“I have seen our soldiers killed in the wilderness, ma’am,” says Nadar softly. “I’ve held them in my arms as they died. I’ve seen the trains sent back to Ahanashtan, loaded up with coffins. I’ve seen these things time and time again, General. With all due respect, I personally do not believe myself to be blind at all.”
* * *
—
Nadar leaves Mulaghesh alone while she conducts her inspection. Mulaghesh furiously rubs her arm, so angry that it’s difficult to focus. Well, at least I know where Nadar stands. Leaving only Lalith as an option.
She shakes herself and begins to scan the walls of the room, her eyes tracing over the black scrawls and splashes of paint.
Look for things so simple, Sigrud told her, that they seem to have no meaning in themselves.
She asked, What in the hells does that mean?
It will not be a curious picture, or a carving in the wall that seems to communicate something, he said. No riddles or codes, in other words. It will be an ordinary thing that simply does not belong. A stripe of chalk or paint that looks like a painter’s error. Something stuck in the walls, like a staple or a pin, or a nick in the walls like someone banged them while moving furniture. Or a slash in a carpet that looks like someone damaged it.
She looks over the images on the walls, trying not to be disturbed by them. Thousands of swords, stuck in the earth. An arrow piercing the heart of a wave. A face she now knows to be the cold, regal visage of Voortya herself gives her pause—Choudhry did an impressively good job of capturing the Divinity’s likeness.
Perhaps she painted over it, thinks Mulaghesh. Whatever it was. Perhaps her signal’s no longer here at all.
Her eye falls on the window in the far wall. It’s long and thin, the barest slit of glass. Mulaghesh recognizes the intent of the design immediately, built to allow in light and air and nothing else.
Yet in the corner of the window frame, almost tucked out of view, is a tiny white dot.
She steps closer. It’s a thumbtack, she sees, pushed deep into the wall.
Mulaghesh feels the window, testing the frame for any weaknesses or hollows. She finds none, but it does have a clasp that allows you to open it. With a squeak, she jimmies the window open, wincing at the blast of cold air, and feels the outside of the window.
There’s something there, just barely: a piece of string, dangling down. She grabs it and begins to pull it in. It’s long, nearly four feet.
Of course, thinks Mulaghesh. If you’re paranoid about room searches, put whatever it is you want to hide outside your room….
But when she finishes pulling the string all the way in, she’s disappointed: at its end is nothing but a small hook, like a clasp from a woman’s necklace. Something hung here once, clearly, but it’s gone now: maybe she moved it, or maybe it fell.
Tied to the string just above the hook, however, is another white thumbtack.
She remembers what Sigrud said: Ministry officers are trained to leave behind caches. Dead drops. If they disappear or get killed, they want to tell whoever comes next what they were doing.
Mulaghesh asked, So she wouldn’t have hidden anything away in the mines or something crazy like that?
Not if she was following SOP. She will have hidden something in a place accessible to you. And she will tell you what to look for.
Mulaghesh holds the white thumbtack up to the light and begins to understand the message: I moved it. To find it, look for this.
“So search all of Fort Thinadeshi,” says Mulaghesh. “For one white thumbtack.” She bows her head. “Fuck.”
* * *
—
Mulaghesh wanders the innards of Fort Thinadeshi. She can’t help but fight the feeling that she’s stepped back in time. The walls are bulky, thick constructions, an architectural design that was abandoned long ago, as it was forced to create alternatingly huge or tiny rooms. She’s never sure what she’ll find on the other side of any given door: perhaps some dusky, yawning chasm of a room, or a tiny hallway full of cramped offices, like a honeycomb carved in stone. The hallways swim with shadows, for much of Fort Thinadeshi still lacks gas or electric lighting and is forced to use candles and literal torches. All around her are thuds, slams, laughs, and shouts, echoing through the misshapen chambers riddling this vast, crumbling relic.
It’s hardly any different from the ruins in the wilderness, thinks Mulaghesh. It suddenly seems unusual that Choudhry was the only one who went mad here.
But more troubling than the atmosphere of the fortress is the amount of firearms and ammunition she sees in motion. The soldiers here are preparing for something. She doesn’t want to think the word “mobilization” and all that it implies, but she can’t help it.
What is Biswal planning to do in Voortyashtan?
What she hates most, perhaps, is the feeling of distance. She is not truly stationed or in command here, no, and it’s true that no one bothers her or even looks twice as she wanders the winding hallways; but with every step Mulaghesh feels like a thief or a liar, sneaking through the shadows and silently watching these boys and girls, most of them hardly more than children.
I am one of you, she wishes to say to them. I am a soldier just as you. All that has happened to me has not made me any different from you. But beyond a few salutes, she exchanges little with the rank and file.
Mulaghesh is roving through the medical wing when she nearly abandons her search. She can’t imagine a more futile task than this, combing through this ocean of dark stone for a single white dot.
She remembers something Sigrud told her during their hours-long briefing: Assume she knows you. Assume she believed you would know who she was and what she had been doing when you came to look for her. If she has something to hide, she would hide it in a place you know she has been.
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 this, 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!”
The Divine Cities Trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles, With an Excerpt From Foundryside Page 73
