She readies herself, leaps up, and hits the wall high enough to hook her elbows over its top. The canvas is taut but still gives a little, allowing her a good hold. She hangs there for a moment longer, then hitches her right leg up until her ankle can get over the top as well. Then she pulls herself upright, straddling the wall, and breathes for a moment.
She makes sure she’s steady, then pops out her combat knife and carves a hole in the canvas wide enough for her to fit through. She glances down into the hole but can see nothing but darkness below. She’s glad she brought a torch, even if it does weigh nearly ten pounds.
She throws the rope down. Then she maneuvers the torch around, flicks it on, and shines it down to see if the rope hangs low enough for her to drop down. It does, she sees, but there’s…something beside it.
Something…wrong.
“Oh, what in the hells,” whispers Mulaghesh.
She grabs the rope with her one hand and slowly, slowly slides down. Once she’s inside she flicks the torch back on, turns around, and looks.
“Holy shit,” she says.
***
The closest one is fifteen feet tall, a flawless statue of a man seated on the ground, cross-legged. He is perfectly bald and hairless, and his demeanor and posture are calm, relaxed: he sits with his back straight and his palms resting on his knees. Yet there are nine longswords thrust into his sides, back, and stomach, almost to the hilt, their blades poking through in all directions, certainly passing through countless vital organs; but the man stares ahead calmly, serenely, as if holding his breath. He is wrought, she sees, of pale white stone, perhaps marble, but his many crevices have played home to countless crustaceans and barnacles and other sea creatures. His serene face, for example, is marred by a colony of barnacles creeping up his neck and onto his cheekbone, as if he has a skin condition.
In the center of his forehead is a carven insignia: the severed hand grasping the sword blade, the sigil of Voortya.
She stares at this sight, white and ghostly in the light of her torch. He’s sitting uneven in the mud, one knee higher than the other, as if dumped here. The mud is covered in track marks, like huge pieces of machinery have been here time and time again.
Mulaghesh gets ahold of herself and looks beyond the statue. The canvas ceiling doesn’t allow much light in: the moonlight strikes it and filters through just enough to make it feel like she’s in a giant drum, or an animal-skin lantern of some kind, the crisscrossing seams giving it the feeling of veins. As such, she can’t see much beyond the light of her torch, but…it looks like there are dozens of forms in here with her.
Maybe more than dozens. Maybe hundreds.
Mulaghesh shines the light beyond the white statue of the pierced man to the next object, which appears to be a massive stone table shaped to look like it’s made of antlers, bone, and tusks. The table also sits askew in the mud, and its sides are spattered with a thick coating of sand and silt. It’s a queerly beautiful sight, and she immediately understands its ritualistic significance: she can see where devotees would kneel before it, the hundreds of tiny stone stanchions intended for tiny candles. There’s a basin in its center; maybe someone would wash there, or drink from it.
She walks on, the beam from her torch bouncing over the mud and the other…things. Statues, she supposes, but they somehow seem more than statues, as if they are machines or devices with functions hidden to the eye, defying logic.
A column made to look like it’s composed of human teeth. A doorway carved to resemble two massive swords leaning together. A throne that seems to have been grown out of coral reef. All of the statues bear clusters of anemones or barnacles or mussels. Many are adorned with drapes and drapes of seaweed, dried and curled against their forms. It gives the statues a queerly somber look, as if in mourning. But nearly all of them are perfectly whole, not a chip or a scratch in them, as far as she can see.
“They’re from old Voortyashtan,” says Mulaghesh aloud. “They dredged these up from the bottom of the ocean, didn’t they?” She remembers Signe saying that the only thing they were dredging up was silt and rubble. Yet these look perfect, as if they were carved just years ago. Why hasn’t anyone heard about this? Mulaghesh wonders.
She suspects she knows why. As she passes by a sculpture of a black sphere standing, in full defiance of physics, on a narrow column of marble, all the hair on her arms rises up. She can see handprints worn into the sphere, as if it had been gripped in countless places, and some part of her mind irrationally tells her it’s still being gripped, that whoever held it is still holding it, though they’re now doing so in some unseen, secret manner.
This all stinks of the Divine, she thinks. And there’s nothing that the civilized world would fear more than rumors of the Divine in Voortyashtan.
The next one strikes pure terror into her heart: a white statue of a massive, hulking Voortyashtani sentinel carrying a giant sword. Its back and shoulders are covered in antlers and bones and horns, and its face is the common Voortyashtani sentinel mask, the primitive approximation of human features. The sight of it makes the visions she had in the thinadeskite mines come rushing back to her. She remembers seeing the sentinels’ armor, how it seemed queerly organic, intermeshed, and she remembers knowing instantly that their armor fed on blood, that the more they killed the greater their armor became. She takes careful note of this specimen before her, whose armor has grown until it’s well out of human proportions, possibly distorting the body within. She hopes its size is an exaggeration: it’s nearly four feet taller than a normal man.
She looks at the wide plinth it’s standing on. Carved there is the word Zhurgut.
She thinks, then takes out her portfolio and looks up the note from Choudhry’s room, written by Efrem Pangyui himself.
The blade and hilt of Voortya each had individual meaning to Voortyashtanis. The blade was attack, assault, aggression, but the hilt, fashioned out of the severed hand of the son of Saint Zhurgut, was a symbol of sacrifice.
“This thing was a saint?” she asks herself. The idea appalls her. This behemoth, bristling with horns and bones and teeth and antlers, is the sort of thing that should haunt dreams. She can’t imagine what it would be like to see such a thing in the real world. It would be like glimpsing a…
“A nightmare,” she whispers.
She remembers Gozha saying, He cut a fearsome figure, that thing. Like something from a nightmare.
She switches her torch off, shuts her eyes, lets them adjust, and then opens them.
She looks at Zhurgut’s silhouette—a human-like form covered in points.
“A man made of thorns,” she says quietly.
Could it be? Could the man Gozha spotted at the charcoal kilns have been dressed like a Voortyashtani sentinel? Mulaghesh herself thought that these murders were part of some ritual, and being dressed like a sentinel could be a part of whatever ritual it might be.