“How delicate?”
“About as delicate as it gets.” She begins to outline Biswal’s briefing, but—as she expected—Signe doesn’t let her get too far into it.
“A bomb?” says Signe, appalled.
Mulaghesh holds up a hand as she chews a fried biscuit. “Well, realistically, it’s probably several bombs.”
“Several bombs?”
“Fifteen pounds of explosives…That’s quite a bang. Better to distribute it throughout your target. Or parcel it out and do a long, sustained, exhausting bombing campaign.”
Signe is so horrified she’s brought to her feet. “You…You can’t be serious!”
“I am. Biswal is requesting you allocate your security forces appropriately.”
“Requesting!” Signe hisses. “Requesting! How polite and considerate of him!”
“Sit down. And calm down. I’m about to say something that might ease your fears a little—but I still want to make sure you absolutely understand that this is a threat to be taken seriously.”
“Does it look like I’m not taking it seriously?” shouts Signe. Mulaghesh has to admit, this is the most rattled she’s seen Signe yet. Threatening the harbor, she thinks, is like threatening her child.
“Sit,” says Mulaghesh forcefully. “Once I’m done you can go tell your chief of security. But I want you to hear this first.”
Signe does so, her face pink with fury.
“Let’s look at the timeline,” says Mulaghesh. “A year and a half ago, the train gets raided. Biswal’s predecessor wages an extensive campaign to recover what was lost and loses his life in the process. And now, just in the past days, we discover that the explosives that were recovered were fakes, and the real explosives are still out there.”
“So?” says Signe.
“So whoever has the explosives hasn’t done anything with them for over a year and a half,” says Mulaghesh. “That doesn’t make sense. You steal something, you try and use it before the owner figures out it’s stolen. You wait too long and then the owner starts investigating and trying to make sure you can’t ever use it. Which is what we’re doing now.”
Signe lights a cigarette. “So?”
“So something doesn’t add up. This isn’t a ‘lull your enemy into a false sense of security’ situation. We’ve been in a false sense of security for months, and they didn’t do anything. Just glancing at the timeline, it almost makes me think those explosives aren’t in insurgent hands anymore. Haven’t the tribes been warring with one another for months?”
“Of course.”
“So you’re telling me that for nearly a year, the insurgents found no opportunities to use fifteen pounds of high-impact explosives against the people they despise?”
“I suppose that’s a good point….”
“And why would they come after the harbor?” says Mulaghesh. “Everyone’s squabbling over the money you and SDC are going to make everyone. It’s not like you’ve done anything to piss off the highland tribes, have you?”
At that Signe’s face does something interesting to Mulaghesh—nothing. Her mouth doesn’t purse, her eyebrows don’t wriggle, and her pupils don’t move one jot. She barely seems to even breathe.
Then, finally, she takes a languid drag from her cigarette and says, “The very idea is ridiculous.”
“Of course it is.” Mulaghesh looks her over. Signe returns her gaze, her arctic blue eyes staring back coolly through the veil of smoke. “Go talk to your security people. You’ll want to get started on this immediately. But when you’re done, come back to me. We’re not done here.”
“Oh, aren’t we?”
Signe wrinkles her nose as Mulaghesh stuffs half of a cured fish fillet into her mouth. “It was damned hard enough just getting you to sit down with me,” says Mulaghesh. “I’m not letting you walk away without getting what I need.”
***
Initially Mulaghesh is worried Signe won’t come back. She can’t blame her: a serious security threat isn’t anything to joke about. But to her relief, Signe comes walking back into the room just as Mulaghesh finishes her plate.
“So,” says Signe. “What is it that you wished to discuss with me?”
Mulaghesh wipes her mouth. “Voortya.”
“What?”
“I want you to tell me about Voortya.”
“Voortya? Why?”
She flips open her portfolio and slides it over to Signe. “Because that’s what was on the walls of Choudhry’s room. I’m no artist, but…It should give you a pretty solid impression of her situation.”
Signe pages through the drawings, disturbed. “She, what…She drew these on the walls?”
“Yes,” says Mulaghesh.
“Well…I did say she was peculiar. This sort of thing would get you arrested in a heartbeat before Komayd took office.”
“But now you can talk about it,” says Mulaghesh. “And you’re Voortyashtani. Kind of. So. Talk.”
Still transfixed by the pages, Signe produces her cigarette case, slips one out, strikes a match, and takes a drag. It’s such a fluid motion Mulaghesh suspects she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it. “Hm. Well. It’s interesting you’ve brought this to me now. It seems Miss Choudhry had been pestering more of my people than I thought. One of our surveyors read the alert I sent out and came forward. She’d approached him and been very friendly with him, though he never had any idea who she was—I actually think he was a little sweet on her. Though her being a Ministry intelligence officer, I suppose she would be skilled at manipulation….”
Mulaghesh grunts, knowing this to be quite true.
“Anyway. She was asking my people about the geomorphological features of the shore, like I told you before. But, I didn’t know why—yet it seems she discussed this with the surveyor.”
“And?”
“Choudhry said she was looking for a tomb nearby, or at least some sign of one, a suggestion that such a thing had once existed. And he, of course, knew nothing of a tomb—but I do.”
“Why would Choudhry care about a tomb?”
“That question is more complicated than you might think. It has a great deal to do with death, history, and the afterlife.” She ashes her cigarette into her cooling thimble of coffee. “At the very start of the manifestations of the Divinities, Voortya was perhaps the most exceptional.”
“Are you sure that’s not just regional pride speaking?”
“Oh, no. I studied at Fadhuri. They corroborated that belief. Voortya was the first Divinity to mobilize her people for warfare on a massive, unprecedented scale. This isn’t easy to do, as I’m sure you know. She was asking for her people to train for months, leave their homes, go to unfamiliar lands, and, very likely, perish. So she did something no Divinity had ever done before—she created an afterlife.”