Bloodmind

by Liz Williams

  Then the man blinked. Both Eld and I leaped backwards and clutched at one another. It must have looked comical, had anyone been watching. The locked jaws released, clattered together with a click.

  ‘Better look harder,’ the corpse said, in a soft and mocking woman’s voice. I barely heard it through the clamour of questions in my own head: he cannot be alive, can he? His backbone is gone, this is madness, am I really seeing this? – a tumult of atavistic, superstitious horror that was broken only when Eld gave a muffled curse and dropped to his knees by the body. He reached into the opening mouth and swiftly extracted a small gleaming pellet.

  ‘Holographic recording. He’s dead as dead can be, Vali.’

  I pretended that I was kneeling by his side, as opposed to sinking into the ferns with relief.

  ‘She’s teasing,’ Eld said softly in turn.

  Rapidly, we searched the man’s pockets but found no trace of identification. Eld rolled him over and parted the mass of hair at the back of what remained of the corpse’s neck.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Identification coding. Everyone in Darkland whom the state can reach has a code embedded in the skin.’ He brushed the hair up to reveal an area of thick grazing, already bled pale and puffy by the action of the stream. ‘Nothing. I wonder whether she’s mutilated him to hide the code, or the fact that he hasn’t got one?’

  ‘You said: anyone the state can reach. Presumably that wouldn’t mean the forest clans?’ We were a long way from Hetla, and my experience with the Morrighanu had taught me that Darkland was filled with different sects. And if Skinning Knife was Morrighanu anyway . . .

  ‘No, it wouldn’t. They’re an unknown quantity.’

  ‘Do you know what she does with the spines?’

  ‘Trophies, perhaps. Or maybe not. She collected the bones of previous victims but I don’t know whether that’s still the case.’

  ‘If this was the Reach,’ I said, ‘we’d bury him with as much honour as we could.’

  ‘But this is not the Reach. This is Morvern, where bodies are put in the branches of the blaze trees, or sent out to sea, or left for the beasts,’ Eld said. And so we learned what we could from the corpse and walked away, leaving the dead among the first fronds of spring.

  *

  I could feel her on the air, now: a clotting trace of rage. It was intermittent, a sensation which came and went, sometimes curling insidiously over my skin when I was least expecting it, sometimes casting a shadow over my senses like a rush of dismay. It reminded me of Gemaley, but it was much stronger and more assured: Gemaley if she had been older, trained, more subtle. Angrier. This made me nervous; it felt too much like my own fury, the rage I’d lived with after my brother, after Frey. The rage I pretended I didn’t have, that I’d tried to cut out of my skin, carving its runes in my own flesh and blood. It made me feel a connection with Skinning Knife and I didn’t want that. How much had dead Gemaley reminded me of myself, hurting because she could? I was a career assassin, she was an isolated psychopath. We were not the same, nothing like.

  I wondered whether Skadi had left such a trail on purpose, if she might be luring us in with gleeful patience. Eld had suggested, and I had felt, that she was mad. Still, it was impossible to second-guess the insane, without following them too far into the dark. And I did not like feeling so trapped. Eld and I could leave Sull, return to our respective nations, hide out, but she would still find us if she chose.

  We made a rudimentary camp in the middle of a small grove of trees. The ground here was bare of ash and snow: we were moving steadily south into Morvern, away from the ice, and the snow was growing patchier.

  ‘How long does summer last here?’ I asked Eld, as we sat around a small glow-pack.

  ‘Not long. The same as the northern parts of the Reach in these latitudes, but Morvern has always had a reputation for being colder than elsewhere. In Hetla, the snow is almost gone now.’ He held out his palms to the glow-pack, the faint light flickering across his face. He looked unreal in the half-light, and harmless: a slightly soft middle-aged man. I was having to remind myself more and more often that he was vitki, that I shouldn’t let my guard drop. My enemy’s enemy is my friend. An old and bitter saying, and I wondered in this case how true it really was.

  ‘What about you, Thorn Eld?’ I asked him, curious. ‘You know all about me and I know nothing of you. What’s your life like, in Hetla?’

  Eld gave me an indulgent smile. ‘The same as any vitki’s. I have a small apartment in security headquarters, the fortress. My work takes up most of my time. I live quietly, outside it. You are too subtle, Vali, to think that the vitki spend all their free time in torture and espionage simply because of the love of it, but I have met people who think this. I do what needs to be done. That’s all.’

  ‘And so if you’re not spending all your free time torturing dissidents, what do you do?’

  ‘Listen to music, read, study history, play chess. Very dull really.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No, I never have been. Vitki tend not to form permanent attachments. The natural partners are the valkyrie – a lot of the younger men go from one to another, and vice versa. But they can be a little . . . demanding.’

  ‘I can imagine. The valkyrie are enhanced, aren’t they? The one I once saw in your office had some kind of visual implants.’

  ‘They’re heavily enhanced, the more so as one goes up the ranks. The upper echelons are really barely human any more and have no wish to be. Ultimate strength, ultimate fighting capability, no time for emotional weakness – they draw on mythology. Like the Morrighanu.’

  ‘In mythology they were also celestial bar girls.’ I had a hard time imagining a modern valkyrie with a pitcher of beer and her hair in braids.

  Eld laughed. ‘I know that, but I’ve never dared mention it. They pay a price for what they undergo. Some societies have a far greater technological efficiency than we do. The modifications one can undergo on Muspell are not always that . . . effective. The body rejects, starts to break down. A lot of the valkyrie have immune problems.’ He paused. ‘It makes them tetchy.’

  ‘And this woman – Skadi, Skinning Knife? What enhancements did she have?’

  ‘She had none at all. That’s what worries me. She claimed not to need them, claimed innate genetic superiority – and believe me, among the valkyrie, that’s a claim that can get you challenged or dead. But they left her well alone. Perhaps they sensed that it was true.’

  ‘She’s psychotic. But what else is she?’

  ‘Of course she’s psychotic. But to the valkyrie, that’s an advantage. Like the Morrighanu, they practise disciplines that aren’t all that far removed from those of your Skald, but which rely to a greater extent on personal suffering as a tool for self-discipline. They go through extremes of self-denial, mortification, pain.’ That explained Glyn Apt’s ill humour, I thought.

  We fell silent. After a while, Eld said, ‘If you want to sleep, I’ll sit first watch.’

  I did not want to say: I’m too afraid to fall asleep, like a child in the dark. I thought, I have the seith, but the seith had not protected me from her last time, and it hadn’t protected me from Gemaley. It was erratic, tied too closely into my emotions. Maybe that was why the valkyrie tried not to have any.

  I thought of waking again to find Skinning Knife standing over me as I lay, passive and helpless. I had not minded that she had been about to subject me to terrible death and I wondered whether the man we had found in the stream had also slid indifferently down into the dark, convinced of the rightness of it all. This seemed to me to be the most dreadful thing about her: that she could kill you and you would not mind.

  As if he had read my thoughts, Eld said, ‘Use what powers you have. Now that we know what she can do, I will remain vigilant.’

  ‘And if she overpowers you?’

  ‘She will not,’ Eld reassured me out of the dark. In the light of the glow-pack, I glimpsed t
he beat of wings and strangely, this made me believe.

  When I woke again, Loki was high above me and Eld was touching my shoulder.

  ‘What is it?’ I came awake immediately, as if doused with snowmelt.

  ‘There’s someone out there.’ Eld’s voice was a breath in my ear; even so close as he was, I barely heard him.

  ‘It is her?’ I hated myself for sounding so fearful, but Eld ignored it. I rose to my feet, listening.

  ‘I am fairly sure that it’s not,’ Eld said. ‘See what you can feel.’

  Shadows. I sent out the seith, probing cautiously into the darkness. It was like putting a hand through a hole in the cellar wall, expecting the bite at any moment. But the bite did not come. I could feel traces in the night, a strange, half-hesitant expectancy, as if someone out there was waiting for something to happen. Power, and pain, and loss – all of these things were waiting.

  ‘I don’t think it’s an animal,’ I murmured to Eld. ‘I think it’s human.’

  There was a soft laugh behind us. Eld and I span round. Someone was standing at the entrance to the grove. Eld brought the glow-pack up, along with his weapon.

  ‘You won’t have to shoot,’ a voice said. Female, and not young. The wavering light played across the figure of an old woman, wrapped in a mass of skins and pelts from which a seamed face peered.

  ‘And who the hell,’ said Eld, with an uncharacteristic quiet fury that I thought was born of fear, ‘are you?’

  ‘A herder, once. I live here, now. I know you’re looking for someone, a shadow-woman. A killer. She passed this way, as she did last spring and then again in the winter. They know her, in Sull, after the massacre. But no one goes near her.’ The Gaelacht of this part of Darkland was different to that of the Reach, although I had a tabula with me. But this woman spoke clearly, in a strong voice and I had no difficulty in understanding her accent. I would not have expected this, from the remoteness of Morvern. And what ‘massacre’?

  ‘Then where is she now?’ Eld spoke with urgency.

  ‘The place where she always goes. Her home.’

  I felt Eld become still and tensed by my side, like a hunting dog. ‘And where might that be?’

  ‘In the heights. The oldest place of all Morvern.’

  ‘Can you take us there?’

  The woman snorted, in an are-you-joking? manner. ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Well then, can you tell us where it is?’

  ‘You can follow her yourself, vitki. Tell your ravens that it is in the crags of the far northern icefield, close to where the blight has crept. It is hidden, high in the rocks, in the volcano known as Therm. Tell your ravens to look for the heat traces, seeping through the rocks above it. You’ll find her there.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I told you. It is her home. Or as close as she seems to get to one.’

  ‘And how do you know this?’

  ‘They would not go near her, even when she first came here, a grown girl. Her foster mothers lived there.’

  ‘Her foster mothers?’

  ‘What, you thought the fenris raised her? Perhaps they would have been kinder kin.’

  ‘Are any of her foster mothers still alive?’

  ‘Oh no. The forest clan that the last one ravaged killed her, when they finally tracked her down. It was the talk of Morvern, but of course no one would speak to an outsider of it.’

  ‘Yet you are doing so now.’

  ‘I can see what you are. You are vitki, and her enemy – I can feel it on you. I also want her gone. This one is worse than the foster mothers, much worse. The forest clans have had their fill; they are preoccupied with fighting the fenris and the other beasts that have been driven north out of blighted Sull. But make no mistake, they want her gone, and so do I.’

  ‘All right,’ Eld said warily. ‘We’ll do as you suggest.’ I glanced at him, and when I glanced back again, the old woman was gone. Eld and I, keeping close together, made a quick search, but she was nowhere to be found: it was as though she had been snatched up into the trees.

  ‘Therm,’ Eld said bitterly, when we were once more sitting over the glow-pack trying to warm our numb hands. ‘If there’s a worse bit of Morvern, I don’t know of it.’

  ‘Could she have been lying? And what was that about a massacre?’

  ‘Very possibly. And there was a massacre here, a couple of years ago, but I don’t know anything more about it. I thought it was some clan thing. Anyway, I’m reluctant to go off on a wild goose chase on the word of a fucking Norn.’ Eld sounded more harried, and more human, than I had ever heard him. The vitki polish was beginning to wear thin.

  ‘So am I. I’m reluctant to be here, Eld. My nation’s at war; I should be back there.’ But Skadi was Idhunn’s murderer. That gave me a reason to go after her, but I still wasn’t sure about Eld’s own reasons.

  ‘But you’re not back there, are you? And there’s no way of getting back.’

  I sighed. ‘But we do have a choice, don’t we? Follow her advice or follow our own wits.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ Eld said gloomily, ‘that the two might very well prove to be one and the same.’

  By this time, the sky was glowing green with the light of approaching dawn.

  ‘You ought to get some sleep,’ I said to Eld.

  ‘I don’t need it.’

  ‘You’ll need to sleep some time, surely? You didn’t get much last night.’

  Eld rose abruptly and started packing up our scattering of possessions. What was I, I thought, his wife?

  ‘It’s all right,’ he insisted. ‘We are depending on one another’s fitness, mental and otherwise. It’s right for you to be concerned about mine. But I assure you, we’re trained in sleep deprivation. I’ve certainly had enough practice in it.’

  And with that, we set off. By unspoken consent, we were heading in the direction of Therm. It was still cold, with a bite and snap to the air, but I could smell spring on the wind and also, sometimes, the sea. I checked the map implant for the configuration of Morvern, but it was incomplete. When I mentioned this to Eld, he said, ‘Morvern is also called the Unknown Land, even in the rest of Darkland. There are legends of ships approaching charted bays, only to find impenetrable cliffs; hunters realizing to their doom that the land has shifted and changed around them.’

  ‘Are the legends true?’

  Eld hesitated. ‘I would like to say that they are not.’

  Certainly, I would not have been surprised to find that the forest was prone to shape-shifting. The grey needles of the trees drifted above us, merging with the rise of snow-clouds that massed far to the north. It was late in the afternoon when we saw our first fire.

  Fortunately, Eld and I were not close to the tree when it went up. It exploded in a hissing cascade of sparks, sending burning cones shooting out through the snowy branches like fireworks. Eld pulled me back as a blazing cone landed at our feet and smouldered to ash in the snow, releasing its cargo of hot seeds, which sizzled down through the snow to the earth beneath. The rest of the tree was soon consumed, branches withering to black twists in the intense heat, needles transforming into a welded grey mass, soft as wool hung on wire. Eld and I hurried on.

  ‘What makes them burn?’ The air was still bitter, snow still patching the ground. I could see how wood might spontaneously ignite in hot desert climes, but not here.

  ‘Legends say,’ Eld explained, with an arch look, ‘that these trees are linked to the fires of Hellheim and sometimes those fires blaze up within them and take their spirits down to the underworld. But that’s just a story. In fact, the fires are caused by some kind of internal photosynthetic reaction that is triggered by light and not heat – now that the days are getting longer, the trees are starting to respond. The seeds are activated by heat.’

  ‘So we’ll see more of this?’

  ‘Almost certainly.’

  Not reassuring, I thought. I could see one of us easily being felled by a burning branch: the tr
ees might look frail from a distance, but among them, you could see how substantial they were. The tree had gone up without warning; had barely registered in the seith before it was ablaze. And there was no way of avoiding them. We would just have to be extra careful, and hope.

  As we gradually trekked further south, the snow that covered the ground began to merge into ash, until we were ploughing through ankle-deep grey drifts. It was softer than snow, but clung to my boots so that I began to develop bears’ feet, shaggy with ash. Perhaps, I thought hopefully, it would at least serve to muffle my footsteps, assuming anyone was listening. I could still sense Skinning Knife, a thin, eerie presence hanging on the air, faint as the scent of the sea. But I began to feel a little easier, knowing that the trees through which we walked had already blazed up to release their seed load. Surely, I thought, they would not do so twice . . .

  We camped in another grove that night, one filled with the stench of fire, and I took the first watch. No one came out of the shadows to visit us this time, neither ally nor enemy. Eld sank into immediate sleep and remained unmoving until I woke him in time for his own shift. I did not expect to sleep, but when I next awoke, it was morning.

  NINETEEN