She shoots again, hitting him again in the chest. He blinks, eyes wide, and the sword in his hand clatters to the floor. He takes one step toward her, then collapses to the ground, pawing limply for the blade that’s now just out of reach.
Mulaghesh keeps the pistol trained on him and slowly walks over.
“You shot me,” he says softly. “I can’t believe you shot me.”
“I’m not quite like you, Lalith,” she says. She holsters the pistol, bends down, and reaches into his coat. “You’ve always believed war to be a grand performance. But to me it’s just killing, just the ugliest thing a person can ever do.” She pulls out the sword of Voortya. It’s covered in Biswal’s blood. “So when you need to do it, there’s no need to make a show of it.”
He stares at her in disbelief. Then he says, “I’m…I’m not going to die, am I? I can’t. I just can’t….”
Mulaghesh watches him.
“I wasn’t…I wasn’t supposed to die like this,” he says softly. “I was supposed…to have a hero’s death. I’m owed a better death.”
“There’s no such thing as a good death, Lalith,” she says. “It’s just a dull, stupid thing we all have to do eventually. To ask meaning of it is to ask meaning of a shadow.”
Biswal’s trembling face fills with fury. “I hope there is an afterlife,” he says, his voice shaking. “I hope there is a hell. And I hope you go there soon, Turyin Mulaghesh.” His head falls back, his neck no longer able to support its weight.
“I’ve already been living in one, Lalith,” she says quietly. “Ever since the March.”
She can’t quite tell when he dies. She can tell his vision is failing him, and then perhaps he’s passed out from blood loss but is still alive…and then…
Nothing.
There’s a click from the door. Then it swings open to reveal Sigrud kneeling on the other side, lockpicks in his hand.
He looks at her, then at Biswal’s corpse. “Success?”
Mulaghesh walks away without looking back. “Get me to the coast.”
***
Captain Sakthi sprints up the steps to the southwest watchtower, his breath hot and burning in his lungs. He can hear the fortress yards behind him, full of soldiers piling in to arm themselves in case of a potential invasion.
Potential, he thinks wildly as he keeps running, or almost guaranteed?
He reviews the situation as he runs. No one knows where the hells Biswal is. The general was last seen reviewing the coastal cannons when he abruptly looked up as if someone called his name, excused himself, and walked away. Colonel Mishwal unfortunately took a bullet to the neck in the highlands, Major Owaisi is suffering from acute pneumonia contracted after tumbling into an icy Voortyashtani stream, and Major Hukkeri is frantically preparing her troops to defend the clifftops south of the fortress.
But this all means that no one is entirely sure whose order they’re waiting on to fire the coastal cannons. This has never been done in the history of the fortress—who’s the authority in such a situation? Yet Captain Sakthi, having seen what is slowly moving across the North Seas to them, is more than willing to abandon all decorum of rank if that means they make it out of here alive.
He finally makes it to the top of the watchtower. The walls of the tower are mostly glass to allow the radio technicians to see into the bay, so he is instantly confronted with the sight he just left.
“Oh, by the seas,” he whimpers. “There’s more of them! And they’re closer!”
The seas west of the fortress, which are often so dark, are now lit up with a queer blue-white luminescence, giving their slow, undulating waves a creamy, green color. This curious effect extends for miles, as if the waters have been invaded by some strange breed of algae.
But the source of the glow is obvious: it comes from the thousands of spectral ships sailing toward them.
They are the most bizarre and terrifying things Captain Sakthi has ever seen, splintery creations of bone and horn and metal, long and thin and positively lethal-looking, as if someone could teach a knife to float. Their sails are huge and billowing, not at all ragged but smooth and silvery. And Sakthi can see someone is rowing their countless oars, hauling at the ocean and driving the ships forward with furious speed.
He takes out a spyglass and squints through it. He can’t quite make out who is rowing, but…but he thinks he can see shadowy, monstrous figures that couldn’t possibly be human….
“By the seas…” He takes the spyglass away. “By the seas! What are you waiting for?” he cries to the technicians. “Why haven’t they fired yet?”
“We haven’t gotten the order yet, Captain,” says one of the technicians sitting at a radio. “General Biswal sa—”
“General Biswal is absent!” says Sakthi. “Radio the damn positions to the artillery and tell them to fire already!”
The technicians look at one another, crouched in their piles and piles of bronzed equipment. To do as Sakthi is asking is the most severe of violations.
Sakthi grimaces, pulls out his sidearm, and points it at them. “Tell them anything afterwards! Tell them I’m culpable! Tell them to hang me! Tell them to put it on my fucking fitness report! Just fire already, fire, fire!”
The technicians grab a radio, turn it on, mutter in a jumble of coordinates, and then finish with, “Fire away.”
There’s a pause.
Then the first cannon fires.
The boom of the cannon is so loud it feels like it will shake Sakthi’s bones to the point of dissolution. The coastal batteries light up with the flare as if a spotlight has shone down on them, and three of the technicians put binoculars to their eyes. Sakthi holsters his weapon, fumbles for his own spyglass, and puts it to his eye just in time to see a column of water erupt up from the ocean.
One of the technicians says, “Miss.”
The cannons fire again and again, targeting the foremost ship. It feels like it takes an agonizingly long time between each blast. Then finally the Voortyashtani ship erupts in a burst of dark smoke, and it begins to drift on the ocean, a flaming, smoking, directionless hulk that now threatens to crash into the other ships.
The technicians cheer, and Sakthi takes away his spyglass to join them. But as he does he sees things in perspective: the smoking, flaming ship is but a fraction of the flotilla, a tiny candle burning in a sea of glittering, soft light.
We’ll have to do that a thousand more times for it to make a difference, he thinks, his stomach sinking. We’re fucked, aren’t we? We’re so desperately fucked.
***
Mulaghesh and Sigrud are sprinting across the fortress courtyard when the first cannon goes off. It’s incredibly, deafeningly loud, and though the courtyard is full of soldiers preparing for combat it’s immediately clear that they’ve never heard the coastal cannons in use, nor did they ever expect to. They’re unnerved, ragged and exhausted from the highlands excursion, and totally unprepared for what might happen.
I have to stop this, thinks Mulaghesh. Or else those sentinels will cut through these kids like a hot knife through butter.
“They likely took down my rope ladder,” says Sigrud. “So I am not sure how to get out. All gates will surely be watched.”