Mulaghesh’s skin goes cold. “What are you talking about?”
“War incarnate,” he whispers. “Battle made flesh. This is how I remember you. This is how I remember you as you shed blood in the lands east of here. That blood took a long journey to reach the taproots of the silver tree….But when it did, you bloomed in my mind like the brightest of stars. How the Great Mother would have loved to have an arrow such as you in her quiver. What a prize you would have been.”
Mulaghesh fights the urge to retch. The idea of this thing—she can’t think of it as a man, by any means—knowing what she did during the Yellow March, and approving of it, is utterly revolting to her. “Shut your mouth! I didn’t ask about that!”
He sucks on his pipe and watches her with a strangely critical gaze. “You wish to find the City of Blades,” he says. “I remember this. Why?”
“To follow the woman who came here before.”
He shakes his head. “No. No, that is not so. I have watched your journey from the west countries. I remember your coming; I remember how you battled your way to me. You have shed blood upon my mountains, upon my country. And when you did, I glimpsed your secret heart.” He shuts his eyes. “I remember…I remember…” His eyes snap back open. “You wish to find the Victorious Army there, upon the white shores of the City of Blades. You mean to find them, and stop them, halt their final war.”
Mulaghesh does not speak.
“Why?” he asks. His tone is that of someone politely puzzled.
“Wh-Why?” says Mulaghesh. “Why would I want to stop an army from destroying the world? That’s your question?”
“You speak,” he says, “as if they were an aberration. A violation. As if warfare was a passing phenomenon.”
“I know I don’t want it on my damned doorstep!”
He shakes his head. “But this is wrong. Warfare is light. Warfare and conflict are the energies with which this world functions. To claim otherwise is to claim your very veins are not filled with blood, to claim that your heart is still and silent. You knew this once. Once in the hills of this country you understood that to wage war was to be alive, to shed blood was to bask in the light of the sun. Why would you forget this? Why would you fight them and not join them?”
“Join them?” says Mulaghesh, appalled. “Join the very soldiers who enslaved my people?”
“Do you not enslave people now?” asks the man. “Chains are forged of many strange metals. Poverty is one. Fear, another. Ritual and custom are yet more. All actions are forms of slavery, methods of forcing people to do what they deeply wish not to do. Has not your nation conditioned this world to accept its subservience? When you wear your uniform and walk through these lands, do the people here not feel a terrified urge to bend their knees and bow their heads?”
“We didn’t leave any fucking mass graves in our wake!” snarls Mulaghesh. “We didn’t torment and slaughter and brutalize people to get what we needed!”
“Are you so sure? You burned down homes in the night, and families perished in the flames. I remember. And now you look back, full of guilt, and say, ‘It was war, and I was wrong.’?” He leans forward, his ancient face burning with intensity. “But this is a lie. You saw light. And now, when you have returned to the darkness, you wish to convince yourself the light was never there at all. Yet it remains. You cannot erase what is written upon the hearts of humanity. Even if the Great Mother had never walked among us, you would still know this.”
Mulaghesh feels tears spilling down her cheeks. “Times,” she says furiously, “have changed. I have changed. Soldiers no longer devote their lives to slaughter and conquest.”
“You are wrong,” says the man. His voice is low and resonant. The metal walls of the dome, all the knives and swords and spears, all seem to vibrate with each of his words. “Your rulers and their propaganda have sold you this watered-down conceit of war, of a warrior yoked to the whims of civilization. Yet for all their self-professed civility, your rulers will gladly spend a soldier’s life to better aid their posturing, to keep the cost of a crude good low. They will send the children of others off to die and only think upon it later to grandly and loudly memorialize them, lauding their great sacrifice. Civilization is but the adoption of this cowardly method of murder.”
The smoke is so thick about her it’s hard for her to see him. “Only a savage would think of peace that way!”
“No. It is the truth. And you know it. You were so much more honest when you slaughtered your own.”
Mulaghesh freezes. The smoke hangs still in the air. The old man slowly blinks his blank white eyes, and sucks at his pipe.
“What did you say?” whispers Mulaghesh.
“You know what I said,” says the man calmly. “Once those under your command did not wish to obey. And when that happened, you did what was necess—”
The rifling is on her shoulder and she’s striding forward, leaping through the smoke. The old man doesn’t grunt or make a sound as the muzzle of the rifling strikes his forehead, pushing him back against the wall of knives.
Mulaghesh leans close. “Keep talking,” she whispers. “Keep talking to me, old man, and we’ll see if I can spill the waters of your memory clean out of your fucking head.”
“You see what you are now,” he says serenely. “You see where your instincts lead you. Why do you deny what you are?”
“Tell me the damned ritual! Tell me how to get to the City of Blades!”
“The ritual? Why, you know it. You know the Window to the White Shores.”
“But that won’t let me cross over!”
“But you know the missing element that will augment it,” says the old man. “You’ve spilled so much of it in your time, and it flows through your own veins—the blood of a killer. What else?”
Mulaghesh pushes slightly harder on his head. “What do you mean? And if you speak another riddle then I swear, you will fucking regret it.”
“You saw a statue, once,” hisses the man. “A statue of the Great Mother, seated before a wide cauldron. Were you to fill this cauldron with seawater and the blood of a killer, enough blood to fill a goat’s bladder, and then perform the Window to the White Shores at the base of the cauldron, then you would be able to pass through—through the sea, through the world, and into the lands of the dead.”
Mulaghesh thinks back. She remembers that when she saw the City of Blades it was in the yard of statues, before the giant white statue of Voortya…and at her feet was what looked like a giant bathtub.
“The living essence of a life of death,” she says, “used to push a living person into the land of the dead.” She takes a step back, releasing him. “Ironic.”
The old man blinks his wide, blind eyes. “You think you are invading. You think you are assaulting enemy grounds. But you are not. You are going home. This life beyond death is one you deserve.”