Bloodmind

by Liz Williams

  But there was a way out: a little tunnel winding through the wall. I didn’t know what it had been, but suspected that it was part of the old irrigation system: it led down under the wall and there was a channel running through its smooth stone floor. It had small hinged valves that perhaps used to control the flow but which were now broken. Water still seeped through it, during the time of rains. Like now. I’d wondered before whether the valves had been shattered by the sudden force of too much water.

  I gave Khainet a hand down the broken steps that led to the channel and then followed her myself. More earthen coolness, a damp breath from bricks that had long ago been smoothed into mud. It was not very far through the wall, and minutes later we were coming out into the sunlight. The edge of the desert lay before us, the rocks sharp and red in the early evening light, casting hard shadows. I glanced back up at the wall. No one. Khainet was already hastening into the limited shelter of the rocks and I was close behind her. The rocks were too sharp and scorching to walk on and we made our way between them instead, up through a deep gulley that gave a bit of shade. We climbed for a while, already drenched in sweat, and sharing one of the water gourds between us in silence. I wondered if Khainet regretted what she had done. I couldn’t allow myself regret, not now, but it was hard. I looked back once and the colony lay far enough below us that I could see over the eastern wall. The bell tower rose in its spire above the city, with the drift of efreets circling around it. Beyond the city, along the sea horizon, the storm clouds were building again and that made me nervous. I knew how fast the storms could come in and this, I’d learned from years at the desert’s edge, was exactly the kind of place in which one might expect flash floods. But we had no choice, we had to stay in the gulley: the rock walls were too sheer to climb up. If a flood came, better hope we’d be drowned, rather than swept back down to be hammered against the mass of the eastern wall. We would be broken like twigs.

  I didn’t know this side of the city well, but Seliye and I had come up here once, exploring. We’d filled the tank with fruit oil and driven the land-car up the gulley, during one of the long dry seasons with the seedpods exploding and crackling in the heat and sending showers of seeds down into the gulley. We’d followed it up as far as a series of piled-up rocks – whether eaten by the wind or put there by the goddess folk, I did not know – and then the land flattened out into a level place, pockmarked with scratches and potholes. If we could make it as far as the level place before the rain came, we’d have a good chance of making it further up into the mountains. And we could refill the water gourds, too.

  That was my hope. But as the evening wore on, it became clear to me that the storm was coming in too fast. Above the gulley, the sky was dark green, and the first crack of lightning, a vivid white, made us both jump. Moments after that, the first fat drops of rain spattered into the dust of the gulley.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of the channel!’ I shouted.

  Khainet turned a panicking face towards me. ‘It’s too high.’

  ‘If the gulley floods . . .’

  But we didn’t have a choice. We began to creep up the side of the gulley, searching for tiny handholds in the smooth rock. Even in spite of her recent illness, Khainet made better progress than I did: younger, and with a stronger grip, she had an advantage. But it was hard going for both of us. The rain was sliding down in torrents and apart from the little handholds and juts, the rock was becoming slippery. Khainet stopped, clinging to the cliff, and squinted back to see if she could give me any help, but I urged her on.

  ‘Don’t stop! I’ll be right behind you.’ This was not true – I was several feet below her – but I could hear the noise I’d feared so much: a steady, thundering roar above the sound of the rain. A flood was coming down the gulley.

  ‘Hunan!’ The panicked look was back on Khainet’s face and I was sure it was on mine, too.

  ‘Keep climbing!’

  ‘Hunan, I can hear something!’

  I didn’t answer her. The boiling roar was coming closer and I didn’t want to spend any spare energy on speech. I struggled upward, following the route that Khainet had taken. But I was too slow and too late. I caught a glimpse of a white race of spray as the flood rounded the bend of the gulley and then it hit. It knocked the breath out of me and swept me away. I had one last image of Khainet’s screaming face and then I was whirled back down the gulley, as though I was of no more consequence than one of the little black seeds.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  PLANET: MUSPELL (VALI)

  ‘You,’ Glyn Apt said, ‘are becoming a nuisance.’

  ‘Sorry. Shouldn’t have taken me prisoner, should you? Since I’m proving such a trial.’ I sat down. Eld had already been taken out.

  Glyn Apt gave me a baleful look and gestured to the Morrighanu who were flocking in behind her. These were younger women, not the goat-girls, with a fanatical fire in their eyes, and I could see the glisten and glitter of weapon enhancements through the skin of their hands and forearms. Birds played in a constant fluttering flock about their sleek heads.

  They said nothing, only motioned for me to leave the cell and accompany them. Glyn Apt fell in behind, probably to keep an eye on me. We went down a strange labyrinth of passageways: nothing like the black-fern corridors, or the functional buildings of the vitki that I’d seen in Hetla. This place was like some ancient broch on Earth, dating from the earliest days of human history. It had been cut out of the turf, rough walls still showing an edge of withered grass, and there was a strong earthy smell to the place that I had not noticed on the previous evening. It suggested that the place where I had been brought in, and the cell itself, were some kind of front structure, leading underground, but I could not be sure. Eventually we came to a different kind of room, a stone chamber that I recognized from the tombs that dotted the islands of the Reach. Our ancestors had built them, during the less civilized time of Muspell’s history when the culture had started looking back to the ancient ways of Earth. It hadn’t lasted, but the tombs remained. This place was, perhaps, two thousand years old or more. It stank of death. I felt the seith flinch around me, curling inward to provide a protective sheath about my body. At the far end of the chamber was a low stone table. Glyn Apt sat down at it and started accessing a very anachronistic data display.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked. Glyn Apt ignored me, head bent over the messages scrolling across the stone surface of the table. The air was thick with birds and the data stream was beginning to make me feel claustrophobic.

  ‘Bring her a stool,’ Glyn Apt said, without looking up. One of the Morrighanu hastened out, to return minutes later with a small stone bench. I took a seat before the table. Glyn Apt looked up and treated me to a long stare.

  ‘You and Thorn Eld. What an unlikely pair you make.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘How exactly did you arrange your escape from the Rock?’

  I decided to tell the truth. More or less. ‘I didn’t. It was the selk’s idea. They took me to Eld.’

  ‘The selk took you?’ Glyn Apt looked blankly confused and I couldn’t blame her. ‘Why?’

  ‘On Eld’s instructions. Because of the woman known as Skinning Knife.’

  I scored a direct hit with that. I could see it in her face.

  ‘You know about her?’

  ‘I know a lot less than you do, probably.’ I didn’t wait for her to drag it out of me, this time. I simply told her.

  ‘. . . and so Eld and I are in search of her.’

  Glyn Apt’s stare deepened. ‘You know only what Eld’s told you, then? Surely you don’t trust a vitki?’

  I was on the verge of saying, ‘I trust this one,’ and then realized that it would make me sound like an idiot. Indeed, in thinking it, I was an idiot. I should not have trusted Eld any more than I trusted the Morrighanu themselves.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I trust him more than I trust you.’

  ‘You think Skadi killed your leader?’

&nbs
p; ‘Yes. Don’t you? I think you believe the same, Glyn Apt. I think you believed that back on the Rock. Was it the Skald you wanted? Or were you after Skadi?’

  Glyn Apt smiled. ‘You’re quite a one for speculations, Vali. Perhaps you’d prefer to share them with my commanding officer?’

  Rhi Glyn Apt’s CO arrived towards the end of that afternoon, and when they led me from the cell and back into the interrogation chamber, I realized how wrong I had been to characterize Glyn Apt as being technologically enhanced. Glyn Apt’s commander bristled with machinery. I could see it gliding beneath the skin of her face and hands, always moving, shifting so that the very bones over which it lay seemed to move also, reconfiguring her angular features to such an extent that it was difficult to look at her. She wore the black body-armour of the Morrighanu, little more than a sleek toughened slickskin which would, I knew from experience, prove hard as steel. The inlaid birds had been holographically set, so that they glided across her shoulders in endless flight, and in addition to this vanity, her hair had been replaced by dark pinions. Her eyes were the silver orbs that I remembered from the valkyrie and the birds that swarmed around her head were both black and white, and closer to the vitki ravens than the birds of Rhi Glyn Apt and the others. She was not introduced to me by name and indeed, she was so far from human that I wondered whether she even had one.

  ‘You,’ she said to me, with so vitriolic a hate that I took a step back and cannoned into Eld, who was being brought back into the room. The remark had been addressed to him.

  ‘Commander,’ Eld said. ‘I thought we’d run into one another again.’

  ‘The secret stealer.’ Her voice had a curiously metallic timbre beneath its harshness. ‘The vitki Thorn Eld. You’ll be a useful bargaining chip.’

  Eld laughed. ‘I doubt it. I’m probably as expendable as everyone else these days. The vitki have their minds on other things.’

  ‘Things that we were promised.’

  ‘What, like those rich lands of the Reach? You were never promised that, Commander. You asked for too much.’

  ‘Not more than is rightfully ours.’

  ‘There’s some contention about that. You wanted everything, as I recall, behaved as though it was no more than your due. Morvern lives in the past. It’s time to stop fighting old battles.’

  ‘There is no such thing,’ the Morrighanu commander said, ‘as an old battle.’ She stared at Eld for a moment, then turned abruptly to Glyn Apt. ‘You said they claim to be pursuing one known to us.’

  ‘One of them has a right to do so.’ That was a surprise to me. I’d had no idea that Glyn Apt might be predisposed to fight my corner, but perhaps I’d been wrong.

  But the commander clearly didn’t think much of Glyn Apt’s moral opinions. ‘Take them outside. Shoot them, now that we have all the information we are likely to get.’

  ‘Commander—’ Glyn Apt cried.

  ‘I don’t want passengers, Glyn Apt.’

  ‘But—’

  Eld and I exchanged glances, but there was nothing we could do. I could feel Eld tense up, waiting for his moment. The commander made a quick gesture. ‘Outside. Do it now.’

  But then there was a rushing in the air, as though the walls had fallen away, and something was among us. I glimpsed a white face and hollow gaze, the flicker of talons. Suddenly, a Morrighanu lay twitching in spasm on the floor and the commander was rushing forward, talons bared.

  ‘Come on,’ Eld said. He broke away from the paralysed guard and seized me by the arm. With Glyn Apt, we raced down the passages.

  ‘The exit’s this way,’ Glyn Apt shouted while elbowing her way past me, sprinting down the turf passage to a glimmer of daylight. We came out on top of a mound, like one of the barrows that one found in very primitive parts of the Reach. Anguish blasted up from below, shrivelling the seith like an uprush of heat.

  Glyn Apt jumped down from the barrow and raced into the trees. Eld and I, slipping a little on icy ground, followed. By the time we stopped running, it was almost dark.

  The place to which Glyn Apt had brought us was another broch, a stone ruin rising up through the trees like a broken tooth. It was squat, no more than fifteen feet in height, and empty. A trackway led past it, the snow gleaming beneath the moon’s growing light. As we stepped into the broch I felt a shiver at the edges of the seith, as though someone had drawn a finger down my spine.

  ‘Why here?’ Eld asked, glancing uneasily around him. ‘I think this is too exposed.’

  ‘You’d prefer the woods?’ Glyn Apt replied. ‘This isn’t Hetla, you know. This is Morvern’s heart and the woods are full of beasts. But they won’t come anywhere near human habitation and this is close enough to that. Those who built it made sure that it had its own protection. You can feel it, Skald girl, can’t you? And so can you, vitki.’

  ‘I can feel it,’ I said. A strange sensation of encasement, security, enclosure, as though we had been sealed off from the outside world.

  ‘It won’t hide us from Skinning Knife, though,’ Eld said.

  ‘That thing was her?’ Even in the faint light, I saw the flash of panic in Glyn Apt’s eyes. She stood, chafing her hands. She had not had time to snatch up a coat and the slickskin armour did not seem to be keeping her warm. I reached out with the seith and confirmed her panic.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ Glyn Apt said, glaring at me.

  ‘Sorry.’ I couldn’t sound all that sincere. I knew what it was like to have people poking and prodding at me. Glyn Apt took a fistful of her hair, which had come loose, and knotted it out of the way.

  Suddenly Eld’s head snapped up. ‘Someone’s coming.’

  I could hear a curious hissing noise, nothing like that made by a wing.

  ‘Down!’ Glyn Apt dragged me back against the wall.

  A light appeared through the trees. As we watched through a crack in the ruin’s wall, I heard the skittering of hooves on packed snow and moments later a sled glided past. It was a long, lightweight thing, drawn by a team of creatures that resembled large goats: I saw their black curled coats, their slitted yellow eyes, the spiralling horns. On the sled crouched three Morrighanu, huddled under cloaks and clutching bolt-rifles. As they neared the ruin, the goats tried to pull back, tossing their heads in panic, but the woman at the front of the sled whipped them on. A minute later and the sled whisked out of sight.

  ‘They’re not looking for us,’ Eld said.

  ‘No. They are fleeing. But the question is, is there anything in pursuit?’

  ‘Look,’ Eld said. There’s no point in panicking. If Skinning Knife wants us, believe me, she will find us.’

  ‘Should you call your headquarters?’ I said to Glyn Apt. ‘Find out what’s going on?’ I almost said: if there’s anyone still alive.

  ‘What do you think I’ve been doing?’ the Morrighanu retorted. ‘Ever since we were forced to flee, I have been attempting to contact them, on the concealed channel. There is nothing but static. My birds can’t get through.’

  ‘All right,’ Eld said, wearily. ‘We may as well try to get some rest. Vali and I will sit watch.’

  ‘I should prefer it if we took double shifts,’ Glyn Apt said. ‘I do not require sleep at the moment.’

  ‘I don’t want to have to watch out for Skinning Knife, wild animals and you,’ I said.

  Eld reached out and touched the Morrighanu lightly on the arm. I heard a faint hiss. A fleeting glimpse of surprise crossed Glyn Apt’s face.

  ‘Neither do I,’ Eld said, as the Morrighanu slumped forward. We put her against the wall, and I searched her as we did so. There was a serviceable knife attached to her belt, and I took it, making sure that she carried no other weapons. Unfortunately, she did not. The haste with which we had left the first broch had led to that. And only then did I sleep.

  When I woke, Glyn Apt was still lying sprawled against the wall of the ruin, quite still. Whatever Eld had dosed her with must have been powerful, unless he had repeated the dose when I’d be
en sleeping. I rolled over and stood up, with the stiff ache of cold in my bones. There was no sign of Eld, but when I walked cautiously to the edge of the ruin, I saw that the goat sled was back. Thorn was talking to the Morrighanu who rode it. The goats stamped in the early morning cold, their cloven hooves making patterns on the frosty ground. A crimson sun was rising up through the trees, dispelling the mist.

  ‘Eld?’ I said. I walked out to join him and the Morrighanu.

  ‘Vali, there you are. My associate,’ he said to the Morrighanu who was standing on the runners of the sled. She looked at me curiously and I found myself staring back. She, and the other two women on the sled, looked like the goat women I had seen before. Each had a cloud of fleecy black hair, bound back with leather thongs, and yellow eyes with a horizontal pupil. Their faces were long and narrow. I did not like to think about any possible genetic connections, and I had to work hard to stop my gaze from straying back and forth between the women and the goats. Eld gave no sign that he saw this confusion.

  ‘These women are on their way back to the broch,’ he said.

  ‘Is that wise?’

  ‘We must find out what has happened to our sisters,’ one of the goat women said.

  ‘By finding out, you may die,’ Eld remarked.

  ‘The shadow-woman has left,’ one of the women said, in a surprisingly deep, resonant voice.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because there is one survivor, the daughter of one of the warriors. She hid in a thorn thicket. She saw the attacker, the shadow-woman, leave. She said that the shadow-woman was covered in blood and licking her lips. She stepped into the air and disappeared. The child remained hidden, not daring to go back in. I have spoken with her this morning by bird; she is still there.’