“So?”
“So it’s not her!” says Mulaghesh, feeling relieved and baffled and furious. “It’s not her! I don’t know who in the hells this might be, but it’s not Choudhry!”
“B-Because of a m-missing scar?”
“She got shot in the shoulder, just above the collarbone, and she nearly died from it, Governor. It was grisly. They don’t give out the Silver Star for nothing. It’d have left a mark.” She looks up, thinking furiously. “Someone’s fucking with me.”
“I’m…sorry?”
“Someone must…Someone must have known I was looking into Choudhry. They must have! Someone wanted me or us to think she was dead. I’ve got someone out there nervous and they don’t like it one bit. They’re rattled enough to go through the trouble of mutilating a totally different body and staking it out on the cliffs to try and throw me off the trail!”
“Isn’t that, uh, a l-little bit p-paranoid, G-General?”
“Maybe. But paranoia usually doesn’t harm, and often helps.” She only hates herself a little for quoting Signe. “Damn. What time is it?”
“It’s 1900, G-General.”
“Shit. Dark already. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to tell Nadar.” She shoves a thread of wet hair out of her face. “Well, Governor. This has been damn educational, I must say.”
“Always a p-pleasure to, uh, assist,” says Rada, perplexed.
“What will you do with, um, the body?”
“Unfortunately, I am used to d-dealing with c-corpses,” she says. “It will b-be no tr-tr-trouble at all t-to make arrangements w-with the f-fortress.”
Mulaghesh thanks Rada for her help, then braces herself for the cold as she exits Rada’s house. But, strangely, the shock never hits her. She realizes Rada’s house was freezing cold, perhaps inhumanly cold, so she was already accustomed to it. As she crests a wet cliff she looks back and sees Rada standing in the doorway, watching her with her great, sad eyes. Yet up above is her chimney, and from it flows a thick, steady stream of smoke, turned a glowing white by the moonlight.
She wonders who could possibly want to fake Sumitra Choudhry’s death. Then she realizes that the most obvious suspect would be Choudhry herself.
***
It’s late when she finally fumbles her key into her door and opens it. When she does she freezes, surprised by the roaring fire in her fireplace. Then she sees the mountain of greasy bones and crumbling crusts of bread on her tea table, behind which sits Sigrud je Harkvaldsson, stripped down to his shirtsleeves, his suspenders dangling from his waist, carving up a forearm-sized hunk of white cheese with his giant black knife. The only remnant of his kingly attire is the white glove on his left hand, concealing the injury he bore long ago.
He jerks his chin at her. “I wondered when you would be back.”
Mulaghesh stares at the mess and holds her hands out, aggrieved. “What…What the fuck?”
“Signe said you wanted to see me.”
“How the hells did you get in here?”
“I picked the lock?” He picks up a clay jug, uncorks it, and takes a massive pull. “How else?”
“By the seas…” She shuts the door and tosses her coat on the bed. “You couldn’t find anywhere else in this giant building for you to eat what looks like three whole chickens?”
“Not anyplace where I wouldn’t get stared at. Or have servants fumbling over me, asking me if I needed things. They treat me like a bomb, waiting to explode. I much prefer your room. No one looks for me in here.”
“Hells, I know I sure wouldn’t! Ah, look, you’ve gotten chicken fat all over the carpet….”
“What was it you wanted to see me about?” He recorks the jug. “Signe mentioned the Ministry, but, to be honest, I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic.”
She flops into a chair beside the fire. “I’m almost not even sure I want to say it aloud. You might think me a fool, or insane. Or, worse, I’d hear it coming out of my mouth and know I’m insane.”
“Shara said that on our first few jobs,” says Sigrud, “tangling with the Divine.” He looks at her, eyebrow cocked. “Which makes me curious to hear what you are about to say.”
There’s a silence. Mulaghesh holds up her hand. Sigrud, without a word, tosses her the jug. She catches it, pulls the cork out with her teeth, spits it into the fire, and takes a long pull.
She shuts her eyes as she swallows. “Grain alcohol,” she says, her voice now raspy. “That shit’s not for the young.”
“That shit is often not even for seasoned Dreyling sailors,” says Sigrud, watching as she takes a second enormous swig. “This makes me think whatever you say is, ah, very bad news.”
“Yes. Yes it is.”
There’s another silence.
“I’ll need you to listen not as a chancellor of a foreign nation,” says Mulaghesh, “but as a former operative. And a friend.”
“So you are saying, do not use this information against you or your country.”
“Yeah, basically. Can you do that?”
He shrugs. “I have always been good at compartmentalization. And, to be frank…I am not particularly interested in the work of a chancellor.”
So she tells him. She tells him everything, from top to bottom, describing Choudhry, the murders, the mutilation of the bodies, her Divine encounter with that apparition that looked like Voortya, and her glimpse into what she now suspects was the Voortyashtani afterlife. And to her relief, he doesn’t look at her like she’s crazy, like she’s absolutely out of her gourd. Instead he just sits there, one eye blinking slowly, as if he’s just heard some rather disappointing gossip.
“So,” he says slowly when she finishes.
“So.”
“You, ah…You believe that the Voortyashtani afterlife—this City of Blades—still exists. Somehow.”
“Yes. Do…do you believe me?”
He puffs at his pipe, releasing a huge cloud of smoke. “Yes. Why wouldn’t I?”
In her relief she chooses not to give him the many, many reasons why a normal person wouldn’t. “I saw it, Sigrud. I saw it. It’s hard to describe what I saw, but…it was real, and I know it was real. They’re all there, all the Voortyashtanis that have lived and fought and died….It’s a…a fucking army, Sigrud! How it’s still around I don’t know, but they’re still out there.”
“And now, you think they are, how shall I put this…coming through?”
“That’s my suspicion. Just as I was, I don’t know, pulled through to them, they can maybe be pulled through to here.”
“And it’s these sentinels who have committed these murders.”
“Yes,” says Mulaghesh. “A whole family cleanly massacred, then butchered, and all such perfect cuts….It’s not something an ordinary person could do. But a single stroke of a sentinel’s blade, they say, was able to part the trunk of an old oak as if it were but a length of straw.”
“But how are the sentinels coming through to here?”