None of them move. Warily, she climbs out of the gazing pool, then scurries over to the wall for shelter. Her breath produces an incredible amount of condensation, even though her skin doesn’t feel cold. It’s as if there’s just something frigid about this place that can’t react correctly to the living.
She looks herself over, mostly to make sure her ammunition is still secured to her rig. The cartridges should still work—she’s seen these damned things fire underwater before. And Signe’s brace has held, so she’s still gripping the rifling. It’s then that she notices that she’s now stained a dark red from head to toe: her clothes, skin, and even her hair are all a dusty crimson. It’s like she’s been marinating in blood, even though her time in the basin was hardly more than a minute or so.
She licks her fingers and rubs her skin, assuming it will wash off. It doesn’t.
“Shit,” she mutters. This will make her easy to spot in this colorless place.
She considers what to do now. She looks up at the two massive towers above her, riddled with windows glowing white or gold. The starry sky above is beautiful and strange, featuring some stars that are both the wrong size and the wrong color. Every once in a while a shooting star blazes bright against the dark. It’s a hauntingly beautiful place, albeit strange and ghostly.
She looks at one group of sentinels, then walks closer until they’re about ten feet from her. She can see variations in their armor now: some feature more aquatic ornamentations, others have more antlers, and some have only teeth of all shapes lining their shoulders and backs. They’re like different uniforms, she thinks. Maybe from different military units, different regions of Voortyashtan…or different eras in history.
She walks closer, rifling at the ready. The closest sentinel still faces away from her, but if it was conscious or alert, it’d hear her footfalls. Then she realizes that the sentinel is speaking, mumbling. She leans closer, listening, until she can hear its words:
“I threw down the bridges, threw down the walls, leapt among the fleeing flock and struck them down like wheat before the scythe. I did this for you, Mother, I did this for you….”
She walks to the next two, and hears:
“I stood upon the prow of my vessel and my heart leapt forth and I struck down their ships one by one, dashing them to flotsam and jetsam, and as we sailed by they clutched to the debris and cried out for help and we laughed at them. I did this for you, Mother. We did this for you….”
“We laid siege to the city for three weeks and four days, and when they opened the gates to admit defeat our swords fell upon them like rain upon a rooftop. They had thought we would be kind, that we would sanction their lives in return for their submission, but oh what fools they were, Mother, what fools they were….”
She listens to them, hearing each brutal story, each horrific victory. They’re reliving them over and over, she realizes, reliving their accomplishments, celebrating the deeds that won them their place here in the afterlife. But always they tie each story back to their “mother,” and each time they do there is a note of recrimination in it: as if they did these things for her, and secretly they did not wish to do them at all, and now she has somehow betrayed them.
She listens to them mumbling, then looks ahead into the gold-lit hallway leading away from the courtyard.
“Now…,” she whispers. “Where in hells is Choudhry?”
***
She wanders through the corridors and streets of the City of Blades, trotting over bridges and along canals and through cavernous tunnels. The streets are not all white stone: many of them are battered or rent shields hammered flat, just like in the dome atop the Tooth. She keeps an eye on the horizon, trying to spy that giant tower she saw in her vision, but the buildings and statues are so impossibly tall that it’s difficult to see anything behind them. She can only look straight up, really.
The streets are dotted with clumps of sentinels, all of them dormant and muttering like the ones she saw in the courtyard. They barely seem aware of their own presence, let alone Mulaghesh’s. But then she notices that no matter where the sentinels are standing, they’re all staring in one direction, as if they can see something behind the towering walls and statues.
So—what are they looking at?
Following this hunch—and completely ignoring common sense—she starts to run toward the sentinels, moving from small clumps to large groups and teeming crowds of sentinels, as they all seem to be magnetically drawn to something, clustering around some fixed point deep in the city.
As she dodges between two tall, muttering sentinels standing on a narrow, ivory-colored bridge, she suddenly stops. Then she backs up and looks down the canal.
The City of Blades seems to be riddled with canals, and the one she’s currently standing over looks like one of the biggest. As she looks down its length she can see countless other bridges straddling it, bridges of many shapes and sizes.
But on one bridge, about a quarter mile down the canal, she can see something lying on its stairs.
No—not something. Someone. A human form, limp and lying there, stained red just as she is.
“Ah, shit,” says Mulaghesh quietly.
She navigates through the crowd of sentinels and runs along the canal to the other bridge.
Not like this, she thinks. It shouldn’t end like this.
But when she emerges from one group of sentinels, and sees the body’s dark hair spilling over the white stairs, her shoulders slump.
She knows what this is, who this is.
She slowly walks over to the body.
It’s a woman. She’s dressed in civilian clothes, but the bandolier, the grenades, and the satchel hanging from her shoulder all suggest access to military supplies. Mulaghesh uses her toe to open the satchel. Inside is a bundle of brown tubes tied together, each capped with metal: TNT.
Packed for one hell of a pop, thinks Mulaghesh.
“So this is what happened to Biswal’s missing explosives,” she says aloud. “The Voortyashtanis never stole them. You did.” She almost wants to laugh at the sheer stupidity of it all.
Then she sighs, steels herself, and turns the body over.
She isn’t sure what she was expecting. All this time Mulaghesh has only had a picture and a file to go on, an idea of a person more than a person themselves. Yet when she sees the corpse of the young Saypuri woman, stiff and cold, she feels a pang she wasn’t expecting.
“Sumitra Choudhry,” says Mulaghesh. “Damn it.”
She’s not terribly decomposed, Mulaghesh notes, which suggests that time doesn’t work too well here, as Mulaghesh suspected. There’s a scab on her brow, left over from her fight outside the tunnel to the mines, probably. She looks terribly, terribly young to Mulaghesh’s eyes, not yet thirty. There’s a trace of irritation or discomfort to her large, dark eyes, as if she can’t believe this is happening to her, that she should come so far just to die here, alone on a bridge over ghostly waters.
“I’m sorry,” says Mulaghesh to her.