City of Blades (47 page)

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. Some
one
. 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.

The only answer is the trickle of the waters below.

She looks closer at the satchel of TNT, wondering what Choudhry planned to use it on. Probably to blow up the citadel, Mulaghesh thinks, just as Sigrud proposed. Mulaghesh considers taking the TNT herself, but she's never been a fast hand with explosives, and she doesn't want to try now with so much at stake. She definitely doesn't want to run around with a bunch of friction-sensitive explosives on her back as a just-in-case measure, either.

Mulaghesh wonders why it hurts as much as it does to see Choudhry here. But she realizes she's been thinking of Choudhry primarily as a soldier: a soldier operating on her own, trying to stop a threat to her country before it gained momentum, a soldier willing to lay down her life in the line of duty. To see she finally made that ultimate sacrifice is saddening, despite everything that's happened so far.

“For so long I thought you were dead,” Mulaghesh says to her. “I don't know why I'm so surprised to find out I was right.”

Then a strange, singing voice says over her shoulder, “It's odd she even got here.”

Mulaghesh whirls around, rifling at the ready. Then she realizes that the voice came from nearly fourteen feet above her, and slowly looks up.

Towering over her is what looks like the figure of an enormous woman, or perhaps a sculpture of a woman made of metal: she is silvery and glimmering, her arms and shoulders smooth like chrome. There is an artfulness to her that is both beautiful and yet repellent—Mulaghesh immediately senses that this thing was
made
by someone—and her limbs are terribly distorted, far too long and thin for a normal human. There's something blade-like about them, the way they narrow and thin at the middle, then expand outward at the ends. Her hands and fingers are nothing but knives, long and curved and thin—so thin it's hard to tell how many fingers she actually has. She wears a ragged skirt that starts high above her waist and then drifts down to coil around her narrow legs. Her feet, Mulaghesh sees, are clawed, like those of a bird, and the woman's face is hidden behind a veil made of woven hair, long and silky and somewhat translucent.

Mulaghesh thinks she can glimpse the features behind that veil, the eyes and the mouth, but…but she doesn't
want
to.

The voice comes again, soft and strangely fluting, as if it's not being spoken from a human mouth but rather echoing through many pipes, like a pipe organ: “I know you. You've been here before.”

Mulaghesh tries to maintain her composure as she keeps her rifling pointed at this…whatever it is. It doesn't seem to be a threat: it just impassively stares down at her. After all, if it wanted her dead it could have just stepped on her. “What?”

“You were here before,” says the creature. “Only you fell through. Just a shade of you. A piece of you. Not the whole you.” The creature looks back over the canal, its posture wistful, thoughtful. “I would remember. We get visitors so rarely these days. Just the few recent ones, really.”

Mulaghesh thinks rapidly. She remembers the voice from her vision:
Are you supposed to be here?

She asks, “You're the guardian, aren't you?”

The giant head swivels back to look down at her. “I am the Watcher,” she says. “I watch and guard these shores.”

“Did…Did you kill her?”

“Her?” The Watcher cranes her head to the side to survey Choudhry's corpse. “If
I
had killed her, she'd hardly be in one piece.” She holds up one hand and flexes her numerous bladed fingers. “Would she?”

“Then what happened?”

“Hm,” says the Watcher. Her tone suggests she's intrigued that Mulaghesh would imagine she'd be interested in something so disinteresting. She looks again at Choudhry's corpse, cocks her head, and says, “Dehydration.”

“D-Dehydration?”

“Yes,” says the Watcher, bored. “She came the same way you did, activating the tribute. But she used only her own blood, and when she came through she was weak and panicked. She ran too hard, too fast. Overexerted herself, poor thing. Not enough blood and fluids in that little body to keep it going, you see. I can tell. I am part of this place, so I know. I saw.”

“What do you mean, activating the tribute?”

The Watcher carelessly flicks a finger at the horizon. “You came from the city, didn't you? The flesh place? The place filled with idols, statues, carvings, each attributed to the memory of a great warrior, a great deed? But the carving of the Mother…That is carefully linked to here.”

“So each one of those white statues memorializes the dead?” asks Mulaghesh.

The Watcher waves her hand, bored:
Of course
. Then she looks at Choudhry and cocks her head again. “That one there did not truly belong here. She had slain but one in her life, and that was a panicked, fretful deed. But
you
…” The Watcher bends down to look into Mulaghesh's face—her giant body moves with a horrifying silence—and extends one long, needle-like index finger. Mulaghesh stiffens, terrified, and nearly fires, but the Watcher simply brushes a stray hair away from her face with astonishing delicacy. “
You
belong here. More than most, in my own humble opinion….But you know that already, don't you?”

“What's going on here?” asks Mulaghesh. “How are the dead even still
here
?”

“Because the two worlds are tied together,” says the Watcher. “Once they were very, very closely tied.” She demonstrates with her massive, bladed hands, folding all the countless serrated fingers together. “One never forgot about the other. Each was impossible
without
the other. The living made war because they knew the City of Blades was waiting for them, and the City of Blades existed because the living made war. But then they broke apart—yet not
completely
apart.” Her fingers snap apart with astonishing speed, leaving only two fingers touching. “Some threads remained. This place persisted, a ghost of itself, but still here. But just a bit ago, someone on the
other
side started renewing the bonds.” Slowly her fingers extend, until more and more and more begin to touch. “The two worlds grow near again, like a fisherman reeling in a catch. The dead awake, very slowly. And when they wake enough…Well. I doubt I'll have much of a job anymore. Because then this city will be empty, won't it?” There's a bored tone of indifference to her words. Mulaghesh is reminded of an employee whose supervisor has left for the day.

“How can someone do that?” asks Mulaghesh. “How can someone just…reknit the world like that?”

“How should I know?” says the Watcher. “I simply watch. I refuse access or I grant it. That is my function, my role. It's always been this, since time before time.”

“And what have you seen recently? Has there been anything…strange?”

“Strange? No. This place is always the same. It always has been this way. Though for so long we had no visitors, no new arrivals, no victorious dead. And then…”

“And then?”

She cocks her head again. “And then three came. There's you, of course; you've been here, now and before. And then that one.” She flicks her finger at Choudhry's corpse. “She came many times, bursting in through the Window, over and over again….It eroded her mind; I felt it. Each time she came here, she was a little worse, a little stranger. And then there was the acolyte.”

“Who?”

“The student of old Petrenko, the ancient smithy.”

“Wait,” says Mulaghesh. “Did you say smithy?”

“Yes. It was Petrenko who developed the method that the old ones first used to make their swords. He brought an acolyte here, once—I felt their spirit barge into this plane of existence—but because I found them unworthy and unlearned, I banished them and sent them back. Foolish old creature, I've no idea what he was playing at….”

“Their spirit…You mean they used a sword to project themselves here?”