demonstration.”
***
She leads Mulaghesh to a small dormitory hallway. “This wing is for senior officers,” she explains, “as well as a few technicians and guests.” She comes to one room door and sorts through a ponderous ring of keys, procured from a maintenance worker. “We still haven’t cleaned it up, under my orders. I had a feeling someone would want to come looking for her.” She unlocks the door. “Though I suspect, General, you’ll want to just glance and move on until your pension’s earned out…with all due respect, of course.”
She pushes the door open.
Mulaghesh’s mouth twists as she looks into the room. “By the seas…”
Sumitra Choudhry, it seems, did a lot of redecorating before her disappearance: all the furniture has been removed except for a mattress, and a four-foot-wide black stripe with oddly fuzzy edges runs along the bare white walls. Mulaghesh notes that the stripe goes from about waist-height to shoulder-height…and as she looks closer she sees that it is not one solid stripe but
writing,
endless scribblings overlaid on one another until they become a dense, black fog, thousands and thousands of words running along the walls. Above and below this stripe, on the ceiling and on the floors, are drawings and sketches that leap out of the wandering black ribbon to stretch across the corners, until nearly three-quarters of the room is covered in black ink.
“She did all this?” asks Mulaghesh.
Nadar nods. Some of the writings must have needed censoring, for they’ve had whole bottles of black ink dumped out onto them, concealing their message. The ink has dripped down the walls in thin, tapered lines, reminding Mulaghesh of icicles running along a roof edge. In the center of the black-smeared floor is the bare, gray mattress.
“So,” says Mulaghesh. “She went mad.”
“So I would conclude, General,” says Nadar.
Mulaghesh walks in. The ink has puddled so thickly on the floor that it’s dried and cracked, like the parched ground of some wasteland. Some of the ink must have dried while Choudhry was still here, for Mulaghesh can see numerous tiny carvings of faces gouged into the calcified ink.
She stands in the center of Choudhry’s old mattress—which is nearly as ink-stained as the rest of the room—and looks around.
It’s as if she painted her own nightmare,
she thinks,
and crawled inside.
The paintings and drawings have a handful of similarities. There are a lot of images of people holding hands, many of them standing on what looks like water. In some, one person—somewhat female looking—is wounding themselves, cutting off their arm or maybe their hand, while a second woman looks on in horror. There are countless images of weapons: swords, daggers, spears, arrows. Some drawings are less clear: one set in the corner looks like four chicken wings on kebab sticks, though there’s something disgustingly strange about them.
But one sketch is strangely arresting to Mulaghesh: it is a landscape, quite well done in comparison to some of the other drawings, depicting a shoreline on which many people kneel, heads bowed. Rising behind them is a tower, and though the outline is done in black ink, somehow it’s been drawn so that Mulaghesh feels the tower is purest white, reflecting the light of a cold winter moon.
“What happened?” says Mulaghesh.
“She came here about half a year ago to research the thinadeskite. Her efforts yielded the same results as ours—nothing. Nothing Divine about it. But then her research got a little…extracurricular. She started leaving the fort, going out to the city and some of the countryside. She stopped visiting the labs completely. She spent some time at the harbor, I am told. We thought it was odd, and I worried she was a security risk, though if you can’t trust a Ministry officer…” She sighs. “But we never ventured into her room here. She was a Ministry officer, after all. So we didn’t know how bad she’d
***
She leads Mulaghesh to a small dormitory hallway. “This wing is for senior officers,” she explains, “as well as a few technicians and guests.” She comes to one room door and sorts through a ponderous ring of keys, procured from a maintenance worker. “We still haven’t cleaned it up, under my orders. I had a feeling someone would want to come looking for her.” She unlocks the door. “Though I suspect, General, you’ll want to just glance and move on until your pension’s earned out…with all due respect, of course.”
She pushes the door open.
Mulaghesh’s mouth twists as she looks into the room. “By the seas…”
Sumitra Choudhry, it seems, did a lot of redecorating before her disappearance: all the furniture has been removed except for a mattress, and a four-foot-wide black stripe with oddly fuzzy edges runs along the bare white walls. Mulaghesh notes that the stripe goes from about waist-height to shoulder-height…and as she looks closer she sees that it is not one solid stripe but
writing,
endless scribblings overlaid on one another until they become a dense, black fog, thousands and thousands of words running along the walls. Above and below this stripe, on the ceiling and on the floors, are drawings and sketches that leap out of the wandering black ribbon to stretch across the corners, until nearly three-quarters of the room is covered in black ink.
“She did all this?” asks Mulaghesh.
Nadar nods. Some of the writings must have needed censoring, for they’ve had whole bottles of black ink dumped out onto them, concealing their message. The ink has dripped down the walls in thin, tapered lines, reminding Mulaghesh of icicles running along a roof edge. In the center of the black-smeared floor is the bare, gray mattress.
“So,” says Mulaghesh. “She went mad.”
“So I would conclude, General,” says Nadar.
Mulaghesh walks in. The ink has puddled so thickly on the floor that it’s dried and cracked, like the parched ground of some wasteland. Some of the ink must have dried while Choudhry was still here, for Mulaghesh can see numerous tiny carvings of faces gouged into the calcified ink.
She stands in the center of Choudhry’s old mattress—which is nearly as ink-stained as the rest of the room—and looks around.
It’s as if she painted her own nightmare,
she thinks,
and crawled inside.
The paintings and drawings have a handful of similarities. There are a lot of images of people holding hands, many of them standing on what looks like water. In some, one person—somewhat female looking—is wounding themselves, cutting off their arm or maybe their hand, while a second woman looks on in horror. There are countless images of weapons: swords, daggers, spears, arrows. Some drawings are less clear: one set in the corner looks like four chicken wings on kebab sticks, though there’s something disgustingly strange about them.
But one sketch is strangely arresting to Mulaghesh: it is a landscape, quite well done in comparison to some of the other drawings, depicting a shoreline on which many people kneel, heads bowed. Rising behind them is a tower, and though the outline is done in black ink, somehow it’s been drawn so that Mulaghesh feels the tower is purest white, reflecting the light of a cold winter moon.
“What happened?” says Mulaghesh.
“She came here about half a year ago to research the thinadeskite. Her efforts yielded the same results as ours—nothing. Nothing Divine about it. But then her research got a little…extracurricular. She started leaving the fort, going out to the city and some of the countryside. She stopped visiting the labs completely. She spent some time at the harbor, I am told. We thought it was odd, and I worried she was a security risk, though if you can’t trust a Ministry officer…” She sighs. “But we never ventured into her room here. She was a Ministry officer, after all. So we didn’t know how bad she’d
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