She knows she’ll see these sights because she has been in this white palace forever, since the dawn of time and all things.
She shakes herself. Her plate mail tinkles slightly with the motion.
This isn’t true, she tells herself. You haven’t always been here….Don’t you remember that?
She wanders the white halls, her metal boots clinking on the white stone floor. She wanders for what could be hours, or perhaps days, she isn’t sure. She sees no one, hears no one. She is alone here. Except for her, this enormous palace is utterly deserted.
At least, the interior is: what lies outside of the palace is an entirely different matter.
She can hear their thoughts even from far within the palace’s depths. They toy at her mind, these pained desires and plaintive, wheedling pleas, begging for her attention, for her action. She tries to ignore them, to keep them out, but they speak so much and there are so many of them….
Mother, Mother—give us what was promised to us. Give us what we need. Give us what we fought and died for….
She finds herself walking up the stairways, perhaps to flee them—she isn’t sure. She isn’t sure of much these days. She has faint memories of how things were before, and she knows that, in some fashion, she chose to be here—but it gets quite difficult to remember sometimes.
She comes to a window. She hesitates—she doesn’t want to see, she desperately doesn’t want to—but she knows she needs to look. They’re getting so much stronger that she can’t quite help herself.
She walks to the window and looks out. She’s high up, several hundreds of feet at least, looking down on a clutch of porcelain-white towers, shimmering and queerly organic, like sea sponges or lumps of coral. More disturbing are the statues, which stand among the towers and straddle the streets, massive figures that are only vaguely human, frozen in positions of combat: a raised blade, a thrusting spear.
These are not what disturb her the most. Because standing far below her, upon the shores of this island and along its many canals and in the streets, are…
Monsters. Abominations. Tall, horrific, glittering creatures with blank, primitive faces, their backs and shoulders covered in horns and tusks.
Their thoughts batter her mind like the winds of a hurricane upon a house:
Mother…Mother! Please, let us go! Please, give us what we were promised….
She shuts her eyes and turns away. Some part of her knows that they were once human, that they became these things only because it was asked of them. But was it she who asked it of them? She can’t quite remember.
She walks up the stairs to her throne room, and the great, hideous, red seat is waiting for her. It is like a living thing, in some ways: a creature she created, begging for her presence. To sit upon the red throne is to become more of herself.
It’s not yours, she reminds herself. Not really. Yet some part of her remains unconvinced.
But to be near the throne makes her stronger, somehow, and it helps her remember. It helps her remember the very strange thing she saw the other day: she came across a window to another world, and inside that window were men. They didn’t know she was there, that she was listening, listening as they described a mine they were building, a deep hole in the earth….And she’d realized with sudden fury and disbelief what they were doing, whether they realized it or not.
As she remembers this, standing there before her great red throne, her fists clench, and she is filled with horror and rage and disgust.
After what she did for them, they would do this to her? They would make all of her sacrifices count for nothing?
She knows she must do something. She must act. But to do so might kill her.
Is it worth it?
She thinks about it.
Yes. Yes, it is.
She focuses, holds out her hand, and reaches for the sword.
The sword is always there. It is never truly gone, because since the day she picked it up it’s been a part of her, or perhaps she’s a part of it, for she knows deep down that it is really so much more than a sword: to grip the black handle and see the flickering blade is to bear witness to a thousand battles and a thousand murders and a thousand years of brutal conflict, to hear the shouts of thousands of armies and see the skies darkened with thousands of spears and arrows and watch the ground grow soft and dark with the blood of thousands of lives.
She holds the sword in the white tower. You’re me, the sword whispers to her. You’re of me, and I’m of you….
This isn’t true, she knows. She thinks it isn’t true, at least. But she needs to believe it just a little longer. Cooperating with the sword lets her do so much….
Including the ability to cross over to the land of the living, and wreak almost limitless destruction.
She takes a breath, shuts her eyes, and listens to the sword.
***
During Mulaghesh’s seventeen-year tenure as polis governor of Bulikov, she oversaw 127 assemblies of the Bulikov City Fathers, 314 city hearings, 514 town hall meetings, and 1,073 Worldly Regulations trials for those who had dared acknowledge the Divinities under the surveillance of Saypur. She knows the exact number because after each one of these meetings—which sometimes lasted up to ten hours—she would go back to her offices, pull out her portfolio, and make a single, solitary tick mark on the very last page.
Just one. Because somehow making these little tick marks helped her compartmentalize all of her contempt and fury and frustration, bottling it all up and releasing it in that one tiny, contained motion, gouging the nib of the pen along the soft, vulnerable surface of the page. And she often had plenty to release, for another delightful feature of any meeting of civic-minded Bulikovians was the heaps and heaps of insults, scorn, and outright threats they hurled at her at the top of their lungs.
Yet as Mulaghesh watches the assembly of tribal leaders from the balconies of the Voortyashtani Galleries—the civic center of the city—she reflects that her stint in Bulikov was a leisurely stroll in comparison to this.
She watches, eyebrows raised, as an elderly, bearded man with a red band of a tattoo around his neck stands up from his bench, assumes a posture of deepest grief, and bellows, “I wish to lay deaths at the feet of the Orskova clan! I wish to hang the deaths of my tribe from their necks and their shoulders!” His comments are met with a chorus of boos and remarkably specific threats from about half the assembly.
Biswal, seated at the table at the front of the Galleries, rubs his temples. “Mr. Iska, you have been told twice now that the Laying of Deaths has been eliminated as a formal motion of the assembly. Please sit down.”