“Yes, by all damned things, shot me!” snarls Thinadeshi. Her voice and accent are unusual: Mulaghesh realizes she’s speaking with a dialect and manner that hasn’t been used in over fifty years. “I go out of my way and nearly kill myself trying to avoid unspeakable catastrophe, only to have some wild woman on a hilltop take out her little cannon and shoot me! Of all the madness! Of all the ridiculous nonsense! And what are you here for now? Are you here to finish the job? You’re a committed assassin, I’ll grant you that! What in damned creation could have happened in the Saypuri Isles to send someone like you after me?”
Mulaghesh feels dizzy. It’s taking up a lot of her brainpower to accept the idea that not only is she standing here talking to one of the founding figures of Saypur, but this particular founding figure is yelling at her with a lot of vitriol. Eventually Mulaghesh’s brain kicks in and she manages to process what Thinadeshi is saying: Wild woman on a hilltop…Does she mean when the mines collapsed?
“But, uh, I didn’t shoot you, ma’am,” says Mulaghesh. “If I’m understanding what you’re describing, ma’am—and I’m not at all convinced that I am—I shot at Voortya. The, uh, Divinity.”
Thinadeshi’s stare could punch a hole in the side of a battleship. She holds her arms out—well, one of them, at least, as her left isn’t particularly mobile. “Do you not see how I am attired? Does it not look familiar to you? I can tell by your egregious accent that it is deeply unlikely that you have had much education, but is putting two and two together so far beyond your grasp?”
“Are you…Are you saying that you’re Voortya? The Divinity?”
Thinadeshi sighs and rolls her eyes. “Oh, by all that is…No. I am saying that when I exercise the powers of this place, it projects an image thaaaah!” She trails off as she’s racked with pain. Another dribble of blood comes leaking out from under her plate mail. “Damn you!” cries Thinadeshi. “Perhaps you’ve murdered me already! Am I poisoned?”
“Uh, I don’t think so,” says Mulaghesh. She undoes the clasp on her rifling and sets it aside. “And listen, I don’t understand a thing about what’s going on, but I know how to treat a bullet wound. I’ve brought a med kit, and I can be decent enough with it, even one-handed.”
Thinadeshi frowns at her, suspicious. “You’re quite sure you’re not here to kill me?”
“No. I’m here to stop that from happening.” She points out the tower window to the sea of Voortyashtani sentinels beyond. “By any means necessary. I had no idea you were even here.”
Thinadeshi’s face softens a bit at that. She swallows. Mulaghesh can tell she’s quite weak. “W-Well. You’ve got quite a task ahead of you, now don’t you.” Then her eyes dim and she begins to topple over. Mulaghesh darts forward and grabs her before she strikes the ground.
***
Twenty minutes later Mulaghesh has the left arm of Thinadeshi’s armor pried off and has cut away her leather sleeve below. “It’ll reappear within a few hours,” Thinadeshi mutters. “All my vestments return to me, over time. I’ve tried taking them off, trust me.” Mulaghesh ignores her. There’s no bed in these chambers, just a giant marble chair about three times too big for a human being, so she has propped her up in that while she goes to work on her shoulder.
There were three opiate shots in her med kit, tiny little syringes not much bigger than your thumbnail, and Mulaghesh dosed Thinadeshi up with one. Thinadeshi hardly makes a peep as Mulaghesh digs in the wound with a pair of tweezers. Mulaghesh can feel the bullet lodged up against Thinadeshi’s upper humerus, and it doesn’t seem to have shattered or split any, which is good. So maybe I won’t have to go back, she thinks, and tell everyone this grand historical figure has died again, and this time I killed her.
“Who are you?” asks Thinadeshi groggily. “What’s your name? You never told me.”
Mulaghesh chews her lip as she delicately explores Thinadeshi’s wound. “I’m Turyin Mulaghesh, General Fourth Class of the Saypuri Military.”
“Military? So the Saypuri Isles still exist as a nation? It’s still solvent?” She sounds surprised, but then she would be: her stretch of history was incredibly rocky, with the global economy still in a nascent state.
“Yeah, but they dropped the ‘Isles’ part a while ago,” says Mulaghesh. “Mostly because Saypur kept folding in regions that weren’t islands. Or maybe they just wanted a cleaner-looking letterhead.”
“I see.”
Mulaghesh can feel her tense up, and knows what question she’s about to ask.
“So,” says Thinadeshi. “What…year is it there?”
Mulaghesh glances at her. “Why?”
“Don’t humor me, General. When I saw the men in the mines I could tell things were different. I’ve been gone far longer than I thought, haven’t I?”
Men in the mines? “Yeah. Yeah, I’d say so. Hold still.”
Then, faintly: “Tell me, and be honest…are my children dead?”
Mulaghesh pauses as she works. She can feel the bullet coming loose, but she still feels obligated to answer this question. “I know one of them is still in government. Padwal.”
“Padwal?” says Thinadeshi, sounding surprised. “In government?”
“Yeah. He’s an MP.”
“A what?”
“A minister of Parliament.”
“Parliament…,” says Thinadeshi. “We’ve kept that? Did no one read my plans to select a proportionate amount of representatives from each region to vote on each issue?”
“Uh…I don’t know, ma’am,” says Mulaghesh. “I’m a soldier, not a scholar.”
“It was a very thorough treatise, I thought,” says Thinadeshi, gritting her teeth as Mulaghesh wriggles the bullet. “What about Kristappa? And Rodmal? What about them?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know, ma’am.”
“You don’t know if they’re alive?” she asks, heartbroken.
“No. I’m sorry. I don’t.”
“But how old would they be today? If they are alive, I mean.”
Mulaghesh pauses, uncertain how to word this. “You’ve been gone over sixty years.”
Thinadeshi sits up. “Over sixty?”
“Um. Yeah. I think the exact number is sixty-four.”
“Sixty-four years?” She stares out the window, aghast. “Oh, my word…I…I suppose it’s…it’s fairly unlikely that they are alive, then.” Her voice is frail and crushed. “After all, Padwal was one of the youngest. What a curiously dispiriting thing it is, to outlive one’s children. If this strange state could even be called living. And I didn’t even get to know they died.”
Mulaghesh readjusts the tweezers. “Can you hold still? I’m about to get this thing out of you.”
“Ah…Ah! Please hurry!”
“I’m going!” says Mulaghesh. “I got it, I got it…” Then, finally, the chunk of metal comes loose, sliding out of the wound. “There.” She flicks it out the window without a thought, then applies bandages to the wound. “I’m going to need your help to stitch this up, though. I can’t manage that one-handed. Think you can assist?”
Thinadeshi’s face is wan. “You ask much of an old woman.”
“We can wait a bit and then try again.”
She sighs. “Oh, no. Don’t bother. My shoulder is not the most important thing right now. And besides, I shall be gone quite soon, I imagine.”
There’s an awkward pause.
“Huh?” says Mulaghesh. “This isn’t a fatal wound by any means. Unless you’ve got a condition or something.”
“A condition…yes. I have exactly that.” She sighs again and shuts her eyes. “I won’t perish from any wound to my body, my mortal self. They’re killing me out there, don’t you see? All those souls out there. They’re pulling me apart.”
“What do you mean?”