“Well, we never got any damned afterlives!” snarls Mulaghesh, pumping the bellows. “When Saypuris were massacred we just rotted in the ground, and if our families knew where we lay then they considered it a blessing! Your tragedy is but a candle flame among a forest fire!”
“I don’t care!” screams Rada. “I don’t care! Damn the world, damn the Continent, and damn Saypur! If the world gives us no reprieve from life then let them destroy it! When I held the sword, it showed me all its broken kin scattered through the hills—and when they first made the mine, I knew what they were digging up, even if they didn’t! When I made my first sword I knew I brought them a little closer, brought the afterlife denied to me just a little closer to reality. Let them come here. Let them do unto us as we deserve!” She bursts into tears, sobbing hysterically. “We deserve it. We all deserve it.”
“Those families you killed, they deserved it? That corpse you butchered to make it look like Choudhry, she deserved it?”
“I don’t even know who that was,” says Rada softly. “I bought the body from a highland peddler….”
“And all those innocents who died when you resurrected Zhurgut, did they deserve it, too?”
She shrugs. “It was necessary. I had to see if my craftsmanship had gotten good enough to bring a sentinel here and keep them here. And you were getting far too close. I thought I could solve two problems at once. But what Zhurgut did will look like a mere bruise in comparison to the Night that is coming….And you can’t stop it, General. It took me years to make the swords. It’ll take far longer than an evening to destroy them, especially by a one-handed old woman with soldiers bearing down on her. I can hear them upstairs—can you?”
Mulaghesh stops pumping the bellows. There’s shouting and a hammering from up above—likely the soldiers trying to hack through the trapdoor.
Rada smiles. “Do you know what’s funny? I brought them here, and they don’t even know it. I broke into the yard of statues; I took the photos and sent them along. They think you betrayed your country, General. I’m sure by now every soldier in Voortyashtan wants your head.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Mulaghesh realizes Rada’s right, of course. The swords glow a little, but she’s far from smelting them down, let alone all of them. The soldiers will break through long before she makes any headway.
“You’re right. I can’t do it with this forge,” she says quietly.
Then she reaches for her belt and pulls out the hilt of the sword of Voortya.
She stares at it. It is dark and glittering, beautiful in a nasty, savage way, and she imagines how its blade flickered with a pale fire, the barest suggestion of something terrible and powerful.
“But perhaps I can with this,” Mulaghesh says softly.
***
Signe Harkvaldsson lies very still under the bracken as she hears the area flood with soldiers. She’s given up counting their number: at first there were only the five or six of them, but now there’s ten, twenty, even more, all of them surrounding the house. She can hear some of them talking, giving orders, sending signals up to the fort.
“…know I tagged one of them. I know I did. I heard her scream.”
“…blonde, right? The one from the harbor? Or was I imagining things?”
“…no blood on the door. Could be inside, but I doubt it. She’s still here somewhere.”
She shifts slightly to the right to look down at her injury. She didn’t give it the treatment it deserved, but she didn’t have the time for it: she’d hardly applied the tourniquet when she heard Mulaghesh kick in the door, which made all the soldiers come sprinting up. Her calf throbs so much that sometimes it’s all she can do to keep from whimpering. She is also disconcertingly aware that she feels quite faint, no doubt from loss of blood: not only has she just been shot, but she also “donated” to Mulaghesh’s ritual.
She hears screaming from inside the house. The soldiers go quiet. It takes her a moment to recognize that it’s Rada screaming, howling in rage: she only ever heard the woman quietly stutter and stammer through life, so to hear her scream like that is queerly disturbing.
A soldier says, “General Biswal is on his way, correct? Good. But tell him to hurry!”
She groans inwardly. If Biswal is coming it’s almost certain more troops will be coming too. And the more troops that come, she thinks, the higher my chances are of being discovered.
She feels faint, and knows that time is running out.
***
“And what,” says Rada Smolisk, “is that thing?”
“Shut up,” barks Mulaghesh. She shuts her eyes and tries to concentrate.
“Is that a sculpture? A piece of a sword?”
“Shut up!” She mentally reaches out to the sword, trying to feel for it. When she saw the sword in Thinadeshi’s hand it seemed to speak to her, to become something in her head, a medley of ideas and sensations and histories. Yet now when she needs it most it’s just a lump of metal in her hand.
“Is that one of Komayd’s trinkets?” says Rada. “I know she had them. Things stolen from the Continent to use against us…It won’t work. None of this is Divine anymore. None of this is fueled by miracles, General. It’s powered by the rage of the dead.”
“Will you shut your mouth?” shouts Mulaghesh.
“No. Why would I? I’ve nothing to lose. I’ve never had anything to lose.” She laughs miserably, massaging her wounded knee. “Don’t you agree with them, General, just a little bit? These forgotten soldiers, furious that their nation and their god didn’t give them what was promised? Haven’t you and thousands of your comrades been abandoned the exact same way?”
Mulaghesh stuffs the sword hilt in her pocket, draws her carousel, and points it at Rada’s head. “By all the damned seas, I’ll do it!” she shouts. “I’ll shoot you, you damned fool!”
Rada doesn’t even blink. Her face is calm and still, eyes watchful and wide. “Do it. I don’t care. In a way I’m an even better soldier than you are, aren’t I, General? The best soldier doesn’t value life, not even their own.”
“You’re no soldier,” says Mulaghesh furiously. “You think yourself a martyr, but you’re the world’s fool, Rada, fulfilling a prophecy no one even wants anymore.”
“This world should have never been,” says Rada calmly, staring up at her along the carousel. “It is accidental. The first thing we should have done after the Blink was line up and calmly walk into the ocean, entering the oblivion from which we no longer had refuge. What is the point of living if there is nothing beyond life?”
“Do you even hear how foolish you sound?” Mulaghesh holsters the carousel. “I’ve lived my life in the shadow of oblivion, Rada. I’ve seen good people go to it and bad. And I’ve always known I’d go there eventually, one way or another.” She looks at Rada. “Maybe I’ll go there now and take you with me.”
She pulls a grenade from her belt. Rada’s eyes grow large as she realizes what she means to do.
“No…,” whispers Rada.
“The sword of Voortya won’t work,” says Mulaghesh calmly. “And the forge won’t work. But what if I detonate four grenades here in this basement with you? What about that?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t?”