City of Blades (20 page)

“I…I see,” he says, embarrassed. “Never mi—”

“But I did see…
some
thing. Just not…that. This happened to you, too, Sergeant Major? You saw the Battle?”

“Y-yes. When I first went into the mines, yes, ma'am. I saw it happening again, like it was happening right in front of me. But I saw it outside of myself. Does that make sense? It was like I was watching myself. And you. You were there. Before the onslaught, and the flying ship…”

“I remember. Is this common? Have these…I don't know,
flashbacks
happened to anyone else?”

He shakes his head. “Very rarely. I don't think many wish to discuss it. But it only happens, I think, to those who have seen combat. A lot of it.”

They drive along in silence. Mulaghesh wishes she knew something of the Divine. Was there something of Voortya's that made this possible, this…memory bleed? What is it down there that wakes up these images, these visions, and sends people plummeting down into them, forced to witness (or rewitness) horrors?

She watches as a shrike flits up to the top of the barbed wire fence and hangs the headless remains of a field mouse on one of the spikes. The image of corpses impaled on stakes flashes before her eyes. The thinadeskite in the charcoaler's hut.

What's the connection? What does thinadeskite have to do with all this?

“Mostly all I do here in Voortyashtan, General,” says Pandey, “is drive. But, do you know, somehow this is still my oddest assignment yet?”

Though she doesn't say so, Mulaghesh fervently sympathizes.

Come 1800 hours that evening, General Turyin Mulaghesh—recipient of the Jade Sash, the Pearl of the Order of the Kaj, the Star of Kodur, and the Verdant Heart of Honor—is quite definitely very drunk, wandering the cliffs north of Voortyashtan with a half-empty bottle of wine and her stomach swilling with several foul concoctions she purchased at some sea shack in the city.

She isn't the only one here: all along the narrow path she spies lovers, grumbling drunks, and tiny campsites crowded with silent, hollow-eyed men. She passes one old man leaning on a walking stick and staring out at the evening sky, and asks him what all these people are doing out here. He simply makes a wide gesture indicating the sea and the hills and returns to his silent watching.

Lonely places draw lonely people,
she thinks as she walks farther north, the fort on her right.
They echo inside us, and we cannot help but listen.

Mulaghesh keeps walking, past the tiny camps, past the couples lounging on their furs, past one man quietly sobbing in the shade of a tiny, leafless tree. She takes a deep sip of wine, tries to convince herself that it makes her feel warm, and keeps walking.

Perhaps I am still plodding on in the Yellow March,
she thinks.
Me and Biswal, wearily holding the banner…

She takes another sip of wine. Almost gone now. She doesn't know where it came from, but she wishes she'd brought more.

She almost speaks aloud the familiar refrain:
Woresk, Moatar, Utusk, Tambovohar, Sarashtov, Shoveyn, Dzermir, and finally…

“…finally Kauzir,” she finishes. The little town just outside the gates of Bulikov.

She remembers the names of the towns still. She always will, she knows. They're written on the inside of her skull. She'll go to her grave still knowing them, even though the towns themselves no longer exist. For Yellow Company visited each one of them during the Summer of Black Rivers. And every home, every building, every farm, every single sign of civilization in each of these villages was put to the torch.

She stares out to sea, remembering.

Biswal told them over and over again it was to be a civilized, strategic procession. “We're here to eliminate resources,” he told them. “No more. Burn the farms and the Continental front lines will grow weaker and weaker.”

But it quickly became such a hard thing, executing a civilized war. The people in these villages did not evacuate quietly, no matter how much Yellow Company ordered them to. They did not simply watch as Yellow Company burned every last remnant of their lives. Rather, they fought: men, women, and children. And Yellow Company fought back.

She remembers waiting, crouched in a wheatfield, the sights of her bolt-shot trained on a window in the second story of a farmhouse. Just below, on the ground, one of her soldiers lay bleeding, a small arrow sticking from his collarbone, one hand pawing at it, trying to pull it out. She waited, waited, and then in the window a figure appeared with a short bow.

A girl. Maybe thirteen. Mulaghesh didn't see, because her finger was already pulling the trigger, already sending eight inches of steel hurtling at the girl, who just…

Dropped. As if she never were.

She can't remember what happened to the wounded soldier. Died, probably. A lot of them died, at first. Until somewhere around the town of Sarashtov, when Yellow Company stopped asking the Continentals to surrender and evacuate, stopped giving them warning at all. Too many of their own soldiers had been lost to a lucky farmer with an axe or a child with a bow and arrow. Yellow Company began simply sneaking in during the night, setting the thatched roofs alight, and rounding up the livestock in the ensuing chaos.

Mulaghesh remembers the sight of a four-year-old child standing alone in a field at night, his face alight with firelight and glistening with tears, screaming for his mother. They marched on and left him there, perhaps to live, perhaps to die. Such a thing did not matter to them.

Figures staggering from burning homes, their nightgowns ablaze, stumbling through the smoke like ravaged puppets. The screams of livestock as Yellow Company herded them through the streets to be slaughtered for their next meal. She remembers the monotonous butchery, killing those they couldn't keep and leaving them to rot, the air so thick with flies. Better to rot than feed Continentals.

An errant memory skitters through her mind: a terrified horse charging into a child's chain swing and hanging itself. This huge, graceful creature thrashing helplessly in the mud. She and the rest of Yellow Company walked on as if this occurrence were nothing of note.

In three weeks they destroyed eight villages, and once word got out that a rogue band of Saypuris was speeding through the heart of the Continent's farmland, all the other villages quickly became abandoned.

By the time Yellow Company reached the gates of Bulikov, the city was slowly realizing that Biswal and Yellow Company had single-handedly destroyed two-thirds of their future food stores in a span of weeks. If a siege began now they could only last a handful of days. Their only hope was that the Continental army would return and crush Yellow Company.

Bulikov's hopes rose when they saw the Continental army on the horizon. But the Continental forces were not returning to deal with Yellow Company: rather, the Continentals were in full flight, General Prandah at their heels. Over the past weeks the Continental troops had seen the columns of smoke north of them and understood that their homes were being destroyed. They'd begun to desert in droves, morale decaying with each passing day. Then General Prandah had pressed the advantage and pushed the wavering forces into a complete rout.

Sandwiched between General Prandah and Yellow Company, the Continental army was utterly destroyed. Within hours, Biswal stood before the gates of Bulikov and demanded that they open. And open they did, creaking and crackling.

But before he could take a single step in, Colonel Adhi Noor arrived, leapt off his horse, and struck Biswal on the chin.

Mulaghesh remembers it like it was only last week: Noor, sweating, stained with smoke and blood, standing over her fallen commanding officer and crying, “What have you done? By all the seas and stars, Biswal, what in all the hells have you
done
?”

Like all officers under Biswal, commissioned or otherwise, Mulaghesh was brought before General Prandah himself and questioned extensively.

“What was Biswal's goal in his expedition?”

“To destroy the Continent's resources, sir.”

“And is that why you killed the Continental villagers? Were they a resource too?”

“They were the enemy, sir.”

“They were
civilians,
Sergeant.” Prandah, of course, did not accept Biswal's promotion of her to lieutenant.

“We felt it made no difference, sir.”

“Why do you say that? When was this decided? Who decided this?”

She was silent.

“Who decided this, Sergeant?”

She struggled to recall. The days were a blur, and she could no longer remember which decisions were hers and which ones were an unspoken choice by the whole of the Company.

“What do you mean, it made no difference, Sergeant?”

“I…I think I meant that there was no difference between the soldier and the civilian keeping that soldier on their feet, sir.”

“There
is
a difference, Sergeant. It is the same difference between a soldier and a raider, a murderer. And neither you nor Biswal have any right to decide otherwise.”

She was quiet.

“Did all of the soldiers agree to the March?” asked Prandah. “Did no one resist?”

She was aware of her face trembling. “N-No…”

“No? No what?”

“Some…some objected.”

“And they wouldn't participate?”

She shook her head.

“What did they do, these soldiers who would not participate?”

She did not speak.

“What did they
do,
Sergeant?”

And suddenly she remembered, as if it'd all been a dream or something that had happened so long ago: Sankhar and Bansa, standing before Biswal and saying they would do no more, no more of this, and Biswal slowly looking them up and down, and suddenly calling her name.

And this realization, this bright, brittle memory, formed a tiny crack inside her, and suddenly she understood what she'd done, what they'd all done, and she burst into tears and sank to the ground.

From somewhere she heard Prandah's voice, speaking in horror, “By the seas, she's just a
girl,
isn't she? This soldier is just a
child
.”

The Saypuri Military chose complete disavowal. Perhaps taking a page from the Worldly Regulations, the Saypuri commanders decided to simply never admit that the March had happened. Yellow Company was far too large to lock up and throw away the key, and Saypur desperately needed manpower to maintain their control of the Continent. In addition, some commanders commended Biswal's accomplishments: he'd won the war, had he not? He'd ended nearly three years of bloody conflict in hardly more than a month.

Biswal was reassigned on the Continent to other, less-glamorous duties. Mulaghesh had no such privilege. She wondered what they would do with her when her service ended. Dishonorably discharge her? Abandon her on the Continent? But in the end their verdict, most likely inadvertently, was the cruelest one possible: they sent her home, with modest honors.

Home. She had never expected to ever see it during the Yellow March. But returning to Ghaladesh proved to be no different than walking the ruined countryside of the Continent: it was strange, intolerable, distant, and muted. She could not adjust to the easy, thoughtless way of living. Her mouth took issue with spices, with salt, with properly cooked food. It took her more than a year to learn to sleep in a bed again, or how to live in rooms with windows.

She tried her hand at jobs, at marriage. She proved to be a miserable failure at all of them. She began to understand, bit by bit, that the devastation she'd wrought did not end on the Continent: perhaps there was some secret place inside her that she'd never known was there, but she'd put it to the torch, too, and only now in civilian life did she realize what she'd lost.

And then one day, drunk in a wine bar in Ghaladesh, she was staring into her cup and thinking about how bitter the idea of tomorrow had become when a voice said over her shoulder, “I was told I'd find you here.”

She looked up and saw a Saypuri Military officer standing behind her, dressed in fatigues. She found she recognized him: he was the one who'd punched Biswal, who'd been there when Prandah had interrogated her. Noor, she thought his name was. Colonel Noor.

He sat down next to her and ordered a drink. She asked why he'd found her.

“Because,” he said slowly, “I think you, like a lot of veterans, are having trouble adjusting. And I wanted to see if you'd like to reenlist.”

“No,” she said violently. “
No
.”

“Why not?” he asked, though it seemed he'd expected the question.

“I don't…I don't ever want to go back. To go through that again.”

“To what? To fight? To kill?”

She nodded.

He smiled sympathetically. He was an unusual soldier, she thought: though there was a sternness in his face, there was something inviting there, too, something often lacking in the commanding officers she'd had. “Soldiers don't just kill, Mulaghesh. Most don't, in fact, these days. We support and maintain and build, and keep the peace.”

“So?”

“So…I believe you might jump at the opportunity to do some good. You're not even twenty yet, Mulaghesh. You've a lot of years left. I suspect you can find better uses for them than filling your belly with cheap wine.”

Mulaghesh was silent.

“Well, if you're interested, we're implementing a new program, a…sort of governing system for the Continent. Military stations designed to provide support and keep the peace.”

“Like cops, sir?”

“Somewhat. Colonel Malini will be overseeing Bulikov, but he will need assistance. Would you be interested in perhaps returning to the Continent and assisting him? You know a lot about the region. But maybe this time you can put it to some good.”