The trees loom over her. Suddenly they seem just as ominous and strange as the statues in the SDC yard. She hesitates before walking into their shadows, then chides herself for being silly and steps inside.
It’s surprisingly dark and still inside the copse of pines, as if their trunks and boughs form a solid wall. The vicious coastal wind doesn’t penetrate their perimeter. It’s so dark that she almost walks right into the stone before she sees it, despite its size.
The stone sits in the center of the trees, about man-high and rounded, yet running from its top to bottom are countless thin slashes, as if the stone was put through a carpenter’s router over and over again. There are hundreds of slashes, even thousands of them, scoring it until it looks like some strange, giant nut with a curious shell. Despite these lacerations the stone is still strong: no matter how she pushes or pulls, no part of it crumbles or falls apart.
She remembers it, she realizes. She remembers this stone, remembers coming here in the night, seeing this ritual. They’d take us up here, she thinks. They’d take us up here and show us what they could do with a sword, slashing through six feet of stone with a single stroke. And so precise was the stroke, so perfect, so smooth, that it never crossed over another slash, never damaged the stone so much it fell apart.
She walks around it in a slow circle, fingers trailing over the marks on the stone, the gray light dappling its surface.
Once every three years they took us up here, she remembers. Once every three years they slashed the stones. In gardens like this, all across the cliffs. It was a message to us, to all of us who wished to leave our clans behind: “Do this, and you will no longer be a person. You will be a device. You will be a weapon, perfect and merciless, wielded by Her hand.” And we gladly gave ourselves.
She stops. Steps back from the stone.
She stares around herself, confused and terrified.
This memory she just recovered, she suspects, is over a hundred years old. And it is definitely not hers: this is the first time she’s ever been here in her life, she knows that.
But she thinks she knows whose memory it is. She glances toward the tall, thick pine at the edge of the copse and thinks, I remember hiding in branches like those, my palm slick with honey, my knife in the other hand, and waiting for the stag….
She saw this place when she was in the thinadeskite mines, the vision of the boy with the knife and the white stag, going through some test to prove himself to the sentinels. To imagine that this place is real, still here, and only a few yards away from the mines themselves is dumbfounding to her.
She steps back, aware of her alien reverence for this place and disgusted by it. This awe, this reverence, is not her own. It belongs to some young Voortyashtani boy from hundreds of years ago, and it somehow became trapped inside of her during her short spell in the mines, like some kind of mnemonic transfusion. She wonders what else the mines could have done to her, as well as how they did it, and suddenly she no longer feels too upset that the mines have been obliterated. She keeps backing away, feeling tremendously violated.
But she finds something else isn’t right. Her memory is telling her something here is…new.
She fights against the feeling—she knows her memories of this place aren’t hers—but she can’t deny the sensation that something has changed here, something that shouldn’t have been changed.
It takes her a while, but she finally decides that the small, black boulder about twenty feet to the left of the standing stone is new. It shouldn’t be here; they practiced swordwork around the stone—Not me, she thinks, but whoever’s memory this is—all of them pacing back and forth, and they’d never have placed a rock of such size in the area. It would have been dangerous.
She walks over to the boulder. It could have just rolled here, certainly. But it’s strangely round and flat, as if it was carven. Maybe someone could have left it here…but why would someone do that?
As Mulaghesh steps before it something changes in her footsteps: there’s a hollow thump, as if she’s standing on a wooden platform. Yet this couldn’t be, as she’s standing on dark green grass.
She lifts up the boulder. To her confusion, underneath it is a loop of rope that rises out of the soft, thick turf. She stares at it a second, then shoves the boulder aside and tugs at the rope.
It takes three tugs before a whole section of sod lifts clean up out of the earth. Underneath it is a large hole, about three feet wide and three feet tall.
She looks at the chunk of sod in her hand, confused. It’s a perfect square. She flips it over and sees that it is actually a wooden trapdoor with sod cunningly tied onto the top, and a loop of rope in the center for its handle. It’s like a camouflaged sewer cap, in a way.
“What in all the hells?” she says.
She looks into the hole, wondering if this is some Voortyashtani grave site, but she sees it’s not a hole at all: it’s a tunnel, sloping down sharp and heading south. It’s no small feat, either: she sees wooden support beams lining the tunnel, supporting all those tons and tons of earth.
She sits up and looks south, and sees the excavation machines working away on the mines.
“Ah, shit,” she says. “The mines…”
She sprints off toward the closest checkpoint, thankful that she maintained her running exercises in Javrat, and flags down a guard. “Get word to General Biswal at Fort Thinadeshi immediately,” she pants. “We’ve had a security breach at the mines. And have them bring a torch!”
***
Nadar and Pandey shine a torch down the tunnel, craning their heads low to see. “Are we certain it goes to the mines?” asks Biswal, looking over their shoulders.
“Hells, I don’t know,” says Mulaghesh. “When I encounter a strange hole in the woods my first instinct isn’t to jump down it.”
Pandey sits back, sighs, and says, “If you would all please give me some room….” Then he stands, shifts the torch around so it’s hanging by his shoulder, and does a graceful hop into the tunnel, sliding down it feetfirst.
Mulaghesh, Biswal, and Nadar watch as the luminescence of his torch grows smaller, until he finally reaches a bend and it vanishes entirely.
“Does it go to the mines, Pandey?” Biswal shouts down.
Pandey’s voice comes echoing up: “It’s…It’s not necessary to talk quite so loud, sir. The tunnel does amplify voices a good bit.”
“Oh.” Biswal clears his throat. “Apologies.”
“But, yes, sir…It does seem to run into the remnants of a cave-in down here, sir. So it probably once did go to the mines, sir.”
“Damn,” mutters Nadar. “Damn it all, damn it all! Another breach! Another one!”
“This, I would assume,” says Biswal, “is how they managed to bomb the mine.”
“It must be, sir,” says Nadar. “That’s the only possible way. I suppose we didn’t find the entrance to the mine down in the tunnels because it must have been as well camouflaged as this damned trapdoor.” She kicks the door hard enough to send it pinwheeling through the glen.