“Yes, yes,” says Bj?rck. He takes the pine box—it easily weighs over fifty pounds—places it on a table, and opens it. He gasps softly. “Oh-hoh.”
Inside is a massive, glimmering sword, over four feet long and thick as a butcher’s cleaver. Its handle is beautiful yet disturbing, featuring patterns of tusks and teeth and chitin. And the blade shines so strangely, as if it’s not a sword but a mirror. He checks the lining—being careful not to touch the sword, following the woman’s instructions—but he sees no hint of explosives or hidden detonation devices.
He stares into his reflection in the blade. He likes what he sees, for some reason. His eyes flash handsomely; his shoulders look broader. Somehow he looks stronger in the blade. Fiercer. Powerful.
“It is not to be touched, they said,” says the woman again.
“Mm?” says Bj?rck, startled. “Oh. Yes, of course.” He shuts the box and rehooks the clasp. “Due to the increased security, I’ll have to be the one to bring the package to her. Unless you have written approval from the fortress…”
“Captain Nadar did not give me any,” says the woman. “But…provided you do not touch it…it should be no issue.” She bows. “Thank you. And good day,” she says, and she turns and walks up the road.
Bj?rck watches her, thinking this all very queer. Then he puts the box under his arm and flags over his supervisor. Upon hearing that it’s from the fortress for the general, he’s given permission to go ahead.
The rain begins to let up as he walks down the seawall road. With each step the box feels a little heavier and a little heavier, as if begging to be dropped, to taste the glint of moonlight, and be held.
I wonder, Bj?rck thinks, why it is I think such things?
***
“Signe…,” says Sigrud. “Are…Are you sure you—”
“We need to go to my office,” Signe says suddenly. She stands, and suddenly all the fear and anxiety is gone from her. “I’ll need maps.”
“O-Okay,” says Mulaghesh.
“Just one moment, first.” Signe goes back to the secret door, opens it, and grabs a briefcase that was sitting on the stairs. Mulaghesh pauses to wonder exactly what brought Signe to her room in the first place.
Signe’s office lies deep in the recesses of SDC headquarters, which comes as a surprise to Mulaghesh. Someone as high-powered and valuable as Signe Harkvaldsson should surely have an office on the top floor with huge windows. Yet her office is almost in the basement, and resembles a loading dock converted into a loft.
But the room is obscured by what looks like, to Mulaghesh’s eye, racks and racks of clothing, each one labeled with numbered tags, starting at 1.0000 and going up to…well, the biggest number she sees is 17.1382. As she passes one rack Mulaghesh cranes her head to get a look at it, and she sees that they’re not clothes but blueprints, thousands and thousands of plans of things that, from what she sees, never got built.
Signe leads them to a large table in the center, an austere block of white stone that’s covered in yet more blueprints. At the table’s center are square stone cups filled with a variety of drafting materials: pens, pencils, rulers, abacuses, set squares, magnifying glasses, and several types of compasses. Next to these are three ashtrays, all quite full. Signe tsks as she approaches. “I’ll have to remind my assistant to dump these out.”
She makes them wait as she rolls up the blueprints and files them away. “Don’t touch anything!” she warns as she paces away through the racks.
Sigrud stares around himself in awe. “My daughter,” he says slowly, “lives here?”
“I don’t see a bed,” says Mulaghesh. “But yeah, I get that impression.”
Signe returns with a large, colorful map fluttering in her hands like a flag. “Here we are,” she says. She lays the map out. It’s a map of the coastline, including the flow of the oceanic currents, though there have been some alterations to where the Solda passes Voortyashtan: dozens of little red blocks are clustered together in a manner that reminds Mulaghesh of a child’s strategy game, like Batlan.
“What am I looking for here?” says Mulaghesh.
“This is an SDC map of all the coastlines and currents of the region. But what we’re looking for…” Then she says, “Ah!” and points to a flicker in the thousands of tiny blue lines a few dozen miles southwest of Voortyashtan. “There.”
Mulaghesh peers at where she’s pointing. “There’s nothing there.”
“I know,” says Signe. “But that’s where it is.”
“The Isle of Memory?”
“Yes. It’s real. That’s where it lies.”
“Then why isn’t it on the map?”
“Because I removed it.”
Mulaghesh and Sigrud slowly turn to look at her.
“Some places aren’t worth going to,” says Signe quietly. “Some places deserve to be forgotten. And that’s one of them.”
“What is it?” asks Sigrud. “What is there?”
“It is part of a chain of small islands,” she says. “The last, and the largest. It was a place where the highlanders conducted a…a rite of passage for adolescents. They’d take children down out of the mountains, along the river, and to the shore, where boats would be waiting. Then we’d sail southwest, along the coast, through the islands, until we found it.” Her face is grim and haunted. “They called it the Tooth. At its top was a ruin—an ancient old place made of metal and knives. It was rumored a man lived in it, an old man who remembered everything—a man of memory, in other words—but I thought it was just a story, a myth. We saw no man, and no one seemed to expect us to. I thought at the time that it was a place that once had been Divine and held some specific purpose that was lost—but the highlanders, being traditional, kept coming back, kept fulfilling their oath. Those islands…they are a very strange place.”
“What did they do there?” asks Sigrud. “The highlanders?”
Signe purses her lips and takes out a cigarette. “Bad things.”
Mulaghesh clears her throat. “So that’s where Choudhry went, yes? Then how exactly am I going to get to this Tooth? I don’t know how to sail, and I sure as hells can’t swim that far.”
“You don’t need to know how to sail,” says Signe, lighting yet another cigarette. “Because I do.”
***
Bj?rck trudges up the muddy pathway to the SDC lighthouse, the seawall tapering off to his left. Someday soon, they say, this will all be paved over and landscaped, a place worthy of being an international embassy, the world’s first impression of SDC’s accomplishments as they begin to sail up the Solda. But for now, it is—like everything in Voortyashtan, in Bj?rck’s opinion—soaking wet and covered with gritty mud.
He hears a shout behind him and awkwardly turns, the heavy pine box slipping down his arm. He frowns when he sees who’s running up.
“Ach, Oskarsson,” he says to himself, dismayed. “Of all the filthy dogs who had to catch me now…”