“Huh? I thought every Divinity had dozens of those. There were hundreds of various hells or heavens or purgatories you could wind up in, right?”
“Toward the end, sure, and Kolkan alone produced, oh, about forty hells for his various followers. But Voortya was the first, and, unlike all the other Divinities, the nature of her afterlife remained consistent for all one thousand three hundred years—or however much it was—of her reign. If you were a follower of Voortya—if you ‘took up the sword’ and shed blood for her, yours or someone else’s, as she wasn’t particularly picky about that sort of thing—then when you died, your soul would sail across the ocean to a white island, a city, where Voortya would gather all of her flock: the City of Blades.”
“I thought Voortyashtan was the City of Blades,” says Mulaghesh. “That’s what everyone calls it.”
“An old confusion,” says Signe. “Traveling Voortyashtanis were prone to discussing their longing to go to the afterlife, describing this ‘City of Blades.’ They talked about it so much even the other Continentals began assuming they were describing their home city. The assumption stuck.”
Mulaghesh grunts and makes a note of it.
“Once she’d assembled the most righteous and the most powerful souls in the City of Blades, they would sail back across the ocean to the mortal realm, each returning to ‘where their swords fell’—where they fell in battle, or so the story goes—and make war upon the whole of the world, bringing down the stars and the sun and the skies and the seas, until all of creation was utterly annihilated. They called it the Night of the Sea of Swords.”
“Wait, wait,” says Mulaghesh. “You can’t tell me the other Divinities tolerated the threat of that?”
Signe shrugs. “Voortya’s afterlife started well before the Divinities united. And when they finally did unite…Well, these things have momentum. It’s tradition. You can’t just stop tradition, even if the world changes around it. And Voortya and her followers took it very, very seriously. It was a pact, you see, a promise Voortya made between herself and those who loved her. That’s another way Voortya is quite different from all the other Divinities—with the exception of Olvos, perhaps, no other Divinity brought themselves down to the level of their followers as she did, creating an agreement among equals. Or perhaps she gave herself to them, as if she’d made the afterlife from herself, pulled from her very body. It’s a little unclear—but all Divine things usually are.”
“So where does the tomb enter into this?”
“Well, theoretically, somewhere around here was a resting place for the Voortyashtani dead. All of them. Ever.”
Mulaghesh whistles. “That’d have to be some tomb.”
“One would assume. In The Great Mother Voortya atop the Teeth of the World, it’s described as filling the whole of the center of the world. Maybe. Poets have a tendency to get somewhat hyperbolic, I find. But imagine finding the tomb belonging to a culture that more or less worshipped death! I expect that would be a huge, huge find for someone at all interested in the history of the Continent.”
“But…why in the hells would Choudhry be looking for that?” asks Mulaghesh. “What does the tomb have to do with…well, anything?”
“Who can say? She did seem to go mad. This certainly suggests so.” She gestures to the portfolio.
“And what could drive her mad?”
She exhales smoke through her nose. “This place…This place affects a weak mind, I think. People find themselves changed by it. Bulikov might have controlled the world, certainly, but it was Voortyashtan that made that happen. Without the support of Voortyashtani sentinels, the Divine Empire would have collapsed. Even though almost all of Voortyashtan is lost, I think…I think the stones and the hills remember.”
That may be true, Mulaghesh thinks, but it seems unlikely that Choudhry would be a creature of a weak mind. Most of the Ministry intelligence officers she’s encountered have been harder than a coffin nail, despite their cultured appearances. Trained for all kinds of torture and interrogation scenarios, certainly. And from her file, Sumitra Choudhry was as straight as a straight arrow could get, the sort of soldier any officer would love to have under their command.
What could an ancient tomb, she thinks, have to do with Choudhry’s real mission—thinadeskite?
The obvious answer is that thinadeskite is mined from the ground, and tombs are underground…so perhaps the tomb could have affected or even caused the thinadeskite’s existence? But though this is the obvious answer, wouldn’t someone notice if they were mining directly into the walls of an ancient tomb? Especially the Saypuri Military, which still treats any whiff of the ancient Continent with extreme—and justified—paranoia.
And what possible interest could the tomb have held for Choudhry, anyway? Even if it was once Divine, shouldn’t all of its Divine and miraculous qualities have ended when Voortya took a shot to the face back in the Night of the Red Sands? However wondrous it might have been, now it’s certainly another damned hole in the ground.
“Is one officer worth all this?” asks Signe.
“Huh?”
“She’s just one officer. Surely the Ministry has hundreds of them, thousands of them. Is it worth dragging in a general to chase her down?”
Mulaghesh slaps her portfolio closed. “We asked for servants, and she agreed. We asked her to come to the ends of the world for us, and she agreed. We asked her to risk her life for us, and she agreed. I don’t care how many officers the Ministry has. She’s worth it.”
Signe raises her eyebrows, as if she didn’t realize how sensitive the subject would be.
“Biswal mentioned a tribal sniper once took a shot at you,” says Mulaghesh.
“Oh, that. Yes.”
“You seem pretty blasé about it.”
“He gave me quite a haircut,” says Signe. She taps her ponytail. “I turned my head at the right moment—or, for him, the wrong one—and he clipped off about an inch or two. My security detail more or less shredded the little shack he was in, which contained a chicken coop. Feathers everywhere. Quite a scene.”
“And was that worth it? You almost died. Is the harbor worth it?”
She nods, conceding the point. “Anything else you wish to ask me, General?”
At first Mulaghesh is about to say no, but then she gets an idea. “You certainly seem to know a lot about the Divine around here.”
“It’s difficult not to.”
“Because you’re Voortyashtani, right? Adopted, at least. What tribe did you live with?”
Signe pulls a face as if she’s just asked her something deeply distasteful.
“What? It’s not like I asked you your sexual preference or something.”
“By the seas…I’m not sure if you could find a way to be cruder.”
“What were you? Highland or river?”
Signe glares at her. “The Jaszlo tribe. Highland. They took us in.”
Mulaghesh thinks back to what the apothecary salesman said. “Pretty traditional, then, yeah?”