“You think…maybe Choudhry?”
“Maybe.” She sniffs. “Let’s take a look, eh?”
***
The path is not stone like the staircase, but a rambling dirt trail that winds underneath the crooked trees. Evening is fading into night, and both of them are forced to resort to pulling out torches, which turn the woods into a shifting, spectral nightscape.
Mulaghesh carefully follows the footprints, gingerly taking each next step. “They’re old. Months old, perhaps longer. Someone came here a lot.”
“Perhaps the tribes are still bringing their children here for their rite of passage.”
“Maybe. If so, they brought a damned wheelbarrow.” She points at a tire tread running through the soft earth.
“That seems…unlikely,” says Signe. “I thi…Oh, my word.”
“What?” Mulaghesh looks up, and sees Signe is shining her torch ahead, its beam falling on…something.
It’s some sort of tomb or crypt—a tall, arching structure built directly into the cliff behind it, with a set of white stairs leading up to a stone door—or what would have been a door, were it not completely destroyed. Chunks of rubble are scattered on the dais before the door.
Mulaghesh walks up and shines her light over the structure before her. It’s an elegant, beautiful construction, pale and delicate in the rippling shafts of moonlight, and covered with engravings: whales, fish, swords, porpoises, and endless waves. “I’m guessing they came here for this. But what in hells is it?”
“A burial chamber, I’m guessing. We found a few like this in the silt at the bottom of the bay, but they were much smaller—little more than a box.” She walks up to the broken door and shines her light in. “Yes—it’s the same. Come look.”
Mulaghesh joins her. The interior of the tomb is much smaller than she expected, considerably smaller than the ornate stone dais before it. It’s about four feet by five feet, and it’s almost completely barren except for a small plinth in the center.
“No place for a body,” says Signe. “Just a weapon—a sword.”
“Maybe they didn’t bury bodies. Their souls were bound up in their blades, weren’t they? Why bother with the corpse when you have that? So you just stowed the sword away for safekeeping…”
“Until you needed it,” says Signe. “Then you made a sacrifice. Someone picked it up, and then…” She shudders.
“Maybe the Teeth of the World are a memorial, like you said,” says Mulaghesh. “A place to store the weapons and souls of their most revered saints. Only now…someone’s gone graverobbing.” She shines her light back out at the woods. “So maybe this is how someone got their hands on a functional Voortyashtani sword.”
“Maybe that was the one your culprit tried to send to you?”
“Maybe. Or maybe they found more.”
“That’s not comforting.”
Mulaghesh walks back out and examines the dais, looking for a name, a carving of a face, anything to identify the owner of the sword that might have been in that tomb. But beyond the ornamentation there are few identifying marks. “Someone so famous, perhaps,” she says aloud, “you didn’t even need to put their name on their grave. I guess this isn’t the tomb Choudhry was looking for back in the city?”
Signe exits the tomb, looking pale and shaken. “The tomb that held all the Voortyashtani warriors, ever? No, I presume not. It’d be a bit cramped in there.” She shivers. “I don’t especially want to search the rest of the Tooth to see if someone broke into any more tombs.”
“I don’t, either. Come on. Take me to the summit.”
***
The journey up begins to wear on Mulaghesh, but she wonders if it’s the path itself that’s the culprit: the farther they walk up the wet, gleaming cobblestones, the taller the trees seem, and the darker the air.
“Something doesn’t feel right,” says Signe.
“No, but it feels familiar. There were places kind of like this in Bulikov,” says Mulaghesh. “Places that were here, but…not here, at the same time. Like scars, I guess.”
“Scars in what?” asks Signe.
“In reality.”
Finally they come to the top. Massive trees crowd around the summit as if to create a wall, and a wide, perfectly round stone arch marks the end of the steps. Beyond it is some kind of structure.
Mulaghesh slows to a stop as it comes into view. It is like a dome—a broad, brown, curving structure nearly thirty or forty feet wide. But it is made entirely out of beaten and smelted-down blades: sword blades and axe blades, knives, scythes, the tips of spears and arrows, all mashed together and layered on top of one another until they form a brown, rusted tangle of sharp edges. The entryway to the dome is lined with sword blades, all pointed in like teeth in the maw of some great beast. It is the single most hostile thing Mulaghesh has ever seen in her life.
“That’s it, huh?” says Mulaghesh.
“That’s it,” says Signe.
“Did you ever go in there?”
Signe shakes her head. “We came near it, looked at it, but…we never stepped off the stairs. It was too wrong. One boy was bold enough to shout to it, to call the old man out—we ran away, terrified, and the boy came down later, saying he saw nothing. Do you really think this is the place Choudhry was talking about?”
“I guess.”
“And…are you going in there?”
Mulaghesh stares at the dome. She can feel it: there is a mind in there, something watching her in the darkness. She imagines a soft sigh from the depths of the dome, a gentle exhalation.
“I am,” she says. “I don’t like it, but I am. Are you?”
Signe pauses. Then she shakes her head and says, “Not my ship, not my rats.”
“That must be a Dreyling turn of phrase, because that doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to me.”
“I am saying this is your mission, General, not mine. I’ll be more than happy to keep watch.”
Mulaghesh walks through the gate. “Fair enough. I don’t blame you.” She stands before the entry to the dome, rifling held ready. “If I don’t come out in thirty minutes,” she says, “throw a grenade in.”
“What?” says Signe, startled. “And kill you?”
“If I’m not out in thirty minutes, then it’s likely I’m already dead,” she says. “And I don’t intend to let this damned place live longer than me.” Then she raises her rifling, stoops down low, and steps into the shadows.
***
There’s a moment of darkness. Then shafts of light filter through the gloom above. She realizes she’s seeing the moonlight shining through the gaps in all the thousands of blades hammered together above, but the color of the light is wrong: it’s dull and yellowed, like it’s shining from the wrong sky. She remembers how things looked during the Battle of Bulikov, when the Divinity appeared and forced its reality onto the city, changing the very sky: this is much the same, she finds—not true light but a crude approximation of it. It is as if the sky above this dome is different from the one she just left.