Markswoman by Rati Mehrotra

Author:Rati Mehrotra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

From The Weapons of the Great War, recounted by a historian of the clan of Arikken to Navroz Lan of the Order of Kali

The Great War was fought many ages ago. The kings and queens who battled for supremacy are long since dust. Not even their graves exist; so many died that they were burned or buried in vast, shallow pits. Some drowned, throwing themselves in the water to escape the burning metal poison that flowed over the earth and hung in the air, dark and suffocating to those who breathed its noxious fumes.

No structures remain of the golden time before the war, save the Fort of Sikandra—and no written tablets survive to tell us what the world looked like then. Everything burned, and what didn’t burn was looted by survivors, and what wasn’t looted succumbed to the wind and rain of the centuries that followed. We have no monument to these men and women of long ago.

Except their guns. Kalashiks do not erode with time. They glow darkly, as if new. Dust will not settle on their smooth flanks. They sit in our underground chamber in a gleaming row, waiting to be picked up and used again.

But we will never commit that sin. This is the injunction that our forefathers laid upon us: guard them well, but do not touch them. Do not even look upon them, or you will be in their thrall.

This is what we know: a kalashik can fire fifty rounds per second. It does not need to be reloaded. There is a replicating mechanism within the chambers of the weapon that constantly replenishes the ammunition, drawing energy for this task from its surroundings, or perhaps from its handler. A drawing made a hundred and twenty years ago by one of the more gifted elders of our clan partially reveals its inner structure.

This is what we guess: the metal of the kalashik is telepathic, like kalishium, but in a deformed way. The metal was made with evil intent and that evil lives on in the machines, twisting the minds of all but the strongest who attempt to wield their power. It is said that the machines are haunted, that they carry the memory of all the men and women they have killed.

Perhaps the truth is even stranger than that. Perhaps the machines are living beings, immortals that will outlast the human race. Or maybe they are just artifacts, and their power exists only in our imagination.

The fact of their perpetual existence remains, a bane to our peaceful way of life, a threat to the balance we have established in the long years after the war. It is said that a time will come when these weapons will leave the world forever, at the hands of one who commands the destiny of the human race. But even the wisest cannot see how or when that will happen.

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