“If you keep getting melancholy, Lalith, I’ll have to take that bottle away.”
“I’m not joking, Turyin. They boxed up my predecessor quick as a flash and replaced him—him and a dozen other officers here. It’s like the world just forgot them.” His eyes have a curious light to them, one Mulaghesh has only seen once here, when Biswal danced around the topic of the Summer of Black Rivers. “The least they can do is remember us. Remember those who took on the sins of our nation to keep it safe. Not all of us get a Battle of Bulikov, Turyin—a battle our people acknowledge and glorify. We’re not all so lucky as you. The rest of us are like the cartridge of a bullet, cast away once used. And we are asked to silently bear that burden. Which we, as patriots, do gladly.” Then he stands, turns, and walks back to the fortress.
What is a blade but a conduit of death?
What is a life but a conduit of death?
—EXCERPT FROM “OF THE GREAT MOTHER VOORTYA ATOP THE TEETH OF THE WORLD,” CA. 556
Mulaghesh burns with anxiety as she walks back into SDC, but no one looks twice at her while she walks through the halls and up the stairs to her room. She opens the door and begins fumbling with her pockets, reaching for the letter, when she spots the washroom door inching open over her shoulder.
She’s not sure how she moves so fast, but suddenly her carousel is in her hand, pointed at the washroom door. Sigrud slowly sticks his head out of the bathroom and cocks an eyebrow at the pistol. “You seem…nervous. Was it a success?”
“That depends on your idea of success,” says Mulaghesh, sighing with relief. “Fuck, Sigrud. I almost shot you! Why don’t you knock or, I don’t know, start the evening outside of my room.”
“Because then my daughter will force me into some other duty: shaking hands, listening to workers.”
“I thought you wanted to get closer to her.”
“I do. She brings me to the people I need to see, then dumps me there, walks away as they begin talking. It is…impolite. But enough of that. You found something of Choudhry’s?”
“A message. In code.” She slides the paper out of her pocket. Sigrud walks forward—she notes that he seems to move silently, even though he’s nearly twice her size—takes it, and moves to the desk in the corner.
“I have laid out the materials we will need,” he says, sitting. “Lots of paper. Lots of pen and ink.”
“Nice to see you’ve set up shop. Shara gave me a codex of all the various encryption metho—”
“That will not be necessary.” Sigrud sits, pulls out a pen, and unfolds Choudhry’s message. “They made me memorize so many codes in my day….This I could do in my sleep. And that is a complaint, not a boast.”
He looks over the codes, then begins making small marks on the paper with a pencil, underlining a stray H or I or 3 or an M. He moves with a quiet, thoughtless grace, as if proofreading a letter.
“That’s not the only thing I found up there.” She groans as she takes off her coat, her back popping and crackling unpleasantly. “Whoever it is we’re hunting drilled a damned hole right down to the thinadeskite mines.”
Sigrud’s brow wrinkles ever so slightly as he mutters numbers to himself. “Mm? What?”
“Someone made a second mine entrance, basically. A little one. Looks like the kind of thing people would carve to escape a prison camp. Biswal and Nadar are convinced the Voortyashtani insurgents used it to bomb the mines, but…”
“But you are still convinced it was a Divinity, or something Divine.”
“Yeah. There’s an ulterior use for thinadeskite besides conducting electricity, or you can have the head off my fucking shoulders.”
He purses his lips, continues writing. “Anything on Choudhry? Besides this?”
“I’m no longer so sure she was mad. Or that she’s behind this, even. She worked her ass off to get this message to me, or someone from the Ministry. That’ll depend on what it says, though…which, we’re making progress on? Right?”
“Progress, yes. It’s a code used for trade delegates in Ahanashtan. Probably the least likely code to be known here. Which is why she used it, to be sure.”
“I don’t like this. I prefer my madwomen to be absolutely fucking stark mad, thank you very much. This takes thinking.”
“There is rice whisky in the washroom,” says Sigrud, “if you would like some.”
“Mm? What? You hid booze in my room?”
“I have booze hidden all over the place. Dead drop training has its uses beyond espionage.”
Mulaghesh finds the jug of whisky—cleverly squirreled away under the sink—and sits and drinks as Sigrud decrypts the message. He shakes his head sometimes, as if what he’s writing confuses him, but keeps going. Then, with something like a cringe on his face, he puts his pen down.
“Finished?” says Mulaghesh.
“I…do not know.”
“How can you not know if you’re finished?”
“Because I am not at all sure what I translated. Perhaps it is in code again, but…If so, it is one I do not know. Come and see.”
Mulaghesh stands and looks over his shoulder, reading:
Listen, listen, little priests
Coming now the bright white shores and all the flock there weeping
Orphans, the disused and forgotten, the chaff of many wars, like snow upon an endless plain
Listen, listen
I’ve spent too much time there. Put too much of myself through. My mind, my thoughts, some part of me, it’s unraveling, and I can’t keep the threads straight. I can feel myself losing myself and I don’t know what that means
No, I do. I know what it means.
I did not kill enough. One confirmed kill, one measly little murder, not enough, not enough to go there. It only accepts the warriors, you see, those whose hands have spilled oceans of blood, lakes of blood
I am trying, I am so sorry
The ore was strange, so peculiar, so odd, and something was amiss. When I neared it, when I sat in their labs and studied it for hours, I dreamed of things, of awful moments of my own past
the pistol barrel trembling as I raised it, her face dumb with surprise, the jolt as the bolt tip pierced my body and then the crack of my weapon in my hand
So I watched the mines. I did not know why. Something was wrong and I had nothing else to watch. I watched and watched and watched.
Saw a lantern. Then gone. Then a lone figure creeping across the hills, to the trees, to the ancient place. Then gone.
gone
I found the secret entrance, the tunnel. I waited to catch them when they exited. I tried to, at least. Fought them. But they struck me, hard, in the head. Lucky hit, lucky
I almost died
I think I almost died then
did I die
how could one even tell
I could go into the tunnels now but I could find no sign of who it was or what they were doing there, so I tried the ritual, the last one that I thought might work. I had sensed it almost working before, almost almost almost, like a key in a lock, all the tumblers almost falling into place
I could sense it wanted to. I just needed to try it in the right place
The mines
I saw them there, the lost army
They’re still there, across the deeps, down in the dark