City of Blades (12 page)

“Yes, ma'am?”

“When is my next scheduled sleep?”

He consults a ledger-sized notepad. “Eleven hundred tomorrow, ma'am.”

Signe smiles at Mulaghesh. “Well. There you go. I do have
some
information for you as well, General—some that needn't wait. I put out the alert you requested, notifying all employees to come forward if Sumitra Choudhry had approached any of them. And it turns out she did. She asked one of our medics as to whether or not Voortyashtan had an apothecary—a place where one can purchase all manner of—”

“I know what an apothecary is,” says Mulaghesh. She makes a note of this in her portfolio. “Did she say why?”

“She didn't, I'm afraid. But our medic told me she was quite eager to buy something. What, she wouldn't say. Look for the shop with the green door on Andrus Street.”

“Wait, the streets have
names
here? I didn't even notice.”

“They're written in the curbs at corners,” says Signe. They approach yet another checkpoint—this one at the door to the tower test assembly yard—and Mulaghesh hangs back, eyeing the Dreyling guard with the rifling slung over his back. “They use fish bones to spell them out. Anyway, here's hoping more of my workers come forward with something about Miss Choudhry. Maybe one of them will know something more useful to you.”

Mulaghesh continues taking notes. The giant iron door in the wall swings open. Signe walks through, head buried in her clipboard and whispering notes to herself. She doesn't even look back as the door swings shut with a tremendous clang.

The shop on Andrus Street is really more of a hut, featuring animal-skin walls with seams tightly stitched shut with tendon. The door is a dangling wooden slat painted dull green, its paint cracking. It offers absolutely no insulation against the chilly drafts.

Mulaghesh walks up, knocks three times. Someone inside calls, “Come in!”

She pushes the door aside and finds she is inside of a labyrinth of messy shelves, all curling around her, a cyclone rendered in wood. All the shelves are filled with bottles and jars, most holding blackened and shriveled things that might have once been organic. Others hold seeds, powders, the cores of strange fruits. It takes Mulaghesh a moment to focus on a desk at the other end of the hut, where a small man who's just as shrunken and withered as his wares is smiling at her.

“Hello, ma'am,” says the little man, “how are you?” His eyes widen, then narrow when he sees her Saypuri uniform. “Beautiful evening, isn't it?”

“I guess.”

“What can I help you with?” asks the little man. He nods at her arm. “Need a pain poultice for that? I get a lot of sailors from the harbor works here missing all kinds of their bits. I know my way around a stump or two, that I do.”

Mulaghesh pauses, trying to figure out how offended she is by this statement. “No, I—”

“Having women's issues, then?” He grins. His teeth are like pebbles laced with black lichen. “A lady your age—do you feel the heats upon you? Not an issue at all. I have a—”

“Do you have any poultices that work on a fractured eye socket?” she asks. “Because you're going to need them if you persist in this line of salesmanship.”

He blinks. “Oh. All right.”

“I'm not here to buy. I have some questions about someone who came here a while ago.”

The little man whistles. “Well, that particular subject matter can be tricky. Very tricksome indeed, unfortunately.”

“Why's that?”

“Well, it would not be in the interest of my clients or my business if I were to go blabbing about what they buy here.” And then, as if an afterthought: “It'd also be a mite bit dishonest, too, I suppose.”

“This would have been a Saypuri,” says Mulaghesh. “A Saypuri woman, like me. Would this be a different situation, then?”

“I'm offended that you would think me being a Continental would prejudice me against a Saypuri enough to compromise my honesty,” says the little man. “It's a hurtsome thing to think, honestly.”

Sighing, Mulaghesh slaps a twenty-drekel note down on the table.

The little man pockets it in a flash. “Right,” he says brightly. “So. This Saypuri woman.”

“She would have come in several months ago, at least.”

“That's as I thought. You're in luck. We very,
very
rarely get any Saypuri women in here, so I think I remember the one you're talking about. Short? Bandage here?” He points to his brow. “Acted like she'd been shut up in a room all day?”

“Sounds like the one.”

“Mmm. Yes, I remember her. Very strange person, she was.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The way she acted,” he says, as if her question was powerfully stupid. “The way she looked at things. I take a pellet of drangla weed every morning—it helps me notice things about people.” He taps the edge of his right eye with a dirt-encrusted finger. “Helps me glimpse the edges of their secret selves. Not easy to make, but I have it reasonably pri—”

Mulaghesh loudly cracks her knuckles against her jaw, bending each finger.

“Right, right. Well. This girl, she made me think of someone who'd come out of hiding, and was counting the seconds until they could sneak away again. She bought some very strange things, too—things I hardly ever sell.” He tilts his head back, eyes closed, thinks, and says, “Rosemary. Pine needles. Dried worms. Grave dust. Dried frog eggs. And bone powder.”

“That's an impressive memory.”

“Stems from a concoction I make.” He sniffs. “Which I, ah, would never be interested in selling you.”

“Smart move.”

“Of course, it
did
help that she came back and bought those same ingredients over and over again. Each time in larger quantities, too.”

Mulaghesh makes a note of all this. “And I suppose you wouldn't know,” she says, “exactly what all this could be used for.”

The little man scratches his head theatrically. “Mm, I might have once known, but the thought escapes me now….”

Mulaghesh puts another twenty-drekel note on the table.

The little man snatches it up. “Well, the
reason
I never sell any of those items anymore is that their primary use doesn't
exist
anymore. In that their primary purpose used to be Divine.”

“I see,” says Mulaghesh.

“Yes. They were popular reagents for performing some of the more mundane miracles, with the sole exception being the frog eggs, as those were more top-tier, I suppose you could say. All of the ingredients she bought were Voortyashtani-oriented: rosemary and pine needles, for their evergreen nature; dried worms, for their regenerative properties; grave dust and powdered bone, for their finality; and frog eggs, for their capacity for metamorphosis. All of these things, you see, deal with the threshold dividing life from death.”

“The domain of Voortya,” says Mulaghesh.

“Uh, yes,” he says, somewhat nervous to be so candidly discussing the sacred.

“And what exact miracle do you think someone would try to accomplish with these reagents?” she asks.

“That I can't say. All the specific stuff was banned when Saypur enforced the Worldly Regulations. They took all those books and packed them away somewhere. I only know the general stuff, which wasn't quite so illegal.”

“Do you know anyone who
might
know what miracle they could be used for?”

“Well…” He scratches his chin. “Komayd did roll back a whole lot of the Worldly Regulations when
she
took the crown, but so far it hasn't trickled down to us little fellers yet. The only folk who might know are the highlanders.”

“Like, the tribes?”

“Them's the ones. They're old traditionalists, they are. They wouldn't have forgotten a thing like that. Though it's a bit hard to just sit down and have tea with them.”

Mulaghesh makes another note of this. “What do you have in the way of sleeping aids?”

“Oh, well…that depends on the sleep you need. Do you have trouble falling asleep? Or
staying
asleep?”

“Staying,” says Mulaghesh, rubbing her left arm.

“And what kind of sleep do you seek, ma'am? Light? Dreamy? Or deep?”

“Deep,” she says immediately. “No dreams, if you can.”

He looks at her, and there's a curious shine to his eye that makes her think that maybe he wasn't lying about the drangla weed. “Is it sleep you want to find?” he asks quietly. “Or dreams you wish to
escape
?”

She looks at him hard. “The latter.”

He reviews his shelves, then takes down a small glass jar filled with tiny brown dots. “Nickletop mushroom caps,” he says, “have a distinctly soporific effect—they make you sleepy, I mean, ma'am. Gets stronger when you steam 'em.” He carefully pours some of them into a tin and affixes the cap. “Sometimes used to put horses asleep before surgery. What this means, ma'am, is
don't
take too much of 'em. Cut one in half, and put it below your tongue before bed. You can brew it in tea, too, but the effects take longer. And
don't
lick your fingers or prepare any food without washing your hands. Or, ah, engage in any manual intimacy. A dusting of nickletop will render any man's trouser eel worthless for hours.”

“Now
that
I'll keep in mind.” She takes the little tin, pops the cap open, and looks inside. The mushroom caps look like tiny, flaky brown pearls. “Any side effects?”

“Just the one on your purse,” he says. “Thirty drekels, please.”

She grouses for a moment—thirty drekels would be enough for a steak dinner, if there was any beef to speak of around here—but she forks it over. She needs sleep more than she needs money.

Back in her room at the SDC headquarters Mulaghesh massages her arm, pulls the carousel from its holster, and sets it on her nightstand. Then she sits on the edge of her bed, alone in her sumptuous room, listening to the wind and the sea bickering outside her window.

The images of the farmhouse swirl about in her mind: bodies ravaged beyond recognition, the black smoke unscrolling from the tips of the dark trees, a human form half-concealed by a clump of clover.

She tries to tell herself that she's just disturbed, as anyone would be. She just strolled through the scene of a brutal mass murder and abominable desecration—that's why her heart is beating so fast. It has nothing to do with the fact that these sights, however grisly, are somewhat familiar to her.

She rummages through her coat, pulls out the little tin of nickletop mushrooms, and taps out one of the dark little buttons. She uses her combat knife to cut it in half and examines the tiny, crumpled half-circle balanced on her index finger. After a second's hesitation she opens her mouth, sticks it under her tongue—it tastes of wood and wool—and lies down on the bed.

The effects are almost instantaneous. She feels woozy, like her brain is waterlogged, and everything is suddenly incredibly heavy. It's as if her bones are so dense they're about to fall through her flesh and through the bottom of the bed.

She remembers what Biswal said to her:
It helps me fight the feeling that I'm a fiddly old man wondering if the past ever really happened….

Her lids grow heavy. The nickletop might keep her from dreaming, but it's helpless to keep her from remembering so much in the few fleeting minutes before sleep.

If you were to bring up the Yellow March in Saypur these days, chances are you'd get a variety of reactions, none of them positive: there'd be a lot of sighs and eye-rolling—
not this again
—and perhaps a snicker or two. Among the more patriotic quarters such a mention would likely evoke outright hostility: you could be booted from the premises, or even struck in the face.

This is because, in Saypur, all talk of the Yellow March has long been considered either a smear campaign or a paranoid delusion, a dangerous or ludicrous conspiracy theory that only crackpots and the unpatriotic would ever entertain.

Everyone respectable agrees that the Summer of Black Rivers (called such even though it lasted nearly three years) was one of Saypur's greatest triumphs. It was the war that defined Saypur's modern national identity, so who would dare besmirch its reputation? Those Saypuris who wish to appear thoughtful will concede that, yes, there might have been
some
thing that inspired the wild tale of the Yellow March—war is war, after all, and full of horrors—but it was certainly far short of the events the conspiracy theorists detail.

But Mulaghesh knows it was no conspiracy. Because she remembers. Even though it was almost forty years ago, she remembers.

The Kaj captured the Continent in 1642, and Saypur pulled off the Great Censoring just eight years later, scouring the Continent of all of its sacred images and art. Shortly after that Saypur plunked down the Worldly Regulations, hoping—in futility—that outlawing mention or acknowledgment of the Divine would mean it would no longer affect modern life. Saypur was pretty strict about the WR for most of the Continent, but they tended to tiptoe around Bulikov: even in its postwar, decimated state, it was still a massive metropolis, and it still wielded a lot of power by sheer population. So, to a certain extent, the WR were enforced in Bulikov in name only, so that Saypur could remain unchallenged and keep the remainder of the Continent in check.

Up until 1681, that is. By then Saypur had built up its military and started to flex its muscles, and it was decided Ghaladesh could no longer tolerate such lax control over the Continent's central city. A litany of severe laws were passed and the crackdowns began. Things escalated—first a protest, then a riot, and then municipal buildings were occupied and the clerks there held hostage—until by '85 Bulikov was in a full-fledged revolt: the Bulikovian Uprising, they called it. And what started out as an uprising quickly evolved into an outright war.