Bloodmind

by Liz Williams

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  The Tor UK team & our authors

  LIZ WILLIAMS

  BLOODMIND

  TOR

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  ONE

  PLANET: MUSPELL (VALI)

  The other women of the Skald had crept from the room, leaving me alone with Idhunn’s body. The investigation team had been summoned and were on their way. Someone had opened one of the tall windows of the lamp room and the sea air streamed in, diminishing the reek of death.

  I stood in the fading twilight and looked down at her: friend, mentor, Skald superior and the woman I credited with saving my life. And now she was nothing more than a mutilated bag of flesh in a slow seep of blood. For what seemed like a long time, I could not look away, but eventually I dragged my gaze up from the filleted corpse. I felt like the ghost of the Vali Hallsdottir I had been so little time ago: Skald assassin, just returned from a mission, home safe, or so I’d thought. But now I was no more than a glimpse in the curve of the lamp casing, face a white oval in the gathering shadows, the scars livid against my skin as though those long-ago claw-tracks had only just been made. The hollow of my empty eye-socket was a well of dark and my good eye looked wide and sightless. I put a hand to the breastplate of my borrowed alien armour and it felt as though my heartbeat was pounding a hole through the leather. The gleam of Muspell’s evening star shone over my shoulder and it struck me then that the thing on the floor at my feet had been named for that star, but the spirit that ruined corpse had housed would never again stand at the windows of the lamp room and look for its burn in the heavens. I dropped to my knees beside Idhunn, taking care not to disturb the pooling blood.

  ‘Idhunn,’ I whispered. I reached out a hand, but did not touch her. Instead, I held my palm a little distance above her body and, closing my good eye, I called upon the senses that on Muspell are known as the seith, as if I shut off my physical vision in order to look through my ruined eye, like those old tales from ancient Earth where the people of the huldra and the fey steal sight away, only to replace it with other gifts. My ancestors had brought those old tales with them across the star roads, but they were only stories, nothing more. My nightmares were real.

  The impression of another person present was very strong. I felt that I could see a shrouded figure crouching over Idhunn’s body, making the first of many delicate cuts in order to detach my friend’s spine. I could even smell this other person: a pungent, musty odour like an old and bloody cupboard. But there was nothing more. A haze lay over the body, a deliberate masking. I rose, still with my eye closed, and walked to the door. The trail led no further. Whoever had committed this murder had taken pains to cover their tracks in the non-physical world, and if that was the case, then the likelihood was that they had also gone to the trouble to hide more tangible evidence, too. And that suggested one thing to me: vitki.

  A cry came from beyond the windows of the lamp room: a thin shocked wail. For a moment, I thought it was a seabird calling, but then the seith kicked in once more, telling me it was a human sound. It had come from somewhere in the fortress below me.

  I ran to the windows of the lamp room and looked out. The sky was stained red in the east, all crimson and flame, but Muspell’s moon, Loki, was already well up and casting a pale light across the water.

  In the light of the moon a ship was riding. As I stared at it, I felt myself grow cold. When I’d come into the Rock a scant hour ago, returning from out-world, nothing had shown on the navigational array of my little seawing. In order to make a swift return to the Rock, I’d avoided the main naval forces of the Reach, which were gearing up for war with Darkland; something this size would have shown up like a bonfire on the screens. Yet I’d seen nothing and no one at the Rock had mentioned it, even during the traumatic aftermath of Idhunn’s murder.

  And anyway, this was no ship of the Reach.

  The thing was huge, perhaps a quarter of a mile from stern to prow. Not as big as the gigantic war-wings that I’d seen being constructed in the shipyards of Darkland, but big enough. Frigate on top, bristling with antennae and gun placements, blast-cannons all along the sides, but icebreaker below. I could see the long ram of the ship riding just under the water, catching the moonlight. It bore no insignia that I noticed, but as I watched, a spiral of wings, shadow on shadow, coiled up from behind one of the spiked masts and soared upward towards the moon. Then, in the blink of an eye, they were gone. I’d seen those birds before – Darkland ravens, not real birds at all, but representations of information, metaphorical constructs carrying data between the vitki. A vitki ship, then.

  But in that, I was wrong.

  I turned from the window and hastened for the door. Going down the steep spiral stairs, I ran into an old woman, hair streaming in disarray, another one with a face like a ghost’s. Hlin Recksdottir, one of the Skald elders, clawed at my arm.

  ‘The vitki – the vitki are here! Vali, I’ve given orders for everyone to arm themselves. We’ll fight them if we have to.’

  ‘Has that ship sent any communication?’ I asked, but I wasn’t really expecting it to be a social call. The vitki were old enemies and the Reach had already gone to war with them, with the whole of Darkland. The vitki ship would aim to take the Rock and the Skald, controlling the strategic shipping lanes that led through into the most developed part of the coast. I clenched my fists to stop my han
ds from shaking.

  ‘Nothing.’ Hlin’s shocked face grew grim. ‘We’ve asked them what they want – as if it wasn’t obvious. I’ve put the data stores on a destruct timer.’

  There were backups in the Skald keeps on the mainland, on the secret islands on which we maintained tiny outposts. I nodded my agreement. Leaving Hlin to follow, I bolted down the stairs to the main doors. Women raced around me: the Rock going into lockdown. As I reached the primary entrance, the blast-doors slammed shut, leaving us in a sudden, eerie silence. The guards were already at their posts, weapons raised. The rest of us in the hall – Hlin, myself, a handful of Skald members – stopped dead, waiting. I don’t know what made me glance up into the dark arch of the ceiling, but I did so and against old cold stone I saw a single feather drifting down, caught in a shaft of light. Mesmerized, I watched it spiral to rest on the floor and as it touched the flagstones, it disappeared. I had a split-second glimpse of each pinion streaming out, turning into data: numbers, letters, co-ordinates, streaking across the floor and melting into the walls. Next moment, there was the creak and grind of hydraulics as the blast-doors started to go up. They had hacked the fortress.

  I seized Hlin by the arm and pulled her behind a desk. I’d not even had time to grasp a proper weapon: all I had was the alien bow I’d brought back as a memento from Mondhile, a light, quick thing, lethally effective against a medieval foe but a useless antique against modern weaponry. Better that than nothing, though. I had three arrows in the shoulder pack: I notched one of them up and waited to fire.

  My chance came in the next minute. The main doors blew open and behind the boil of light and fire I saw someone standing on the steps. I didn’t wait. I drew back and loosed the arrow, just as one of the Skald guards opened fire with a much more effective handgun. But neither bow nor finelight made any appreciable difference. My arrow clattered harmlessly to the floor after hitting an invisible shield; the finelight bolt dissipated into a shower of sparks.

  The person stepped forward. A black-and-silver uniform encased a tall female form. Her hands were gloved, but the dataflow of enhancements ran across the exposed skin of her face. Blue eyes sparked silver, set in a gaunt countenance. White birds, like albino crows, circled around her head. And again a single feather fell. The woman reached out and took it and her gloved hand closed over it. I thought I saw her smile.

  She said, ‘My name is Rhi Glyn Apt; I am a commander of the Morvern Morrighanu. Put your weapons down. You’re out-numbered. There’s a blast-cannon trained on the keep. We have your access codes.’ A pause. ‘I suggest you consider terms of surrender.’

  It was useless to believe that I would tell them nothing. They may not have been vitki, but they were still from Darkland and they seemed to know all the tricks.

  Glyn Apt had me taken to the lower regions of the keep: what had once been a dungeon in the older, and bloodier, days of the Reach, and was now used as a meditation chamber. It was windowless, built of thick, dovetailed slabs of stone, furnished only with a settle. The Morrighanu commander took the settle, and had me bonded to the wall. It wasn’t torture, not quite, but she made it clear that there wasn’t going to be a choice. First, she had me injected with a mnemonic over-ride, and then she wired up the map implant in my head to her own information system. To anyone who watched, it would have looked as though a white bird perched on my shoulder, plucking at the socket of my eye.

  They wanted to know about Mondhile. They made me relive it, over and over again.

  The tower. Gemaley’s home, rising mottled from the rock, the stone lit by its own shifting light. Inside, a ruin containing a bloody heart: the energy well that motivated both Gemaley and the animal pack that lived there. My former lover Frey, prowling through the dungeons, luring me with weird vitki promises that I still didn’t understand.

  Then, my escape to a nearby town – an ordinary, not-yet-tech settlement, transformed by the bloodmind, the feral state into which the Mondhaith were prone to fall. Gemaley’s beast pack had attacked then, just to see what would happen. I’d seen elderly grandmothers battling wild animals, and not always losing.

  Human and animal. Animal and human.

  Why were they asking me all these questions?

  They made me go through it again, and then again.

  I didn’t even realize when they’d stopped, or understand that I was no longer in the interrogation chamber. At first I thought I was back in Gemaley’s dungeon, but then it changed, shifted, to somewhere alien and smelling of musk, the Hierolath’s chamber on Nhem where he had raped me before I’d killed him, and then – still bleak, still cold – the room I’d shared with my brother in Scaraskae and he was the one on top of me, in me and I shrieked as I’d never allowed myself to do in my parents’ house, because he would tell them it was my fault—

  The Hierolath was dead, and so were Frey and Gemaley. I did not know if my brother still lived and I told myself that I did not care. It should have made a difference.

  But knowing, somewhere in back-brain, that Rhi Glyn Apt was witnessing all these events through the mirror of my mind, felt like violation all over again. I suppose some might say it could have been cathartic, but I didn’t do catharsis very well: spiralling back to the same old nightmares was like trying to prove the past to myself. Trying to prove, and failing.

  When the drugs wore off, and the white raven had sipped the last piece of autobiography from my mind, Glyn Apt came to stand before me. I managed to look her in the face. The valkyrie I had seen in Darkland’s capital of Hetla had been perfect, a sculpted ice warrior. Beneath the chasing data, Glyn Apt was not so like that woman, more recognizably human: in her late forties, perhaps more, with pouches under her eyes and the beginning of lines around her mouth. She had not bothered with corrective surgery any more than I had; I could see the tracery of scars around her jaw. Accident or duel? I didn’t know enough about the Morrighanu to be able to tell.

  She said, ‘You used to cut yourself.’

  Without asking, she pulled back my shirt sleeve and revealed the myriad scars on my arm. An adolescent way of coping, and yet I’d kept my scars, just as she’d kept her own.

  ‘I haven’t done that in years,’ I said, and hated the way the words mumbled out.

  ‘No,’ Glyn Apt replied. I saw silver spark behind her eyes: something transmitted? Something incoming? ‘Now you get others to do it for you instead.’ There was no mockery in her voice; she spoke as someone making a statement of fact. She turned my face to one side, not gently: I could feel the power of the servors in her glove. Turn up the ratio and she’d be able to rip off my head as easily as a fenris. Data streamed across her face like moonlight. As though she’d read my thoughts she said, ‘Those scars on your face. They were made by an animal, your records say. You were put on an ingsgaldir initiation, for all that you are neither vitki nor of Darkland.’

  ‘My ex-lover was vitki. Frey. You must know that by now. He put me through an initiation, with a fenris out on the ice. It would have been nice if he’d told me that it was initiation. At the time, I thought he was trying to kill me.’

  Again, I thought Glyn Apt might have smiled.

  ‘You’d have done better to seek out the Morrighanu than the vitki,’ she said.

  ‘You said it yourself,’ I told her. ‘I’m not from Darkland.’

  But that night, when they’d set me free of the wall and put me in a cell, it was Darkland of which I dreamed.

  I was once more standing on the headland overlooking the city of Hetla. It was night and Darkland’s capital was under curfew. Only a few red lights flickered along the coast, denoting observation turrets and anti-aircraft installations, baleful scarlet eyes in the darkness. The only sounds, apart from the constant thunder of the spring sea, were the boom and crash of construction work across the fjord in the wingyards. In my mind’s eye I could still see those massive war-wings sitting in dry-dock, awaiting completion before being sent out across the ocean to the Reach, my home.

>   Then, above the sounds of preparation for war, I heard another noise: a thin, high singing, very sweet. And in my dream I remembered that when the equinoctial tides sweep across the seas of the north, the semi-sentient species known as the selk come down with the arctic melt water, and sing. This voice I now heard was beautiful and cold, and it paralysed me. I stood, suspended in the night, with the ocean ahead of me and the deep forest behind, and listened to the song of the selk as it curdled my blood to frost.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ a voice said at my elbow. I looked up, to see the vitki Thorn Eld. Friend of Frey’s, or foe? I’d never really known, but I wasn’t surprised to see him there. Eld had known all about me, after all, and when he’d interrogated me in Darkland he hadn’t even had to give me any drugs to get the information. It had been as if Eld had been living in my head.

  ‘Yes, I can hear it,’ I said.

  ‘When you killed Frey,’ Eld remarked, his round face bland in Loki’s light, ‘you used a beast pack to do so. A proper ingsgaldir in the ancient sense, to link yourself with the world, with animal mind, with a gestalt. Do you think you can use the selk in the same way?’

  ‘It’s not even occurred to me,’ I told him with perfect truth, but suddenly we were out on the ice, and the selk were surging up under my feet, shattering the floe, sending us down into cold dark and I was reaching out for Eld, to save him or to help myself, I did not know. But Eld was already gone and—

  I woke, into freezing air, gasping for breath. It was a relief to find myself still in the cell, though the heating had evidently gone off. The knowledge of Idhunn’s death came crashing in on me all over again.

  Yet the selk-song went on. It was coming from beyond the cell, penetrating the chamber and lodging inside my head, echoing against the walls of my skull like the rush of blood when you hold a shell to your ear. I waited for a moment, but the song continued insistent and summoning.

  A moment after that, Glyn Apt was there on the other side of the cell shield. The dataflow had been temporarily switched off and her face was unremarkable without it, pale and plain, with blunt features. Without the silver underlay of information, her eyes were a faded blue, like spring ice.