Mulaghesh slowly realizes what she means. “You?” she asks, horrified. “They wanted you to stand in for Voortya?”
Thinadeshi smiles weakly. “They needed the Maiden of Steel, Queen of Grief, Empress of Graves, She Who Clove the Earth in Twain, Devourer of Children. Am I not all these things, to some extent? I devoted my life to the railroads, to reconstruction, so I am the Maiden of Steel. I’ve torn apart mountains to build them, so I am She Who Clove the Earth in Twain. Hundreds of laborers died fulfilling my dangerous dream, so I am the Empress of Graves. And…my own children perished in my endeavors. My family suffered unspeakably for everything I wrought. So I am also Queen of Grief, and Devourer of Children. Perhaps it was my punishment to become this thing. Perhaps I deserve this. Whatever the case, they needed someone who matched their idea of Voortya—and I came close enough to count. There was a vacuum, and I merely filled it.”
“But why did you consent?”
“Because when they spoke to me,” says Thinadeshi, “when they reached out to me and begged me to take up the mantle of their mother, I understood that their true hope was that I would allow them their last war. Their final great battle, the one they’d been promised for centuries. And I could not allow that. I could not allow them to make war upon my country, not after it had just been freed.
“So I climbed down to them. And as I did, the world…changed. The skies grew dark. The stars changed—they became older, stranger. And the farther I climbed down the broken cliff to them, the more the world shifted and churned until I was walking down a white staircase, and then I was in a grand, white courtyard with many passageways and staircases up—and the voices asked me to climb up, up, and I did. I climbed and I climbed until I came to the top of the tower, and there was the great, awful red throne, and beside it…Beside it was this.”
Thinadeshi closes her eyes once more, and concentrates. She reaches out with her right hand, appearing to sift through the empty air before her. Then her fingers clench around something, and she pulls out…
Suddenly there is a sword in her hand, or rather a sword hilt, as the blade is but a faint flicker of golden light. Mulaghesh can’t tell exactly where it came from: it feels as if it’s always been in her hand, but Thinadeshi simply chose to make it visible now.
The hilt and handle are strange to Mulaghesh’s eyes: at first it appears to be made of some dark, viscous black material, like volcanic glass. But then the light shifts, and the hilt isn’t dark stone, but a severed hand. Its blackened fingers clutch the bottom of the formless blade, its thumb and forefinger crooked in such a manner that Mulaghesh knows it was not made by any artist.
The more she looks at the sword the more she perceives many things in it, even sensations: the sound of steel on steel, the sight of distant flames, the rumble of horses’ hooves. The sword flickers back and forth between being made of stone and fire and steel and lightning before, finally, becoming a human hand once more. And as she looks she knows that this is no mere sculpture: the hand is real, sacrificed by a man long ago to his Divinity, and through the sacrifice of his son she became exceedingly powerful, and this sacrifice was memorialized on stones and books and pieces of armor, the hand clutching the blade, the sacrifice paired with assault.
“The sword of Voortya,” says Thinadeshi quietly. “It is with me always now. Just like the sentinels and their own weapons, it is a part of me. It whispers to me, telling me I am Voortya, telling me what I must do, playing with my thoughts. It is damnably hard to resist sometimes. For long stretches, I think I am Voortya, sometimes.”
“That sounds dangerous,” says Mulaghesh.
“You’ve no idea. I think it is not the true thing, or at least not as it was: like the City of Blades, like everything Divine, it is but a shadow of its former self. But that is still more dangerous and more powerful than any device any mortal has ever wielded. One day I will be rid of it. Perhaps soon.” Thinadeshi sits back as if the effort of producing the weapon exhausted her. “When I took up the sword of Voortya, in the eyes of the dead, it was as if I was her. And because she’d granted them power, they then bestowed it upon me. I was given limited abilities, both within this ghostly realm and beyond. And one of those powers was to enter the land of the living, and destroy. Which I did.
“I crossed over, and I attacked the cliffs with all the power that was granted to me. I brought down the tomb, I pummeled the earth, I hacked at it again and again with the sword of Voortya. The effort exhausted me—in retrospect, it nearly killed me, for I had done something only a Divinity should be able to do—but I did it.”
“Why?”
“They wished to return to where their swords lay—but what if there were no swords? What could they do then? The blades act as beacons, you see, tying the land of the dead to the land of the living. By destroying them I cut the strings and set this island adrift, existing in a half-real state. I was marooned here with them, dressed up as their dead god, but at least the world was safe. At least my people were safe. At least my children could finally go on to live happy, safe lives.”
“How have you stayed alive all this time?” asks Mulaghesh. “I don’t see any food or water around here.”
“I’ve wondered that myself,” says Thinadeshi. “But I never get hungry here, or thirsty. My suspicion is that this place is some kind of a limbo, really. When Voortya died, it stopped being completely real…and when I destroyed the swords, and destroyed the last final link to mortal life with them, it became even less real than that. Time doesn’t work here, or if it does, it doesn’t work the way it should.”
Thinadeshi is silent for a long, long time. She draws a rattling breath. “But then,” she croaks. “But then, but then, but then…I felt it. I felt it out there in the land of the living. Somehow we were being pulled back. Someone had found the tomb, or what was left of it. Someone had found the swords. And they began meddling i—”
Mulaghesh sits upright, every muscle in her body clenched to the point of straining. “Son of a bitch! Son of a damned bitch!”
Thinadeshi draws away from her, alarmed. “What? What is it? What’s wrong with you?”
“It’s the thinadeskite!” cries Mulaghesh.
“The what?”
“The thinadeskite! It’s not some naturally occurring ore! It’s what’s left of their damned swords!”
***