City of Blades

City of Blades – the second book in The Divine Cities trilogy written by Robert Jackson Bennett – manages to easily surpass its already great predecessor. The novel offers a complicated discussion on the problem of soldiering, juxtaposing the idealized purpose of the military with their real one in a narrative tinged with blood and violence, but also deeply melancholic.

The story follows Saypury General Turyin Mulaghesh in her trip to the city of Voortyashtan, in Continental territory, after she’s requested to come back from retirement by her friend, the new prime minister. Her mission is to remain a secret at all costs: Mulaghesh must solve the disappearance of a young female officer who was in Voortyashtan to investigate the nature of a new type ore found in the depths of some mine – an officer that, for all accounts, went mad right before her disappearance and was frequently seen at night in the cliffs near her military base, holding only a lantern. Mulaguesh is to trust no one and look for any signs of divine interference.

After arriving in Voortyashtan, however, Mulaghesh discovers that the actual city is submerged and that the region is basically formed by a single harbor, the Saypuri military fort, a mine, and the wild highlands, which are home to angry tribe leaders that ready to wage war once more with Saypur, if they are just given the means and the chance.

Mulaghesh is defined by the contrast between her outward persona and her interior conflicts. On the outside, she’s full of cynical swagger and witty confidence: she’s the kind of veteran fighter that usually responds “Oh, shit” to every complication but goes on to tackle and overcome every single one of them nonetheless. She’s also crude and frequently a brute, the kind of soldier that doesn’t pick locks but use crowbars to break them. On the other hand, she often wakes up screaming in the night, haunted not by nightmares, but by her own memories. She’s old and regretful; scarred by time, by missed opportunities, and, especially, by the wrong choices she has made in life.

She’s considered a hero by her fellow officers due to her deeds on the war between Saypur and the Continent, but she knows that the difference between a war hero and a war criminal is often just a matter of who actually won the war. Mulaghesh is a soldier through and through: she obeys orders, following them through the letter no matter the damage they will do to others or to her own psyche. In short, she kills people without thinking twice.

This means that Voortyashtan feels like home to her – albeit a very uncomfortable one. The place is called City of Blades for several reasons: because of the sharp rock formations at its entrance, because it’s not much of a city but actually a wild region locked in perpetual war – a place so tinged with death that they spell the street names with fish bones – and also because of its strong military history and the connection of its people with their weapons: special swords that serve as extensions of their souls.

The parallel is not lost to Mulaghesh, who understands that this link between weapon and soldier applies is one between man and death. Mulaghesh’s internal conflict comes precisely from the fact that, although she believes that the main purpose of a soldier is to serve, the only thing she ever saw during decades of service was the military hurting and killing other people. For Mulaghesh, that’s a perversion of the role of a soldier.

The characters around her, however, never cease to point out that this so-called perversion may be just how things really are, and the protagonist’s romanticized view of soldiering is just that: an idealized view of her job that serves only to make her feel better. “‘I thought you were a soldier. Is it not your purpose, to make endings? Is it not your duty to make these’ – she taps the corpse – ‘from the soldiers of the enemy?’“ a character asks the protagonist. Mulaghesh’s response may be laudable, but it ultimately rings hollow in the face of all the carnage around her:

“A soldier serves not to take, they don’t strive to have something, but rather they strive so that others might one day have something. And a blade isn’t a happy friend to a soldier, but a burden, a heavy one, to be used scrupulously and carefully. A good soldier does everything they can so they do not have to kill. That’s what training is for. But if we have to, we will. And when we do that we give up some part of ourselves, as we’re asked to do.”

The tragedy in Mulaghesh’s story is that her views on soldiering, although commendable, may be just a way for her to cope with every barbarity she’s ever committed, the children she has murdered; the families she’s ruined; even the Saypuri officers she had to silence because they dared question all the killing. It provides an excuse for the protagonist: what she did was horrible, but it was a perversion of what could have really been. If there is a good way to be a soldier, there’s hope still, she seems to think. But if there’s not, even the respect she nurtures for her fellow officers ceases to be warranted. She would lose the only thing that still keeps her going and trying to do some good.

Mulaghesh knows that she was young, naïve, and stupid when she enlisted – the most common characteristics of people that do, when it’s not out of desperation – and that is a constant source of regret to her, because the military inevitably becomes a way of life, and a prison: there’s no escape from it; it’s a violent life that can only meet a violent end.

Mulaghesh’s old boss and the active General in charge of Voortyashtan is the personification of everything she despises. Lalith Biswall is a man that talks about the greater good and how the end justifies the means while being certain of his righteousness – a dangerous combination that often creates powerful dictators. Biswall doesn’t serve the people or Saypur, but only himself. He thinks of war as a means to fame and glory.

When the protagonist first meets him in Voortyashtan, Biswall even shows a great deal of prejudice against the Continentals, comparing them to animals when he’s describing the problems of negotiating with them: “As the wise man says,” he explains to Mulaghesh, “when the shepherd lies down with his goats, he finds himself listening to them. And soon, who are the shepherds and who are the goats?” Biswall and his officers look at the Continentals and see barbarians moved by thoughtless rage:  “They are savages. They seek to harm everyone that opposes them, ma’am, however they can. They think no more than that,” an officer explains to Mulaghesh, who remains alone in grasping the irony of the sentence.

The fact that Biswall could grow to become a General is at the heart of the problem. After all, in war, blind hate and murder are often not just excused but also glorified. They are treated as a necessary evil, and people who shoot at children but get results receive medals nonetheless. The sentence, “It’s war”, then, becomes a common expression to justify barbarity, treating it as an inevitable outcome, as if war is a warped context that makes dealing death an accomplishment and the extermination of people, cause for celebration. And a man like Biswall can become a General, being now in charge of giving his men orders that will transform them into future versions of him. Mulaghesh, despite her idealized views, knows and resents that:

“‘Well . . .’ Pandey struggles for the words. ‘It seems like there are only a few of the true old heroes still serving today. When they retire, so much history will be forgotten with them.’ Mulaghesh looks out the window toward the fir-dotted hills, stark and looming under the grey skies, and tries not to think of the first time she saw countryside like this. ‘What a pity that will be.’”

It’s not surprising to see so many soldiers in the narrative believing in destiny; believing that everything is preordained and that fighting fate is like fighting a river: it’s because to witness so much death and so much suffering and still believe that they have a choice in the matter is to make everything unbearable. They must become passive, thoughtless beings, unaware that they could at least try to swim against the current, just so they can live with themselves: to blindly accept and execute orders become a mechanism of self-defense, because to question is to invite doubt, and doubt invites responsibility for one’s own actions. It’s tragically fitting, then, when it is said, “Doubt is not a thing that exists for General Lalith Biswal. And this unspoken belief spreads to his soldiers.”

The narrative keeps hitting its characters with everything it can. It’s not a coincidence, for example, that a certain supporting character from City of Stairs eventually returns in this one, as their violent nature is a perfect fit for this novel’s main theme. Alongside Mulaghesh, they will both suffer the consequences of living the lives they’ve chosen for themselves when they were too young to know better – although their path is more connected to revenge than hers is.

Even the protagonist’s laudable notion of what a soldier must be is questioned in one of the novel’s best scenes, when the Mulaghesh is confronted by a corpse that functions as the living memory of all the violence that has ever happened in the world. She may think that a soldier must serve, but to serve one’s nation is ultimately to serve the interests of its rulers. Soldiers, therefore, are less fighting for the lives of their people as they are for the quality of life of certain people, as the mystical character points out to her:

“Yet for all their self-professed civility, your rulers will gladly spend a soldier’s life to better aid their posturing, to keep the cost of a crude good low. They will send the children of others off to die and only think upon it later to grandly and loudly memorialise them, lauding their great sacrifice. Civilisation is but the adoption of this cowardly method of murder.”

This mystical, strange character goes on to defend that soldiers that enjoy killing are not twisted and wrong, but honest with themselves, since it’s the only thing they are made for. Mulaghesh, of course, is disgusted at the notion but can’t find words to argue against it.

The troubled history between Saypur and the Continent also complicates matters. Saypur remains the violent invader – despite the best efforts of its new Prime Minister – but only because the Continent spent centuries oppressing and enslaving the Saypuri, who are obviously unable to let go of the rage centuries of oppression have nurtured.

All this makes Voortyashtan, a region whose god is no one less than the god of war, the perfect stage for the growing tensions between the two peoples to explode once more. Mulaghesh often remembers the horrible stories about how her compatriots used to suffer at the hands of the Continentals, especially when she looks at the statues raised precisely in the image of those that used to enforce that suffering; monuments that celebrate death and destruction. The soldiers stationed in Voortyashtan that are sent to control the highlands, in turn, soon become feral, as they start to be attacked even by civilians, which are neither receiving nor giving quarter. In other words, the narrative depicts an endless cycle of conflict born from oppression.

Here is where the fantasy part of the novel kicks in. For the Continent’s history is defined by its people’s relationship with the divine. Gods that really lived and walked among men, helping to conquer other lands while making the Continentals feel like they are the chosen people. At the time the story takes place, these gods are already long gone – killed during a war – but remnants of their power and of what they signify remain. Voortysahtan’s god is Voortya, the god of war, the devourer of children. The apocalypse they were promised by her involves the return of all the soldiers that ever died in battle to wage a final war – and the promise of an afterlife is depicted here as both a literal and a metaphorical prison, which binds the people to its rules in return to the prospect of avoiding oblivion.

Voortya also has special soldiers, called sentinels, who are single-minded warriors whose only purpose is to slaughter everything in their path – exactly like any soldier, some characters argue. Their descriptions could come from a horror story:

“The Voortyashtani sentinel ripples with movement as it walks. It is difficult to tell if its armour is metal, or bone, or both. Spikes and spurs adorn the armour’s shoulders, elbows, and knees, as if a forest of antlers is sprouting from its limbs. In some places the armour is held together by thick leather straps; in others it appears to have been grown, melded together over its wearer’s body. It is covered in old stains, some brown, some red: blood, obviously, from some past slaughter.”

Mulaghesh, therefore, soon has to deal with these supernatural menaces that embody everything that she despises, including herself. The Voortyashtan apocalypse starts to become a palpable threat and, as her investigation on the officer’s disappearance comes to a close, the protagonist finds herself even more hurt and traumatized. After all, as the novel’s bitter ending perfectly exposes, such is the life of a soldier.

Despite its melancholic themes, City of Blades also offers a very exciting narrative, full of twists and turns, and some outlandish set-pieces, like a huge battle that involves a humongous minigun, a moving train, snipers, and a sword that likes to hum. It’s often very funny too, full of characters that seem always ready to make a witty remark about the horrible things that are happening.

In sum, City of Blades is an excellent sequel with a perfectly crafted story that manages to be both exhilarating and thought-provoking.

June 09, 2020.