City of Blades (4 page)

Mulaghesh squints at the box. “Where does it keep it?”

“Well, it's…The sound's carved, I suppose, into that little black disc bit….At least, I
think
it is. They had a bunch of graphs when they explained it to me….Anyway, I'll leave you to it.”

“Pitry,” says Shara's crackly, ghostly voice, “if you're still there, you can leave us now.”

“See what I mean?” says Pitry. He smiles again and slips out the door to the balcony, leaving Mulaghesh alone with the box and the file.

“I hope you're well, Turyin,” says Shara's voice. “And I hope your time in Javrat has been comfortable. I apologize for approaching you with this task, but…everything aligned far too well for me not to make the ask. It's been ten months, and you are still a general of prestige who has slipped from the public eye. And you also have good reason to be on the Continent, touring nearly anything you like, and everyone will believe it's solely to earn out your pension—your country doing you a favor before it puts, how shall we say, a reliable old horse out to pasture.”

“Shit,” says Mulaghesh. “Don't pull your punches….”

“It is, of course, unusual to appoint a general of your stature to such fieldwork,” says Shara's voice, “but even more than all the reasons I have listed, I believe that you are
personally
suited to this task for a number of reasons which I hope will soon become clear.

“I'll explain now. This message cannot be replayed, so listen closely.”

Mulaghesh leans in until her ear is almost right next to the brass tube.

“Two years ago, a discovery was made on the Continent: one of our installations stumbled across a curious, powdery ore along the mountainous western coastline. This material went unremarked upon until, as part of an experiment, a team in the regional governor's office tried to pass an electric current through it.

“What they discovered is that this material conducts electricity in a manner
heretofore unseen
. If you are unaware, no conductor is perfect—whether it is copper or steel, some electricity is lost along the way. But with this material, none is lost.
None
. And…some recent reports suggest that it possesses properties far,
far
stranger than that….” A pause. “But I am not sure whether or not to trust these accounts. I will leave it up to you to judge when you arrive.”

Something about that unsettles Mulaghesh. It's something in Shara's voice, as if to repeat aloud what she'd been told would make it all a little more real, and thus a little more disturbing.

“If we use this material to its fullest potential, then it would be nothing short of revolutionary for Saypur
and
the Continent—which could desperately use power and heating. Powerful industrial factions are very keen to make that happen right now. However, I have not allowed it to be processed on any larger scale. My primary concern is that our scientists and engineers are unable to determine exactly
how
this material does what it does. Normal conductors they understand: this they most certainly do not. And I am most distrustful of what we cannot explain, as you can understand.”

Mulaghesh grimaces, because she absolutely does. If this material possesses astonishing properties, and if those properties can't be explained, then it's possible those properties are
miraculous:
the product or direct creation of one of the ancient Continental Divinities. Between the actions of Shara and her great-grandfather, the much-revered Kaj of Saypur, nearly all of the original Continental Divinities
should
be dead, and all their miraculous items completely dead and nonfunctional with them.
So if this stuff is miraculous,
thinks Mulaghesh,
then maybe yet another Divinity isn't as dead as we'd like it to be.

“You are probably now thinking, correctly, that I am concerned this material may be Divine in nature,” says Shara's voice. “This will probably cause you to wonder why I am sending
you
to investigate rather than someone from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, someone whose field of study is all things Divine and miraculous.”

“That would be correct,” mutters Mulaghesh.

“The simple answer to this is that we did. Eight months ago. And after three months of studying this material, she vanished. Disappeared. Without a single trace.”

Mulaghesh cocks an eyebrow. “Hmph.”

“Her name was Sumitra Choudhry,” says Shara's voice. “Her file is in the dossier Pitry has provided to you. As I said, she studied this material for three months, operating out of the Saypuri Military installation in the region. Her communications back became erratic, and then one day Choudhry was simply gone. Quite abruptly. Our forces in the region searched for her and found nothing. They did not suspect any…
unusual
foul play.” There is a clink of glass, a
bloop
of gushing liquid—is she pouring a glass of water?—and the sound of a sip. “And I say unusual, because this material was discovered in Voortyashtan. And this is where you are bound.”

“Ah, shit!” shouts Mulaghesh. “
Shit!
Are you fucking
kidding
me?”

Another sip.

Shara's voice says, “I will give you a moment to compose yourself.”

Mulaghesh then says a lot of things to the little box. Mostly she tells it the things she's going to do to Shara when she gets back to Ghaladesh,
if
she gets back to Ghaladesh, because isn't there a one in three chance of her being murdered or drowning or dying of the plague in fucking
Voortyashtan,
ass-end of the universe, armpit of the world?

And this is where Shara has sent her: to the worst possible hinterlands on the globe, the military outpost you get shipped to only if you sleep with or kill the wrong person.

“…don't even care if they throw me in prison!” Mulaghesh shouts at the box. “I don't care if they draw and quarter me! I'll do it to you in broad daylight, and the hells with your fancy titles!”

Another contemplative sip of water comes from the box.

“You rip me out of Javrat and stick me on a boat to
Voortyashtan
without even telling me?” says Mulaghesh. “That is bad form,
bad
form right there! Low character!”

Another sip.

Mulaghesh buries her face in her hand. “Damn it all….What am I going to
do
?”

“I hope you're calming down now,” says Shara's voice primly.

“Fuck you!” says Mulaghesh.

“And I think you may be somewhat relieved when I tell you that the military installation in question is our regional governor's quarters, Fort Thinadeshi. So, you will be in what is, I hope, a tightly controlled region. As you know, the fortress is located just outside of Voortyashtan proper, the urban area, so it will be a little more…
civilized
than the rest of the region.”

“That's not saying mu—”

“This may not be saying much,” says Shara's voice. “We will also be providing you with a contact, someone who can help you acclimate to the situation in Voortyashtan. Pitry will have more on that.”

Mulaghesh sighs.

“I need someone on the ground that I can trust, Turyin. I must have someone ascertain whether there is any reason to believe this new material has any Divine origins, as well as what happened to Choudhry.”

“What else do you want me to do, capture the sky in a damn beer glass?”

“You may prove uniquely suited to this,” Shara's voice says. “Because the new regional governor of the Voortyashtan polis is General Lalith Biswal.”

The name is like a hammer upside Mulaghesh's head. She sits in shock, staring at the little box.

“No,” she whispers.

“As you both fought together in the Summer of Black Rivers,” continues Shara's voice calmly, ignorant of Mulaghesh's distress, “I am hoping you will have some leeway with him, where most operatives would not.”

His face flashes before Mulaghesh's eyes: young, dark-eyed, smeared in mud, watching her from the shadow of a trench as the sky pissed rain down their necks. Though she knows he must be close to sixty-five by now, this is how she'll always remember him.

“No, no, no,” whispers Mulaghesh.

“And Biswal being about as brass as you are, I think he may be sympathetic to your cover story. He's a veteran of the military's petty bureaucracy and has seen many comrades go on the touring shuffle.”

Mulaghesh just stares at the little box on the desk.
What vast sin did I commit,
she wonders,
to be damned to a fate such as this?

“There is also the matter of the harbor,” says Shara's voice. “As you are aware, Saypur is cooperating with Voortyashtan and the United Dreyling States to try to create a second functioning international port on the Continent. This should not, I hope, influence your mission in any significant way—but it is not an easy project, and tensions are running high in the region.”

“Great,” says Mulaghesh.

Shara then summarizes some communication channels Mulaghesh can use to report back, codexes and tradecraft methods that will be provided to her. “However, this is only to be done in
extreme
situations,” says Shara's voice. “Due to recent…political pressures, if the nature of this operation were to come to light, it could turn out very badly. As such, I will have to be much more hands-off with you than either of us would likely prefer. But I have every confidence in you to navigate any obstacles.”

“Ah, shit.”

“I want to thank you for accepting this operation, Turyin,” says Shara. “I can think of no one else I'd rather have in Voortyashtan. And I want to thank you for returning to me, even if it's for this one operation. I will not claim that I completely understand why you resigned, but sometimes I think I do.”

You obviously do,
thinks Mulaghesh,
otherwise you would not have sent that letter.

“Thank you again for your support, and your friendship, Turyin Mulaghesh. Your country honors you for the service you have given it—service in the past, present, and future. Good luck.”

A hiss, a click, and the voice fades away.

The door to the Tohmay reception room cracks open. Pitry, who has been staring over the balcony at the moonlit sea with his hands behind his back, glances back and does a double take as Mulaghesh emerges carrying a crystal tumbler full of what looks like very expensive liquor. “Wh-Where did you get that?”

“Helped myself to the bar.”

“But…But we'll have to
pay
for tha—”

“Did you know?”

“Did I know what?”

“That Shara was sending me off to damned
Voortyashtan
?”

Pitry hesitates. “Well, I…I was
somewhat
aware you wou—”

“Fucking hells,” says Mulaghesh. She quaffs the liquor, then winds up and hurls the tumbler over the edge of the balcony. Pitry watches as what must be a forty- or fifty-drekel glass disappears into the ocean with a
plook
! “Of all the places in the world to send me sniffing up the Divine! As if I'd ever
want
to. Haven't I seen enough of all of that? When am I allowed to rest?”

“But you'll be among familiar company, won't you? General Biswal will be there; he's an old comrade. Which is not to say that your heroic days are necessarily
behind
you, of course….”

Mulaghesh's face goes blank, losing all of its cynical swagger, and she stares out at the sea. Though Mulaghesh has not seemed pleased with this mission so far, this is the first time Pitry's seen her genuinely afraid.

“He wasn't my comrade, Pitry,” she says. “He was my commanding officer. I thought he was dead, frankly. I hadn't heard wind of him for years. How did he get appointed to regional governor of Voortyashtan?”

“Because the last one was assassinated,” says Pitry, “and no one else would take the job.”

“Ah.”

“They thought he was the right man for the position, though. I understand General Biswal has a…a history of making do in contested territories.”

“That's one way of putting it,” Mulaghesh says.

Pitry glances at her. “What was it like?”

“What, the Summer of Black Rivers?”

“Yes.”

There's a long pause.

“Do you remember much of the Battle of Bulikov, Pitry?” she asks softly.

“I…I do.”

“Do you ever want to see something like that again?”

“It is, perhaps, cowardly of me to say so, but…No. No, I do not.”

“Smart choice. Well. I will put it this way: what Biswal and I did to the Continent during the Summer of Black Rivers makes the Battle of Bulikov look like spilled milk.”

Pitry is quiet. Mulaghesh stares out at the sea, running the index finger of her right hand up and down the knuckle of her wooden left thumb.

“Get out of here, Pitry,” says Mulaghesh. “I want to be alone right now.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he says, and steps back through the door.

Saypur proudly claims that because it was a colony with no Divine assistance, it was forced to think for itself. We claim that because we were forced to innovate or die, we had no choice but to innovate.

This is somewhat true. But it is the notes of Vallaicha Thinadeshi that allow us keen insight into Saypur's sudden technological advances—many of which originate with the forgotten Continental saint Torya.

From a smattering of mentions in Bulikov's records of executions we can confirm Torya was a Taalvashtani saint who spent most of his life in Saypur, being sent there in 1455. As followers of the builder Divinity Taalhavras, Taalvashtanis were architects, engineers, designers, and machinists—people who tinkered with the rude materials of mortal life as well as the Divine miracles that supported so much of it.

Torya grew so bored with his work on his Saypuri estate that he often pestered his servants to feed him distractions, treating them as puzzles and problems. Some of his creations involved wheeled shoes that allowed his servants to race up and down his lengthy hallways, as well as a stove that used convection to cook bread twice as fast.

As far as we can tell, he did this solely as a cure for his boredom—not out of any charity.

It was his Saypuri valet who realized the opportunity Torya presented. Over a series of months the valet fed him a variety of large-scale problems for him to solve, and Torya became so involved in his work that in 1457 he felt obliged to create a series of rules for the mortal world: laws of mathematics and physics that applied to reality without any Divine intervention, as well as some innovations that could easily exploit these rules. As Torya had access to countless Divine devices with spectacular properties, he was able to establish these rules both quickly and accurately.

This soon proved revolutionary. The valet secreted out copies of Torya's writings and had them sent all over the country. Within a decade Saypuris were farming with irrigation, building structures faster and better than ever before. But it was the creation of a small steam-powered loom in 1474 that brought unwelcome attention, for the Saypuri who created it lived in a Voortyashtani colony—and Voortyashtanis understood the nature of power and knowledge far more than the Taalvashtanis did.

The Voortyashtanis realized someone had taught the Saypuris these methods, and quickly traced the information back to Saint Torya. The Voortyashtanis then executed every slave and servant who had come in contact with Torya's estate, and petitioned Bulikov not only for Torya to be defrocked, but also executed. They won their petition, and Torya was brutally disemboweled in 1475 for crimes against the Continent's colonies.

But the Voortyashtanis' victory was not complete: Torya's laws persisted and were worked upon in secret. When the Kaj himself created his mysterious weaponry to slay the Divinities in 1636, a copy of Torya's laws was one of his most heavily used references. And in the 1640s, when Vallaicha Thinadeshi began the great technological revolution that would secure Saypur's place in the world, none of it would have been possible without the work of Saint Torya, performed just under two hundred years earlier.

Saypur, being a proud nation, would not like to admit that a Continental contributed so much to the foundation of their technological achievements. But we forget another lesson of history when we do so: a slave will use any tool to escape their slavery, even those of their masters.

—DR. EFREM PANGYUI, “THE SUDDEN HEGEMONY”

F
irst the rain—the screaming, awful rain. The slap of the downpour is so stunning that Mulaghesh, who's spent the latter part of her trip cloistered in her cabin aboard the Dreyling cargo ship
Hjemdal,
is almost stupefied by such brutal weather, and it makes her rethink the desire she's had for the last two weeks: to get the hells off of this chain of boats and set her feet on dry land.

But not this land,
she thinks.
Not any land that exists under weather like this….

She shields her eyes, walks out on deck, and looks.

She is faced with the wide, expansive mouth of a river—the Solda River, of course, whose waters once passed through Bulikov, the very city where she was stationed for nearly two decades. On each side of the river mouth are two vast, ragged peaks that slowly recede down to the waters in a rambling jangle of sharp, broken, blade-like stones.
No wonder they call it the city of blades,
she thinks. It all looks like rubble, as if the cliffs surrounding the city have been steadily collapsing—yet amidst the stones about the peaks are lights, streams of smoke, and thousands of glimmering windows.

“So that's the city of Voortyashtan,” she says grimly. “Well. It lives up to expectations.”

Then she sees the harbor. Or, rather, what will one day be the harbor—maybe.

“Holy shit,” she says.

The main issue with reconstructing the Continent—the underlying aim of nearly all of Shara Komayd's legislation—is one of access. There has only ever been one functioning international harbor on the Continent in modern history: Ahanashtan, which has always been Saypur's key foothold on the Continent. But if you're trying to bring aid and support to the entirety of the Continent, having only one way in and one way out makes it quite difficult.

Yet as the Continent's climate changed—growing steadily colder with no Divinities to miraculously warm the weather—there became only one remaining decent warm-water port: Voortyashtan. Which happens to sit on the mouth of the Solda River, which, if brought under control, would give the entire world access to the inner recesses of the Continent.

And long ago, Voortyashtan did once possess a harbor. In fact, back in the days of the Divinities, it was far, far larger and busier than any harbor the contemporary powers could ever aspire to. But it was put to unspeakable, monstrous purposes—purposes that make modern Saypuris shiver to think of even today.

“Every obstacle,” Shara used to say (before her own career became mired in its own obstacles), “is always an opportunity.” Would it not be a tremendous symbolic victory, she asked, if Saypur built a new harbor in Voortyashtan and put it to good use? Wouldn't they all sleep a little better at night knowing Voortyashtan, that most backward and dangerous of cities, was slowly being modernized, led along like a mule is led by a dangling turnip?

So it was decided that the Department of Reconstruction, with the approval of the polis of Voortyashtan, would reconstruct its ancient harbor, thus bringing swift aid to the other half of the Continent, and probably making Voortyashtan the second-richest polis on the Continent in the meantime.

But as to who would do the actual work—that was another issue. Saypur, being a naval nation, naturally had a dozen contractors and companies willing to do the job—but for Saypuri prices, all of which were astronomically high. For a while it seemed the harbor would never be built without some outrageous financing miracle, but then the newly founded United Dreyling States—having overthrown the corrupt Dreyling Republics a mere three years ago, and desperate for income—came forward with a series of bids so low that Saypur wondered if the Dreylings were using slave labor. But in the end, the Southern Dreyling Company—or SDC, as many prefer—finally captured the prize and signed the contracts.

Though from what Mulaghesh last heard, the construction of the harbor has so far proven to be more difficult than anyone anticipated. She remembers hearing about how some tremendous wreckage from the Blink blocked up much of the Solda River's mouth and would have to be removed. And if she recalls, all of SDC's most brilliant engineers were still scratching their heads over it.

Yet now, just outside the Solda Bay, she sees that they seem to be making headway. Remarkable headway, in fact.

In the mouth of the bay is a forest of dredging cranes, each 150 feet high, all in lines radiating outward from the shore. Some of the cranes are building other cranes, reaching farther and farther out to sea, while the ones closer to the shore are deconstructing the cranes at the back. It's a brilliant, confusing, impressive mess of construction work, and for a moment Mulaghesh wonders if these mechanisms are here to repair the ruined mess of Voortyashtan or if they're here to tear it down. The shore behind the cranes is awash with activity: tiny timber structures and makeshift piers all fueling the work taking place in the bay, reforging this ruined metropolis into what could one day be the trade capital of the western coast of the Continent.

But where's the wreckage the cranes are supposed to be hauling away? From what Mulaghesh can see, the Solda Bay is wide and clear.

“We'll have to cut a sharp turn here, ma'am,” says the captain of the
Hjemdal
. “Might wish to hold on tight.”

“Cut around what?” says Mulaghesh. “It damned well looks like we're in open seas to me, Captain.”

“Stand on the port side and look down, ma'am,” says the captain, “and you might catch a glimpse of it.”

Mulaghesh does so, holding tight to the railing.

The ship veers beneath her. Dark water washes up the hull. She sees nothing, but then…

There is a disturbance in the current a few dozen feet out: the surface of the water is rippled where it ought to be smooth. She squints, and sees something down below….

Something white. Something wide and smooth and pale, just below the surface of the water. As the
Hjemdal
cruises by she spies the faint outline of an aperture in this white surface below the water—a long, thin gap, pointed at the top and flat at the bottom. As they near she sees molding lining the gap, and a shutter hanging off of one ancient, rusted hinge.

Then she understands:
It's a window.

“That…That was a building,” she says aloud, looking back. “There was…There was a building under the water back there.”

“Welcome to
old
Voortyashtan,” the captain says with false cheer, waving at the mouth of the Solda. “Though you can't see much of it these days. It's moved, y'see, about three hundred feet. Vertically, straight
down
.” He grins and laughs wickedly.