***
The tattered cityscape of Voortyashtan slides by as the train picks up, replaced by tall white cliffs. Signe lights another cigarette—her fifth so far, Mulaghesh gauges. There’s something distinctly mercantile about the Dreyling woman: her hair is tied back and parted in a fashion Mulaghesh knows is now quite chic in Ghaladesh, and she wears a close-cut, collarless black jacket with a flap that hides all buttons, paired with slim, dark trousers and glossy black boots. A tremendous gray scarf sits in piles around her neck, going right up to her chin. Mulaghesh feels Signe would fit right in at some high meeting of a company board, spitting out numbers and calmly allaying the fears of stockholders. Which is probably exactly what she does, Mulaghesh reminds herself.
But her hands are an anomaly: when Signe removed her gloves Mulaghesh expected to see smooth, soft, perfectly manicured digits. But instead her hands are hard, callous, cracked things suggesting years of brutal labor, and they’re smudged and smeared with black ink, as if she’s been handling cheap newspapers all day.
Mulaghesh shivers as a draft snakes into the train car.
“Late winter,” says Signe. “It’s quite harsh here, as it is for the rest of the Continent. But Voortyashtan sits on the Great Western Current, ensuring its waters will never freeze over. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.”
“What a pity that would be.”
“Perhaps so. It does bring with it a great deal of moisture. Did you know, for instance, that Voortyashtan is the flood capital of the world?”
“Another charming trait to recommend it. As if its history wasn’t enough.”
“True. What do you know about Voortya, General?”
“I know she’s dead.”
“Besides that.”
“I know I like that she’s dead.”
Signe rolls her eyes. Smoke pours from her nostrils.
“Fine,” says Mulaghesh. “I know she was the Continental Divinity of war and death. I know she was terrifying. And I know her sentinels once essentially controlled the known world, shipping out of this very bay by the thousands.”
“By the hundreds of thousands,” Signe says. “If not more. And you are correct that she was the Divinity of war and death, but she was also the Divinity of the sea—something many forget. Likely because her martial exploits are…much more memorable.”
“If by that you mean her sentinels killed and maimed and tortured Saypuris by the millions, yeah. That’s pretty memorable, for us. Maybe a little too memorable.”
“True. But what many forget is that, as the Divinity of the sea, most of her domain was built on the sea. The original Voortyashtan, as we understand it, was one giant, floating city, constructed on many docks and plinths, or perhaps floating on the sea itself. Either way, we’ve gleaned from its current position that, whatever its methods of support, they were definitely miraculous.”
“You mean because it’s at the bottom of the bay.” This part of the story is familiar to Mulaghesh: there’s hardly a part of the Continent that wasn’t devastated when the Divinities were killed by the Kaj, which caused all the miracles that supported the Continent’s way of life to abruptly vanish—an event known as “the Blink.” If the original city of Voortyashtan was allowed to float on the ocean by miraculous means, that would definitely explain why it’s currently playing home to the fish of the North Sea.
“Correct.” Signe flashes her cunning smile. How the hells does she keep her teeth so white, Mulaghesh thinks, irritated, if she smokes so much? “What you see now of the city was not the city. Just the entrance portion of the Voortyashtan of old. Those two peaks east of the city aren’t mountains, General—they’re the frame of a door.”
Mulaghesh chews her cigarillo. “So modern Voortyashtan is built on ruins of the old city’s gates?”
“Correct. And the original city now clogs up the Solda, causing massive seasonal flooding downriver and preventing one of the grandest rivers in the world from becoming a passageway of incredibly lucrative trade.”
Mulaghesh laughs wickedly. “So your job here is to give the whole of the Continent an enema, is that it?”
This doesn’t even put a dent in Signe’s smile. “That is one way of putting it, yes.”
“And you actually think you’ll make this rendition of the schedule?”
“Oh, well…In truth, my current calculations suggest we’ll beat the latest iteration of the dredging deadline by nearly three months.”
Mulaghesh stares at her, mouth open. “You…You think you’ll beat it?”
“Yes,” says Signe mildly.
“You’ll beat this deadline that keeps getting pushed back years?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not being completely and utterly mad?”
“Not to my knowledge, no.”
“How do you think you could possibly manage this?”
“I don’t begrudge you your skepticism,” says Signe. “For years, SDC struggled with figuring out how to dredge the bay, how to rectify this decades-old damage done by sustained catastrophes. But eventually our engineering staff came up with a solution: modular component processing.”
“What?”
Signe smiles, and Mulaghesh realizes she’s just given the expected reaction in Signe’s little presentation. “We can’t work from the outside in of the Solda Bay—there’s a whole undersea city between us and, well, the city. So we decided to work from the inside out. We broke down the two main pieces of equipment—a crane, and a cargo ship—into their most basic components. Simple, cheap, functional components requiring the least amount of effort to put together and take apart. Then we made a small landing depot a few miles from Voortyashtan where we could get to shore”—she motions out the window toward the approaching lighthouse—“and built track that would allow us to ship the components closer to the bay. Once we could get the components to the mouth of the Solda, and once we got our first two cranes built, the game was over.”
Signe takes a nonchalant puff from her cigarette. Mulaghesh studies her, waits, and finally asks, “How was it over with just two cranes?”
“Why, get two cranes in the right places, and you can do anything. First they built ships and piers. Then they built four more cranes farther out in the sea, one on either side of each of them. Then those four cranes hauled up rubble, loaded up the ships, and built eight more cranes out into the sea, one on either side of each of them. Then the eight new cranes hauled up rubble, loaded up the new ships, and built sixteen new cranes…and then thirty-two, and sixty-four, and so on, and so on. This is a gross simplification, but you get the idea.”
Mulaghesh looks at the forest of cranes out the window. “So all that out there took…”
“The state of the project, as you see it today, took just under twenty months to produce.”