“Why?”
“We’ve asked these kids to come all the way across the world to fight and labor for us. Someone has to look after them.” And yet, a tiny voice says inside of her, you walked away from the job that could have helped you do that the most.
Shut up, thinks Mulaghesh.
Does it feel better, being alone? Does it really?
Shut up!
“A thoughtful position,” says Rada as she works. “Few possess your capacity for self-reflection, General. We are beautiful, strange creatures of heat and noise, of sudden, inscrutable impulses, of savage passions.” She sets down a knife, grabs some kind of miniature saw. “Yet when we consider our own existence, we think ourselves calm, composed, rational, in control….All the while forgetting that we are at the mercy of these rebellious, hidden systems—and the elements, of course. And when the elements have their way, and the tiny fire within us flickers out…” An unpleasant cracking sound as Rada separates something from the body that should never be separated. “What then? A blast of silence, probably, and no more.”
Mulaghesh can’t help but say it, as the subject weighs so heavily on her mind: “You don’t believe in an afterlife?”
“No,” says Rada. “I do not.”
“Sort of strange, a Continental who doesn’t believe in an afterlife.”
“Perhaps the Divinities made one for us, once,” says Rada. “But they are gone now, aren’t they?”
Mulaghesh does not voice her extreme concerns about this.
“I wonder how cheated the dead must have felt when that afterlife evaporated around them,” says Rada. “It’s like it’s a game,” she says softly. “And no matter how you play it, it ends unfairly.”
“The ending’s not the point,” says Mulaghesh.
“Oh? I thought you were a soldier. Is it not your purpose, to make endings? Is it not your duty to make these”—she taps the corpse—“from the soldiers of the enemy?”
“That’s a gross perversion of the idea of soldiering,” says Mulaghesh.
“Then please,” says Rada, looking up. “Enlighten me.”
She is not being sarcastic or combative, Mulaghesh realizes. Rather, she is willing to follow any string of conversation down the path it leads, much like she’s willing to follow a damaged vein through a desiccated corpse.
The surgery room is quiet as Mulaghesh thinks, the silence broken only by the tinkle of Rada’s utensils and the soft hush of the rain.
“The word everyone forgets,” says Mulaghesh, “is ‘serve.’?”
“Serve?”
“Yes. Serve. This is the service, and we soldiers are servants. Sure, when people think of a soldier, they think of soldiers taking. They think of us taking territory, taking the enemy, taking a city or a country, taking treasure, or blood. This grand, abstract idea of ‘taking,’ as if we were pirates, swaggering and brandishing our weapons, bullying and intimidating people. But a soldier, a true soldier, I think, does not take. A soldier gives.”
“Gives what?”
“Anything,” says Mulaghesh. “Everything, if asked of us. We’re servants, as I said. A soldier serves not to take, they don’t strive to have something, but rather they strive so that others might one day have something. And a blade isn’t a happy friend to a soldier, but a burden, a heavy one, to be used scrupulously and carefully. A good soldier does everything they can so they do not have to kill. That’s what training is for. But if we have to, we will. And when we do that we give up some part of ourselves, as we’re asked to do.”
“What part do you give up, do you think?” asks Rada.
“Peace, maybe. Killing echoes inside you. It never goes away. Maybe some who have killed don’t know that they’ve lost something, but they have.”
“That is so,” says Rada quietly. “Deaths of all kinds echo on. And sometimes, it seems, they drown out all of life.”
And with those words Mulaghesh suddenly remembers that the woman before her was once trapped in a collapsed building with the corpses of her family, trapped in the dark with them for days and days. And when she does she realizes that, in some way, little Rada Smolisk might still be trapped in that darkness, and trying to free herself. The surgeries, the humanitarianism, the autopsy, even the taxidermy—all of this could be an effort to literally place her hands upon the raw stuff of life and sort through it, seeking some secret that might unlock her dark prison, and bring in light.
Or perhaps, Mulaghesh thinks, Rada Smolisk feels at home only among the dead. She’s not stuttering at all now, and is actually bordering on erudition; whereas in the waking hours of life, with Signe and Biswal, she is a trembling, nervous thing, far from her normal surroundings. If death echoes, wonders Mulaghesh, perhaps one could get used to it, or even come to love its noise. Much like how Choudhry surrounded herself with sketches and images of this hellish country, and its history.
Then she remembers….
The charcoal sketch in Choudhry’s room—a landscape depicting a shoreline on which many people kneel, heads bowed, and a tower rising behind them…
Mulaghesh sits forward. She saw it, she thinks suddenly. She saw it. She saw the damned City of Blades, just as I did.
It must have been the Window to the White Shores, she realizes: the miracle Signe described. But it must have worked. Choudhry snuck into the statue yard and performed that ancient rite and glimpsed the very island Mulaghesh did; and perhaps the only reason Mulaghesh herself saw the City of Blades last night is because the ritual was still working, like a door left open for anyone to walk through.
So how did she come to die? After all that, how did Sumitra Choudhry come to be murdered just as the other Voortyashtanis?
“I’m s-sorry, General,” says Rada finally. “I’ve l-looked all I could, but I’ve found n-nothing.”
“Nothing?” asks Mulaghesh, dispirited.
“Nothing indicating anything, really. There’s j-just not much to g-go on. P-perhaps I am n-not up to the t-task.”
Mulaghesh stands and walks to the table, surveying Rada’s grisly work. “I hate this so damned much, Rada. I hate it beyond words.”
“D-Did you know her, G-General?”
“No. Never saw her. Just heard about her. But to see someone reduced down to this…” She shakes her head. “We don’t even know it’s her, do we. We can’t even tell her family that she’s really dead. Just that we think so. And it’s not like we could have them look to tell us if it’s really…”
She trails off, thinking.
“G-General?” asks Rada.
Silence.
“Uh. General?”
“She got a Silver Star,” says Mulaghesh quietly.
“Um. What?”
“She got a Silver Star. For heroism after being injured in the line of duty. She got shot, in the, uh…” She snaps her fingers, trying to jog her memory. “In the shoulder. In the left shoulder. I read her reports.”
“Meaning…”
Mulaghesh cranes over the body and gently pushes aside a drooping flap of skin to look at the left shoulder. “It’s smooth. It’s smooth, damn it. No scarring at all!”