“Here. Look. Help me take off my right glove.”
Mulaghesh does so. Then Thinadeshi holds her hand up to the window. “Watch.”
“Okay…” Mulaghesh crouches beside her, not sure what she’s watching: Thinadeshi’s hand is small, well-manicured, but otherwise unremarkable.
But then…
Mulaghesh sees it, very faintly: the outline of the window frame through Thinadeshi’s hand, as if her flesh is very slightly translucent.
Mulaghesh says, “What in all the hells…?”
“You see it, then,” says Thinadeshi grimly. “My…I don’t know, my corporeal essence is fading. I’m not supposed to be here, so this place is steadily asserting that I’m not here. No mortal was ever intended to shoulder the burdens of a Divinity.” She puts back on her glove. “I am being rejected, slowly but surely. But I’ve known I’ve been losing this battle for some time.”
Mulaghesh holds down the bandages on Thinadeshi’s shoulder, which is still seeping blood. “Can I ask how you came to be here? Or, really…what’s going on?”
“I suppose in the normal world everyone assumes I just disappeared.”
“That’s about the cut of it.”
“But I didn’t, obviously. I have chosen to remain here, in this place, since I left the world I knew.”
“You chose to come here?”
“Oh, no, I didn’t choose to come. But I chose to stay once I realized the consequences if I left.” She sighs and rubs her eyes, exhausted. “What’s the last you know about me?”
“I know you vanished in Voortyashtan. That’s all anyone knows.”
“Yes…I was on an exploratory mission, trying to find a rail passage out to the wildernesses, along the Solda to the coast, so we could try to bring it under control. We saw bandit kings and pestilence and warfare and mass rape. There was no leadership, no control after the Blink. And the Blink struck this place quite hard. I remember coming here, seeing the squalor and the vandals, fighting off attackers nearly every day and night. I was brazen, you see. And…reckless. I had just lost Shomal.”
Mulaghesh remembers this from her history books: Thinadeshi’s four-year-old son, lost to plague during her travels on the Continent. “I see.”
“I was willing to fight everyone and everything, after that,” says Thinadeshi quietly. “I was going to win or die trying, and…and I didn’t prefer which, honestly. But then one day we made it. We passed through the ranges and came to the ocean. But the question was, what was the easiest route? What was the best way to link the North Seas to Saypur? So we had to survey. And one morning I was walking along the coast, taking measurements of possible passages back through the ranges…and then I came upon it.”
Thinadeshi’s words are growing slurred now: the opiates must be sloshing around in her system. “The Blink did a lot of damage to the Voortyashtani coast. So much of what they built was on the sea, so many miracles worked into the cliffs and the shore, and the Blink was so recent then. It was like chaos, unimaginable devastation. Homes and bridges and rubble all piled up on the bottom of the cliffs. And some of the cliffs had cracked open, like an egg. And I came to one of these cracks, and I looked in”—her face fills with an awful dread—“and they saw me, and they called up to me.”
Thinadeshi’s horrified expression sets a chill in Mulaghesh’s belly. “Who? Who did?”
“The soldiers,” says Thinadeshi softly. “All the Voortyashtani soldiers. Ever. They were waiting for me in that cliff. It was a tomb, you see. A massive tomb, bigger than anything I’d ever seen. But the Voortyashtanis had a very strange way of memorializing their dead.” She looks at Mulaghesh, wild-eyed. “You know about their swords? That the two bond, with each becoming a vessel for the other, the body carrying the sword and the sword carrying the soul?”
“I’m familiar with it,” says Mulaghesh.
“That’s what was down there,” says Thinadeshi. Her eyes are wide with awe. “All those swords. Thousands of them. Millions of them. All with minds in them, all with agency, memories of lives and inconceivable bloodshed, and all of them crying out to me.”
Mulaghesh remembers the reports of Choudhry searching the hills for a mythical tomb…but she never imagined that it was like this. “So the tomb wasn’t full of bodies, but full of swords?”
“Yes. Voortyashtanis didn’t consider there to be a difference between the two. Sentinels fashioned their lives to be weapons, their bodies and minds to be instruments of warfare—their swords were a part of that, perhaps the heart of what they became. That’s why they call this place the City of Blades, after all. And when I found them, there were so many of them, exposed to the sky, spilling out into the sea, all of them screaming out to someone to find them, to help them.”
“But how were they still alive? How did they still exist? They were Divine, right? How could they exist without Voortya?”
“Because Voortya had made a pact with them,” says Thinadeshi wearily. “It was an agreement: they would make themselves into weapons, be her warriors and go to war for her, and she would give them eternal life. And this contract was so binding that it had to be executed—even if Voortya wasn’t there! Her death did not, to use the terminology, render anything null and void! The dead were still supposed to get their afterlife. They were still supposed to reside with Voortya in the City of Blades. And one day, they were still supposed to return to where their swords lay in the mortal world and begin the last war, the final war that would consume all of creation. This is what was promised them, and the dead, in essence, intend to see that the bargain is fulfilled. If it was only one or two departed souls, their power might be negligible—but there are millions here with me in the City of Blades. With their strength pooled they’re able to make sure reality holds up its part of the bargain. They are insisting that they be remembered, and any Divine construction created to remember them is therefore forced to persist.” Suddenly she looks terribly, terribly weary. “But they needed Voortya herself in order for the agreement to be executed. Some part of her had to reside with them in the City of Blades. Or someone quite similar, I should say.”