with Her
someone must stop it, stop what’s coming
There is a man I have learned of, an ancient man who knows the ways of this place from long ago
They say he is a man but others say he is not a man but an idea that wears the image of a man
But perhaps
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps he knows the songs of Voortya’s opposite, the songs of sacrifice
He knows the rituals never written, never recorded, he knows the secret ways in and out of this world and the next world
He knows the way things were
The flow of life to death and death to life
Memory, old and withered, waiting upon the isle
I must find him
I must find him and find the ways across, so I can end them all, kill them all, stop what’s coming before it starts
Remember
Remember me, remember this
Remember that I tried
Sigrud and Mulaghesh are silent while they reflect on this. The room suddenly feels quite small and dark, the fire in the fireplace a low glimmering that gives off barely any light.
“Um,” says Mulaghesh. “Okay. So. Let’s try and extract whatever tangibles we can from this.”
“Good luck,” says Sigrud, standing. He walks to the fireplace and taps his pipe out onto the coals.
Mulaghesh holds up an index finger. “Okay. Um. One—it was not Choudhry who made the tunnel to the thinadeskite mines. Someone else made it, and Choudhry got the jump on them, but they got away. That would be how she received the head wound I’ve been hearing about, and it’s how she got into the mines to perform the Window to the White Shores. Unfortunately, odds are that whoever made the tunnel stopped using it the second they were found out, so I don’t think I can pull off another stakeout, like Choudhry did.”
“What if they left something in the mines to go back for?”
“Then it’s crushed flat as a half-drekel coin under all that rock.”
“Oh. Good point.”
“Second.” Mulaghesh sticks out another finger. “It sounds like Choudhry isn’t the person behind all this. She was hot on the heels of whoever it was, and maybe that’s how she came to find out about the murders—though she doesn’t mention the murders at all here.”
“If her message is true, yes. That is the case.”
“Yeah, and let’s just assume it’s true for now. Because it also suggests that Choudhry left Voortyashtan to go…somewhere. To see someone, some old Voortyashtani who might know rituals and rites even the locals would have never heard of—and likely ones that even Shara wouldn’t know of.”
“Could it even be possible for someone to live that long?” says Sigrud. “The Blink took place almost ninety years ago.”
“Eighty-six, to be exact. The Blink and the Plague wiped out tons of people, but not all of them. Perhaps some survived, had children, passed along secrets. But she also makes him sound strange…an idea wearing the image of a man? What does that mean?”
They sit in silence, each hoping the other will suggest something.
“What we don’t know,” says Sigrud, “we don’t know.”
“True enough. Moving on. Third.” Mulaghesh sticks out her ring finger. “It sounds like Choudhry experienced the same visions I did down in the thinadeskite mines, visions of the most violent moments of her own past, only she saw it in the thinadeskite labs. She mentions shooting someone with a pistol”—she reaches across her desk and flips through Choudhry’s file—“and she did receive a distinguished service award for an ‘altercation.’ You know what that means.”
Sigrud points a finger to the side of his head and drops his thumb, miming the hammer of a gun, and mouths the word Pow!
“Right. So somehow…Somehow the thinadeskite reacts to people who’ve seen combat, who have been forced to take lethal action, reaching out to them and making them remember those moments. Pandey mentioned it, I saw it, and now Choudhry. None of them mention seeing the violence from other eras like I did, though.”
“Maybe,” he says, “it is because you have killed many more people than they have.”
“Mayb—” She stops and looks at him. “Why do you say that?”
“I was a Ministry operative. It was my job to know things. And I mixed with many soldiers.”
Mulaghesh watches him clean the bowl of his pipe, stopping briefly to dig something out from between two of his teeth.
“And…what did you hear?” she asks.
He examines the chunk of food on his thumb and flicks it into the fire, where it sizzles. He regards her with a cold, steady gaze. “Nothing that would make me blush.”
They look at each other for a moment, Mulaghesh concerned and mistrustful, Sigrud blank and indifferent.
“You’re an unusual person, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson,” she says.
“I feel the same of you,” he says nonchalantly.
“I see.” She clears her throat. “Well. To return to what’s at hand…After these experiences, Choudhry grew suspicious just as I did. Which makes me ask, what the hells is in thinadeskite that does this? And why isn’t it registering as Divine?” She’s reminded of what Rada said while operating on the corpse: Deaths of all kinds echo on. And sometimes, it seems, they drown out all of life. “None of Voortya’s other miracles work, right?”
“No. Voortya’s miracles are used as an example of how a Divinity’s miracles stopped working. That’s what I recall Shara saying. Voortya was, how did she say, the textbook example.”
“Except I saw the damned City of Blades. As well as whatever apparition of Voortya it was that destroyed the mines. And now we know Choudhry saw the city too—which makes me wonder if that’s where she disappeared to.”
Sigrud stops cleaning his pipe. “You think Sumitra Choudhry is in the Voortyashtani afterlife?”
“No one’s seen hide nor hair of her,” says Mulaghesh. “And besides the person she surprised coming out of the tunnel to the mines, I can’t see that she had any real enemies. She explicitly says in the message that she went somewhere. That’s the only logical conclusion, illogical as it may be.”
“So if she did go over to the City of Blades…why?”
“She came to the same conclusion I did—the Night of the Sea of Swords, the Voortyashtani apocalypse. She realized it might be coming, that someone might be trying to trigger it. Maybe Choudhry went there to try to stop it. But how she thought she could do that…I don’t know.” She tosses the decoded message back onto the desk. “Fuck. Not for the first time, I wish Shara were here. She’d know what to do.”
Sigrud packs his pipe until it is overflowing with what smells like abysmally poor tobacco. “Why don’t you just ask her?”
“She’s supposed to be hands-off with me. Industry forces looking over her shoulder, that kind of thing. The only means I have of contacting her is routing a telegram through Bulikov to Ahanashtan. It’d take days.”
“She didn’t tell you about the emergency line?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Her…emergency line. For contacting her.”