City of Blades (13 page)

It was to be the world's first taste of modern warfare, of battle bereft of Divine intervention. Saypur had just scaled up its production of bolt-shots and other mechanized weaponry to the extent that common infantry could utilize them, and its forces were fresh and eager to fight, keen to prove to their old repressors that Saypur deserved to be a world power. But the Continent had numbers and territory on its side, and despite General Prandah's claims that this would be a “lightning-fast war, a lot of noise followed by a long silence,” and the vigorous public campaign that all hostilities would merely last a summer—hence the name, which stuck—soon both Saypuri and Continental forces found themselves dug in two hundred miles east of Bulikov on the banks of the Luzhkov River, with no indication that either could break through the other's fortifications.

Enter Captain Lalith Biswal, then twenty-three years old, a careful, bookish student of what few non-Divine wars could be studied. And, under his command in Yellow Company, a sixteen-year-old Turyin Mulaghesh who had run away from home, lied about her age, enlisted, and gotten her stupid ass promoted to sergeant without even realizing what was going on.

It was during the fifth Battle of the Luzhkov when Captain Biswal and Yellow Company were dispatched in an ambitious flanking maneuver, marching upstream, floating the river, and attacking the Continental positions from the north. It should have worked perfectly and caused massive disruptions in the Continentals' lines…or it would have if the Continentals hadn't been aware of the pending attack, right down to the minute it started.

The Saypuri attack was routed both quickly and brutally. The skiffs that had been used to float across the Luzhkov were captured and burned, leaving Yellow Company stranded on the wrong side of the river. All order and discipline collapsed, and the Continentals drove them mercilessly north, away from the battle and the Saypuri lines.

Yellow Company retreated through the night, a rambling, uncoordinated rush through the Continental countryside, pursued by forces far more knowledgeable about the territory than they were. The woods were filled with screams, sprinting horses, distant firelight. When the sun came up, the ragged Saypuri soldiers looked around and realized they did not recognize where they were.

They had never seen this particular set of hills before. Their scouts reported settlements nearby, but not fortifications: they were simple farms.

It took Biswal a moment to realize: “We're past their fortifications,” he said, sitting atop his horse. “By the seas, we're
behind
them!” Though Yellow Company could not have known, the Continental brigade that'd been dispatched to pursue them had been distracted by a full-frontal assault by General Prandah's forces far to the south. Which meant Yellow Company no longer had any pursuers, no one to push them out of Continental territory.

It should not have happened. But it did.

Mulaghesh still remembers the evening of that first day, when Biswal approached her and took her aside. The mist gathering on the hills, the moaning and weeping from the scattered troops. Fires were forbidden—the smoke would give them away—so all of them clutched their arms and legs and shivered, eating dried meats. This had not been intended to be a far-ranging mission, so they had very few provisions, and many of those had been lost in the retreat.

He led her to a small forest clearing. “Lieutenant Pankaj died of wounds this morning,” he said.

“I'm sorry, sir.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. Though I've heard a lot of sorries today. The word's losing meaning.” He sighed. “We can't find Niranjan, or Kapil,
or
Ram. Which means that I've lost nearly all of my officers overnight. I don't have powers of promotion, but you're more or less going to have to be my lieutenant, Mulaghesh, so that's what I'm going to call you. And if we live to get busted down for that, I'll be grateful.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You're young, but I've watched you fight. You're not stupid, and other soldiers listen to you. That's a valuable thing.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Biswal turned to watch the hills. “So. It seems like we have three choices. We can return south, survey the enemy's position, and try and flank them again when the time's right, carrying out our original orders. Or, we can go east, try and ford the Luzhkov, circumvent the enemy's position, and rejoin Prandah.” He paused.

“And our third choice?”

He looked at her, his pale eyes sharp. “What do you think our odds are of pulling either of those two options off, Lieutenant?”

“Minimal, sir.”

“And why's that?”

“The Continentals aren't stupid. At some point they'll realize we're still here. If they aren't in pursuit by now, they'll be ready for us to return. They'll watch the river. That's what they'll expect.” She glanced, side-eyed, at the ragged, wounded soldiers sitting below the pines. “And I don't think we're in any shape for serious combat, sir. We don't have any supplies. I'm not sure if we can last more than a handful of days.”

“I agree.” He looked at the hills surrounding them again.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“You mentioned a third option, sir.”

“I did.” He sucked his teeth. “Do you know what keeps the Continental forces on their feet, Lieutenant? What keeps their fortifications so firm?”

She was smart enough by then to know not to answer a superior officer's rhetorical questions. “I don't, sir.”

“Farms,” said Biswal. He walked to a tree, leaned against it, and watched a tiny hamlet nestled in a distant valley. “Food and farms. We're in the middle of the breadbasket of the Continent, Mulaghesh. By complete and total accident, sure, but here we are.” He paused. “And there are lots of ways to win a war. A war isn't between armies, it's between nations.” He pursed his lips, sighed, shook his head. “But by the seas, what a way to fight.”

“Are you suggesting we…”

He looked over his shoulder at her. “Go on, Lieutenant.”

“Are you suggesting that we make war upon the civilians here?”

“I'm saying one option is we destroy their farms, their infrastructure, their irrigation systems. Take what we need to survive, destroy the rest, then move to the next town, and do it again. We'd cut right through all of the Continentals' supply lines. But it's a damn bastard thing to do, that I'll say.”

He looked at her, and she somehow understood that he wanted her to judge him, to say something, perhaps to approve. And what lay unspoken between them was the knowledge that they now made war in the nation of those who once enslaved them.

All Mulaghesh could manage was, “We're dying, sir.”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“We're starving.”

“Yes.”

“I think we're going to die here no matter what we do.”

He was silent. Then: “Yes. I agree.”

“My conclusion, if I might be so bold to give it, sir, is we might as well try and do our part,” she said quietly. “With as much time as we have left.”

He nodded and stared off into the distance, lost in thought. Then: “Gather as many troops as you can. Comb the forest, comb the hills—
carefully
. Round up the survivors. Tomorrow morning, we're going to move.” He took out his spyglass and watched the little hamlet in the valley. “We'll approach from the southwest, through the forest. It'll be slow going, but we'll want to surprise them. And damn it, Mulaghesh…” He ripped away his spyglass and held it tightly in his hands, as if imagining choking someone, and she understood how furious all this made him. “If…If we're going to do this, we're going to do this
right
. We'll do it
peaceably
. We'll be organized, disciplined. No casualties, unless we can't avoid them. I will
not
condone the shedding of innocent blood, even if it is Continental. Certainly not women or children. We are soldiers, not raiders, with strategic goals. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

“Do you think we can achieve that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you have your orders, Lieutenant. Dismissed.”

She saluted and trotted away through the woods.

Lying upon the bed in the SDC headquarters, head swilling with the fog of nickletop, Mulaghesh looks back on that moment and thinks,
What wild promises we make in order to justify the worst of decisions.

Yet even as her body grows leaden and numb, one last thought persists, nagging at her.

Something she saw today isn't right.

She remembers the corpses from the farmhouse that afternoon, and thinks,
I've seen those bodies before. I've seen something like that before.

She tells herself:
Bodies in the Continental wilderness. Certainly. I know that sight well.

Yet still:
No. No.
I saw those bodies just recently
.
I saw that sight just today,
before
I went to that farmhouse….

And she realizes that she's right.

Mulaghesh attempts to sit up, but her body won't obey. She lurches forward with one arm outstretched, grasping for her portfolio, but succeeds only in knocking it off her nightstand. Then darkness closes in on her.

Don't lose that thought. Don't lose that thought….

When she wakes in the morning she feels like her eyes are made of drying mud. It takes a disconcertingly long time for her to make some basic connections—
Where am I? Why does my arm hurt? What in hells is wrong with my head?—
and an even longer time for her to find the energy to sit up and rub her face.

“No side effects,” she mutters. “Fucking bullshit.” Everything hurts: her back, her legs, her arms. It's a miracle she didn't overdose and kill herself.

Suddenly, she remembers.

“Holy
shit,
” she says. She grabs her portfolio and sprints out the door.

It takes twenty minutes for an SDC telephone to open up—apparently some major construction work is going on upshore—and even longer for the on-call sergeant to get Captain Nadar on the phone.

“What?” says Nadar's voice, not even bothering to try to be cordial. “What is it? Who is this?”

“It's General Mulaghesh. Listen, I realized something about those bodies the other day.”

“Oh.” Nadar clears her throat, affecting a more formal tone. “Yes, General?”

“We'd seen them before. Both of us had. That very day, as a matter of fact. We saw them before we ever went to that farmhouse.”

A long pause.

“What?” says Nadar, bewildered.

“I made some copies of the sketches in Choudhry's room,” says Mulaghesh, flipping through her portfolio. “And in one corner was something I couldn't make sense of. They looked like, like little chicken wings on kebab sticks or something like that. But that's not what they were. It was a drawing of
human bodies.
Bodies mutilated just like the ones we saw yesterday!”

The Dreyling foreman on the phone next to her slowly turns to stare at her over his shoulder, bug-eyed.

“What are you suggesting, General?” says Nadar.

“I'm suggesting that Sumitra Choudhry drew the murder scene we saw yesterday
months before it actually happened
. She predicted it, somehow!”

“What? How could that be?”

“I don't know. But I know what I'm looking at.”

“But Choudhry was mad….Couldn't it just be a coincidence?”

“I feel like drawing ritually mutilated torsos and then
seeing
ritually mutilated torsos is a pretty damned unlikely coincidence, even for a madwoman.”

The Dreyling foreman is now sweating heavily and stretching out his phone's cord to its fullest extent as he inches away from her.

“So what are you proposing?” says Nadar.

“You probably don't have time for this, but I do,” says Mulaghesh. “I want to ride up to where the first murder took place and check it out. If there's a chance Choudhry was involved in this, we need to look into it.”

“The first murder took place deep in disputed territory, General. It's not safe.”

“Neither am I. I can handle myself.”

“I admire your confidence, General, but—if it turns out that you can't?”

“Well, you all are getting pretty handy at boxing up dead generals. I expect you could handle me in your sleep.”

Nadar sighs. “I'll talk to Pandey and have him make preparations for you.”

“Excellent,” says Mulaghesh. “I appreciate your cooperation, Captain Nadar.”

“Always happy to help, General,” says Nadar, though she pauses just long enough to make it clear the reverse is true.

Later that day Mulaghesh—armed and provisioned in case she gets lost—sets out into the countryside, taking the same road they took yesterday, north of Fort Thinadeshi. But at one creek she makes a hard right toward the Tarsil Mountains, which swell up in the distance, forming a towering pink-and-green wall.

She consults the map again. The village she's looking for is called Ghevalyev, deep in the woods along one of the many creeks in this area. Everything she sees is covered in damp, soft green moss—tree branches, stones, even the road itself. Eventually Mulaghesh wonders if she, too, would find herself covered in moss if she didn't keep moving. But after a few miles the lumps of moss take on some more organized shapes, and she realizes that underneath the greenery are walls, fences, and gates—civilization, in other words.

She checks the map. “I must be here,” she says, surprised. “Huh.” She checks the rest of the original report, which Pandey included with the map. There's not much on this first incident—they thought it was a clear and simple case of murder at the time, albeit a particularly gruesome example—but there is a note that the man found dead at the scene was the village charcoal maker.