The bulb fills up with a white, white hot light, a bursting, blinding eruption of pure incandescence that’s so intense Mulaghesh can almost feel it on her skin. It’s so bright it’s like the light is shooting back into her head and out the other side, and she cries out and looks away as the walls themselves begin to glow, reflecting this terrible light.
There’s a pow! as the filament in the bulb gives out. Mulaghesh shouts, ‘Fucking hells!’ and holds up her portfolio to shield herself from the shattered glass – but it doesn’t come. She slowly lowers it. The bulb is whole but dark, the interior of its glass scarred and smoky. Prathda has his face turned away as well, but when he looks back at her he has a dazed smile, as if having just swallowed some wonderful drug.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘We call it thinadeskite. After the engineer, you see.’
*
‘This bulb,’ says Prathda, unceremoniously dumping it in a trash can, ‘should have been capable of handling 110 kilomundes. It’s an electrical term. Enough to light up a goodish portion of your average city park, I should say. So the fact that the thinadeskite was able to blow that out is . . . significant. However, we did use a very refined portion of thinadeskite in these cables. If you would, General – I have a few more interesting things to show you.’
He walks out the door without looking back. She starts to follow, then stops and picks up the battery. It’s warm. She turns it over and sees a label on its bottom reading 90 KM. KM standing for kilomundes, presumably, a terminology she’s never heard of before, but then she’s no scientist.
‘Hm,’ she says. She replaces the battery and follows.
Nadar stands outside with a smile on her face. ‘Still have your eyebrows, General?’
‘I kind of wish we’d gone with the charts,’ says Mulaghesh.
‘Trust me,’ says Nadar, ‘you don’t.’
‘As you can see, its conductivity is staggering,’ Prathda is saying as he walks ahead. ‘Simply staggering. The Department of Reconstruction is very interested in this, as are countless industry representatives, though we’ve only been allowed to give them very limited reports, of course. Just think of every power need of all of Ghaladesh, met by one centralised little plant – or even distributed plants! Imagine miles and miles of wiring and cabling, made of thinadeskite! Imagine a whole factory powered by a piece of wire no thicker than your finger!’
‘It certainly is a lot to think about,’ says Mulaghesh. They pass by a window looking into a strange laboratory with lots of microscopes. Lots of lenses, lots of bulbs, lots of wire, lots of refining. She takes a careful look at the raw material itself in one glass tank: it looks a little like ordinary graphite to her. ‘How does the stuff work?’
Prathda coughs, suddenly awkward. ‘Well, that is a subject of some controversy. There are a lot of theories. The right one is currently being determined.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘We’re working on it. We think it might be an alteration to a commonly found dielectric compound, or it might have something to do with oscillations in the spin of certain subnuc—’
‘You don’t know.’
‘Um. No. We don’t. Not yet, anyway.’
Mulaghesh knew all that, of course. But it’s quite something to see Prathda collapse so quickly.
‘Prathda and the rest of our science department here are working away on that,’ says Nadar.
‘Sure, but that must put a kink in your production plans,’ says Mulaghesh. ‘You can’t build a completely new power system out of shit no one understands.’
‘It’s true that, like any good scientist, we need to be thorough,’ says Prathda. ‘And we are trying to be. I know what Ghaladesh is concerned about, and’ – he shakes his head, laughing in frustration – ‘and we have confirmed, repeatedly – repeatedly! – that it is of no concern: they are worried that this material is Divine, somehow.’
‘I guess I can see why they’d be concerned about that,’ says Mulaghesh, as if she’d only just heard the idea.
‘But, it cannot be. Not only because the Divinity of these lands, Voortya, is most certainly, undeniably dead – Saypur would not be a free state if the Kaj had not struck her down at the very start of the War, of course – but also because we have conducted numerous tests endorsed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself to ascertain the Divine nature of a substance or event, and each test has come back irrefutably negative. The Ministry’s own tests!’
‘Okay, but . . . to be clear, thinade . . . What is it, again?’
‘Thinadeskite.’
‘Right. Beyond the conductivity, thinadeskite doesn’t do anything else inexplicable, right?’
‘Well. That . . . depends on your definition of inexplicable.’
‘I would define it,’ says Mulaghesh, ‘as something you do not know how to explain.’
He pauses. She watches as his eyes search the upper left corner of the room: a habit, she’s learned in her time, of someone trying to navigate a difficult truth.
What Mulaghesh really wants to do right now is, as it is delicately expressed in reports, ‘apply the full measure of her authority’ – that is, get right up in Prathda’s face and chew him out at maximum volume until he’s good and rattled. This is often the simplest way of dealing with a soldier tiptoeing around a hard truth, she’s found, and it’s definitely what she would do if she were in Bulikov with the full backing of the polis governor’s office.
But she doesn’t do that. Mulaghesh forcibly reminds herself that she is not in command here, and she isn’t here to clean house, to take command, to report back to any oversight committee on the workings of Fort Thinadeshi. She’s not here to be a commander, but an operative, a spy. And these people think her to be no more than a tourist, someone here for a month or two before saying farewell and sailing off into obscurity.
A molar on the right side of her jaw pops as she grinds her teeth. I cannot think of someone more ill-suited to this task.
She asks herself – what would Shara do?
She’d keep him on the hook and string his dumb ass along.
So instead of physically assaulting Prathda and bellowing questions at him, she slowly asks, ‘Would it have something to do with how your 110 kilomundes bulb got blown out by a 90 kilomundes battery – 20 kilomundes less than what I’m guessing is the full capacity of the bulb?’
Prathda looks at her with the face of someone who is slowly realising that this person is much smarter than he gave them credit for. Captain Nadar tenses up slightly, surprised at this turn in the discussion.
‘Does thinadeskite conduct electricity, Prathda,’ Mulaghesh asks, ‘or does it generate it?’
He thinks for a long time. ‘We . . . haven’t determined that yet.’
‘Okay.’
‘But in a refined state, it . . . amplifies the charge. Considerably.’
Mulaghesh is silent. Prathda shifts on his feet, uncomfortable.
‘Should that be possible?’ she asks.
‘Well. No.’
*
‘This subject area,’ says Nadar, ‘is a little . . . sensitive, General.’
‘I can understand that,’ says Mulaghesh. ‘I don’t like the impossible more than anyone else does.’
‘It does defy our current understanding of physics,’ Prathda admits. ‘Electricity cannot just come from nowhere. It has to be generated from some phenomenon. But our understanding of physics is changing all the time. We learn new things every day,’ he says as he leads them back through the labs. ‘This is the goal of Arc Lightning. Science is like a glacier: slow and indomitable. But it will get to where it’s going.’
‘Thank you for that eloquent speech, Prathda,’ says Nadar curtly. ‘And for the tour. Very informative, as always.’
Prathda bows expansively, thanks them both, and returns to his work.
‘He’s a nice enough guy,’ says Nadar as they exit. ‘But it’s hard to get top-grade scientific talent out here.’
‘I see. So u
ntil we can verify exactly how thinadeskite does what it does, it’s not hitting any factory floors.’
‘Correct, General. And we have all kinds of industry muck-a-mucks clawing at our backs to get their own people in here to run their own tests. But I’m not playing babysitter for a bunch of damned tweedy civilians.’ Nadar says the word with a surprising amount of disdain. ‘We have enough problems here. We don’t need academics or scientists getting gutted or shot on our back door as well. Not to mention the security risks that poses, letting industry get their say in military matters.’
‘Any security issues with Arc Lightning?’
‘No serious ones, at least.’
‘Serious ones?’
‘Well. Truth be told, there was one odd incident a few months back that now seems to have been somewhat harmless. Some of our operations crew noticed signs that someone had started a fire in one of the branches. Not as sabotage, it seems, because there’s not much to burn down in a tunnel underground, but . . . Something like the ruins of a campfire. A very small one.’
‘That is odd.’ Mulaghesh makes a note of it.
‘Yes, I went and looked myself. It looked as though whoever had done it had been burning just . . . well, plants, I suppose. Leaves. Some cloth. Things like that. As if someone had camped out down there, trying to escape the rain, perhaps.’
‘How long ago was this?’
‘Oh, months . . . Probably four or five months ago. We checked the fences, checked the security checkpoints, checked the tunnels, but found no sign of forced entry or tampering. It was strange, but it’s never happened again. It’s weak tea in comparison to the other issues pressing on us.’
‘If you could have your way, Captain – what would you do with this project?’
Nadar blinks. Her heavy, dark eyes flick back and forth over the floor. ‘If I can speak freely, General?’
‘You may.’
‘I’d mothball this. Shut it down. Now’s not the time to play scientists.’
‘And what would you do instead?’
Her response is immediate: ‘Arm and train the river clans, and coordinate with them to drive the highlanders out of the Tarsil Mountains entirely.’
‘No more negotiations, then?’
Nadar scoffs. ‘It’s just a front. The highland tribes use the talks to stall just long enough until they can make their next move. They disassociate themselves from any conflict, of course. “That wasn’t us who did it, just people who happen to fervently agree with us – and how can we control them?” Very convenient.’
‘I see.’ Mulaghesh clears her throat. ‘One last thing, Captain . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I know you said that you’d used tests to confirm that this material was not Divine . . . but when they sent me here, I saw a record of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs representative coming here to do some additional tests.’
Nadar’s face darkens.
‘But,’ says Mulaghesh, ‘there was some kind of note that she went AWOL. Is that correct?’
Nadar thinks for a long time, her mouth working. ‘This, too,’ she says finally, ‘is probably something that can be explained with a simple demonstration.’
*
She leads Mulaghesh to a small dormitory hallway. ‘This wing is for senior officers,’ she explains, ‘as well as a few technicians and guests.’ She comes to one room door and sorts through a ponderous ring of keys, procured from a maintenance worker. ‘We still haven’t cleaned it up, under my orders. I had a feeling someone would want to come looking for her.’ She unlocks the door. ‘Though I suspect, General, you’ll want to just glance and move on until your pension’s earned out . . . with all due respect, of course.’
She pushes the door open.
Mulaghesh’s mouth twists as she looks into the room. ‘By the seas . . .’
Sumitra Choudhry, it seems, did a lot of redecorating before her disappearance: all the furniture has been removed except for a mattress, and a four-foot-wide black stripe with oddly fuzzy edges runs along the bare white walls. Mulaghesh notes that the stripe goes from about waist-height to shoulder-height . . . and as she looks closer she sees that it is not one solid stripe but writing, endless scribblings overlaid on one another until they become a dense, black fog, thousands and thousands of words running along the walls. Above and below this stripe, on the ceiling and on the floors, are drawings and sketches that leap out of the wandering black ribbon to stretch across the corners, until nearly three-quarters of the room is covered in black ink.
‘She did all this?’ asks Mulaghesh.
Nadar nods. Some of the writings must have needed censoring, for they’ve had whole bottles of black ink dumped out onto them, concealing their message. The ink has dripped down the walls in thin, tapered lines, reminding Mulaghesh of icicles running along a roof edge. In the centre of the black-smeared floor is the bare, grey mattress.
‘So,’ says Mulaghesh. ‘She went mad.’
‘So I would conclude, General,’ says Nadar.
Mulaghesh walks in. The ink has puddled so thickly on the floor that it’s dried and cracked, like the parched ground of some wasteland. Some of the ink must have dried while Choudhry was still here, for Mulaghesh can see numerous tiny carvings of faces gouged into the calcified ink.
She stands in the centre of Choudhry’s old mattress – which is nearly as ink-stained as the rest of the room – and looks around. It’s as if she painted her own nightmare, she thinks, and crawled inside.
The paintings and drawings have a handful of similarities. There are a lot of images of people holding hands, many of them standing on what looks like water. In some, one person – somewhat female looking – is wounding themselves, cutting off their arm or maybe their hand, while a second woman looks on in horror. There are countless images of weapons: swords, daggers, spears, arrows. Some drawings are less clear: one set in the corner looks like four chicken wings on kebab sticks, though there’s something disgustingly strange about them.
But one sketch is strangely arresting to Mulaghesh: it is a landscape, quite well done in comparison to some of the other drawings, depicting a shoreline on which many people kneel, heads bowed. Rising behind them is a tower, and though the outline is done in black ink, somehow it’s been drawn so that Mulaghesh feels the tower is purest white, reflecting the light of a cold winter moon.
‘What happened?’ says Mulaghesh.
‘She came here about half a year ago to research the thinadeskite. Her efforts yielded the same results as ours – nothing. Nothing Divine about it. But then her research got a little . . . extracurricular. She started leaving the fort, going out to the city and some of the countryside. She stopped visiting the labs completely. She spent some time at the harbour, I am told. We thought it was odd, and I worried she was a security risk, though if you can’t trust a Ministry officer . . .’ She sighs. ‘But we never ventured into her room here. She was a Ministry officer, after all. So we didn’t know how bad she’d gotten. Then one day, she never came back. We conducted a search, and found this. I’ve no idea what happened to her. But then, she did disappear right when another spate of fighting broke out.’
Mulaghesh steps on the mattress and slowly looks around. ‘And she left no paperwork trails? Nothing in your labs or in the fort that she was unusually fixated on?’
‘She stopped coming to the labs mere weeks after arriving,’ says Nadar. ‘Soon she was like a ghost. We rarely saw her, and she rarely engaged with us. Though some patrols mentioned she was sometimes seen walking the cliffs, holding a lantern. But that could have been anyone, General.’
‘What sorts of tests did she run?’
Nadar runs through a litany of tests Mulaghesh hasn’t ever heard of, things involving lily petals and graveyard mud and silver coins. ‘What’s more,’ says Nadar, ‘she went beyond the thinadeskite itself, and started testing the fort. The stones in the walls, the dirt, the trees . . . She tested all of this region, practically, for any trace of the Div
ine – and found nothing. It was like living with a madwoman.’
‘Who was the last person to see her alive?’
‘That’s difficult to say, because we aren’t totally sure when she disappeared. We had some reports of a Saypuri woman being sighted on the shore down in Voortyashtan, but no one could confirm if it was Choudhry or not. That’s the last hint of her movements that I have.’
Mulaghesh makes a note of this. ‘And is there any cause for this?’
‘Cause?’
‘Any, I don’t know . . . abuse or injury or trauma that could have given her this break from reality?’
‘She did receive some kind of wound at some point . . . A head trauma, though she made up several stories about how she got it.’
‘Is that the reason for her behaviour?’
‘I doubt it. Her change was much more gradual.’
‘Then what?’
‘General . . .’ Nadar sighs and smiles weakly at her. ‘If you figure it out, you’d be the first. But this place puts pressure on a mind. A lot of awful things happened here. A lot are still happening. And if I can speak freely, General . . .’ She glances around the room. ‘This shit frankly gives me the heebie-jeebies.’
Mulaghesh can certainly see why. She tries to memorise everything she’s seeing, all the sketches, all the strange glyphs. She tries to make some copies in her portfolio, but they feel clumsy and crude. I wish Shara was here, she thinks. She knows about everything Divine. Or I wish I knew a Voortyashtani to ask about this . . .
She then realises that she does – or, rather, she knows a Dreyling who grew up in Voortyashtan.
She grimaces. Playing with Signe Harkvaldsson, she feels, is playing with fire.
Then she notices a stack of papers lying in the corner. She walks over, picks them up, and does a double take.
‘What the hells?’ she mutters.
Mulaghesh knows Choudhry graduated with top honours from the Fadhuri Academy with a discipline in history – so why was she reading about a historical subject every schoolchild in Saypur knows backward and forward?
Mulaghesh stares down at the painting of Vallaicha Thinadeshi, perhaps the most famous woman in Saypuri history, and the person Fort Thinadeshi is named after.
City of Blades (Divine Cities #2) Page 8
