And both she and Choudhry, she reminds herself, vanished without a trace in this place, over sixty years apart.
“Any other interesting reading habits?” says Mulaghesh.
“It’s all we found,” says Nadar. “We think she burned the rest, though we’re not sure when. Or why.”
There’s one final page to the stack of papers, a sketch of something Mulaghesh’s eyes can’t quite interpret: it looks like a black hand holding a sword blade, but the hand has been fashioned to become the hilt. It’s a severed hand, she realizes, the severed wrist of the hand serving as the grip and pommel, with the clutching fingers acting as the blade’s cross-guard.
Below this sketch of the sword are two smaller sketches, one of the sword blade alone, the other of the disturbing hand-hilt. Below this is a note, torn out from some other publication:
The blade and hilt of Voortya each had individual meaning to Voortyashtanis. The blade was attack, assault, aggression, but the hilt, fashioned out of the severed hand of the son of Saint Zhurgut, was a symbol of sacrifice. Together the two pieces were emblematic of the joy of warfare as well as the devotion and cost warfare required. Together they balanced, becoming the warrior spirit, both taking and giving, dominating and submitting.
—EP
Mulaghesh doesn’t have to think hard to realize whose initials “EP” are. Efrem Pangyui, she thinks. You still haunt me to this day….
Mulaghesh looks up at the sound of a door slamming outside, followed by the patter of sprinting footsteps in the hall. Sergeant Major Pandey appears at the open door, panting. “Captain Nadar…I’m sorry, I’ve been looking all over for you, ma’am.”
“Yes?” says Nadar. “What is it, Pandey? What’s the matter?”
“It’s…It’s, ah, happened again, Captain.”
“What has?”
Pandey frowns as he tries to think of how to phrase this. He says, “Another family north of here.”
Nadar goes terribly still. Slowly she turns to Mulaghesh and says, “Will you excuse us?”
“Certainly.”
Nadar and Pandey exit and stand in the hall, quietly conferring. Mulaghesh grabs Choudhry’s notes and stuffs them in her portfolio, but she makes sure to tilt her head toward the door, listening. She can’t catch any clear words—the one she can make out over and over again is “victim” or “victims”—but when she glances out Nadar’s face is pale and her mouth is pulled tight in distaste.
Mulaghesh sticks her head out the door. Pandey is nervously watching Nadar, waiting for an answer but too frightened to ask further. Mulaghesh walks over to them. “Something up?”
Nadar shakes her head, furious. “Fucking shtanis…”
“Eh?”
“I apologize, General. There’s…A report just came in about an attack. A family on an isolated farm north of here. Four of them. Town called Poshok.” She pauses. “We are told it’s quite gruesome.”
“I see. So. What are you going to do?”
Nadar sighs. “There’s an upcoming meeting of clan leaders that will surely feature a lot of difficult negotiation.”
“Biswal mentioned that.”
“Right. And this is the last thing we need, especially if it was one clan killing another.”
“So. What are you going to do?”
“Ride out there and look at it. Try and find the perpetrators, and put them on the gallows or in the ground. The faster this dies, the better.”
“Want me to come along?” asks Mulaghesh.
Nadar looks at her, surprised. “You’d want to do that, ma’am?”
“Really, I’m here to do whatever needs doing,” she says. “I might have dealt with a few things like this as polis governor. And, frankly, I think Biswal would prefer it if I wasn’t up under his feet. Besides, you’re all busy. I’m not.”
“I’m…I’m told the scene is quite upsetting, General,” Nadar says.
“I’ve dealt with my share of upsetting scenes,” says Mulaghesh. “Odds are this won’t be anything I haven’t seen before.”
Nadar considers her words very carefully. “I’m…not so sure of that.”
Saypur may boast a formidable navy and claim control of nearly all the trade routes of all the seas, but even if our navy were twice as large as it is today it would still not hold a candle to the naval forces of ancient Voortyashtan.
But their might was not derived from the number of ships they commanded, nor the number of warriors that manned the ships—though both of these were immense. Rather, each individual ship, no matter its size, possessed incredibly destructive powers. For though it is true that Voortyashtani sentinels armed themselves with naught but a sword and waded into battle with no shield, records indicate that their relationship with their swords was one loaded with unusual Divine properties.
A Voortyashtani sword was considered an extension of its warrior’s soul, a piece of their heart: the two were linked on an almost metaphysical level. Most formidably, a warrior’s sword always returned to the hands of its owner, which meant that when hurled across battlefields or even the open seas, it would inevitably come speeding back to the hand that threw it, no matter what the sword struck or encountered.
As Voortyashtani blades were extraordinarily large and sharp weapons, and the sentinels possessed superhuman strength, this meant that one sentinel essentially wielded as much destructive power as a modern-day cannon. If records of naval battles are to be believed—and they are so numerous and consistent, one must assume that one can—a tiny Voortyashtani cutter with only a handful of sentinels aboard could easily sink a Saypuri dreadnought.
Understandably, the relationship between a warrior’s soul and its blade carried enormous spiritual importance for Voortyashtanis. If the warrior survived for long enough it was said that the sword would become the vessel of their soul, and their body would become simply a tool for wielding it. There are even some stories of common Continentals wielding a Voortyashtani blade and becoming possessed by the previous owner, undergoing a grotesque transformation to do so. There is not much evidence found to substantiate these claims, however, and this myth may simply be an exaggeration of Voortya’s relationship to her warriors: she asked them to be weapons for her, and weapons are what they willingly became.
—DR. EFREM PANGYUI, “THE CONTINENTAL EMPIRE”
It’s midafternoon by the time they start out, twenty of them on horseback with Nadar in the lead. It’s been a while since Mulaghesh went anywhere on horseback, and her ass and crotch start reminding her of this almost immediately as they compensate for her handicap—handling the reins one-handed isn’t always easy—but the country roads won’t tolerate an auto.