“Aren’t you basically running the harbor?” asks Mulaghesh.
“Somewhat,” she says. “After a few final large obstructions are cleared, we have multiple strategic plans for mopping up, ones that I designed months ago. I can afford to be missing for a few days, or I can soon.”
Sigrud shakes his head. “I do not like this,” he says. “I do not like this plan one bit.”
Signe rolls her eyes. “You forget I have been to some of the most difficult parts of Voortyashtan. I was raised in them.”
“And I have no desire to see you go back to them!”
“If the general here is correct—and I am reluctantly forced to admit that she, at least, believes it to be true—then everything I’ve worked for is in peril,” says Signe. “Everything I’ve spent my life preparing could be destroyed!”
“Your life?” says Sigrud. “You think five years is a life? Five years is no time at all, it is a blink of an eye!”
“Five years for me,” says Signe, “but we are talking billions of drekels hanging in the balance here—fortunes for decades to come!”
“Do you think only in money? Is that what you’ve become?
“Money?” says Signe, furious. “Money? You think I’m here to make money? No, Father dear, what I’m here to do is put you both out of a job!”
Sigrud and Mulaghesh glance at one another.
“Huh?” says Mulaghesh.
“People like you,” says Signe. “You think the world’s decided in fortresses, atop battlements, from far behind razor wire and fences. It’s not, not anymore. The world’s decided in countinghouses. We don’t listen to the march of boots; we listen to type machines and calculation machines pounding out revenues and budgets. This is how civilization progresses—one innovation at the right time, changing the very way the world changes. It just needs one big push to start the momentum. Thinadeshi herself knew that. She tried. And we are left to take up her work.”
Sigrud shakes his head. “I…I do not doubt you. And I do not doubt what you are doing. I commend you for it.”
“Then what?”
“I just…I just wish you to know that there is more to life than this. There is more to life than these…these great tasks we set for ourselves.”
Signe slowly grinds out the cigarette in the ashtray. “You misjudge me.”
“I don’t think I do.”
“You do not know me. If you wanted to, you would.”
“If I could have broken down those prison walls, I—”
“I know you were on the Continent for almost a decade!” shouts Signe. “I know you were free for years, running about with Komayd, doing her dirty work! You could have come home at any time if you wanted to, you could have known us if you wanted to, but you didn’t! You just left us up here, in this…this hell!”
“I did not wish to expose you to what I was!” he says. “The…the things I saw in prison…the things I did, the things they did to me…Your lives were better off without me.”
“Until Komayd said it was time for you to run home,” says Signe. She laughs bitterly. “Here is the truth of it, Father. You are a brave man when you have a knife in your hand. But when faced with another person who truly needs you, I think you are a cowa—”
She stops as they hear the sirens sounding in the harbor, a low, rising wail.
“What in hells is that?” says Mulaghesh.
Signe looks to the windows. “The alert siren,” she says. “Something’s wrong. We…We must be under attack!”
***
Signe, Sigrud, and Mulaghesh all sprint up toward the first floor of the SDC building, only to find Signe’s chief of security Lem sprinting in the opposite direction. “There you are,” he says, gasping. “We had some…some kind of attack happen.”
“Where?” demands Signe. “What happened?”
“It’s out front. Just in front of the lighthouse, in fact. Should we notify the fortress?”
Signe looks to Mulaghesh, who nods once.
“Yes,” says Signe. “Better safe than sorry. Now show me.”
As they walk, Lem summarizes the events. “…Deputy Chief Oskarsson stopped him just outside to inspect the package, and found it was some kind of…sword.”
“Sword?” says Mulaghesh.
“Yes. A ceremonial sword of some kind.” He looks at her sidelong. “I take it you don’t know about this?”
Mulaghesh grimly shakes her head.
Lem shoves the door open for them as they run outside. “That’s not good.”
“So what?” says Signe. “Someone tried to give Mulaghesh a sword? Exactly how did this constitute an attack serious enough to sound the alarm?”
“Well…Because then this happened.”
He gestures ahead to the seawall road, where two SDC trucks sit idling in the road. Beside them stands a crowd of armed Dreylings looking at something on the ground. When they see Lem and Signe they part and stand back.
Something dark and thick lies in puddles on the road. Sigrud sniffs the air. “Blood,” he says softly.
“Yes,” Lem says, leading them over.
“Was someone injured?” asks Mulaghesh.
“That’s…much less clear, ma’am,” says Lem. He points to a group of guards huddled on the other side of the road, then gestures to them. They escort over a tall, jittery Dreyling. The man’s face is pale as snow, and his breath has the sour smell of vomit to it.
“Bj?rck,” says Signe to the pale Dreyling. “What happened?”
He shakes his head. “Jakob…I mean, Deputy Chief Oskarsson…He opened the box, and he touched the sword, and then he just…changed.”
As they listen to his story, Mulaghesh and Sigrud exchange a glance. Mulaghesh cocks an eyebrow—Divine?
Sigrud nods once. Almost certainly.
Bj?rck shakes his head. “The sound he made was so horrible…I panicked. I pushed him. He fell over the wall, into the waters. But the sword did something to him. Before I pushed him, when I looked at his reflection in the blade, he…it wasn’t him anymore, it was something else. Something else standing in his place.”
Mulaghesh and Sigrud look over the seawall. The waters are dark and swirling, sloshing up and down a small concrete loading dock just fifteen feet below them. “I assume that would have happened to me if I’d gotten it,” says Mulaghesh. “Who gave you the box to deliver? Was it a woman?”
The Dreyling nods.
“And what did she look like?” asks Mulaghesh.
“I could not see her. She wore a cloak, and a scarf….And it was raining then.”
Sigrud leans out over the water, frowning, though Mulaghesh can’t see what worries him so.
“What did she sound like?” asks Mulaghesh. “Old? Young?”
“She sounded…I do not know. Normal. No strong accent, nothing notable. She was short. Wore dark robes. She just went up to the street there.” He points.
Sigrud cocks his head, still staring at the waters below the seawall.
“We could do searches in the city,” says Signe. “But a fat lot of good that will do. So many people come i—”
Sigrud says, “There is something down there.”
“What? Besides the ocean, you mean?” says Signe.