Free City of Blades by Robert Jackson Bennett

after the famed innovator Vallaicha Thinadeshi—is one of the oldest military installations on the Continent, half coastal fortress, half military base. Sporting an immense coastal battery, precipitous battlements, tangles of wire fences, and a sprawling barracks, there is something both grimly majestic and crudely improvised about Fort Thinadeshi, all things for all situations, for all situations are found and met here in Voortyashtan.
What a grand and noble mess it is,
thinks Mulaghesh as the auto putters through a gate, the dark walls towering over her.
    She imagines what Sumitra Choudhry would have thought of it. She thinks back to when she read Choudhry’s files aboard the
Kaypee
with Pitry. The girl served eighteen months in the Saypuri Military, a common practice undertaken to improve one’s odds of Ministry recruitment. During her time in uniform she received a Silver Star and a Golden Stroke for “Distinguished Service” during an “altercation” when a Continental charged a checkpoint.
    Mulaghesh was experienced enough to parse through these neutral phrases.
She shot and killed someone,
she said aloud,
when someone really needed her to do it
. She glanced at the Silver Star notation.
And she got injured doing it.
    Yes,
Pitry said.
Took a bolt to the left shoulder when a Continental charged a checkpoint, just above the collarbone. Nearly killed her. But she managed to get the shot off after
she’d been injured.
    She pulled off a killshot
after
being critically injured? She’s either a hard case or lucky.
    From what I’ve heard of her, General,
he said mildly,
I rather think it’s the former.
    They park and Pandey leads her into the headquarters, whose interiors are dank and tomb-like, yawning hallways and tiny, tunnel-like stairways. This part of Thinadeshi, she realizes, was built mere years after the Kaj took the Continent, and is so out of date it’s almost mind-boggling. As someone who’s been part of the planning and construction of multiple installations, the many glaring flaws—this staircase too tight for evacuation, those windows too large and exposed—come leaping out to her, almost causing her to cringe.
    “Where are we going?” asks Mulaghesh as they climb up a winding staircase. “I thought Biswal was here.”
    “He is, ma’am,” says Pandey. “He’s in the nest, just above us.”
    “The what?”
    “The nest. The crow’s nest, sorry. General Biswal is, as he puts it, a visual thinker, so he likes a view.”
    Mulaghesh is about to ask him to please clarify his damned self when gray light comes spilling in from above, and they emerge into a rounded, glass-walled room like something you’d find at the top of a lighthouse. She glances to the side and has a moment of vertigo when she realizes how high up they are, the battlements sprawling out three hundred feet below her.
    “General Biswal,” says Pandey. “General Mulaghesh.”
    Mulaghesh looks around. She realizes this chamber—which must be the topmost spire of Fort Thinadeshi—has been converted into something like a makeshift office, with a small desk facing east. Stuck on the windows before the desk are numerous maps of the region, many of which she finds familiar. The wall of colors and images confounds her eyes so much that it takes her a minute to realize there’s someone seated at the desk, wearing a bright orange headcloth.
    He grunts and slowly swivels in his chair, turning to look at them.
    Mulaghesh’s world seems to spin around her.
    He is not the man she remembers. There’s some remaining suggestion of the broad-shouldered, powerfully built man he was once, but he’s got more around the middle now, his carefully manicured beard is now bone white, and small, delicate little spectacles now balance atop his nose.
    But his eyes are still the same: still pale, pale gray and somewhat deep-set, as if viewing the world from deep within himself.
    General Lalith Biswal smiles—a somewhat forced gesture—and stands.