“…tribal leaders has complained about the cannons, and though I can understand that it must be unnerving to live with them pointed at you day and night, they’ve been like that for decades.”
Mulaghesh stops and puts her hands on her knees. Nausea coils around and around in her stomach, like an infant snake trying to break out of its egg.
“General? Are you all right?”
The answer, of course, is no, absolutely not. She doesn’t understand what’s happening to her, but somehow she’s catching what seem to be glimpses of past lives and day-to-day proceedings—however ghastly—of how the Voortyashtanis of old lived.
Are they hallucinations? Is she ill? Suddenly Choudhry’s bizarre drawings on the walls of her room seem much more understandable.
“Must…” She swallows. “Must be an altitude change.”
Pandey is silent. When she looks up he is watching her with a queer look on his face.
“What is it, Sergeant Major?” asks Mulaghesh.
“Nothing. Would you like to see more, General?”
She certainly does not, but she knows she needs to. The two of them walk on through the pockmarked tunnels. At one point the lamps run out. “Work ended on this branch a long time ago,” Pandey remarks, and he has to lift one lamp off the ceiling to carry. He smiles at her and says, “Try not to sneeze if you can, General. Otherwise we’ll have to fumble our way back.”
“I had been told,” Mulaghesh says, “that you all found some strange materials in the mines here. Signs of tampering—a fire.”
“We found signs of someone starting a small fire, yes.”
“Where was this, Sergeant Major?”
He nods ahead. He leads her to a small, low tunnel. It’s hard to see in the dark, but the bottom and the walls appear scorched and smoked. “This was it, I believe.”
Mulaghesh extends a hand. Pandey passes the lantern to her, and she crouches and examines the scorch marks. The placement of the fire doesn’t seem to have anything special about it: it’s just another tunnel, like the dozens of other ones she’s seen down here. There are ashes and crinkled leaves lying in the divots and holes of the tunnel floor, but none of them suggest much to her. Wrapped in sackcloth, maybe, and set alight…
“And I assume you all conducted a search concerning this?” she asks.
“We did. Checked the fences and all the tunnels, General. No way in or out, except the fort.”
Mulaghesh grunts. It’s Choudhry for sure, she thinks. She got in here somehow. As a Ministry officer, there’s a whole lot of obfuscations and subterfuge Choudhry would have been trained in that Mulaghesh wouldn’t know the first thing about. She could’ve blackmailed a guard, maybe, or perhaps she just knew a way to get through fences without leaving any trace. From the stuff that she saw Shara randomly pull out of her pocket in Bulikov, nothing would surprise Mulaghesh. “Well. Then I’m as stumped as you are. I suppose I’ve seen all that I can see here.”
They start back up through the tunnels. Mulaghesh wasn’t aware of how far they’d walked: the tunnels seem to wind and wind and wind around, and soon she’s not aware if she’s walking up or down, ascending or descending.
“I heard rumors there was a Voortyashtani tomb down here,” says Mulaghesh. “No sign of it, I guess?”
“Nooo,” says Pandey, suppressing a laugh. “No, General, can’t say that I’ve seen such.”
“No stone walls, no arches?”
“No, no. Just rock and more rock. I would imagine that after Bulikov everyone would be very sensitive to mysterious, underground structures. A thing like that would get reported quite quickly, General.”
“I’d hope so.”
“Besides that little fire we found, we’ve had few issues, ma’am. The shtanis stay focused on their feuds; they seem to have forgotten us up here.”
They walk on in silence.
“So, I understand you’re staying with CTO Harkvaldsson, General?” he asks. “At the SDC headquarters?”
“Yes. Why?”
“No reason,” he says quickly. “I had to drive her around for a while, when the harbor was first starting. She was qui—”
The oil lamps blink out. Darkness comes rushing in.
No, thinks Mulaghesh. Get me out.
The sounds of their footsteps fade away.
Get me out of here….
She expects to see some other grim little scene from Voortyashtani life: perhaps an execution, or some horrifying moonlit rite conducted under the shadows of standing stones. But instead she sees something far more familiar, and far more upsetting.
The bones of a farmhouse, nestled at the foot of a hill. Its roof has fallen in and its walls are blackened and charred. The mortar, which once dammed back drafts of icy air, has turned to powder and crumbled away, revealing the warped ribs of the wide, flat structure. The floor is ashen and still smoking, narrow tendrils coiling across the morning sky.
A young woman kicks through the ruin, poking at the ashes with a slender sword. No, not a woman—a girl. A sixteen-year-old girl, large for her age. She wears a Saypuri uniform—the first generation of Saypuri Military uniforms ever made, in fact.
She stops. Lying before the house’s stone chimney, black and raw and half-submerged in the ashes, is a human form. A boy. Maybe not much older than she is.
She looks at it. She reaches forward with the sword point, uses it to lift the blackened hand a few inches. She lets it drop, and it falls back to the blanket of ash with a soft thump, sending a cloud dancing up to fill the tattered room.
A young soldier trots up and knocks on the remnants of the door. He calls out, “Lieutenant!”
She doesn’t answer, staring at the body.
“Lieutenant Mulaghesh?”
The girl steps away from the shrunken corpse. “Yeah?”
“Captain Biswal is gearing up to move out, Lieutenant. He’s requested confirmation regarding whether your team has discovered any supplies.”
The young lieutenant sheathes her sword. “No. No supplies, no rations. Everything here has burned to a crisp.” She strides out, kicking up clouds of ash. “On to Utusk next, I suppose. They won’t know what hit them.” She looks at the young soldier. He’s not much older than she is, but he still seems younger: there is a softness to his eyes, to his posture, as if always bracing for a blow. “Did you have any casualties?”
“No. No…Saypuri casualties, at least.” He hesitates, blanches.
“Something the matter, Private?”
“No, Lieutenant.”
“You don’t look well.”
He hesitates. “Sankhar and I…There was a farmhouse burning…”
“Yes?”
“A man came out. Tried to attack us. And we…We cut him down.”
“As you should have.”
“Yes, but…Then I looked up, and I saw a woman watching us from the farmhouse, holding a child. She saw me looking and she ran back inside, and…”
“And?”
“And the farmhouse kept burning, Lieutenant, but I never saw anyone come out. I never saw anyone come back out.”
Silence. The young girl brushes ash off the toes of her boot.
“You did your duty, Bansa,” she says. “Don’t forget, it was their choice to get involved in this war. And we are giving every home the opportunity to flee. Some do. Many don’t. But that is their choice. Do you understand?”
He nods and whispers, “Yes, Lieutenant.”