His grin practically glows, pleased and proud. “It is, ma’am. Happy to see you again.”
She remembers him a little more than some of the other soldiers she had under her command in Bulikov: he was captain of the barracks rowing team, which practiced in the summer on the Solda, much to the displeasure of the Bulikovians. And she remembers he was a wickedly talented swordsman, sparring with a liquid grace that even Mulaghesh, who was no slow hand with a blade herself, found remarkable.
“You went and got yourself all grown up, I see,” she says. “What in the hells are you doing all the way up here?”
“Mostly driving, ma’am,” Pandey says. “Turns out there aren’t too many soldiers up here knowledgeable with automobiles, so I’ve been stuck with this noble duty.”
Instinctively she looks Pandey over, checking his arms and legs for a sign of injury, his cheeks for any hint of malnourishment, his teeth for any sign of scurvy. He’s not yours anymore, she thinks. He’s Biswal’s now—or, perhaps, he’s his own. “Well, I hope you’ve honed your skills. I need to get up the cliffs and quick, but I’d like to do it in one piece.”
Pandey throws open her door. “The road is a vasha string, General,” he says, referring to the Saypuri instrument, “and the auto my bow. I’ll give you a grand performance.”
“If you can drive half as well as you can talk, Pandey,” she says, climbing in, “I expect I’ll be fine.”
Ten minutes later Mulaghesh watches out the window as Voortyashtan lurches by, the auto pitching and yawing like a boat in a storm. She spies tents and yurts and ditches and alleys, makeshift structures that can hardly bear the brunt of the wind. Standing throughout this disordered sprawl are tall, curious stone formations, tottering, misshapen cairns that run in lines along the Solda. Something about the cairns disturbs her, but it’s difficult for her to say what.
“It’s like a damned refugee camp,” says Mulaghesh.
“It would be similar, General,” says Pandey. He points at one of the cairns. “Were it not for those.”
“What do you mean?” She looks closer at one as they drive underneath it. It’s much taller than she’d anticipated, twenty or thirty feet, but she spies the suggestion of human features on the bulbous top of one towering cairn: the shallow dimples of eyes, the soft bulge of what could be a nose. She examines the others in the distance, searching for the divots of shadow at their tops, and sees the same.
“Statues,” says Mulaghesh. “They’re statues, aren’t they?”
“They were, once,” says Pandey. “Rumor has it they guarded the Solda, greeting those who floated down to the old city, passing through the gates.” He nods at the two peaks along the river. “The change in climate’s been none too kind to them.”
She imagines what they might have once been: tall, human figures dotting the shores, perhaps splendid and regal, now beaten and twisted into something barely recognizable, staring down forever at a missing city. “What must it be like, living in the shadows of these things?”
They come to the clifftops. Fort Thinadeshi broods on the horizon like a storm cloud, immense and dark and gleaming wetly, so covered with cannons that it resembles a vast porcupine. “I suppose the shtanis are used to living with threats hanging over their shoulders, General,” says Pandey.
“Shtanis?”
“Oh. Um. It’s what we call the locals here, ma’am.”
Mulaghesh frowns. The word puts a bad taste in her mouth, or perhaps it’s the sight of the fortress looming ahead.
As they approach the first perimeter of fences, Mulaghesh looks northwest of the fortress and sees a curious installation not more than two miles from the fort’s walls. The structure looks bland and benign, a dull, small concrete creation, but it’s got twice as many fences and watchtowers as the rest of the fortress’s perimeters.
“What in the hells is that?” she says. “That’s a damned truckload of wire sitting around it, whatever it is.”
“I believe they’re considering expansion, General,” says Pandey. “Or so I’m told. Haven’t made much progress, though, or so it seems.”
She nods pleasantly, fully aware that this is a cover story—though she can’t tell if Pandey knows that. That little gray button of a building, she suspects, must be the extraction point for whatever ore they discovered out here.
“What brought you here, Pandey?” she asks. “After Bulikov you could have gone anywhere.”
“Well, when General Biswal took command here, I couldn’t resist. He was your old commander, wasn’t he? It was an education serving under you, ma’am. I suppose I wished to continue it.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well…” Pandey struggles for the words. “It seems like there are only a few of the true old heroes still serving today. When they retire, so much history will be forgotten with them.”
Mulaghesh looks out the window toward the fir-dotted hills, stark and looming under the gray skies, and tries not to think of the first time she saw countryside like this. “What a pity that will be.”
***
Fort Thinadeshi—named after the famed innovator Vallaicha Thinadeshi—is one of the oldest military installations on the Continent, half coastal fortress, half military base. Sporting an immense coastal battery, precipitous battlements, tangles of wire fences, and a sprawling barracks, there is something both grimly majestic and crudely improvised about Fort Thinadeshi, all things for all situations, for all situations are found and met here in Voortyashtan. What a grand and noble mess it is, thinks Mulaghesh as the auto putters through a gate, the dark walls towering over her.
She imagines what Sumitra Choudhry would have thought of it. She thinks back to when she read Choudhry’s files aboard the Kaypee with Pitry. The girl served eighteen months in the Saypuri Military, a common practice undertaken to improve one’s odds of Ministry recruitment. During her time in uniform she received a Silver Star and a Golden Stroke for “Distinguished Service” during an “altercation” when a Continental charged a checkpoint.
Mulaghesh was experienced enough to parse through these neutral phrases. She shot and killed someone, she said aloud, when someone really needed her to do it. She glanced at the Silver Star notation. And she got injured doing it.
Yes, Pitry said. Took a bolt to the left shoulder when a Continental charged a checkpoint, just above the collarbone. Nearly killed her. But she managed to get the shot off after she’d been injured.
She pulled off a killshot after being critically injured? She’s either a hard case or lucky.