“Thina…deskite?” asks Thinadeshi. “What do you mean?”
“It’s this ore,” says Mulaghesh. “Or that’s what they thought it was, discovered outside of Fort Thin…” She pauses as she realizes nearly everything she’s about to reference has been named for the ill-looking person sitting before her. “Never mind. But they thought it was this natural resource with some unusual properties, so they started digging it up. But it wasn’t natural at all; it was what was left of the swords after you obliterated the tomb, pulverized it beyond recognition! That must have been why Choudhry was so interested in the geomorphological history of the cliffs: she could tell that something was wrong! She must have noticed some sign of the damage you did, and known that it couldn’t possibly have been some natural effect!”
Thinadeshi looks at her side-eyed. “I won’t pretend to know anything about a lick of what you’re saying here, but do go on.”
Mulaghesh scratches her scalp, excited and anxious. “And that must be why the ore never tested as Divine! Because it isn’t the will of a Divinity that makes it work—it’s the will of the dead! If you’re right, and anything that memorializes the dead is forced to persist, then that would explain everything—why the man atop the Tooth was still alive, why the ‘tribute’ statues they hauled up from the bottom of the sea are still around, and why any miracle relating to the dead still functions! And that’s why I had flashbacks down in the mine’s tunnels—I was literally walking through a sea of souls and memories.”
“I will assume you are talking about the mine I destroyed,” says Thinadeshi.
Mulaghesh stops. “Oh. That’s right. That was you, after all.”
“Yes,” says Thinadeshi, nettled. “This was the incident in which you shot me, if you remember.”
“Which was pretty damned justified, if I might say so! From my end you looked a damn sight like the real thing!”
“Of course I did!” snaps Thinadeshi. “When one wields even a shadow of a Divinity’s power, that power tends to follow decorum and clothe one correctly!”
“What, it even makes you a hundred sizes bigger?”
“It’s all a play of images and perception, a warping of the world! Miracles are apparently very formal things, I’ll have you know!” She winces as Mulaghesh tends to her shoulder. “But they do not make one invulnerable.”
“How was it that no one else saw you?”
“Because I did not wish them to,” says Thinadeshi. “I tapped the sword’s strength to veil myself from the land of the living. But…when I climbed the cliff, the sword bucked, like a dowsing rod sensing water. Something was wrong. Perhaps it sensed you—maybe it sensed some quality in you it found familiar, or even desirable. Why hide one’s self from a kindred spirit?”
Mulaghesh is silent as she considers the awful implications of this. Finally she asks, “How did you know about the mine?”
“Because someone opened a window into it,” says Thinadeshi. “I felt someone trying to open many entryways into this place. I didn’t know that was one of the things I could do—sensing such a thing—but apparently I can. They tried it over and over again. I went to investigate, fearing someone could, I don’t know, incite or awaken all the souls here. Then I came across a gap hanging in the air, a mirror or window into…somewhere else. A tunnel of some kind, and in that tunnel were some grubby little men. They did not see me, and I listened to them talking, digging down in the dirt and hauling up all the fragments of the very things I’d hoped I’d destroyed long ago. I thought that this might be the reason the City of Blades was being pulled back, reconnecting with the land of the living. So I did what was necessary.”
“And you destroyed it,” says Mulaghesh. She doesn’t bother telling Thinadeshi that she killed three soldiers in the process of doing so. What good would that do?
“But it didn’t work,” says Thinadeshi miserably. “I can still feel us growing closer and closer. It made me so weak, to do it, but it accomplished nothing. The dead remember more and more of what was promised to them. Something has happened in Voortyashtan, and it acts like a faint light to a blind man, and they are following it, feeling their way back to the land of the living, and what they are owed. What were you people doing with that mine, anyway?”
Mulaghesh summarizes what little she understands about the wide-ranging qualities of thinadeskite. Thinadeshi is absolutely horrified. “And they named it after me?” she says. “They named this hellish material after the person who tried to annihilate it?”
“Well, they didn’t know that,” says Mulaghesh. “You’re well thought of, and they thought it could be world-changing….They said it would revolutionize nearly anything electrical.”
“Of course it would!” says Thinadeshi angrily. “If it can store a soul and all of its memories for hundreds of years, then a few photons are no issue at all! Every atom of those things is packed with the fury of millions of people denied what they felt was their due. I’ve no doubt that’s expressing itself in all manner of horrible ways!”
“But they’re not doing anything special with it,” says Mulaghesh. “They’re just making wire and other electrical material out of it. And if you’re telling me that destroying the mine didn’t stop anything…then it must have been something else that started this whole thing.”
“Then what?” says Thinadeshi. “What else could possibly be waking the dead?”
Mulaghesh thinks back to that afternoon on the clifftops: tripping over the tunnel, finding Choudhry’s letter describing a mysterious person infiltrating the thinadeskite mines…
“What if…What if it’s not just messing around with the ore that does it? You said yourself that the dead wouldn’t accept just anyone as Voortya, they needed someone that was…I don’t know, the right shape. The right clothes.”
“Yes?”
“So the right shape for the thinadeski—”
“Please stop calling it that.”
“All right! The right shape for the ore…would be a sword.” She looks at Thinadeshi. “Would it be possible for someone to forge new swords out of the ore?”
“I…I suppose,” says Thinadeshi. “But how would one know how to do it? How would one even know what to make? I made sure no examples of Voortyashtani swords remained in the living world.”
“No, you just destroyed that one tomb,” says Mulaghesh. “Special saints got tombs of their own. Ones that I guess contained only their swords. We found one in the Teeth of the World, one that didn’t have a sword in it. Unless someone had already been there and taken it—”
“—so they could use it as an original,” says Thinadeshi, “and use it to make copies. But they would need to have extensive smithing knowledge for that to work.”
Mulaghesh cocks her head, thinking. Then time seems to slow down for her.
She remembers walking into a house, noting how cold it was…but then as she left, turning around and seeing a thick tumble of smoke from the chimney.