by Liz Williams
PLANET: MONDHILE (SEDRA)
The mountains for which I had always longed hung in the air beyond the moor, the foothills invisible in a sea of mist, the glacier summits floating like islands. Now, with memories of my time in the warband still echoing in my head, I set off in the direction of Moon Moor.
And it wasn’t just the mountains that were calling me. I wanted to see that strange underground place again. I wanted to find out if I’d just imagined it, under the enemy dreamcallers’ thrall, or whether it had been real – and if so, what it was. There were all manner of weird things in the north – ruined towers, ancient abandoned fortresses. But I’d never heard of anything like the underground chamber, with that shifting half-beast half-human figure, and I’d never heard of anything like the insect that had descended onto Moon Moor and stolen my sister, either. The Moor held mysteries and I was at the end of my life now, not far from dying. I didn’t think I had anything left to lose.
By the time I reached the old earth road that led to the Moor, it had started to snow. I’d taken warm clothes with me: the same thick cloak and stout gloves that I’d worn in the warband all those years ago. No point in getting rid of them if they were still good. The cloak was a little bloodstained, but I didn’t mind that, though I couldn’t remember now whether it had been my blood or someone else’s. So much war, resulting in nothing. But we’d all had a good enough time, even the dead, so I suppose that was what counted. There weren’t many of the warband left these days: most of them had died in other battles, or from fever, or had gone out into the world when their death drew near, just as I was doing. I counted myself lucky to have made it this far. So I pulled the stained cloak a little closer and trudged on through the snow.
It was only a light fall, this early in the winter, just enough to dust the scrub. The mountains were lost in it, but towards late afternoon, the clouds rolled back to reveal those floating peaks, still very far away. I looked back to where the sun was settling in a red smear over the coast, staining the snow with a bloody light. I started looking around me for shelter, reading the lines of the land, and finding it in a heap of rocks like a cairn, piled high above the path. The lack of a knife bothered me as I climbed the low rise of the slope: if this was a beast’s lair, visen, altru, perhaps even wild mur, or if a child was hiding out here, I’d be in trouble. But so be it, I had to remind myself. This was what I was here for: to meet my death, no matter what form it took.
But not today. There was no sign of any animal up at the cairn, no spoor, or footprint, or telltale smell. Altru stink: it’s something in the glands under their tails, and they say that people in the south keep tame altru and make perfumes of it. Still, I wouldn’t fancy smearing myself with something out of an animal’s arse. They’re a funny lot down there, though. If you keep yourself clean, what do you need perfumes for?
At the back of the cairn, facing the mountains, was a pile of rock with a hole in it, a good place to spend the night. I gathered ferns, dry and crackling now with the cold, dusted off the snow and made a bed. A few minutes after that, I had a fire lit. Then I found a heppet burrow, sat in front of it in silence for a while, and started drumming on the earth with my fingers. You have to get the pressure right, or they won’t fall for it. But I’d had a lot of practice over the years and soon enough the heppet stuck its head out of its burrow for a look, and that was when I collared it. It didn’t have time to be surprised. I broke its neck and skinned it with my claws, leaving the skin for those nightbirds that eat fur. The rest of the heppet went on a makeshift spit over the fire and it made a good supper, once I’d found some late herbs to go with it. I thought of eating it raw, but my teeth weren’t as good as they’d once been. Then I buried the bones and lay down, though it was a while before I slept. The clouds were still hanging over the mountain wall but directly overhead the sky was clear enough to see the winter stars: the Island, and Visen, and Cold Castle. I traced them all, and thought of my sister. I felt very close to her then, as though she was just around the corner of the rock, waiting for me. And then I slept. But I do not remember what I dreamed.
The snowfall had taken the edge off the air, but during the night another wall of freezing air rolled down from the mountains and touched the land with its breath. When I woke, the embers of the fire were grey and the edges of my cloak were stiff with frost. I got to my feet, with a bit of difficulty. Growing old is just the way of things but I’ve never stopped resenting the way it traps and ambushes you, so that what you never used to think about is now a constant pre-occupation. Maybe dying in battle is better after all.
And maybe not. The land was silent, locked in snow halfway down the slopes and frost below that, magnificent under a sharp blue sky. The mountains were very clear this morning: seeming so close that I felt I could reach out and touch them, run a fingernail down the ridge of a glacier and scrape out snow. And at the base of the frosty hills lay a black line, very well defined and rolling like a snake. That, maybe fifteen lai away from where I stood, was Moon Moor. Well named, for the moon Embar was hanging above it, its chewed face transparent enough to show the sky behind. The ghosts that lived on Embar would be sleeping now, although someone had once told me that it is always night on the moons, with no real sky.
I broke a thin rim of ice on a nearby pond, more a shallow puddle at the bottom of the cairn, and washed as best I could. There’s no excuse to go dirty to your death. Then I wrapped myself in the cloak again, ate some of the heppet and made a small parcel of the rest, and scuffed over the ashes of the fire. I did not want to leave tracks behind me, just in case – a legacy of warband days. It would have been a small luxury not to have bothered, I suppose, but old habits die hard. Then I set off, towards Moon Moor.
I’d hoped to keep the moor in sight all the way, though I don’t really know why this seemed so important to me. Perhaps I thought it might vanish, shimmer into mirage if I took my eyes off it. But the best path led me down into a dip, following a crashing stream, through groves of satinspine and cruthe. The black bark was peeling into strips now, and a few red leaves still hung from the branches like banners. But most of them were gone, and the summer vegetation – the ferns and dream-plants – had rotted too, sinking down into the earth for their winter sleep. I’d heard – another family story – that the plants appeared in Eresthahan, growing out of the sky in the land of the dead as though it lay beneath our feet instead of the place-between. But the thought made me smile, all the same. I even looked up, to see if roots and coiled shoots were hanging down from the clouds, but the sky was empty, bright and bare even of the promise of snow. I must be growing senile, I thought, and I walked briskly on. Towards noon the woods thinned out and I took a beast track up through the trees to a ridge. I was at the edge of the Lakeland country now: pools and ponds were strung like a skein of beads below the ridge, all the way to the edge of Moon Moor. I dropped down to them once, to pick up a bird whose feet had been frozen into the ice. A kindness to kill it, and I did so. That took care of my night meal, and then I made my way back up to the ridge and on. As the glaciers started to shine in the sun’s dying light, I reached the edges of the moor, in sight of the place where the warband had been ambushed.
It had been long ago. Maybe forty years, or more: I’d been a young woman then. Good days. I liked to think that I could still see the scorch marks on the scrub, still smell the smoky, dream-laden air. But now the moor was peaceful and overgrown, the ridge far smaller than I remembered it, lost in growing bushes. Yet I could still feel the dead beneath the earth, their bones pulling and tugging at me like the tide, and I could hear their faint angry voices as they lamented their death. Their spirits had perhaps not gone to Eresthahan, but had become part of the substance of the moor, just as the pregnant warrior with the shattered jaw had done. I remembered her well, her fierce broken grin, her exultation in the latest killing. Maybe my own dreamcalling had summoned her up but I hoped I would meet her again, that she would be the one to greet me at my death and t
ake me down to hell. She reminded me of me.
I pushed my way between the bushes, looking for the entrance to the cave. Nothing. There was no sign of any opening, not even a hole small enough for a heppet. When I had finished scrabbling, and emerged scratched from the thorny scrub, the sun was low on the horizon and I knew that I had to find somewhere to make a shelter for the night. In the end, it was the back of the ridge itself, the spine of rocks. I lit a fire and cooked the bird, wondering whether it had been a dream only, or whether there really was another world beneath my feet.
*
And then the dream came back. I woke, or thought I had, and it was night. The moon Elowen hung in a sword’s curve where the sun had been, and Embar was still at its height, sailing the summit of the sky. The darkness was dusted with stars and the cold roared into my throat when I sat up and took a breath.
At first I didn’t know what had woken me up, and then I heard it. Voices. People were speaking, in hushed tones that occasionally rose like the sound of the sea. I thought for a moment that they’d seen me, were discussing me, but then I realized that the voices were coming from the other side of the ridge.
I might be old, but I could still move quietly. I crept up over the top of the ridge, relying on soldiers’ tricks of stealthy movement. They came back quickly enough. When I reached the summit of the ridge and could look through the rocks, I did so.
There were four of them. They were standing in Elowen’s light. They were human, at first sight, and then I saw that this was not true, not quite. They wore clothes – long tunics like robes, and boots made out of leather strapped with thongs, like the people who live in the deep forest. But I could see their faces quite clearly in the moons’ light and their faces were all wrong. Not muzzles, but too long for human faces, with eyes that were either too big or too small. Their jaws looked mangled, as if their owners had met with an accident. They had patchy, mangy hair, and fingers that were little more than stubs. I had never seen anything like them before and I did not want to see them now. The teeth that I could glimpse through their mangled jaws were sharp. I could not understand them – it was no language that I’d ever heard – and they smelled rank, an abnormal smell, like sickness, which drifted through the clean scents of scrub and cold earth.
I did not fancy challenging them, or making them aware of my existence. But perhaps they were aware of it already; had been watching me from secret places as I made my way across the Moor. I didn’t like that thought. And it raised the question of how long they had been here.
I began to draw back among the rocks, but as I did so, they vanished. It made me blink. They had simply gone, as if they were shadows. I did not want to investigate the place where they’d stood: that would wait for morning and daylight, which in any case was not now far away. I went back to the remains of my fire and huddled wakeful until dawn.
TWENTY
PLANET: MUSPELL (VALI)
By mid-morning the trees were starting to grow thinner, and the ash that coated the ground was now banked in great drifts against the curves of the land. Eld frowned when he saw this, but said nothing, and I remembered the woman in Hetla telling me of Sull Forest and its blight when I was in the capital on a previous journey. This, perhaps, was the real start of it and when we came out of the trees and found ourselves on a long, empty slope of hillside, with the blackened stumps of trees across the distant lee, I knew that I was right.
Eld stood unmoving for a long time, staring across the slope. At last he said, ‘It’s worse than I had imagined. Worse than I was shown.’
‘You’ve seen images of this?’
He nodded. ‘At the top levels of the vitki high command. And now I am finally telling you something that is not common knowledge.’
‘Eld – what caused this destruction? That woman I met in Hetla said that it was the war effort. What did she mean?’
‘The common people were not told, Vali. Everyone in Morvern knew about this, but only the vitki and the upper echelons of the valkyrie were informed. I don’t know aboutthe Morrighanu. The vitki knew, of course, because we caused it.’ He glanced uneasily around him, as though the wind was listening. ‘It was a weapon. Something new, something prototypical.’
‘But this is a huge tract of land, Eld,’ I said. I could see the wasted hillsides rolling as far as the horizon. A thought crept into my head and nestled there like a worm. ‘This wasn’t nuclear, was it?’
‘You know that’s illegal, planet-side,’ Eld said, perfunctorily, as though paying lip service to some impossible ideal. ‘But no, in fact it wasn’t nuclear. It was something else, developed in a vitki lab.’
‘Then what was it?’
‘I don’t know.’
I stared at him. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’
‘No one knows except the people who engineered this thing, and activated it.’ Eld grimaced, as if embarrassed. ‘I told you about vitki arrogance, vitki short-sightedness. This is probably the best example of that.’
‘“Probably”?’
Eld pointed to the distant wastes. ‘The lab was over there, somewhere. The epicentre was at some point in that direction, according to the map implant.’
‘It blew up?’
‘It vanished. And it seems to have dragged the rest of the land with it, like water down a plughole.’ Eld took a handful of his own cloak, pulling it taut and poking a finger in the centre of the stretched fur. ‘Just like that.’
I looked down again at the ashy ground and now that he had shown me this, I could see the long striations in the soil, running north to south.
‘But of course, no one knows what they were working on, or what actually happened, because there’s no one left. One minute the lab was transmitting data back to Hetla, the next – it was gone, blinked off the screen. And when my colleagues investigated, they found that it had taken a large chunk of Sull with it, as well.’
‘But you said “vanished”. Surely an explosion would have caused the same effect on a monitor?’
‘It could have done, yes, but later the high command received raven reports which showed the lab at the time of the catastrophe. It simply blinked out of existence and a firestorm raged through the forest. Some ravens are partially satellite-generated, so the data stream remained constant. If there had been any recording devices actually here, they would have been incinerated.’
‘And you really have no idea what they were working on?’
‘No. I suspect that other people in the high command do, but the trouble with the vitki hierarchy is that it is highly cellular and compartmentalized. Our right hand doesn’t know what our left hand is doing, and that’s the way we prefer it.’ Eld spoke sourly; I did not think it was a policy with which he agreed. ‘And if someone knows, they’re not telling.’
‘What was a vitki lab even doing out here? I thought you said that Morvern is a law unto itself. The Morrighanu are a different sect. Why would it be safe to plant one of your operational facilities in the middle of what amounts to hostile territory?’
‘It’s not that simple. There are connections, negotiations, informal treaties. The existence of the lab would have been agreed with the Morrighanu, at least.’
‘Do you have any idea whether it’s even safe to walk through this region now? Might there be some kind of . . . taint, like radiation?’
‘Vali, I have no idea. But if we are to get to Therm, then the swiftest way is through the blight itself.’ Eld and I stared at one another for a moment. ‘But it does have one advantage,’ he added, with a smile. ‘No one from Morvern is likely to come in here after us.’
‘Very well,’ I said at last. ‘Then we’d better start walking.’
The only pity was that Eld was wrong.
It was only towards evening that I began to realize how extensive the blight had been. Sull stretched ahead and behind us, a wasteland of shattered tree stumps, black and glossy as if vitrified. When I tentatively touched one, it felt as hard as stone and was icy even thr
ough my glove. It reminded me of the cliffs that surrounded Darkland’s shores. Eld watched me sidelong.
‘Best left alone,’ was all that he said.
The rest of Sull Forest had seemed barren enough, but this area looked absolutely lifeless, without even a wind stirring. The ash still covered the ground, but there were many places in which it had worn away and there was no earth beneath it, only something hard and, occasionally, polished, as if the whole region had been carefully paved. It was often slippery underfoot and I began to be grateful for the ash. When I reached out with the senses of the seith, I felt nothing: an absence of life, of presence, as though this land was no more than a stage set, an unreal shell, concealing nothing. And the air itself smelled strange, hollow, as sterile as a hospital wing.
Eld and I again made camp, again kept watch. Nothing came to disturb us, but I did not sleep well this time. And when it was my turn to take watch, I felt increasingly as though I was merely playing some kind of role, detached from the world. I did not want to tell Eld how much this alarmed me, but next morning I could tell that he, too, was spooked. I noticed that we were keeping close together, that he kept darting glances at me from those pale eyes as if to reassure himself that I was still there.
‘How far is it to Therm from here?’ I asked him, towards noon.
‘About fifty miles. I’d estimate that we have another couple of days in the blight.’
‘How are you doing for rations?’
‘I have enough. Although I must say that I’m growing very tired of strip-food and pills.’
‘So am I. If we could only hunt . . .’
‘Ah, yes. I sometimes forget that you are a huntress, Vali.’ I wasn’t sure whether it was admiration or amusement that I glimpsed in those colourless eyes.
I chose to laugh. ‘Used to be.’
‘But still are in a way, of course. Only these days you hunt your fellow killers, rather than animals. You don’t eat much meat, do you?’
