The only answer is the trickle of the waters below.
She looks closer at the satchel of TNT, wondering what Choudhry planned to use it on. Probably to blow up the citadel, Mulaghesh thinks, just as Sigrud proposed. Mulaghesh considers taking the TNT herself, but she’s never been a fast hand with explosives, and she doesn’t want to try now with so much at stake. She definitely doesn’t want to run around with a bunch of friction-sensitive explosives on her back as a just-in-case measure, either.
Mulaghesh wonders why it hurts as much as it does to see Choudhry here. But she realizes she’s been thinking of Choudhry primarily as a soldier: a soldier operating on her own, trying to stop a threat to her country before it gained momentum, a soldier willing to lay down her life in the line of duty. To see she finally made that ultimate sacrifice is saddening, despite everything that’s happened so far.
“For so long I thought you were dead,” Mulaghesh says to her. “I don’t know why I’m so surprised to find out I was right.”
Then a strange, singing voice says over her shoulder, “It’s odd she even got here.”
Mulaghesh whirls around, rifling at the ready. Then she realizes that the voice came from nearly fourteen feet above her, and slowly looks up.
***
Towering over her is what looks like the figure of an enormous woman, or perhaps a sculpture of a woman made of metal: she is silvery and glimmering, her arms and shoulders smooth like chrome. There is an artfulness to her that is both beautiful and yet repellent—Mulaghesh immediately senses that this thing was made by someone—and her limbs are terribly distorted, far too long and thin for a normal human. There’s something blade-like about them, the way they narrow and thin at the middle, then expand outward at the ends. Her hands and fingers are nothing but knives, long and curved and thin—so thin it’s hard to tell how many fingers she actually has. She wears a ragged skirt that starts high above her waist and then drifts down to coil around her narrow legs. Her feet, Mulaghesh sees, are clawed, like those of a bird, and the woman’s face is hidden behind a veil made of woven hair, long and silky and somewhat translucent.
Mulaghesh thinks she can glimpse the features behind that veil, the eyes and the mouth, but…but she doesn’t want to.
The voice comes again, soft and strangely fluting, as if it’s not being spoken from a human mouth but rather echoing through many pipes, like a pipe organ: “I know you. You’ve been here before.”
Mulaghesh tries to maintain her composure as she keeps her rifling pointed at this…whatever it is. It doesn’t seem to be a threat: it just impassively stares down at her. After all, if it wanted her dead it could have just stepped on her. “What?”
“You were here before,” says the creature. “Only you fell through. Just a shade of you. A piece of you. Not the whole you.” The creature looks back over the canal, its posture wistful, thoughtful. “I would remember. We get visitors so rarely these days. Just the few recent ones, really.”
Mulaghesh thinks rapidly. She remembers the voice from her vision: Are you supposed to be here?
She asks, “You’re the guardian, aren’t you?”
The giant head swivels back to look down at her. “I am the Watcher,” she says. “I watch and guard these shores.”
“Did…Did you kill her?”
“Her?” The Watcher cranes her head to the side to survey Choudhry’s corpse. “If I had killed her, she’d hardly be in one piece.” She holds up one hand and flexes her numerous bladed fingers. “Would she?”
“Then what happened?”
“Hm,” says the Watcher. Her tone suggests she’s intrigued that Mulaghesh would imagine she’d be interested in something so disinteresting. She looks again at Choudhry’s corpse, cocks her head, and says, “Dehydration.”
“D-Dehydration?”
“Yes,” says the Watcher, bored. “She came the same way you did, activating the tribute. But she used only her own blood, and when she came through she was weak and panicked. She ran too hard, too fast. Overexerted herself, poor thing. Not enough blood and fluids in that little body to keep it going, you see. I can tell. I am part of this place, so I know. I saw.”
“What do you mean, activating the tribute?”
The Watcher carelessly flicks a finger at the horizon. “You came from the city, didn’t you? The flesh place? The place filled with idols, statues, carvings, each attributed to the memory of a great warrior, a great deed? But the carving of the Mother…That is carefully linked to here.”
“So each one of those white statues memorializes the dead?” asks Mulaghesh.
The Watcher waves her hand, bored: Of course. Then she looks at Choudhry and cocks her head again. “That one there did not truly belong here. She had slain but one in her life, and that was a panicked, fretful deed. But you…” The Watcher bends down to look into Mulaghesh’s face—her giant body moves with a horrifying silence—and extends one long, needle-like index finger. Mulaghesh stiffens, terrified, and nearly fires, but the Watcher simply brushes a stray hair away from her face with astonishing delicacy. “You belong here. More than most, in my own humble opinion….But you know that already, don’t you?”
“What’s going on here?” asks Mulaghesh. “How are the dead even still here?”
“Because the two worlds are tied together,” says the Watcher. “Once they were very, very closely tied.” She demonstrates with her massive, bladed hands, folding all the countless serrated fingers together. “One never forgot about the other. Each was impossible without the other. The living made war because they knew the City of Blades was waiting for them, and the City of Blades existed because the living made war. But then they broke apart—yet not completely apart.” Her fingers snap apart with astonishing speed, leaving only two fingers touching. “Some threads remained. This place persisted, a ghost of itself, but still here. But just a bit ago, someone on the other side started renewing the bonds.” Slowly her fingers extend, until more and more and more begin to touch. “The two worlds grow near again, like a fisherman reeling in a catch. The dead awake, very slowly. And when they wake enough…Well. I doubt I’ll have much of a job anymore. Because then this city will be empty, won’t it?” There’s a bored tone of indifference to her words. Mulaghesh is reminded of an employee whose supervisor has left for the day.
“How can someone do that?” asks Mulaghesh. “How can someone just…reknit the world like that?”
“How should I know?” says the Watcher. “I simply watch. I refuse access or I grant it. That is my function, my role. It’s always been this, since time before time.”
“And what have you seen recently? Has there been anything…strange?”
“Strange? No. This place is always the same. It always has been this way. Though for so long we had no visitors, no new arrivals, no victorious dead. And then…”