She looks around the depressing little shack. It’s bereft of almost anything personalized or pleasant. The bed is just a raised fretwork of sticks covered in furs and skins, the fireplace a teetering stack of bricks. Mulaghesh can’t imagine why someone would marry into such a life—but then, she knows not everyone has a choice.
As she walks around the shack she realizes her footsteps sound oddly…hollow. She bounces up and down on the balls of her feet and listens to the creak and moan of the floorboards. Then she squats and peers through two slats of wood. It’s hard to tell, but it almost looks like there’s some kind of a space down there….
“He built it to escape a fire,” says a voice from the door.
Mulaghesh snaps up, hand on her carousel, and pauses at the sight of the old woman at the doorway. The old woman, to her credit, hardly flinches: she’s a brown, hard, wiry thing, like a human form carved from old, smoked wood. She’s dressed in ratty furs and skins, her eyes dark and hard and glittering.
“Lady,” says Mulaghesh, “I know there’s no door, but there’s still plenty of stuff to knock on.”
“You’re from the army,” says the old woman. It’s not a question. “An easterner.”
“And you are?”
“I am Gozha.”
“Ah.” Mulaghesh relaxes, but only a little. “How is it you came to be here, Gozha? I have you on my list to visit. I have some questions for you.”
“Drozhkin came to me to beg forgiveness.” She steps inside. “He felt he had slighted me by telling you what I saw. Betrayed a neighbor, I suppose. That man…Nothing goes in his head that doesn’t come out his mouth. I’m surprised his brains have stayed where they are.”
“And what was it that you saw, ma’am?”
Gozha stands beside her, looking down at the stain on the floor. “He was not a bad man, Bohdan. Not smart, not lucky, but not bad.”
“Is that so?”
“He built the cellar down there to hide in case of a fire, in case the whole house went up. He even built a pipe out the side of the dirt mound so they’d have air.” She looks at Mulaghesh. “He loved her, you see. Wanted to protect her. He always had the doctor out here, checking on her, just in case. He fretted so. But…he wasn’t smart—if she was hiding in the basement, and the house caught fire, why, she’d be trapped with it falling in on her….Not one for deep thinking, Bohdan.”
Mulaghesh stands up. “What happened here?”
“Why? What does it matter to you?”
“What’s happened here has happened elsewhere. And it could happen again.”
“Again. What does it matter to you?”
“They’re getting better at it, I think. The last one was worse than this. The next one will be worse still.”
“Again. Still. What does it matter to you?”
“Why wouldn’t this matter to me?” says Mulaghesh.
“Why? You are an easterner, a Saypuri. We are Voortyashtanis. To you we are no better than pigs or goats—yes?”
“I’ve seen Voortyashtanis bleed and I’ve seen Saypuris bleed. It looks the same. I’d like to keep everyone’s blood right where it is as much as I can.”
“Glib pleasantries,” says Gozha. “The sort of thing a diplomat claims before cutting your throat and making off with your daughter.”
Mulaghesh looks her in the eye. “Do I look like a fucking diplomat?”
Gozha holds her gaze for a moment. She looks away. “I did not see the murders.”
“Then what did you see?”
“Very little.” She looks out the window. “I was just over there, in the trees. It was dark, late at night, but the moon was bright. I was leading my pony through the woods nearby….She has a strong sense of smell, my little pony. And when she started acting up, I could tell what she smelled. I knew there was blood nearby.” Gozha walks to the open door of the shack. “I came to the edge of the clearing to see, and I saw a woman standing there in the charcoal yard.”
“Bohdan’s wife?”
Gozha shakes her head. “No. This woman was shorter. I think she was short. Perhaps I only had eyes for what was standing at the door of the house….”
“Which was what?”
“You’ll think I’m mad.”
“I’ve seen mad things. You can believe me.”
Gozha tilts her head, thinking, and says in a dreamy voice, “I thought it was a scarecrow, at first. Not a real person, a real man. A picture of a man, arranged from…well. Made of things.”
“Things?”
“Yes, things. Scraps, it seemed. Spikes. Rags and thorns. A man made of thorns, six or seven feet tall, dark and faceless….And in his hands was a gleaming sword, silvery and bright. I didn’t think he was real until he turned around and walked back in the house.”
Silence.
Gozha turns around. “You don’t believe me. You think I’m mad. Of course you do.”
Mulaghesh thinks for a moment. “I don’t….Well. Hells. I don’t know what to believe. He was wearing a suit? A suit of rags and…and thorns?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if he was a he. It was dark and hard to see. But he and the woman just looked at each other, seeming to speak quietly, before he went back inside.”
“Tell me about this woman.”
“Like I said, she was short, and wore a dark cloak. Purple or green, perhaps. She had it pulled tight over her head. I couldn’t see her face or even her hands.”
A careful one, then, to hide so much of herself. “What happened after the man in the thorn suit walked back into the house?”
“I had tied my pony up in the lane east of here. It began to whinny and whicker, frightened, and I worried the woman and the man of thorns would see me, so I snuck away. It wasn’t until two days later that I heard that Bohdan and his wife were found dead.”
“And you don’t think Bohdan was in the thorn suit?”
“Bohdan was like a lot of men around here, easterner—he is lucky if he ate as a child. He was not, shall I say, broad of beam.”
“Which the man in the suit was.”
“He cut a fearsome figure, that thing,” says Gozha quietly. “Like something from a nightmare.” She looks at Mulaghesh. “You think these people killed Bohdan and his wife?”
“It seems likely, yes.”
“Why? Why kill the charcoal maker of Ghevalyev? Who could possibly care about poor Bohdan?”
“I think that’s the point,” says Mulaghesh. “It’s easier to harm those considered unimportant—a charcoal maker and his wife, or a family on a farm, out in the middle of nowhere.”
“But why do it at all?”
“It sounds like…like some kind of ritual,” says Mulaghesh. “A ceremony. The way the bodies are mutilated, the way the person doing it dresses. And someone watches, from a distance, needing to make sure it happens….”
“Voortyashtanis have many ceremonies,” says Gozha. “And surely they had more before the collapse, the Blink. But I never knew of this one.”
“That’s not to say it didn’t exist,” says Mulaghesh. “But what it’s meant to do is beyond me.”
Gozha begins to walk away. Then she stops at the door and says, “It feels strange to say this to an easterner. But I hope you catch these people.” Her gaze sharpens. “We are not pigs or goats, General Mulaghesh.”
“I know that.”