The light curls, coils, churns above her head. Then she takes a breath and realizes the dome is full of smoke.
The acrid tang unravels in her lungs and she’s overtaken with violent coughing. It’s a reek of a sort that she’s never smelled before, something oily and woody and putrefied. She blinks tears from her eyes, which are slowly adjusting to the darkness.
The floor of the dome is made of shields hammered flat, just like the blades that form the roof. Across the gloom, at the very end of the dome—she finds herself wondering, How big is this place?—she sees there is a human form sitting beside what looks like a pale, silvery shrub.
He’s real, thinks Mulaghesh, though she finds it hard to believe it. He’s really real.
The man is masked in shadow, but he appears to be holding an ornate pipe, long and white like a piece of coral. The pipe curls up from his crossed legs and over his shoulders and around to his mouth, winding around his neck like a noose. She watches as the shadowy figure sucks at it. The bowl in his lap flares a soft orange. Then he exhales an absolute thundercloud of roiling, reeking smoke.
“I take it you’re the man atop the Tooth,” Mulaghesh calls to him.
If this means anything he doesn’t show it. He just takes another huge draw from his pipe, leans back, and sends a stream of smoke up to the ceiling.
Yet this time his face happens to catch one of the rays of light.
She freezes, and thinks: Holy hells. He’s a corpse.
She watches as he lowers his head, the ray of light sliding across his features. His skin is gnarled and papery, covered with splotches of discolorations like mold blooming in the walls of an old house. His eyes are wide and white and blind, and his eye sockets and cheeks are so sunken and hollow it’s like he hasn’t eaten in…Well. Maybe ever. He is dressed in wraps of thin, wispy rags, and he seems incapable of completely shutting his mouth, so his narrow, blackened teeth are always visible, like the grin of a corpse.
Mulaghesh tightens her grip on her rifling. He doesn’t exactly look like a physical powerhouse, but he must be Divine, which means appearances can be deceiving.
She takes a step forward. “Who are you?”
He stares ahead blindly. The only sign that he heard is the slightest twitch of his head. Then a voice rattles up from his skinny chest, a voice like rocks and gravel being washed ashore.
“I,” he says slowly, “am not a who.” Each word he speaks makes a fog of coiling smoke.
“Okay,” says Mulaghesh slowly. “Then…what are you?”
“I am memory,” says the man. He sucks at his pipe and exhales again.
“What do you mean, you’re memory?”
“I mean,” he says, “I am that which remembers.”
“Okay. So you just…remember things?”
He sucks his pipe but doesn’t bother to answer.
“What kind of things?”
“My memory encompasses,” he says, “all the things that I remember.”
Mulaghesh frowns. His circular answers suggest a lack of basic human intelligence, or maybe she’s not asking the right questions. “How…How did you come to be here?”
There’s a pause. Then he smacks his lips and says in a measured chant, “I am the 374th memory vessel of the Empress of Graves, Maiden of Steel, Devourer of Children, Queen of Grief, She Who Clove the Earth in Twain. Upon this spot I took the place of the 373rd vessel, broke a leaf from the Tree of Memory, and inhaled all the knowledge of what the Great Mother had promised. Within me is the memory of all who have been lost, sacrificed, cut down. I contain villages, armies, generations. I remember the slain and the dead, the victorious and the defeated. I am memory.”
Mulaghesh glances at the silvery little shrub beside him. “Tree of Memory?”
“Yes.”
“What does that mean? What is the Tree of Memory?”
Again he begins to chant: “In honor of Her people swearing fealty to Her, the Great Mother stabbed a single arrow into the stone, and it flowered and became a great tree, a tree whose roots lie under all the stones of this land.” He gestures to the tiny, silvery shrub with one gnarled hand. “The tree is fed by the blood of the people, by their conflict and their sacrifice, and the memory of all that they have done flows through its vessels—and into me,” he says, smoke blooming from his lips, “into this thing I am, this creature of flesh and bone. I am the final vessel of all these memories. I am the pool fed by the many mountain streams.”
Mulaghesh looks over his bony wrists, his painfully thin ankles. “How…How long have you been here?”
He cocks his head, like he has to think about it. “I have, in my time here, borne witness to ninety-six winters.”
“How is that possible?” asks Mulaghesh softly.
“I am memory,” he says. Smoke curls up around his head like a ghastly crown. “I need nothing. All I must do is remember. Which I do.”
“But this is all…miraculous, isn’t it?” asks Mulaghesh. “Isn’t Voortya dead?”
Silence. Then: “The Great Mother is gone from this world. This I remember.”
“Then how are you still here?”
A pause, as if he’s accessing some hidden part of himself. “Pass from this world,” he says finally, “and your agreements will still exist. Your contracts and oaths and debts will carry on. Promises were made. And some of those promises are being kept. I am here to remember the dead. When those oaths are fulfilled, I shall fade also.” He shudders a bit. “I will finally pass on, out of this room, into the light. Into the light…Into the air of the world I once knew…” He closes his eyes.
Mulaghesh suppresses a shiver. Enough of this. “There was a woman who came before me,” she says. “She asked about a ritual. I think it was a ritual to cross over to the afterlife, to the…to the City of Blades. Is this so?”
“I remember this.”
“I need to know what you told her.”
A gray, dry tongue wriggles up from the depths of his mouth and runs over his tiny, discolored teeth. Mulaghesh nearly gags in disgust.
“What did you tell her?” she asks. “How can I get to the City of Blades?”
He reaches over to the tree, and pinches off one thin, silvery leaf. He places it in the bowl of his pipe, and takes a drag—yet then he freezes, as if an idea has struck him. His blank white eyes widen, and he turns to look at her—the first time she feels he’s actually looked at her yet, focusing on her with all of his energy.
He stares at her, then softly says, “I…I remember you.”
“You what?”
“I remember you,” he says. He takes another puff from the pipe, and this seems to fuel his memory. “Young and bright and filled with cold anger. I remember you. You swept across the land like a screaming storm. In one hand you carried fury and in the other you carried slaughter.”