City of Blades (26 page)

But what
was
that other place?

I know what it was,
she says to herself, terrified.
I know where I just went.

Sigrud's face appears above her. He kneels to help her. “Turyin? Say something, if you can.”

“It's still there,” she says, gasping. “It's real….”

“What? What is?”

She feels herself growing weak, as if what she saw bruised her very mind. Before she passes out she tries to shout to them, “The City of Blades! It's still there!
The City of Blades is still there!
”

But before she can, darkness takes her.

Life is but a prelude to death. Other worlds await.

Live your life and choose your path knowing this secret. We shall all find one another past the dark veil at the edge of this land. We shall embrace one another on distant white shores and celebrate our final victory.

—WRITS OF SAINT ZHURGUT, 721

S
he wakes with a start and realizes she's screaming. She sits up and her hand goes to her hip for the carousel, but it's not there. She slowly realizes she's lying on her bed in her room in SDC.

“For the love of…,” says Signe's voice from nearby. “What is the
matter
with you?”

Mulaghesh's head snaps to the side to see Signe sitting in a chair in the corner. From the pile of black cigarette butts in the ashtray on the floor beside it she's been there for a while.

“The fuck are you doing?” asks Mulaghesh. She sniffs and rubs her eye. “Keeping vigil?”

“Looking after you. You passed out like you had some episode or something. I chose to keep an eye on you while my father began to make the formal rounds.”

“Shit.” Mulaghesh sits forward and rubs the center of her forehead. It feels like insects are trying to gnaw their way out of her skull.

“Head hurt?” says Signe.

“Shut the fuck up for a second.”

“Mm. Aren't you a pleasant creature in the morning. Though it's closer to noon.”

Mulaghesh replays the last thing she saw in her head—or what she
thought
she saw. That moment, that vision, felt like it was beyond seeing, as if she experienced that world with senses beyond the common five.

Her pulse rises immediately.
It's still there. The City of Blades is still out there…somehow.

It's an absurd idea, yet what she saw doesn't leave a trace of doubt in her mind. To say otherwise would be like walking through a rainstorm for the first time in your life and then denying you were ever wet.

There's another world out there,
she thinks.
There's a place below this one, floating on an ocean underneath reality.

She thinks of the sentinels, the dismembered bodies, Gozha whispering about the man made of thorns, and everything starts to suggest a dreadful idea to her.

And maybe the boundaries are beginning to blur.

“Are you all right?” says Signe, worried. “Is it…Are you having flashbacks?”

“What?” snaps Mulaghesh.

“Flashbacks. You're a soldier. I know…What is it they call it…War echoes? Battle echoes?”

“Where's your dad? With Biswal?”

“No,” says Signe. “That was canceled. And that's another reason why I'm here. There's been a…development.”

“Which is?”

“They've…found another body. Or
parts
of another body. Much as you found them at the farmhouse, or so I'm told, but these were on the cliffs west of the fortress.” Signe sucks at a cigarette hard enough for Mulaghesh to hear the crackle across the room. “It's a Saypuri woman. It was, I mean.”

The pulsing in her ears goes silent.

“Choudhry?” she asks quietly.

“I don't know, I'm afraid. They haven't found the head. A patrol discovered it on the cliffs west of the fortress, just where she used to walk. It seems…likely.”

“Where's the body now?”

“The”—Signe searches for the right word—“parts are with Rada. I suggested to Biswal that this would be wise, as she's the medical expert here, and I thought you'd wish to do a dissection.”

“Autopsy.”

“Yes. One of those. He consented. The rest of the fortress is quite busy with the collapse of the installation, or so it appears, so he was happy to give this duty to you. He mentioned that there are rather a lot of dead Saypuris for him to worry about these days.”

Mulaghesh tries to leap out of bed, but her legs fail and she almost plummets to the floor.

“By the seas…” Signe stands and helps her up. Mulaghesh is surprised at how strong she is. “You're not well.”

“You're damned right I'm not well! Where's my weapon?”

Signe retrieves the carousel from a drawer and hands it to her. “Off to duel with someone, General?”

“You see your father, you tell him I want to see him,” says Mulaghesh, holstering the pistol.

“And what shall I tell him you wish to see him for?”

Mulaghesh tries to think of how to say this without sounding barking mad. “Tell him it's Ministry work. Just tell him that.”

Two hours later Mulaghesh knocks on the front door of Rada Smolisk's house. It's pouring rain, a bitter thunderstorm suddenly springing on them from offshore, and Mulaghesh is thankful she wore her peaked cap today. Rada's house is nestled in a small forest just below the clifftops on the northwest side of the city, so it's somewhat equidistant between the Galleries and fortress, perhaps as a grand metaphor for Rada's difficult position. The home also overlooks the harbor yards, which lie about five hundred yards below. Mulaghesh can even see the yard of statues, including the tiny hole she carved in its canvas roof last night.

Rada answers her front door wearing a ridiculous and quite ugly fur dress, which she almost completely jumps out of when she sees Mulaghesh standing on her door. “G-General! You're up. I h-heard you w-weren't w—”

“Another body?” says Mulaghesh. “Another one?”

Rada nods solemnly. “I'm afraid so. A woman, this time. A S-Saypuri. Biswal and Nadar did g-g-give me p-permission to perform an a-a-uhhh-autopsy, though they s-said to w-wait for—”

“Show me.”

“Certainly. C-Come in.”

Mulaghesh brushes rain off her sleeves and steps over the threshold. The front room is dark, messy, and was obviously never intended to receive visitors, as every surface is concealed by tottering towers of books and cups of tea. It's terribly cold inside, a common symptom of a lonely house, in Mulaghesh's experience. But most curiously, Rada's walls are covered in taxidermied animals: sparrows, thrashing fish, the heads of deer and hogs and certain mountain cats. It's as if all the fauna of the hillsides crept down her walls and suddenly found themselves frozen.

Mulaghesh says, “Uh. Do you hunt?”

“No. W-Why? Oh, yes, the a-animals. No. Th-Those I do m-myself.”

“You…stuff them yourself?”

“Oh, y-yes. It's a hobby of m-mine. There's a lot of hunters here, and they t-tend to d-d-discard much of animals. I f-find a way to use them. I pr-practice in these r-rooms, through here,” she says, leading Mulaghesh through a door. On the other side is a much more normal space—a white, plain, medical office one would normally expect to see when looking for a doctor. “N-no one, um, ever actually c-c-comes to the other d-door.”

“Oh. I'm, uh, sorry.” She coughs. “I didn't realize.”

“No, it's qu-quite all right.”

Rada's taxidermy skills are still on display here, though in a more restrained capacity: the snarling head of a boar and a duck in midflight hang on the walls just beside the entry door. Rada asks Mulaghesh to wait while she changes into something more functional. “The body is qu-kwuhhite, uh, m-messy you see.”

“I see.” Mulaghesh takes off her rain-slick greatcoat and hangs it in the corner.

Rada withdraws while Mulaghesh sits and thinks. She's more dismayed than she expected: she'd thought for some time that Choudhry was dead, and then after that she thought she was somehow involved in the murders. But to hear she was desecrated so abominably is something Mulaghesh never expected.

Rada returns, now dressed in dark tan clothing with a rubber apron. “She's in the b-back room. If you're r-ready.”

“I am.”

Rada nods and leads her through the door. On the other side is a small room that looks fit for surgical or perhaps funerary purposes, and in the center is a large stone slab with drainage holes in it. On the slab are…

Things. That's all her brain can process them as: items. Objects. Fragments of something. Not a person, certainly not a human being, because she simply can't conceive of such a thing. To see a fellow person cut down to such crude elements is dehumanizing beyond words.

She tries to get ahold of herself. She focuses, and looks.

On the table are two torso halves. Dark-skinned, breasts withered and sagging. The hint of thick pubic hair at the crotch. A woman vivisected carefully and cleanly, her arms and legs pruned away. Only her left thigh remains, but this segment too has been dismembered, placed close to the hip as if to try to give these ravaged pieces of a human the semblance of a whole. It only highlights the monstrousness of all of this.

“It's the s-same as you saw,” says Rada. “Yes?”

“Yeah,” says Mulaghesh quietly. “Close. But they left the heads and limbs behind the other times.”

“We're not wuh-wrong that it's a S-Saypuri woman, th-though?”

Mulaghesh shakes her head. “No. Even though she's bloodless now, the skin's the right tone. They found her on the cliffs?”

“Y-Yes. Where the m-missing M-Ministry officer used t-t-to walk, or so I'm t-told.”

She looks at Rada, breathing hard. “And you can do an autopsy?”

“P-partially, yes. Th-the b-body isn't f-fresh, so to suh-speak, but…I can t-try. What do you hope t-to find?”

“Anything. Something. I want to find something to use to pin these bastards down.”

Rada nods meekly. “Then we'll begin.”

Mulaghesh takes a seat on the far wall and pulls up a second chair to prop her feet up. She slouches in the chair, hands resting on her stomach, and watches, much as someone would a spectator sport, as Rada Smolisk carefully and thoughtfully dissects the once-human husk lying on her table. It is not, as Mulaghesh feared, an inhuman, monstrous violation; rather, Rada makes remarks throughout her examination more suggestive of a boat trip through a pleasant and familiar countryside.