“What happened?” says Mulaghesh.
“She came here about half a year ago to research the thinadeskite. Her efforts yielded the same results as ours—nothing. Nothing Divine about it. But then her research got a little…extracurricular. She started leaving the fort, going out to the city and some of the countryside. She stopped visiting the labs completely. She spent some time at the harbor, I am told. We thought it was odd, and I worried she was a security risk, though if you can’t trust a Ministry officer…” She sighs. “But we never ventured into her room here. She was a Ministry officer, after all. So we didn’t know how bad she’d gotten. Then one day, she never came back. We conducted a search, and found this. I’ve no idea what happened to her. But then, she did disappear right when another spate of fighting broke out.”
Mulaghesh steps on the mattress and slowly looks around. “And she left no paperwork trails? Nothing in your labs or in the fort that she was unusually fixated on?”
“She stopped coming to the labs mere weeks after arriving,” says Nadar. “Soon she was like a ghost. We rarely saw her, and she rarely engaged with us. Though some patrols mentioned she was sometimes seen walking the cliffs, holding a lantern. But that could have been anyone, General.”
“What sorts of tests did she run?”
Nadar runs through a litany of tests Mulaghesh hasn’t ever heard of, things involving lily petals and graveyard mud and silver coins. “What’s more,” says Nadar, “she went beyond the thinadeskite itself, and started testing the fort. The stones in the walls, the dirt, the trees…She tested all of this region, practically, for any trace of the Divine—and found nothing. It was like living with a madwoman.”
“Who was the last person to see her alive?”
“That’s difficult to say, because we aren’t totally sure when she disappeared. We had some reports of a Saypuri woman being sighted on the shore down in Voortyashtan, but no one could confirm if it was Choudhry or not. That’s the last hint of her movements that I have.”
Mulaghesh makes a note of this. “And is there any cause for this?”
“Cause?”
“Any, I don’t know…abuse or injury or trauma that could have given her this break from reality?”
“She did receive some kind of wound at some point….A head trauma, though she made up several stories about how she got it.”
“Is that the reason for her behavior?”
“I doubt it. Her change was much more gradual.”
“Then what?”
“General…” Nadar sighs and smiles weakly at her. “If you figure it out, you’d be the first. But this place puts pressure on a mind. A lot of awful things happened here. A lot are still happening. And if I can speak freely, General…” She glances around the room. “This shit frankly gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
Mulaghesh can certainly see why. She tries to memorize everything she’s seeing, all the sketches, all the strange glyphs. She tries to make some copies in her portfolio, but they feel clumsy and crude. I wish Shara was here, she thinks. She knows about everything Divine. Or I wish I knew a Voortyashtani to ask about this….
She then realizes that she does—or, rather, she knows a Dreyling who grew up in Voortyashtan.
She grimaces. Playing with Signe Harkvaldsson, she feels, is playing with fire.
Then she notices a stack of papers lying in the corner. She walks over, picks them up, and does a double take.
“What the hells?” she mutters.
Mulaghesh knows Choudhry graduated with top honors from the Fadhuri Academy with a discipline in history—so why was she reading about a historical subject every schoolchild in Saypur knows backward and forward?
Mulaghesh stares down at the painting of Vallaicha Thinadeshi, perhaps the most famous woman in Saypuri history, and the person Fort Thinadeshi is named after.
***
When Mulaghesh was in school—which was so long ago that she doesn’t even want to think about it—there were two kinds of kids: those that worshipped the Kaj and those that worshipped Thinadeshi. Most flocked to the Kaj: the man was, in a way, the savior of Saypur, a brilliant martial leader who freed them from bondage.
But what children eventually realized was that the Kaj never came back: he died on the Continent, less than a year after his final victory. He never saw the founding of Saypur. He never had any idea that their country could ever happen. He didn’t build; he only destroyed.
Which was where Vallaicha Thinadeshi came in. As the Continent had relied on Saypur to provide a huge amount of resources without Divine assistance for hundreds of years, Saypuris had been forced to grow pretty canny about engineering and planning. And Vallaicha Thinadeshi proved to be the canniest: when Saypur was finally founded in 1648, she led the effort to build roads, develop irrigation and farming, and set up urban planning practices that could deal with the millions of Saypuri slaves suddenly set free. Saypur’s sudden freedom wasn’t easy, but it would have been a hell of a lot harder if Vallaicha Thinadeshi hadn’t been there to get the right things in the right places.
But she didn’t stop at that: she was also an innovative genius. It was Thinadeshi and her cadre of engineers who developed the railways and the telegraph systems. Her protégé had been the one to bring running water to Ghaladesh. And when Saypur opted to continue occupying the Continent in 1650, and “reconstruct,” it had been Vallaicha Thinadeshi who sailed over and brought railways to the Continent—though Mulaghesh now knows this was chiefly so Saypur could quickly move troops throughout the polises, as they did not trust the Continent to remain passive.
It’s this era of Thinadeshi’s life that’s endured, this image of her as adventurer and inventor, braving strange, hostile lands and bringing enlightenment with her. Mulaghesh knows the image is only somewhat true: Thinadeshi brought her family on her travels, and lost two children to plague, something she never forgave herself for. But perhaps the most mystifying and fixating thing about Thinadeshi’s life is how it ended. And it is this subject that Choudhry was apparently reading about.
Mulaghesh reads.
By 1661, Thinadeshi had brought railways and some basic infrastructure to every Continental polis except one—Voortyashtan. She finally ventured into Voortyashtan in order to, as one journalist put it, “bind the most monstrous Continental state beneath the noble steel of the Saypuri rails,” but it was during this expedition that Vallaicha Thinadeshi suddenly and inexplicably disappeared. Her scouting team searched for her and questioned the locals, but found no sign of Thinadeshi anywhere. It was as though she simply vanished. After months of searching they returned to Ghaladesh, and the country mourned the loss of a national hero.
Mulaghesh flips back to look at the painting of Thinadeshi: proud, regal, fearless, aristocratically thin and brown from the sun.