“You’re just repeating yourself. No. No, I have no idea what in the hells you’re talking about.”
He sticks his pipe in his mouth and screws up his face as he thinks about it. “Do you really want to talk to her?”
“Well…It’d be nice, sure, so—”
“Say no more.” He walks to the window and licks his finger. “Now…How did this stupid thing start? Ah, yes.” He then begins to draw on one pane of the window, his thick finger making delicate, graceful strokes on the glass.
“What are you doing?” says Mulaghesh. “Are y…Whoa.” She watches as his finger appears to dip into the glass, like it’s not a solid pane but is instead the surface of a puddle, somehow hanging there on the wall.
“It works here,” says Sigrud softly. “Good. It’s one of Olvos’s, who isn’t dead, so it should still work.”
She shivers. Something in the air changes: it’s like the shadows have all turned around, or perhaps the fire has grown larger but is now casting off dimmer light, or light of a hue her eye has trouble catching.
The pane of glass is now dark and opaque: Mulaghesh can see the harbor in the panes on either side of it, but in the one Sigrud touched she can now see nothing but black. She notices she can hear something new, too: a soft clicking, like that of a clock, though there is no clock in the room.
“I…think that worked,” he says slowly, not sounding at all convinced.
There’s the sound of someone muttering, “Hmm…Hunh?”
Mulaghesh looks around, trying to find its source. “What…What did you just do?”
Then the sound of something shifting, but it has a strange quality to it, as if the sound is bouncing up a metal pipe from far away.
“Shara?” says Sigrud. “Are you there?”
And then, somehow, there’s a woman’s voice saying, “What in the hells?”
There’s a click and the black pane changes, suddenly filling with golden light, which appears to be coming from a small electric lamp on a bedside table on the other side of the window.
This is, Mulaghesh knows, impossible: what is on the other side of the window is the harbor and the North Seas. Yet it’s like the pane of glass is a hole, and by looking through the hole Mulaghesh can see…
A bedroom. A woman’s bedroom. A very important woman’s bedroom, judging by the curtained, four-poster bed, the intricately wrought desk, the giant grandfather clock, and the countless paintings of very stern-looking officials wearing sashes and lots of ribbons and medals.
She’s seen this place before, she realizes. This is the prime minister’s mansion….
A face pokes through the curtains of the four-poster bed. It’s a familiar face, though it has far more lines and gray hairs than when Mulaghesh last saw it. It is also fixed in an expression of unspeakable, furious outrage.
“What…What!” says Shara Komayd. “What in hells are you doing, Sigrud?”
Mulaghesh says, “Ah, shit.”
***
“Turyin?” says Shara. Her voice is distant and wobbly, as if it’s not coming from her mouth but is being pulled out of her room, packaged up, transported to this room in the SDC headquarters, and unwrapped beside Mulaghesh’s ear. But it’s also much, much older and wearier than Mulaghesh remembers, as if Shara has done nothing but talk since they last met. “Turyin, are you mad? This is the one thing we absolutely cannot risk right now!”
“Okay,” says Mulaghesh. “Whoa. Hold on. I had no idea he was going to do that.” She looks at the pane of glass, as if trying to spot any hidden mechanisms. “This…This is a miracle, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s a damnable miracle! It is also three in the morning here! Are there any other obvious matters I need to confirm before you explain why you have interrupted me in a state of…of some serious undress? Assuming you have a reason, that is?”
Sigrud says, “Turyin thinks your officer has gone to the afterlife.”
Shara frowns. “What?”
“Um…Okay,” says Mulaghesh. “Let me start from the beginning here.” She tries to rattle off the current state of things—a much more rambling and disjointed version of the very conclusions she just went through with Sigrud.
Shara listens and grows so distracted she lets the curtains drop, revealing that she is wearing a set of bright pink-and-blue button-up pajamas. “But…But that’s not possible, Turyin,” she says when she finishes. “You can’t have seen her. Voortya is dead.”
“I know.”
“Very dead.”
“I know! You don’t think I’ve been thinking that every day since I’ve been here?”
“Yes, but…I mean, none of Voortya’s miracles work anymore. And I know. I tried them, all over the Continent. It was an easy way to determine if there were any alterations to reality in any given location, certain contortions of physical rules—”
“You’re losing me.”
“Fine. But the Divinity we know as Voortya is very, very much gone from this world.”
“I know that. But I saw what I saw.”
Shara sighs, fumbles with her nightstand, and puts on her spectacles. Then she walks to the window and says, “Press your translation of Choudhry’s message up against the glass. Hurry now. We can’t get caught like this…”
Mulaghesh does so. To her surprise, the surface of the pane of glass is quite hard.
She can’t see her, but she can hear Shara talk as she reads: “My word…Oh, my goodness gracious…What did that poor girl go through?”
“So you get the gravity of our situation.”
“Yes,” says Shara. Her voice sounds like she’s just aged ten years. “You may remove the message now, please.”
Mulaghesh takes it away. Shara is staring into space, blinking wearily. Then there’s a soft sound from the four-poster bed, a quiet coo, and Shara comes to life. She rushes back to the bed, sticks her head through the curtains, and shushes something. After a moment longer she returns to the window.
“You have company?” asks Mulaghesh.
“Something like that.” Her tone makes it clear that she’s not willing to discuss it.
“When’s the last time you got sleep?” asks Mulaghesh.
“Sleep?” asks Shara. She attempts to smile. “What’s that?”
“I take it things aren’t going well.”
“Oh, no. Not well at all. I fully expect this term in office will be my last.”
“What! But what about all your programs? What about the harbor?”
“Oh, well, they’ll be cut. The harbor they’ll keep—they’re contractually obliged to—but they’ll slash it to the bone. Unless whoever inherits the position from me chooses not to, of course, which seems unlikely. Anyway.” She rubs her eyes. “That is not the subject at hand. The subject at hand, I think, is one of sacrifice.”
“Of what?”
“Sacrifice. It grows clearer now. You know the story of Saint Zhurgut? How he fashioned Voortya’s sword from the arm of his son?”
“I’ve heard mention of it.”