first, and hold the sword just to see if it is dangerous, is that a bad thing?”

  Björck can tell that security is the farthest thing from Oskarsson’s mind: he wishes to hold this thing, to feel its heft and power. “I…I—”