The ride north is quiet and somber. The firs on either side are close and dripping with moisture. Low clouds veil the distant Tarsil Mountains, turning their bright pink hue to a muddy brown before obscuring them entirely.
Not for the first time that day Mulaghesh wonders if she knows exactly what in all the hells she’s doing. She’s not at all sure if impetuously hopping onto an expedition north to what’s apparently a brutal murder scene will benefit her investigation into Choudhry and the thinadeskite.
She supposes it could. She imagines Shara saying something like, A good operative plays every angle, insinuates themselves into everyone’s good graces, and learns every story they can.
That seems like something Shara would say, Mulaghesh thinks. So maybe this isn’t that bad of an idea.
But another thing Shara might say, though, would be, A good operative doesn’t waste everyone’s fucking time. Which Mulaghesh just might be doing here.
Curious forms emerge from the mist as they ride: tall, smooth standing stones, placed in patterns that couldn’t be coincidental. Then a fallen arch or causeway, white stones stained green by the mold and moisture. A mile later they encounter half of a tower, vivisected by some unknown catastrophe, its bricks scattered over the hills like broken teeth. Relics and remnants of a culture that collapsed long ago.
The last is the most startling. The sight must be a familiar one, because only Mulaghesh reacts as it comes into view: at the top of a distant hill sit two giant stone feet, perhaps eighty feet long and fifty feet high, truncated at the ankles. The feet are bare and stand on a massive marble plinth that sits uneven on the loam, like the soil below could no longer suffer the weight of whatever huge figure once stood there. But no matter how Mulaghesh searches she sees no more of the statue: no distant stone shoulder or marble hand, shattered and moldering on the nearby hills. No blank white visage half-submerged in the loam, cracked and corroded.
She looks back at the feet and the plinth as they ride on. “Do I want to know what that was?” she asks.
Nadar says, “I know I don’t.”
***
Mulaghesh smells it before she sees it: soft, wet wood burning somewhere nearby. Pandey consults the report he received—“Directions are a devilish bastard here, General,” he breathlessly confides—and points down one of the narrow country roads. They round a copse of firs, and Mulaghesh sees a narrow tendril of dark smoke threading its way into the late-afternoon sky.
They ride up in silence. The farmhouse is a low structure with a large porch, dark smoke streaming out from somewhere at its back. But there’s something in front of the porch that’s hard to comprehend: six totems, perhaps, or maybe decorations, pale white and placed on stakes. Yet they seem to tremble strangely, like the light around them is fluttering.
I don’t like this, thinks Mulaghesh.
As they ride closer they spy a hint of a breast on one of the totems, and on another a wisp of chest hair, and soon it’s apparent that the reason the air seems to tremble is because it’s positively swarming with black flies.
“Oh, by the seas,” says Nadar, disgusted.
They are human torsos, or rather halves of human torsos, vivisected from collar to crotch, with each half placed on a stake. The body cavities are open and exposed, the organs within withered and black. The heads, arms, and legs have been neatly shorn off and placed in piles in between the stakes as if they were no more than kindling. It is, despite the viscera and stink, a curiously neat presentation, carefully and thoughtfully done, as if these corpses were vegetables to be washed and peeled for dinner.
As the sight comes into view many of the soldiers hang back, appalled. Nadar senses the change in disposition, turns, and says, “Secure the area. Pandey, search the woods for signs of any passage. You and you, stay here and guard the gate. Stop anyone you see nearby for any reason.” Then she turns back to the grisly scene, muttering, “Fucking shtanis…”
“Are you good to look closer?” asks Mulaghesh.
Nadar glares at her defiantly. “Yes.”
Mulaghesh rides forward and Nadar follows, looking fainter and fainter with each step. Soon the horses begin to resist, disturbed by the scent.
“How could they…How could they do this?” asks Nadar.
“Carefully, it looks like,” says Mulaghesh, waving away flies and circling the bodies. “They managed to part the sternum and the spine, even. That’s not easy to do—though the spinal column seems to have been a more difficult tas—”
Nadar turns her head and vomits onto the grass. Her horse whickers, startled.
“Do you need some water?” asks Mulaghesh.
“How can you just look at them?” says Nadar, spitting and wiping her eyes.
“It’s the worst I’ve seen, yes,” says Mulaghesh grimly, looking at the closest body. “But not by a lot.” She looks at the severed heads on the ground. A family, Pandey said—a wife and two sons, both adolescents. Their faces, blue and distorted, have the dull, stupid look of the dead, as if they’ve just been asked a difficult question.
Mulaghesh dismounts, waves more flies aside, and steps closer to the corpses. There are no wounds on them besides their mutilations, no stab wounds or slashes or bullet holes. One of the sons has some kind of ugly rash on his ribs, but that’s clearly not fatal. Though she doesn’t search the pile of limbs on the ground much—even she has her limits—she doesn’t see any damage there, either. “Either they were poisoned or suffocated or something,” she says aloud, “or the wounds they suffered were the killing blows.”
“As in, they had their heads struck from their shoulders?” says Nadar.
“Maybe.” She looks at half of a truncated neck, which is already withered and gray. “It’s a smooth cut. Done either all at once, in one blow, or done slowly. Tricky to do, either way. People aren’t liable to stand still for such a thing. The boy has some kind of skin infection, something nasty….But I’m not sure if that means anything.”
“Would you…Would you get away from there?” says Nadar. “You are absolutely crawling with flies.”
Mulaghesh wades out of the throng of buzzing insects. “Pandey said there were four.”
“What?”
“The initial report. He said it was a family of four. Where’s the fourth?”
The two of them ride around to the back of the farmhouse and find the fourth body lying in a patch of clover by the fence, facedown. It’s a man of about forty, from what Mulaghesh can see, but he shows no sign of mutilation or even harm. Mulaghesh dismounts again, looks him up and down, then squats, grasps him one-handed, and flips him over.
His still, white face stares up. Though he’s now discolored and crawling with beetles—she grimaces as something dark and scuttling dashes out of his mouth to hide in his shirt collar—she sees no slashes, cuts, or injuries of any kind on him. His throat, however, bears a strange tattoo, a band of green ink that resembles a braid, completely encircling his neck.
“So this is the dad, I guess,” she says.
“I guess,” says Nadar. She dismounts as well, though it’s clear she doesn’t want to.