City of Blades

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Where did you catch it?” she says as they run.

  “My calf,” says Signe. “It’s…It’s not too bad….” But she’s talking through gritted teeth, suggesting it definitely feels quite bad.

  Mulaghesh turns, takes cover behind a tree, and looks for motion. She spies three of them lurching up through the ferns and the bracken toward her. She takes careful aim at the tree above them, then fires. The bark erupts just above their heads, and they dive for cover again.

  “They must not be the cream of the crop,” says Mulaghesh, hauling Signe up toward Rada’s house. “Otherwise you’d be dead.”

  “Put me down,” whispers Signe.

  “What?”

  “Put me down and leave me here,” she says. “I’m just slowing you down!”

  “I’m not leaving you, damn it!”

  “And you won’t make it to Rada’s house with me!” says Signe. “They’ll catch up to you and either shoot us or arrest us both! Either way, we’re dead. If we get arrested and the sentinels invade, we’re dead, Turyin. You know that!”

  Mulaghesh slows to a stop. She looks around and finds a large clump of bracken underneath one of the pines. “Do you think you can tend to your own wound if I give you the supplies?”

  “I can deal with a wounded leg,” says Signe, though she’s wincing. “Give me the rifling, and I’ll give you more cover fire and buy you some time.”

  “I won’t have you killing a Saypuri soldier on account of my dumb ass. Don’t use it unless you have to.” She sets Signe down and sees her face is twisted in pain. She takes a look at the wound and immediately assesses that it was almost a clean shoot, though it looks like it might have nicked the bone a little. She reaches around and pulls out her med kit. “I’d see to you myself if I could.”

  “I know,” says Signe, taking the kit. “Now go! Get out of here and stop her!”

  Mulaghesh turns and sprints up through the trees.

  ***

  Mulaghesh darts up the hillside to the other side of the house, to Rada’s living quarters entrance. She dives into the bracken and peers through the leaves, watching, waiting. She can hear the soldiers calling out to one another, signaling their positions as they comb the forest. None of them seem to be near her, and she doesn’t think any of them can see her.

  She starts creeping toward the house. It’s dark, but not dark enough for her to feel safe. Finally she comes to the base of the house, where a large bay window spills golden light across the trees. She can see the door, but she’ll be plainly visible if she moves toward it. She rises to a squat, reloads the carousel, watches the trees, and, seeing nothing, sprints for the door.

  She makes it. There’s no sound of a shot or a shout. But she can hear something coming from the base of the house: a soft ping! ping! sound, like metal on metal.

  I know what that is, she thinks grimly.

  She reaches down and tests the knob. It’s locked. She feels around for the door frame and confirms that the hinges are on the other side. Then she steps out from the cover of the wall, squares herself with the door, and delivers a powerful kick just beside the knob.

  The door cracks open. One of the soldiers out front shouts, “What was that?” But Mulaghesh is already charging into the house, carousel ready.

  The lights are on inside, but she doesn’t hear movement. She shuts the door and shoves a cabinet in front of it, knowing it won’t stop them. Then she quietly begins to move throughout the house, searching from room to room.

  Rada Smolisk is not home, or so it seems: no one in the kitchen, the living room, or any of the clinic’s quarters. Mulaghesh walks to the fireplace and feels the ashes there. They’re quite cold, as are the stones. Yet she just saw smoke pouring out of the chimney, and heard that sound below….

  Mulaghesh inspects the chimney and the fireplace. She knows that her time is limited, but Rada must be hiding around here somewhere. She doesn’t see any cracks or paneling in the walls around the fireplace, but as she paces over the carpet she suddenly stops, thinks, and looks down.

  One corner of the carpet is strangely askew, as if someone tried to pull it into place from an awkward angle.

  She grabs a corner of the carpet and hauls it up.

  Set in the wooden floor underneath is a wide trapdoor with a metal handle set in its side.

  She holsters her carousel and lifts the trapdoor. Below is a set of winding, curving stairs down.

  There’s a pounding at the door she came in through. She can hear the cabinet she tipped in front of the door creaking and cracking. Mulaghesh glances around, grabs a fire poker from the fireplace, and enters the staircase. She shuts the trapdoor and slides the fire poker through the handle, locking it. She wipes sweat from her brow, draws her carousel, and continues down.

  It should be dark here, one would imagine, but it isn’t: though there are no lamps, the winding staircase is lit by a faint orange light that filters up through the cracks in the steps. As she descends Mulaghesh can hear that tinny ping, ping, ping—the sound of pieces of metal striking one another.

  Or a hammer on an anvil, she thinks.

  It’s only a few steps after that when she starts to hear the voices in her head, whispering and murmuring.

  “…chased them down the shallow river, their arrows singing, and we leapt ashore with our blades and hearts glimmering gladly and struck them down like rag dolls, and how cheered we were by their shrieking flight….”

  “…fought me day and night, for four days, my teacher and I there upon the hills, for she had said she’d show me the primal beast that lurks at the heart of the world, the pet of the Mother, and when I struck her arm from her body and plunged my sword into her throat she died smiling, for she knew she had taught me all there was to know….”

  It’s familiar, she realizes: this is like the chanting and muttering she heard from the sentinels in the City of Blades.

  The stairs level out. She sees the wicked blaze of the forge beyond, and the swords in racks before it.

  There are dozens of them. Maybe four dozen, maybe five. Only a few approach the terrible, beautiful weapon wielded by Zhurgut, most not half so large nor half so fine. They are perhaps the products of a prentice smith, one still learning the wend and weft of the metal, still grasping what heat and pliability will allow one to do. But they are still swords, still weapons, and though crude she can see there is a primitive utility to them.

  And she can hear them. She can hear them talking, whispering. Inside these weapons, she realizes, are the memories and desires of an entire civilization.

  A small figure toils before the forge, adorned in a thick leather apron and a wide, blank metal mask with a tinted glass plate. The sight would almost be comical if the person did not carry themselves with an air of such grimness, pumping the bellows with determination and familiarity, indifferent to the sting of the sparks. This creature knows the forge and knows their work, and intends to do it.

  “Little Rada Smolisk,” whispers Mulaghesh. “What are you doing?”

  She watches as Rada holds a blazing chunk of metal in the teeth of a pair of tongs. She sets it on the face of the anvil and gives it a mighty blow, turning it over and over, her movements assured. Mulaghesh can see that the forge is cunningly crafted: Rada has built her own hearth and firepot and tuyere and bellows, with a vent above that must feed into the chimney. It must have taken her months to construct. There are also air vents built into the corners of the basement in order to allow out the heat. There’s even a draft in the room as the hot, active air circulates out, bringing the cool, wintry air in.

  Mulaghesh glances around at the dozens of swords, and reflects that, not for the first time, Rada Smolisk is trapped down here in the dark with the dead.

  Mulaghesh paces forward, mindful of the hammer in Rada’s hand. “Stop, Rada.”

  Rada pauses for a second, then continues hammering away on the lump of metal.

  “I said stop it!”

  Rada turns the lu
mp over, examines it, then sets it back in the coals. Her voice is small and soft: “No.”

  “Put the hammer down!”

  “No.” She takes the piece of metal back out, lays it on the face of the anvil, and pounds away at it again.

  “I will shoot you, Rada!”

  “Then do so,” says Rada quietly. “Shoot me. Kill me.” Another ringing blow. “I am indifferent to it.”

  “I know what you’re doing! I’ve been to the City of Blades, Rada! I’ve seen it!”

  The hammering slows. Then she remarks, “So? What difference does that make? How does that stop anything? So you know. So what?” She looks at the hammer, considering it. “This is the most alive I’ve ever felt in my life. Did you know that? All the burdens on my soul and on my tongue…With each blow of the hammer, they fade away.”

  Mulaghesh watches as Rada lifts the hammer and begins pounding away again. “The hells with this,” mutters Mulaghesh. She holsters her weapon and strides forward. Rada turns, brandishing the hammer, but Mulaghesh can tell that she’s not sure what she really wants to do with it: she didn’t expect or even really want a confrontation. So Mulaghesh grabs Rada’s wrist with her right hand, forcefully spins her around, and delivers a devastating stomp to the back of her right knee.

  Something pops wetly in Rada’s knee. She screams in agony and falls to the ground, her hammer clanging on the anvil. Mulaghesh ignores her. She walks to the swords and starts grabbing them and hurling them onto the coals.

  Rada’s shrieks turn into peals of laughter. She lifts her metal mask. Her face is wild and ash-streaked, not at all the timid little thing Mulaghesh has known over the past weeks. “You think that’s going to do anything? You think you’re going to destroy them like that? Maybe if you had a few weeks! It’s too late, General.”

  “You went to the Teeth of the World, didn’t you, Rada?” says Mulaghesh, pumping the bellows. The swords glow hot, but not hot enough. “Took a boat, maybe hired one of the tribesmen. You found Petrenko’s sword. He took you to the City of Blades to learn from him directly, projected you there. But the Watcher there gave you the boot because you didn’t deserve to be there.”

  “I’m not a killer, no,” says Rada softly. “But I know death. I know it quite well. It is my constant companion, as you know well, General.”

  “So what in hells are you doing bringing more of it down on the world?” snarls Mulaghesh. “You tested out your swords on those innocent people in the countryside! You sat and watched as people butchered their own loved ones!”

  “I had to know if it worked,” she says, her voice still soft. “I had to know if the swords were true, if they were really connected to the City of Blades. They took so much work to make….”

  “Work? I’ll fucking say! You made the tunnel to the thinadeskite mines, you’re the one who’s been stealing it to reforge these weapons! You’re a damned clever creature, Rada, but are you so damned foolish you don’t realize those things will kill Continentals and Saypuris alike?”

  “Of course I know that,” says Rada. “Of course I do.”

  “Then why are you doing it, for the seas’ sakes?”

  “Why?” says Rada, her voice rising, torn between amusement and hysteria and outrage. “Why? You want to know why?”

  “Yes, damn you!”

  “Because it is one thing to be conquered and lose one’s land,” screams Rada suddenly, “but it is another to lose eternity!”

  Mulaghesh pauses, struck by Rada’s frenzied outburst.

  “Can you imagine it, General?” Rada cries. “Can you imagine being trapped with all the corpses of your family for days and days, the stink of their bodies, the leak of their blood? Feeling them grow cold and clammy in the dark beside you? And imagine growing up fearing that whenever the lights go out, they might come back! Imagine going to bed every night not knowing if you might reach out in the night and feel a cool, wet face beside you, and feeling its mustache and eyebrows and knowing it was once your father! Just flesh and bone, and nothing more.”

  Rada looks up at Mulaghesh, her face contorted with fury. “Then imagine realizing that once there was more. Discovering that there was an afterlife, a heaven! Once my family could have been safe! Once the dead could have been preserved, loved, respected! When I gripped Petrenko’s sword, I saw it. I saw what once waited for these people, and I realized all at once what had truly been taken away from us—that in one stroke all the afterlives that had been lovingly built for us had come crashing down, collapsing, trapping all those souls in the dark….Do you understand what your country did to us, General? Do you understand that the Blink didn’t merely injure the living, but countless, countless souls in the afterlife? And all the people who died in the Battle of Bulikov died twice—once in this world, and again when they never passed on to the afterlife intended for them!”

  “Well, we never got any damned afterlives!” snarls Mulaghesh, pumping the bellows. “When Saypuris were massacred we just rotted in the ground, and if our families knew where we lay then they considered it a blessing! Your tragedy is but a candle flame among a forest fire!”

  “I don’t care!” screams Rada. “I don’t care! Damn the world, damn the Continent, and damn Saypur! If the world gives us no reprieve from life then let them destroy it! When I held the sword, it showed me all its broken kin scattered through the hills—and when they first made the mine, I knew what they were digging up, even if they didn’t! When I made my first sword I knew I brought them a little closer, brought the afterlife denied to me just a little closer to reality. Let them come here. Let them do unto us as we deserve!” She bursts into tears, sobbing hysterically. “We deserve it. We all deserve it.”

  “Those families you killed, they deserved it? That corpse you butchered to make it look like Choudhry, she deserved it?”

  “I don’t even know who that was,” says Rada softly. “I bought the body from a highland peddler….”

  “And all those innocents who died when you resurrected Zhurgut, did they deserve it, too?”

  She shrugs. “It was necessary. I had to see if my craftsmanship had gotten good enough to bring a sentinel here and keep them here. And you were getting far too close. I thought I could solve two problems at once. But what Zhurgut did will look like a mere bruise in comparison to the Night that is coming….And you can’t stop it, General. It took me years to make the swords. It’ll take far longer than an evening to destroy them, especially by a one-handed old woman with soldiers bearing down on her. I can hear them upstairs—can you?”

  Mulaghesh stops pumping the bellows. There’s shouting and a hammering from up above—likely the soldiers trying to hack through the trapdoor.

  Rada smiles. “Do you know what’s funny? I brought them here, and they don’t even know it. I broke into the yard of statues; I took the photos and sent them along. They think you betrayed your country, General. I’m sure by now every soldier in Voortyashtan wants your head.”

  “Shut the fuck up.” Mulaghesh realizes Rada’s right, of course. The swords glow a little, but she’s far from smelting them down, let alone all of them. The soldiers will break through long before she makes any headway.

  “You’re right. I can’t do it with this forge,” she says quietly.

  Then she reaches for her belt and pulls out the hilt of the sword of Voortya.

  She stares at it. It is dark and glittering, beautiful in a nasty, savage way, and she imagines how its blade flickered with a pale fire, the barest suggestion of something terrible and powerful.

  “But perhaps I can with this,” Mulaghesh says softly.

  ***

  Signe Harkvaldsson lies very still under the bracken as she hears the area flood with soldiers. She’s given up counting their number: at first there were only the five or six of them, but now there’s ten, twenty, even more, all of them surrounding the house. She can hear some of them talking, giving orders, sending signals up to the fort.

  “…know I tagged one of them. I kn
ow I did. I heard her scream.”

  “…blonde, right? The one from the harbor? Or was I imagining things?”

  “…no blood on the door. Could be inside, but I doubt it. She’s still here somewhere.”

  She shifts slightly to the right to look down at her injury. She didn’t give it the treatment it deserved, but she didn’t have the time for it: she’d hardly applied the tourniquet when she heard Mulaghesh kick in the door, which made all the soldiers come sprinting up. Her calf throbs so much that sometimes it’s all she can do to keep from whimpering. She is also disconcertingly aware that she feels quite faint, no doubt from loss of blood: not only has she just been shot, but she also “donated” to Mulaghesh’s ritual.

  She hears screaming from inside the house. The soldiers go quiet. It takes her a moment to recognize that it’s Rada screaming, howling in rage: she only ever heard the woman quietly stutter and stammer through life, so to hear her scream like that is queerly disturbing.

  A soldier says, “General Biswal is on his way, correct? Good. But tell him to hurry!”

  She groans inwardly. If Biswal is coming it’s almost certain more troops will be coming too. And the more troops that come, she thinks, the higher my chances are of being discovered.

  She feels faint, and knows that time is running out.

  ***

  “And what,” says Rada Smolisk, “is that thing?”

  “Shut up,” barks Mulaghesh. She shuts her eyes and tries to concentrate.

  “Is that a sculpture? A piece of a sword?”

  “Shut up!” She mentally reaches out to the sword, trying to feel for it. When she saw the sword in Thinadeshi’s hand it seemed to speak to her, to become something in her head, a medley of ideas and sensations and histories. Yet now when she needs it most it’s just a lump of metal in her hand.

  “Is that one of Komayd’s trinkets?” says Rada. “I know she had them. Things stolen from the Continent to use against us…It won’t work. None of this is Divine anymore. None of this is fueled by miracles, General. It’s powered by the rage of the dead.”