#fixed typos

We start off with a fable about Voortya and Ahanas, goddesses of death and life, combining their efforts and their natures to create an afterlife for Voortya's followers. (What comes of Ahanas' followers we aren't told, but I would be surprised if they stopped at one, when that one benefits only the Voortyashtanis.) The work of creating it involved such a connection between the two that when it was complete, Voortya struck off the hand that held Ahanas' to sever the link to her opposite, because otherwise she could not let go. 

I wonder what the effect was on the Goddess of Life and Growth.

When we're told the story, this is presented as a heroic act - the goddess maiming herself because it was the only way she could make a promise to her followers come true, reaching out beyond what her nature allowed as ruler of War and Death. Her call to the unlike is presented as a grave risk, and her sacrifice a severing of the connection to return to herself.

I think the book supports an alternate reading: Voortya's sacrifice was an act of profound trauma and self-destruction. We learn that she never speaks again, that her hand is forever represented as missing just as her human followers' would be, despite apparent regenerative capabilities shown by other divinities in the first book, and that she displays neither the nature of the snarling beast she had before her relationship with Ahanas, nor that of the fearsome warrior she had during it. She becomes instead an implacable destroyer of all before her, until she's slain before the trilogy begins by the Kaj.

There's resonance later, when we learn that Saint Zhurgut struck off his own son's hand as a sacrifice, and then gave his entire self to become Voortya's hand (symbolism not lost). The themes of self-sacrifice both heroic and ignoble, and the abhorrent sacrifice of others' lives and bodies, are repeated and strengthened again and again in this war story, but I'm going to focus on a few incidents with our main characters.

Like calls unlike again when Thinadeshi enters the City of Blades and takes up Voortya's sword, the weapon with a hilt shaped like a severed hand and a blade like moonlight. This time, the call goes the other direction - the living woman reaches out to the dead goddess. The engineer tries to stop the apocalypse by impersonating Voortya, clutching the sword, using its power to whisper to the hordes of the undead that the time has not come. Yet the longer a live, mortal woman holds the sword, the less the inhabitants of Voortya's afterlife believe in her, and she slowly loses what little control she has gained. 

Zhurgut swears himself to be Voortya's hand, Thinadeshi throws her whole being into stopping what he represents and forbidding an unwinnable war. Thinadeshi is barely qualified to enter the City of Blades - she did take a life, once, and under duress. The guilt of it still racks her in the few scenes we have, and it makes it impossible for her to convince the dead of the validity of her claim, but her sacrifice makes a delay, and that delay saves the world in the end.

The pattern shifts when Voortya's influence extends to Mulaghesh. Like calls to like, as if she might become a second Saint Zhurgut, and cut a bloody swath - but Mulaghesh says no.

Pretty early in the book, I started thinking it was significant that Mulaghesh is missing a hand. None of the characters called much attention to it, aside from Signe, whose observational skills extend to successfully fitting a prosthetic, but the narration did, over and over. Voortya's missing left hand captured in statuary, Zurghut's son and his sacrifice, Mulaghesh's irritation as she struggles to climb or carry or aim with that hand. I thought it was too pretty a symmetry to leave alone, and sure enough. She is uniquely qualified to solve the looming end of the world, and her history matters in a way that's pretty unusual in military fantasy.

Mulaghesh is not only a soldier, she's one who would reasonably be charged with war crimes. She's the guilt-ridden killer of civilians and her own men, who saw a way to survive a no-win situation, who not only gave strength and time and health in the service of Saypur's invasion of the Continent, but her own morals. She did things she cannot forgive herself doing, and then tried to bury it by her return to service and her retirement at the end of City of Stairs. Where other characters in City of Blades agitate for conflict, Mulaghesh is the voice telling them to stop, and that they don't understand how badly they cannot win that fight, by any means possible.

It's her history that allows her to enter the City of Blades, but her reaction to her history differentiates her from Zhurgut - she loathes what she's done, fears what she's become, and strives to make peace, even if it's only the veneer of peace possible when her country has invaded those who once held them in chains, slain their gods, and made a solid effort at the destruction of their cultures. (There's a whole other essay in that.)

Zhurgut, meanwhile, razes block after block of Voortyashtan, his own city, while singing a mantra of death. Voortya is known to be unstoppable, merciless, and to revel in destruction. Her changes over time give different faces to that destruction: first the earliest depictions of her as a four-armed, snarling beast, described in terms that made me think inescapably of the rabid animal running furious and endangering everything near it. Second, the four-armed warrior, dancing on the battlefield, glorified by her followers and feared by everyone else. Third, Voortya as we see her in the Sentinels in Saypur - barely human, armored in thorns, wielding a sword that can cleave stone, and leaving vivid reminders at every turn that nobody, nothing, matters before their blades. It's a return, of sorts, to that first state - but she's lost even the appearance of an amoral force of nature, and an aspect of malicious, senseless destruction has come to the fore.

The pattern is self-destruction. Each Sentinel gives over their will, their body and soul, to don the armor of thorns and become the weapon of Voortya. Zhurgut, most of all: his sacrifice is not only himself, but he drags others down with him. Voortya herself first creates, then cuts, her connection to Ahanas. 

Mulaghesh too is nearly destroyed by her own actions, but she doesn't run toward death. She hides away and tries to drink until she can't remember the Yellow March, but her conscience is strong and her memory won't let up. That's the critical difference: she learns from her own atrocities, and is one of the more complex and human characters in the book for it. Mulaghesh wants to live, and she wants to live in a better world. She spends most of the book telling other people not to make her mistakes, that the role of the soldier is to serve, not to become a scourge. 

It's never laid out in so many words, but Mulaghesh's struggle is to come to terms with her actions, believe that the only life you can morally sacrifice is your own; and that not all sacrifices mean death. Her throwing herself into the fight in Bulikov at the end of City of Stairs is a fine example, and through City of Blades she tries to teach the lesson to many other characters, even as she strives to keep the world intact. Even as she battles her own nightmares and memories.

Thus, when she talks with Thinadeshi and realizes the self-sacrificial extremes the engineer has taken to keep the apocalypse at bay, she sees the way. 

She knows it might be the end of her, and does it anyway, in one of the few truly heroic acts in the book. She knows the rules the Sentinels follow, and when the undead army roars for blood and the right to scourge the earth, she declares that not a single one of them is a fit to do it. It's no accident that when Mulaghesh takes up Voortya's sword, she first casts aside her mechanical hand. It's a symbolic self-maiming, an echo of Zhurgut and Voortya, and a return to what she was before she put it on - the General retired in disgrace. Her history is full of blood, her hand perhaps the most qualified to hold the blade; and the pact is broken on the force of her will to end the fight. 

The soldier Mulaghesh sends the Sentinels back to their afterlife with a stroke of Voortya's sword in a parallel of the Kaj taking Voortya herself down; twice over, the fighters kill the war. There's an opportunity, but Mulaghesh doesn't fully step into the mantle, or go as far as self-immolation. She throws down her sword (Her sword) and weeps over poor foolish Pendry, and over the people she's killed whether they wore a uniform or not. 

And then she picks up her prosthetic hand and puts it on, even though Signe is gone and the mechanism doesn't quite pull right, any more, and she gets about the business of living.