City of Blades

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  She listens to them mumbling, then looks ahead into the gold-lit hallway leading away from the courtyard.

  “Now…,” she whispers. “Where in hells is Choudhry?”

  ***

  She wanders through the corridors and streets of the City of Blades, trotting over bridges and along canals and through cavernous tunnels. The streets are not all white stone: many of them are battered or rent shields hammered flat, just like in the dome atop the Tooth. She keeps an eye on the horizon, trying to spy that giant tower she saw in her vision, but the buildings and statues are so impossibly tall that it’s difficult to see anything behind them. She can only look straight up, really.

  The streets are dotted with clumps of sentinels, all of them dormant and muttering like the ones she saw in the courtyard. They barely seem aware of their own presence, let alone Mulaghesh’s. But then she notices that no matter where the sentinels are standing, they’re all staring in one direction, as if they can see something behind the towering walls and statues.

  So—what are they looking at?

  Following this hunch—and completely ignoring common sense—she starts to run toward the sentinels, moving from small clumps to large groups and teeming crowds of sentinels, as they all seem to be magnetically drawn to something, clustering around some fixed point deep in the city.

  As she dodges between two tall, muttering sentinels standing on a narrow, ivory-colored bridge, she suddenly stops. Then she backs up and looks down the canal.

  The City of Blades seems to be riddled with canals, and the one she’s currently standing over looks like one of the biggest. As she looks down its length she can see countless other bridges straddling it, bridges of many shapes and sizes.

  But on one bridge, about a quarter mile down the canal, she can see something lying on its stairs.

  No—not something. Someone. A human form, limp and lying there, stained red just as she is.

  “Ah, shit,” says Mulaghesh quietly.

  She navigates through the crowd of sentinels and runs along the canal to the other bridge.

  Not like this, she thinks. It shouldn’t end like this.

  But when she emerges from one group of sentinels, and sees the body’s dark hair spilling over the white stairs, her shoulders slump.

  She knows what this is, who this is.

  She slowly walks over to the body.

  It’s a woman. She’s dressed in civilian clothes, but the bandolier, the grenades, and the satchel hanging from her shoulder all suggest access to military supplies. Mulaghesh uses her toe to open the satchel. Inside is a bundle of brown tubes tied together, each capped with metal: TNT.

  Packed for one hell of a pop, thinks Mulaghesh.

  “So this is what happened to Biswal’s missing explosives,” she says aloud. “The Voortyashtanis never stole them. You did.” She almost wants to laugh at the sheer stupidity of it all.

  Then she sighs, steels herself, and turns the body over.

  She isn’t sure what she was expecting. All this time Mulaghesh has only had a picture and a file to go on, an idea of a person more than a person themselves. Yet when she sees the corpse of the young Saypuri woman, stiff and cold, she feels a pang she wasn’t expecting.

  “Sumitra Choudhry,” says Mulaghesh. “Damn it.”

  She’s not terribly decomposed, Mulaghesh notes, which suggests that time doesn’t work too well here, as Mulaghesh suspected. There’s a scab on her brow, left over from her fight outside the tunnel to the mines, probably. She looks terribly, terribly young to Mulaghesh’s eyes, not yet thirty. There’s a trace of irritation or discomfort to her large, dark eyes, as if she can’t believe this is happening to her, that she should come so far just to die here, alone on a bridge over ghostly waters.

  “I’m sorry,” says Mulaghesh to her.

  The only answer is the trickle of the waters below.

  She looks closer at the satchel of TNT, wondering what Choudhry planned to use it on. Probably to blow up the citadel, Mulaghesh thinks, just as Sigrud proposed. Mulaghesh considers taking the TNT herself, but she’s never been a fast hand with explosives, and she doesn’t want to try now with so much at stake. She definitely doesn’t want to run around with a bunch of friction-sensitive explosives on her back as a just-in-case measure, either.

  Mulaghesh wonders why it hurts as much as it does to see Choudhry here. But she realizes she’s been thinking of Choudhry primarily as a soldier: a soldier operating on her own, trying to stop a threat to her country before it gained momentum, a soldier willing to lay down her life in the line of duty. To see she finally made that ultimate sacrifice is saddening, despite everything that’s happened so far.

  “For so long I thought you were dead,” Mulaghesh says to her. “I don’t know why I’m so surprised to find out I was right.”

  Then a strange, singing voice says over her shoulder, “It’s odd she even got here.”

  Mulaghesh whirls around, rifling at the ready. Then she realizes that the voice came from nearly fourteen feet above her, and slowly looks up.

  ***

  Towering over her is what looks like the figure of an enormous woman, or perhaps a sculpture of a woman made of metal: she is silvery and glimmering, her arms and shoulders smooth like chrome. There is an artfulness to her that is both beautiful and yet repellent—Mulaghesh immediately senses that this thing was made by someone—and her limbs are terribly distorted, far too long and thin for a normal human. There’s something blade-like about them, the way they narrow and thin at the middle, then expand outward at the ends. Her hands and fingers are nothing but knives, long and curved and thin—so thin it’s hard to tell how many fingers she actually has. She wears a ragged skirt that starts high above her waist and then drifts down to coil around her narrow legs. Her feet, Mulaghesh sees, are clawed, like those of a bird, and the woman’s face is hidden behind a veil made of woven hair, long and silky and somewhat translucent.

  Mulaghesh thinks she can glimpse the features behind that veil, the eyes and the mouth, but…but she doesn’t want to.

  The voice comes again, soft and strangely fluting, as if it’s not being spoken from a human mouth but rather echoing through many pipes, like a pipe organ: “I know you. You’ve been here before.”

  Mulaghesh tries to maintain her composure as she keeps her rifling pointed at this…whatever it is. It doesn’t seem to be a threat: it just impassively stares down at her. After all, if it wanted her dead it could have just stepped on her. “What?”

  “You were here before,” says the creature. “Only you fell through. Just a shade of you. A piece of you. Not the whole you.” The creature looks back over the canal, its posture wistful, thoughtful. “I would remember. We get visitors so rarely these days. Just the few recent ones, really.”

  Mulaghesh thinks rapidly. She remembers the voice from her vision: Are you supposed to be here?

  She asks, “You’re the guardian, aren’t you?”

  The giant head swivels back to look down at her. “I am the Watcher,” she says. “I watch and guard these shores.”

  “Did…Did you kill her?”

  “Her?” The Watcher cranes her head to the side to survey Choudhry’s corpse. “If I had killed her, she’d hardly be in one piece.” She holds up one hand and flexes her numerous bladed fingers. “Would she?”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Hm,” says the Watcher. Her tone suggests she’s intrigued that Mulaghesh would imagine she’d be interested in something so disinteresting. She looks again at Choudhry’s corpse, cocks her head, and says, “Dehydration.”

  “D-Dehydration?”

  “Yes,” says the Watcher, bored. “She came the same way you did, activating the tribute. But she used only her own blood, and when she came through she was weak and panicked. She ran too hard, too fast. Overexerted herself, poor thing. Not enough blood and fluids in that little body to keep it going, you see. I can tell. I am part of this place, so I know. I saw.”

 
“What do you mean, activating the tribute?”

  The Watcher carelessly flicks a finger at the horizon. “You came from the city, didn’t you? The flesh place? The place filled with idols, statues, carvings, each attributed to the memory of a great warrior, a great deed? But the carving of the Mother…That is carefully linked to here.”

  “So each one of those white statues memorializes the dead?” asks Mulaghesh.

  The Watcher waves her hand, bored: Of course. Then she looks at Choudhry and cocks her head again. “That one there did not truly belong here. She had slain but one in her life, and that was a panicked, fretful deed. But you…” The Watcher bends down to look into Mulaghesh’s face—her giant body moves with a horrifying silence—and extends one long, needle-like index finger. Mulaghesh stiffens, terrified, and nearly fires, but the Watcher simply brushes a stray hair away from her face with astonishing delicacy. “You belong here. More than most, in my own humble opinion….But you know that already, don’t you?”

  “What’s going on here?” asks Mulaghesh. “How are the dead even still here?”

  “Because the two worlds are tied together,” says the Watcher. “Once they were very, very closely tied.” She demonstrates with her massive, bladed hands, folding all the countless serrated fingers together. “One never forgot about the other. Each was impossible without the other. The living made war because they knew the City of Blades was waiting for them, and the City of Blades existed because the living made war. But then they broke apart—yet not completely apart.” Her fingers snap apart with astonishing speed, leaving only two fingers touching. “Some threads remained. This place persisted, a ghost of itself, but still here. But just a bit ago, someone on the other side started renewing the bonds.” Slowly her fingers extend, until more and more and more begin to touch. “The two worlds grow near again, like a fisherman reeling in a catch. The dead awake, very slowly. And when they wake enough…Well. I doubt I’ll have much of a job anymore. Because then this city will be empty, won’t it?” There’s a bored tone of indifference to her words. Mulaghesh is reminded of an employee whose supervisor has left for the day.

  “How can someone do that?” asks Mulaghesh. “How can someone just…reknit the world like that?”

  “How should I know?” says the Watcher. “I simply watch. I refuse access or I grant it. That is my function, my role. It’s always been this, since time before time.”

  “And what have you seen recently? Has there been anything…strange?”

  “Strange? No. This place is always the same. It always has been this way. Though for so long we had no visitors, no new arrivals, no victorious dead. And then…”

  “And then?”

  She cocks her head again. “And then three came. There’s you, of course; you’ve been here, now and before. And then that one.” She flicks her finger at Choudhry’s corpse. “She came many times, bursting in through the Window, over and over again….It eroded her mind; I felt it. Each time she came here, she was a little worse, a little stranger. And then there was the acolyte.”

  “Who?”

  “The student of old Petrenko, the ancient smithy.”

  “Wait,” says Mulaghesh. “Did you say smithy?”

  “Yes. It was Petrenko who developed the method that the old ones first used to make their swords. He brought an acolyte here, once—I felt their spirit barge into this plane of existence—but because I found them unworthy and unlearned, I banished them and sent them back. Foolish old creature, I’ve no idea what he was playing at….”

  “Their spirit…You mean they used a sword to project themselves here?”

  “Yes. Of course. How else?”

  Mulaghesh’s heart feels like it’s about to hammer its way out of her rib cage. “Wh-Who was this? Do you know?”

  The Watcher looks down at her. “When they project themselves here, I see no face and hear no voice. I only see their thoughts and deeds. And that one was no warrior.” She looks down at Mulaghesh. “You belong here. I assent to your presence. You have killed many, and I sense in your heart, in your spirit, that you will yet kill more. Perhaps many more.” The Watcher draws a single bladed finger across her smooth stomach, creating a high-pitched squeal that sets Mulaghesh’s teeth on edge. “May my mutterings do you well, little warrior. Go and perform your function, as I should do so now. Farewell.” The Watcher turns and begins striding back across the beaches, picking her way among the countless Voortyashtani sentinels.

  “Wait!” cries Mulaghesh.

  The Watcher halts, turning her head very slightly to look back at Mulaghesh.

  “Where is Voortya?” she asks. “Where can I find the citadel?”

  “The citadel?” asks the Watcher. “Oh. Why it’s that way, of course. It always is—isn’t it?” She stabs a finger in one direction, then resumes her journey, humming atonally to herself.

  ***

  Mulaghesh heads in the direction the Watcher pointed. She can’t even tell if she’s going the right way or not: there’s no real point of reference for her to use here. But the groups of sentinels grow thicker and larger.

  She moves on, and on, and on. Maybe only one mile, maybe forty. She can’t tell. Then it emerges from the swamp of white stone and immense structures, which appear to fall away like supplicants parting before their monarch.

  The citadel seems to unfold or calcify in the very air, growing on the hill before her like coral forming deep underwater, a great, curving, castellated construction blooming in the moonlight. It is osseous, ivory, an alien amalgamation of bone and frills and strange, aquatic apertures, all building to one tall, slender tower in its center, a shard of white rising into the sky. And there at the tip—a window, perhaps?

  Mulaghesh watches the window. Then the light from inside it blinks, blacking out from left to right, as if someone’s pacing before it.

  “So someone’s home after all,” says Mulaghesh. “Goody.”

  But the question remains—who?

  She trots off toward the chaotic base of the structure, full of loops and arches and staggered columns. The sand under her feet turns to stone, or perhaps marble. Smooth, hard steps descend into the belly of the structure, then down into a long tunnel. Mulaghesh checks her surroundings before entering, critically aware she is a bright red splotch in this ivory-colored palace. But it seems to be deserted.

  She isn’t sure what she’s looking for here. Choudhry couldn’t help her, and the Watcher sure as hells couldn’t. But there must be something in here, even if it is Voortya, or perhaps a shadow of Voortya. But what to do when she finds her?

  She exits into what looks like a courtyard and finds she’s in the center of a tangle of staircases. There are so many stairs up and down and some even to the side that they hurt her eyes. For a second she feels like she’s back in Bulikov. More importantly, though, she doesn’t see anyone on the staircases. Again, she’s all alone here.

  This isn’t right, she thinks. This is a damned palace, after all: Where are the servants, the staff? Who lives here? Who works here?

  She screws up her mouth, picks the staircase that seems to go up the highest, and starts off.

  Time seems soft here, so she isn’t sure if she spends a few minutes or a few hours pacing up staircases, stalking from ivory-colored room to ivory-colored room, pausing before each doorway to check the corners. Her legs begin to ache and throb. She feels like she’s climbed up a whole damned mountain.

  Finally she comes to a window. It’s tall and oblong, and lined with carvings that look very much like some kind of carapace growth. But she still stops and looks out, and sees…

  “Holy hells,” says Mulaghesh.

  The whole of the City of Blades lies below her, a forest of towers and statues, the streets tiny and insignificant at their feet. Yet in the streets and the alleys and along the canals are thousands upon thousands of sentinels, perhaps millions of them—more human beings, if they could even be called such, gathered in one place than she’s ever witnessed be
fore.

  But she can also see the edge of the City of Blades from here, the pale white shores sinking into the dark seas. And on those seas she can see something…strange. The surface of the waters are dotted with shapes, long and thin and curiously formed, with one end covered in spears and points, and in their centers a tall, thick pole of some kind.

  They’re boats, she realizes. Voortyashtani longships, each with a weaponized prow for ramming other boats. Yet they seem somewhat ghostly and unreal, as if they’re not quite there, or not quite there yet: they seem to flicker, as if they haven’t made up their minds as to whether or not they exist.

  As such, it’s hard to count them. But she would guess the fleet would be larger than twenty thousand vessels. Enough to sink every Saypuri dreadnought five times over.

  It’s unimaginable. But she doesn’t have to imagine it, because they’re all right there, right in front of her.

  “If those things set sail,” she says quietly, “we’re doomed.”

  She steels herself, grips her rifling harder, and turns to the nearest staircase up. Then she begins ascending again.

  ***

  The spiral of stairs narrows, tighter and tighter. She’s going up, in smaller and smaller loops. She thinks she’s in the center tower now, finally.

  About a hundred steps up she spots a tiny splash of color in this endless white place: a splotch of blood, right in the center of one of the stairs. It’s crusted over, but she can tell it’s fairly recent. She crouches and peers at it, then looks up the stairs.

  Divinities don’t bleed, she thinks. Not since the last time I checked.

  She continues up the stairs. The droplets of blood increase. Mulaghesh is perversely reminded of a lover leaving a trail of rose blossoms to their bed.

  Finally the stairs end at a large foyer—one that seems far too big for the narrow white tower she saw from the ground. Its ceiling is arched and is covered in what appear to be stone swords, all carved at strange angles, like stalactites dangling from the roof of a cave. Empty, dusty lanterns hang along the wall. She guesses they haven’t seen use in years, maybe decades.