by Liz Williams
Eld laughed. ‘They can go to war if they wish. People’s ambitions are very small these days. I don’t care about the Reach, Vali. Darkland can subdue it, or negotiate with it, or destroy it, or sail away and leave it alone for all I care. I have other goals.’
‘You said you know who the quarry is. Idhunn’s murderer. You said she was here. Where is she now?’ I rose to face him, backing him against the window. ‘What is she? Tell me, Eld.’
‘You’ve met her, Vali. I could feel her on you, around you, the last time we met. Here, in Darkland, near Hetla on the shore. A little piece of her presence, fluttering around you like a moth.’
I thought back. Ashy woods, with trees that erupted into sudden blaze as the resin caught in the heat of Darkland’s fleeting summer. A forest like a gathering of cloud, captured mist above the thundering sea. A woman in a house in the forest depths, sitting in a room full of bones with a skull in her lap, staring at me, unblinking.
‘That cabin,’ I said. ‘In the forest. It’s her.’
‘I told you that you knew her,’ he said.
‘But who is she?’
‘She isn’t a vitki. She’s Morrighanu. I don’t know what else she is.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Her name is Skadi. But they called her Skinning Knife, when they first found her in the forest. That was over ten years ago now. She had no papers, no documents, no clothes – she was living on her own and no one knows how she survived. Occasionally you find children who are feral – on the world you visited, Mondhile, that seems to be the norm. On more – human – worlds, you sometimes find children who are cared for by animals. But in the case of this woman, nothing would go near her. She was maybe twenty or thereabouts, and she took down two of the men who tried to catch her. Eventually they brought her back to Hetla and she was studied in an institute. No one ever found out who she was. They gave her a name but she wouldn’t use it even after she learned to speak, and she learned damn fast. Feral children usually don’t do very well once they’re returned to civilization. This one did. This one did very well for herself.’
‘They called her “Shadow”,’ I said, for that was what her name meant in one of the old Earth tongues. The goddess Skadi: the winter warrior, whose symbol is the snow itself. I could see why they’d given her the name. I thought of the spirit woman with her skinning knife. ‘You said she isn’t a vitki but she is Morrighanu.’
‘Yes, she never joined the vitki. Although that’s not entirely true. She initially became a valkyrie. She had considerable innate ability. Usually there’s an argument with some of the upper echelons if we try to take outsiders in: valkyrie and vitki keep to their own. Not with this one. Everyone wanted the kudos of having her in their sect. She killed like an animal kills – quickly, with no remorse.’ He paused. ‘She was said to enjoy it as well as being good at it, and that always gives one a cachet in certain quarters.’
‘And now she’s working for Darkland,’ I said, ‘and may have murdered my mentor, though I don’t know why.’ Glyn Apt had lied to me, no surprises there. ‘In that case, why are you trying to find her? And how did she find us? Was she ordered to kill Idhunn?’
‘I am trying to track her down,’ Eld gave a small ironic snort of laughter, ‘because she isn’t working for Darkland any more. At least, not for the central Parliament of the security forces – any more than Frey was. As for why she killed Idhunn, I’ve no idea.’
You do not have to be versed in the seith to sense the webs tangling around you, part of a greater, unglimpsed weave. In that dingy room the air seemed to thicken.
‘So if she wasn’t working for you, who was she working for?’
‘I don’t know.’
I frowned. ‘But Frey was working for himself?’
‘I don’t know that, either. Tell me, Vali, what do you know about Nhem?’
That surprised me. ‘Nhem? It’s one of those extreme religious worlds. Founded by a fleet of cultists who’d captured a group of women and taken them along for breeding stock. There’s a disparity between the actual races – the women are small and dark, the men are tall and light-skinned, a classic form of discrimination on old Earth. And the women are bred to be non-sentient, but some of them have reverted and banded together. They approached the Skald and hired me for a mission.’
‘To assassinate the leader. Which you did. At no small personal cost, I think.’ The pale gaze was seeing too much now, boring into me, and I turned my face away. ‘You were raped, after all.’
‘And then I killed him.’
I could almost taste the question Eld was too sensitive, or perhaps too cunning, to ask. Who was he standing in for, Vali? Which part of the past were you trying to avenge?
‘It was worth it, if they can use it,’ I said curtly. ‘Besides, I’d been raped before.’ There was a little silence, filling the hollow of my words.
‘Nhem always struck me as a very . . . black-and-white world. The men are cruel and ruthless, the women are victims.’
‘Perhaps.’ Eld was too clever to make trite observations, or to expect me to agree with them. I’d suffered at the hands of men: first my brother, then Frey, then the Hierolath. After Frey, I’d sworn off men, wanted nothing more to do with them. But I’d killed two out of three; my brother was long gone. And after all of them, the last person who had sexually assaulted me had been a girl: Gemaley. A young man had helped me, risked his life, and since then I’d teamed up with Eld. Well, in a manner of speaking. Nothing is simple.
Eld, watching me closely, went on, ‘Not many shades of grey, on Nhem. But genetic engineering is a sloppy process; they must have realized that. It was bound to breed sports, not to last.’
‘Switching sentience on and off,’ I said, ‘That’s the common pattern – on Nhem, on Mondhile, here.’
‘Do you know why you were hired to assassinate the Hierolath? After all, the infrastructure of Nhem doesn’t depend on one man.’
‘We were told that it would destabilize things enough to let the free women create some changes. I don’t know what they were planning, though.’ I’d had my doubts at the time. ‘Do you, Thorn? What does this have to do with Skinning Knife?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But you’re not the only one to have seith senses, Vali. I do, too. And something keeps prodding at me.’ He paused. ‘Frey’s visit to Nhem with you wasn’t his first visit.’
‘I can see him getting on with the Nhemish like a house on fire. All those claims of male superiority.’
Eld’s mouth quirked. ‘He tried to give you an ingsgaldir.’
‘Yes, but without bloody asking first! It’s the same mentality, Eld, and you know it. Either they strip women of their identities by engineering them, or they apply psychological abuse that has the same effect. After Frey, I barely knew who I was. It’s a difference in sophistication, that’s all.’ And Eld had tried much the same thing. More vitki mind games.
And last night, when she had bent over me, and made my death seem so perfectly reasonable. Vitki tricks and secrets . . . ‘Where is Skinning Knife now?’
‘You should have some understanding by now of how we operate. The vitki and the Morrighanu both are well versed in disguise, deception, sleight of eye. We use skills that we’ve been honing for the past thousand years.’ He gave a brief smile that, after a moment, I realized had been intended to be reassuring. ‘I don’t think she came here to kill you, Vali, though I’m sure that’s what you thought at the time. She came as a warning of what she is capable of doing. As soon as she saw me, she was out of here and in case you think I defended you, then think again. I did nothing, Vali. I could not. I sat here paralysed until several minutes after she had disappeared into the forest dark. And that terrifies me.’
I stared at him. I had not thought him to be the kind of man who would be terrified at anything. When we had met in Hetla, when he had brought me in for questioning, he had seemed all-powerful, knowing my head and my heart, completely in control. And
now, as I stared into the cold grey eyes and saw the fear that he was no longer hiding, I understood that I had once again made the same mistake. I had invested him with powers and with an authority over me to which he was not entitled. It was unconscious, but potent nonetheless. It was exactly the same mistake I had made with Frey.
I rose to my feet and walked once more to the window. It took a moment of effort to look out into the forest, as though Skinning Knife herself might drop from the trees like some great silent bat. I felt myself shiver. Frey had been human. Eld was human, and so was Skinning Knife. On old Earth, my seith abilities would have seemed like magic. We were not, I told myself, dealing with anything beyond nature, simply someone versed in a variety of techniques, and the ruthlessness or insanity required to implement them in murder. I had put Frey to his death. I would track her down and I would serve this woman as she had served Idhunn. Before me in the moonlight, the forest seemed to glare and swim. I turned back to meet Eld’s gaze.
‘Tell me then,’ I said. ‘Where do we begin?’
SEVENTEEN
PLANET: NHEM (HUNAN)
The next few days were spent trying to bring in the meagre harvest before the rains came. Some of us had been farm-wives in our past lives, and knew instinctively what to do: they had it easier than us city women, I sometimes felt, for the farm-wives were the ones who had experienced more freedom. Though they all spoke of the hardships of land-working – something all of us knew by now – they also spoke of being left alone in the hot fields, the silences, the wind rushing through the grain, the pleasure of just being. I could understand that. It was why I liked the bell tower so much: there were no voices. The goddesses were quiet. The dust made only the faintest rustling as it skittered across the floor, and the high skirling of the efreets soon faded into the background. No one shouting, incomprehensibly or half-understood. No one making demands. The only thing that made demands on us now was the land itself; harvests don’t wait.
Khainet came to join me in the gardens. We’d built these over a number of years, in the lee of the wall. The gardens were shady, but also got enough sun for the crops to flourish: gnarled fruit grew there, and a variety of tough, seeded grain that we made into porridge and bread. It was monotonous, but no one much minded. When Khainet found me, I was picking the long orange fruits we called saq and piling them into a basket. The sun had touched them a little too much and they were already starting to turn to mush; this evening, they would be sliced and layered in earthenware jars, or dried on the roofs for the short winter. Beyond the bulk of the wall, the clouds were massing and the air had the metal smell of approaching thunder.
Khainet took one of the saq from the basket and studied it as though she had never seen it before. Perhaps she hadn’t, although they were common enough in some of the eastern districts around Iznar.
‘If you eat that, you’ll regret it,’ I told her. ‘They’re bitter unless they’re dried first.’
She put it back in the basket. ‘Do they grow here naturally? Or did someone bring them?’
‘We found a small grove of them inside the city. We’ve been cultivating them ever since. Birds drop things sometimes and they grow. But some of the women brought seeds in their clothing, or in scraps of food, and we’ve grown those, too.’
She nodded. ‘I wondered where the food on the table came from.’
‘It’s a struggle, all the time. I’m sure you can see why. This isn’t fertile country.’
‘How did they manage, then? The – goddesses? Did they eat air?’
I smiled. ‘We don’t know. Maybe the land was more fertile then. Maybe there was a blight, and that’s why the city is ruined and abandoned now.’
‘Where did they go, then? Why aren’t any of them here now?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘I’d like to have seen them,’ Khainet said, and I nodded as if in agreement, but privately I wondered whether it was best after all that the goddesses had gone, so that we could make them into whatever we wanted them to be.
Khainet wanted to help and so I let her carry some of the baskets through into the dark-store, where other women would prepare the fruit later. Years ago, I’d have done the carrying myself: I was a strong woman then, bred for it. But now the twists had come to my joints and I left the carrying to the younger women, like Khainet.
She took five baskets in, and I had to show her how to carry the first one, balancing it on her shoulder rather than hauling it along two-handed. It was clear that this kind of work didn’t come naturally to her, and that bore out the truth of her story. It wasn’t that I distrusted her, but our memories have been so ruined, and sometimes are nothing more than a smashed puzzle. You can get very confused as you pick through the fragments.
Khainet got the hang of the lifting, though, and I watched as she swayed down the narrow path between the bean rows, with the heavy basket cocked on her shoulder. After that first trip, when I’d made sure that she knew what she was doing, I took my eyes off her and went back to paying attention to the fruit. It was some time after she’d taken the last basket away that I noticed she hadn’t come back.
I called her name. No answer. I hobbled along to the store, fearing the worst, and I was right. She was crumpled on the floor, with the basket beside her: she hadn’t dropped it, but must have fainted just as she set it down. One hand had flopped into it, as if reaching for a fruit.
I felt for her pulse. She was breathing raggedly and her colour was bad: her skin looked like white dust. I tried rousing her, then forcing a little water down her throat, but she did not respond. I pushed a folded sack beneath her head, turned her on her side and went for help as fast as I could. By the time I reached the first row of homes – not far from the gardens, but in the full blaze of the sun away from the wall – I was panting and the buildings were turning from dark to light and back again. I was aware of hands taking me by the arm, leading me into the shade.
‘Hunan! What’s wrong?’
My sight was still too blurred to see her, but I recognized the voice. She’d come to us a decade ago. Her name was Tare. I tried to tell her what had happened, calmly and quietly, but I ended up blurting it out and not making much sense, either.
‘Don’t worry,’ Tare said, and she was calm and quiet. ‘I’ll send someone to see to her.’
‘I have to go back. I—’
‘You stay here. Get your breath back first.’
She didn’t give me a chance to argue. A moment later, she was gone into the warren of the house and I heard her calling out to somebody. It occurred to me that I had no idea who lived here: years back, I’d have been able to say exactly who lived with whom, even who loved whom, and I didn’t know whether it was that the colony had grown beyond my ability to remember, or whether I was simply losing my grip. I leaned back against the rough grain of the couch and closed my eyes. I didn’t mean to sleep.
In Iznar, we were allowed out by ourselves, but only to the marketplace by the city gate. As children, we were trained how to dress over and over again by our Fathers, while our mothers stood dumbly by. The sack-like thing we wore in the confines of the households had to be covered by another gown that we slipped over it, a wide, shapeless thing made of flounces. I don’t know who made them, although years later one of the incoming women told me that they were issued by the Hierolath’s people. It was obvious, looking back, that they kept to a standard pattern: as concealing as possible, with a head covering that was supposed to go over the face. Since we all looked more or less the same anyway, however, that rule was not so rigorously enforced as the actual covering of the head: failure to do so in the street would result in a beating from one of the militias and delivery back to house confinement. I never understood why my wrist ached and burned when I was a small child, nor the nature of the ceremony I underwent when I was delivered by my Father into House Father’s custody along with a number of jars of household fuel, an old electric fan, and two pigs. It involved cutting the top of my wrist, then
a tugging and pulling while I tried not to cry, then a bandage. Now, I think they were putting in something that held the details of where I lived, since I did not have enough words to tell anyone that.
The market, then, was the only place where we could go on our own. House Father would issue me with a piece of paper, which I was somehow given to understand was magical: if I handed it to the marketing manager, he would give me what I needed and I would carry it home, trotting like a dog, laden with baskets. Later, when Luck-Still-to-Come and Boy-Next-Time were older, I took them with me and they carried things, too.
But there was one day when we went somewhere other than the market. If I’d had awareness, it would have surprised me greatly, because the household routine had barely altered from its few patterns ever since I’d gone to House Father’s house. As it was, House Father shooed myself and the girls into our gowns and out of the door before we had time to blink, then took First Joy by the hand and led him down the road. Meekly, we followed. We had no idea where we were going and we did not make a sound.
It was very hot. The cracked tarmac of the road surface had blistered into peeling puddles and they smelled pungent. Above us, the sky was bleached of colour by the heat. Iznar smelled and looked as it always did: low buildings, many of them falling down and separated by wide areas of weeds, filled with the smell of vehicle fumes, cooking oil, dust . . . And there were many more people than was usual even for market day: men and women, the women all gowned, just like ourselves. There was an odd feeling in the air – something tense and excited. I did not understand it, of course, but it affected me, making my skin itch beneath the flounces of the gown.
We trudged on through the afternoon heat, past the road that led to the marketplace. The girls tugged at my hand, expecting to take that road, but House Father, with First Joy close at his heels, was marching past. Mute and puzzled, we followed the men.
