City of Blades (21 page)

Mulaghesh stares over the cliffs of Voortyashtan. Gulls nest in the rocks below, and they flit back and forth over the waves, snapping up moths, ghostly, porcelain flickers in the moonlight. Besides them, she is alone. There's not a single soul for nearly half a mile around her.

The horizon flickers with roiling clouds and lightning. A storm coming—unwise to be out here now.

She wishes she'd grown, that she'd put the March behind her. But seeing those memories in the thinadeskite mine—young Bansa, hardly yet a man, knocking on the wall of the ruined farmhouse, not knowing what would happen to him mere days later—it was as if all the years since the March were just condensation on a pane of glass, wiped away with the flick of a hand, and on the other side was that ruined, scarred countryside, and she could not shut her eyes or look away.

She looks at the label on the bottle of wine. Some putrid Voortyashtani concoction. She drains it, walks to the edge of the cliff, and drops it over the side.

She watches it plummet, a glittering green teardrop falling to the dark ocean. It turns to dust against the face of the cliff. She never hears the crash.

She stares at the moon's reflection on the face of the waves. She imagines that it's a hole in the world, that perhaps she could dive out and fall through it and find a place where she could rest.

But then it changes, and suddenly the moon's reflection looks like a skull to her.

She blinks. To her bafflement, she watches as the moon's reflection changes, shifts: it's not a giant skull, but a face, a woman's face, still and blank, lying just below the waves.

“What the hells?” she says.

Then the ocean bursts up, something shooting up from its depths.

It rises, rises…

And Mulaghesh sees her.

She rises up astonishingly fast, like a whale breaking through the surface for a leap, water pouring off her enormous shoulders, pouring off her arms, pouring off her chin: a giant formed of metals, of steel and iron and bronze and rust. When she fully stands the cliffs are just barely at her breast, a vast, glittering creature standing against the frigid moon and stars. Her face is cold and still, an emotionless steel mask, her eyes dark and blank.

It is a helmet, Mulaghesh sees: she is not made of metal but is wearing armor—beautifully wrought, ornate armor, plate overlying mail—and depicted on this armor are a thousand terrifying images of unspeakable violence.

She is magnificent, terrible, beautiful. She is the sea, the moon, the cliffs. Warfare incarnate, violence never-ending.

“Voortya,” whispers Mulaghesh.

It is impossible—utterly
impossible—
and yet it is so.

One giant, mailed hand grasps the top of the cliffs, and she hauls her vast bulk up.

No, no,
thinks Mulaghesh.

The gulls are shrieking, terrified. The ground trembles beneath Mulaghesh's feet. Her hand fumbles for her carousel.

Voortya towers over Mulaghesh, dark and impossible and lovely and monstrous. With a whine of metal she turns her blank eyes to stare at the fortress. In her right hand is a flicker of light: a sword blade rendered in ghostly, pale luminescence.

I won't let you,
thinks Mulaghesh.

Mulaghesh pulls out the carousel and points it up and fires. She sees the muzzle flash reflected on the giant steel greaves, and is vaguely aware of herself screaming:
I won't fucking let you!

Mulaghesh feels her sanity unraveling—it is all too much, too much to see, to behold—but to her surprise, the Divinity reacts, recoiling as if in pain. Mulaghesh hears a voice in her mind, huge and terrible: “STOP, YOU FOOL! STOP!”

Then the stars wink out and she feels herself falling, and somewhere in the distance is the sound of thunder.

Though no Divinity, from what we have recovered, was ever depicted with much coherence, the Divinity Voortya is interesting in that there was a distinct shift in how she is described in Voortyashtani texts. In the very early days she was depicted as an animal, a veritable monster, a four-armed half-person, half-beast that was wild and savage. This version of Voortya is commonly associated with bones, teeth, tusks, antlers: the natural, biological adornments of combat. These signatures were retained even in her later years.

But somewhere in the sixth century, while the Divine Border Wars were still ongoing and all Divinities and their followers battled for domination, Voortya underwent a distinct change. She stopped presenting herself as a beast and started to commonly manifest as a four-armed woman dressed in armor. The armor is described as being highly advanced for the era: plate on mail on leather, and inscribed on the plate mail were all of her victories, all of the foes she had slaughtered, depicted with graphic detail. It is shortly after this period that she began to wield the famed Sword of Voortya, the blade wrought of moonlight whose hilt and pommel were the severed hand of the son of Saint Zhurgut, her most ardent apostle.

It is interesting that this shift in appearance coincides with three other changes. Firstly, it is after this transformation that we begin to see coherent, consistent recordings of the nature of the Voortyashtani afterlife, as if before this point the Voortyashtani afterlife did not truly or properly exist. Secondly, though Voortya's mostly human, four-armed appearance stayed more or less the same, her top-most left hand now appeared missing, as if severed during her transformation.

And thirdly, and perhaps most notably, after this change, there is no recorded instance of the Divinity Voortya ever speaking again. Either to the other Divinities or her own followers.

—DR. EFREM PANGYUI, “THE NATURE OF CONTINENTAL ART”

S
omewhere there is screaming. The cough and sputter of engines. The scent of smoke. No gunfire, though: her half-functioning brain makes a note of this, saying only,
Possibly not combat
.

Then a flash, a crash, a bang. She's slapped with rain, and awakes.

She is lying on wet earth. Rain patters her back. She remembers, slowly, that she has limbs. She turns herself over, shoulders complaining, and looks up.

Voortya is gone. A driving rain hammers the clifftops, runlets of water carving through the moist grass to go spiraling off into the sea.

She hears more shouting, the groan of machinery. She sits up—her whole body hurts as if she's just fallen out of the sky—and looks behind her.

A thick plume of smoke is rising from the earth a few miles west of Fort Thinadeshi. It takes her no time at all to realize it's the thinadeskite mine.

There are shouts, screams, cries. Automobile lights slash through the swirling dust and smoke. She can see figures sprinting back and forth, pointing, waving their arms. Machinery being set, started, juddering into action. It all has the look of a disaster to her.

She looks around and sees her carousel lying in a mound of bracken. She picks it up, fingers still dull and stupid, and confirms that it's empty: she fired all five rounds. She feels the barrels—still warm—which means she fired them recently.

Though the question remains,
she thinks, looking back at the sea,
fired them into
what
?

She holsters the carousel, stands, and staggers toward the thinadeskite mine, her feet sloshing in the wet earth. As she gets closer she sees there's an immense hole in the ground, like a sinkhole after a torrential rain, dozens of feet deep. The wire fences have collapsed, allowing her to cross through. One of the figures running around the rim of the hole is unusually agitated, pointing, screaming orders, darting back and forth with their hands clasped around their head. She doesn't need to get close to know it's Lieutenant Prathda, head boy of the thinadeskite project.

“No, no!” he's crying. “That stone there! It's clearly blocking the aperture! No, not
that
one, the one with the orthoclase striations, on the left!”

One of the soldiers working at the machinery turns to look at Prathda, bewildered.

“The
granite,
Private!” he shrieks at the soldier. “The
granite slab
! Move it,
move it
!”

Mulaghesh wipes rain out of her eyes as she approaches. “What the hells happened here?” It looks like someone's just carved a gigantic trench in the earth. There's no sign at all that this was once a functioning mine.

Prathda does a double take. “Where did
you
come from? The mine's caved in somehow, the whole damnable mine has just
caved in
! In the middle of the night! With no warning!”

“It collapsed?”

“Yes!
Yes!
And damned if I know how! We'd done countless integrity reports, brought in all kinds of mining experts to analyze the density of the soil, and now this! This, when we need it least! It'll flood in
minutes
if the rain keeps up!”

“Was anyone inside?”

“Of course there were! We'd be fools to leave this place unguarded! But…” He looks back at the ruined mine.

Mulaghesh understands what he's thinking. “The odds are slim that they're alive.”

She steps back to let the emergency crews by and takes stock of her surroundings, doing all she can to defy her whirling head and capture every possible detail. Lightning flickers in the sky, giving her a sliver of illumination. She tries to imagine what could have done this. The only thing she's ever seen in her life create this kind of destruction is an artillery shell.

“I guess that solves it,” says a voice over her shoulder.

She looks around to find Biswal sitting on a stone nearby, staring into the chaos.

“What?” asks Mulaghesh.

“The collapse. It answers the question that's weighed so heavily on my mind.” Biswal still hasn't made eye contact with her: he just watches as the crews try to haul rubble out of the way. There's something off-putting about his expression, as if he always expected this calamity, or perhaps
some
calamity; and now that he's been proven right, it fills him with a strange energy. “What were the insurgents going to do with all those stolen explosives?”

“You think they bombed the mine?”

“You heard Prathda. He's right. They did countless studies when constructing this thing, took every measure of safety. The only reason it'd collapse is if someone
forced
it to. And all the damage is in a straight line. That's no coincidence, and this is no collapse.”

“Why would they attack the mines?”

“Why does a rabid dog attack a bull? Don't give these people too much credit, Turyin. They don't have strategies, they don't have goals. That's why they seem to win.” One of his lieutenants waves to him. Biswal watches him for a moment, his eyes heavy-lidded and face inscrutable. Then he stands. “Whatever happened here, it's not over yet.” He brushes off his pants and strides away into the chaos.

Mulaghesh watches him go, then turns to look at the collapsed mine. Then she walks away, climbs a nearby hill, and looks down on the damage.

It is all in a line, as Biswal said. But somehow she gets the impression the destructive force did not come from within but rather from
above,
as if a tremendous weight struck the earth above the mine with enough power to crack through yards and yards of soil and stone.

She remembers the sight of Voortya, and the huge sword glinting in her hand.

Did a Divinity climb up on these cliffs,
she wonders,
lift her sword high, and bring it down on the mine?

She jumps down and starts walking toward the cliffs, searching for some sign of a Divinity's passage, or really
any
thing's passage. She finds nothing. And besides, this region is covered with patrols, any one of which would have noticed a ten-story metal woman walking around with a sword, which is the kind of thing you mention to your CO.

She looks back at the mines. If it was indeed Voortya herself who stood here and looked out at all of Voortyashtan, what went through her giant, steel head?

If she did destroy the mines, why? Why bother with them at all? Wouldn't Fort Thinadeshi be a much better target for the Divinity of war, sitting there upon the hill, huge and lit up and covered in cannons?

Was Voortya driven to stop them from mining the thinadeskite? But why would Voortya care about what by all accounts is simply a new type of electromagnetic ore? Are they violating some kind of sacred rule by drilling deep into the earth?

Even if she saw
something,
Mulaghesh reasons, it couldn't have been Voortya. For one thing, the Divinity Voortya had
four
arms. Mulaghesh doesn't know much, but she knows that. In every instance when she presented herself, the Divinity of war had four giant, muscular arms, two to a side. And yet the thing she witnessed here on the cliffs had two.
It also seemed to react in pain when I popped off some rounds at it,
she thinks. Though Saypur's made some striking breakthroughs in weapon technologies, she doesn't think small arms fire would make a Divinity pause. Hells, six-incher cannons only stunned Kolkan and Jukov back in Bulikov, but didn't seem to injure them any.

And last but certainly not least: it couldn't have been Voortya, because Voortya is stone-cold fucking dead. A couple hundred Saypuris witnessed the Kaj blow her head clean off her shoulders in the Night of the Red Sands.

More questions, and no new answers.

Mulaghesh comes to the cliffs where she dropped the bottle off the edge. She sees nothing: no giant finger marks in the rocks, no footsteps, no churning of the earth. There is no sign, save for her empty, warm carousel, that what she experienced was anything more than a dream.

Am I going mad?