by Liz Williams
‘I have no intention of becoming a prisoner again, Glyn Apt. If we are to go with you, we work together, and this is to be made clear to your high command.’ What was left of it.
‘They will not accept you,’ Glyn Apt stated, very cold. ‘You are Skald. An enemy.’
‘This is not a time to start making parochial distinctions,’ Eld said. ‘She is working with me, and I am vitki. Do you not think we should be thinking more widely, about a common enemy?’
‘Parochial?’ Glyn Apt spat. ‘You expect me to set aside a thousand years of hate, against all policy of my high command?’
‘Yet you defended me against your own commander,’ I said. ‘What was all that about?’
‘I was prepared to defend you,’ Glyn Apt said, tight-lipped. ‘You are a woman, with reason for vengeance. But I would have let her kill the vitki.’
‘That’s not a reason. Glyn Apt, if I need to do so, I will contact the high command of both vitki and valkyrie and ask them to put pressure on your organization in this matter.’
‘You think they’ll respond?’ Glyn Apt said. ‘I’ve had time to do a little more research into this quest of yours. It isn’t even approved by your own command, is it? This foreign enemy was the only person you could talk into accompanying you. And I know that you have been outcast from the vitki ranks as a result of your vendetta against the project of Skinning Knife.’
‘Eld? Is that true?’ I said into the sudden silence.
‘Yes, it’s true,’ he answered after a moment. ‘But you should know that I believed that Skadi killed Idhunn. I don’t think you have much doubt about that yourself, do you?’
I gave a slight nod. I didn’t want Glyn Apt to know that I’d actually spoken with Idhunn, or what was left of her in the Morrighanu information system. I hadn’t had time to investigate her coal of information, either, and that frustrated me. So what, then, was Eld’s story?
Both Glyn Apt and Eld were on their feet now, facing one another. I did not fancy Glyn Apt’s chances against the vitki. I moved so that I was an equal distance from both of them.
‘Glyn Apt,’ Eld demanded, ‘be reasonable. Whatever you think of me, whatever denial you might be engaged in, at least let me talk to what’s left of your high command.’
‘They will not listen to you,’ Glyn Apt said, but I had already made my choice. I had the Morrighanu on her knees with her own knife at her throat before anyone else could move.
‘Give him the hand-held. Put him through, or I’ll kill you.’
After a moment, Glyn Apt complied, as I watched her hands carefully. Eld took the communicator aside and spoke into it, out of earshot. I gripped Glyn Apt, keeping the knife steady. The other women watched me, with wary goat-eyes.
After a few minutes of conversation, Eld came back to our tense little group and held the communicator to Glyn Apt’s ear. She listened, with every evidence of distaste. At last she said, ‘Very well, then. It seems you’ve convinced someone, at least. We are all to go back to High Command, and discuss the situation.’
‘Good,’ Eld said. ‘Vali, you can let her go now.’
I did so, pushing the Morrighanu so that she sprawled across the still-frosty ground. It gave me a little satisfaction, at that. She huddled together with the other women, speaking in low, fluid voices, occasionally casting unreadable glances in the direction of Eld and myself. A short time after that, the silver-and-black wing blasted down out of the sky.
Whatever my feelings about the Morrighanu, it was good to be out of the clearing and away from the vanished broch. Glyn Apt’s colleagues remained below. I saw the little figure of the goat sledge, tiny as a toy, retreating through the forest below and then it was gone.
The sense of the broch still lingered around me and inside my head, as though the edges of the seith had been withered and blasted by fire. When Glyn Apt had stalked off to speak to the pilot of the wing, I put aside what remained of my Skald pride and spoke of this to Eld, who just gave a grim nod.
‘I don’t know what we’re doing here, Eld. We seem to be thrashing about in utter confusion, whilst our enemy walks in and out as she pleases and leaves havoc in her wake.’
‘Perhaps that’s the point. Weaken us with a sense of our own powerlessness until she chooses to strike. She seems to like to play.’
‘Well, it’s working.’ I stared out of the porthole of the wing as we swept low over the forest: a grey-and-white waste, touched with columns of flame. I could almost smell the burning. Spring, it seemed, was coming fast, in fire.
Skinning Knife had saved our lives. A few moments later, we’d have been shot. It could not be coincidence that she’d arrived when she did. Would she have killed us too, if we hadn’t escaped? There was a game being played; I could feel pieces of puzzle and I didn’t understand them. I wasn’t ready to share these speculations with Eld, but he was watching me, clearly wondering what I was thinking. So I said, ‘Which is worse, Eld? Something that kills for the love of it, like some beasts do, or something that schemes and plans and wants to see what will happen?’
‘Assuming they’re even separate. It’s a mistake to think that hot and cold cannot exist in the same being – a passion for pain combined with clinical precision. I’ve seen that in Skadi, Vali. So have you.’
At that point, Glyn Apt returned, looking even more sour than usual.
‘We’ll soon be making the descent to High Command,’ Glyn Apt said. The pilot is expecting turbulence. You’d be advised to strap yourselves in.’ She looked as though she would much rather not have told us that part.
Coming down to the High Command was not a journey I like to remember. The wing rocked, buffeted by the winds that tore through the gaps in the mountain wall. I tried the map implant, but could not determine whether this was the wall of rock down which Eld and I had descended only a few days ago. Like all the terrain in Darkland, it was black and glassy: I looked out of the porthole of the wing to see a snaggled line of teeth, cresting up from the snow below like the spine of a dragon. Shortly after that, a blizzard whirled up and the desolate scene disappeared as completely as the broch, behind a wall of white. The wing hung for a long time, riding the wind, veering from side to side as though we rode the waves. Eventually the pilot must have got clearance or spotted a gap, because the wing surged forward and the tumult outside was abruptly curtailed by darkness.
‘Is this it?’ I said, into the quiet. For all I knew, we’d suddenly died.
‘It is.’ Glyn Apt released the door catch and the door fell open into a blast of air from the stabilizer jets. We followed her out into a hangar, carved from the rock of the mountain.
‘They’re waiting for us now,’ Glyn Apt explained. Her manner had changed: she seemed nervous, almost eager. I wondered whether she had experienced a change of heart in bringing us here, or whether she was planning some further trap.
She led us along a narrow passage and through a set of doors, into a room that immediately reminded me of the council chamber of the Skald. It had the same high-arched roof, spanned by ribs of stone, and even a round table; and it felt as though it had been carved in very ancient days, perhaps when the ancestors of the Darklanders had first come here. The room was, like the Morrighanu themselves, familiar, and therefore disturbing in its familiarity.
Around the table sat a number of people, perhaps twenty in all. It was impossible not to notice the ebb and flow of tension in the room, twinging across the edges of the seith, and when I studied those who were seated there, I understood why. They were not all Morrighanu. At least a third of them were men, and therefore presumably vitki, and three were clearly valkyrie, as chilly as their vitki counterparts. Their blank silver stares rested upon me as I followed Glyn Apt through the door, lingered without interest, until they fastened their gazes upon Eld and did not let go. Eld showed no sign that anything unusual had occurred. With Glyn Apt escorting us, we took two seats on the farthest side of the room. Thorn was the first to speak.
‘Am I to
take it, Heldur, that you’ve actually decided you have something to say to me after all?’ He addressed a man sitting opposite us: elderly, perhaps in his late seventies, with a shaven head and the rapacious face of a gannet.
‘It seems you may not have been entirely mistaken in your conclusions, Eld. The rescindment of your position still stands, however, until we have additional evidence.’ I had been expecting a harsh caw of a voice, but the man spoke like an academic, in a thin, reedy tone. A single feather fluttered down from the ceiling and he caught it in his palm, closing a wrinkled fist over it. When he opened his hand once more, the feather had gone. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see word has finally come.’
‘It makes no difference,’ one of the other councillor women said. She, too, was old: completely bald, with dead black eyes. ‘Our weapon is gone. What do you have to say about that?’
‘I have nothing to say,’ the old vitki answered, and added, ‘Madam, I think you may mistake me for someone who cares.’
At once the Morrighanu were on their feet, but the elderly woman waved them impatiently down again. ‘Sit. You cannot expect sympathy. I would not extend it, were the circumstances reversed – oh, I was forgetting. Of course, they have been so.’
‘Indeed,’ the old vitki said. ‘Our laboratory.’
Glyn Apt’s mouth quirked in a humourless smile. ‘At least the vanishing of our little broch did not take half the forest with it.’ Same phenomenon? I wondered.
‘And so,’ the old vitki continued, turning to Glyn Apt, ‘you were the one who followed the quarry to the Rock, were you not?’ I sat up a little straighter at that. Had the quarry been myself? Or Skinning Knife?
‘That is so,’ Glyn Apt said.
‘And found another prize instead,’ the vitki murmured. His gaze passed over me to Eld, as if I was not only of no consequence, but had not even been seen. If that was the way they planned to treat an enemy agent, I thought, it was fine by me. I was still hoping to hear something about the progress of the war.
The valkyrie stared blankly ahead, as ever. The Morrighanu continued to look fierce and angry. I decided that I had little useful to contribute. Eld had brought me here; he could handle the difficult questions. But his next comment surprised me.
‘So,’ he said. ‘What else has vanished?’
‘It is not “what else”,’ the old vitki said, ‘but “who”. People are vanishing.’
‘People are being killed. By the girl you championed.’
The old vitki ignored Eld’s remark. I realized, with a sick sense of dismay, that the old man was now staring directly at me, and saw me all too well.
‘Skald girl,’ he now said, soft-voiced. ‘You know, do you not? You spoke with the avatar of your leader?’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ My voice seemed to ring out very loudly in this tall stone room, and echo.
‘Don’t you? The woman who called herself Idhunn, who years ago belonged to the Morrighanu, whose mother went to another world and stole someone away?’
‘What are you talking about? Which other world?’
‘A world named Mondhile. A place you know as well as anyone here.’
I kept silent. Frey’s ripped spirit seemed to hover about the chamber, as suddenly as if summoned.
One of the valkyries finally opened her mouth. She spoke hollowly, as if from the bottom of a well. ‘She knows it. She killed your kinsman there.’
I started to say something, but Eld put out a hand. The valkyrie continued, ‘And was it not the Skald who ordered us to be sent to the cliffs of glass, who exiled us, prohibited our return so that we had to eke out an existence on the glacier and in the forest?’
One of the vitki gave a harsh laugh and said, ‘Don’t you think we ought to be thanking them for that?’
‘Never mind what the Morrighanu girl is doing. If she wants to kill, then let her. She will only weed out the weak. Is not our war against the Skald itself?’ the valkyrie said. Her silver eyes turned to me, and again it was as though she did not see me, but was looking through me. I remembered an old story of the Reach: that a dog with silver eyes can see the wind. I wondered what she was really looking at. But above all this was the thought: the Skald exiled the vitki, and those who became the valkyrie. Had the original valkyrie, perhaps, even been members of the Skald itself? It was an extremely disquieting thought, that our own might have turned against themselves and been sent away. But Idhunn too had said as much, when I spoke with her avatar. And what happens once, can happen again: the tritest lesson of history.
‘Did you know this?’ Eld asked.
‘No, and I do not know whether it is true.’
The valkyrie stood, bristling. ‘Of course it is true. Every child knows it. We were exiled by witches.’
‘What is taught is not always what is true. I’d have thought you would have known that, living here.’
‘This is pointless,’ one of the other vitki said. ‘Glyn Apt has looked into her head. We know what she knows of Mondhile. That is the matter at hand; everything else is irrelevant.’
‘Trial by combat,’ the valkyrie declared. She either wasn’t listening to the vitki or didn’t care: she had her own agenda.
‘She’s my associate,’ Eld said. ‘I won’t allow that.’
‘I should like to see you stop me,’ the valkyrie replied. She put her head on one side, regarding me coldly, like a hawk. ‘Shall we test it, you against me? The soft path against the path of iron?’
‘Look,’ Eld said wearily. ‘Internecine squabbling is all very well, but it won’t get us anywhere.’
The old vitki was staring at Eld, with sparkling malice. ‘When we last spoke, you suggested that the war has been a mistake. Because that could be construed as treason, you know.’
‘I did not speak of the war, as you should remember,’ said Eld. ‘I spoke of common cause with the Reach over this Morrighanu woman. Nations may have such, even when they are at loggerheads. It is simplistic to think otherwise.’
‘Are you calling me a fool?’ the old man asked, as if he was hoping that the answer would be ‘yes’, but Eld merely smiled and did not answer. ‘But still,’ the old vitki went on, ‘the woman from the Skald will be permitted to stay, at least, for a while, before the expedition sets off.’
‘Expedition?’ Eld asked, neutrally.
‘The Skald girl has experience of Mondhile.’ The vitki looked at me, with seeming blandness.
‘What?’ I said. ‘You want me to go back to Mondhile? Why?’
Back to what passed for the graves of Frey and Gemaley, and a feral people.
‘Not alone. Eld will go with you. And Glyn Apt.’
None of us, I thought, could look very pleased at the prospect of that.
*
We left the next morning, on a little Morrighanu space craft. Muspell does not have a large space fleet; the war at present was confined to planet-side, apart from a few skirmishes. Eld and I were confined separately – I don’t know what they thought we might try, but seizure of the ship was probably in their minds. My cell had a portal screen and I was able to watch my world fall away, serene and clouded, the northern seas already more free of ice than they had been when I came back home, with spring on the way and war in its wake.
When Muspell was no more than a marbled sphere, the door opened and Glyn Apt came in.
‘Mondhile,’ she said.
I gave her a hostile glare. ‘You know everything I know.’ But there was that coal of information that Idhunn had given me, information that was buried so deeply it would be difficult to access . . . I tried to keep the unease from my face.
‘No,’ Glyn Apt replied. ‘In fact, I don’t.’ The data began to run across her face with increased density and speed, until her features became obscured behind its moving blur. ‘When you went there, in search of your faithless Frey, what did you know about it?’
‘All I know came from a report that had been sent into space a generation ago, broadcast but
incomplete. An anthropologist, who went to Mondhile with a Gaian religious mission and never made it off-planet.’
‘And people who enter a state called the bloodmind. You mentioned that, during interrogation. Interesting.’
‘Yes, a fascinating spectacle, seeing humans and animals tear one another to pieces. Made my week.’
‘I would have liked to have seen that,’ Glyn Apt said, as though agreeing.
‘I’m sure you’d have been right at home.’ Perhaps that was unfair, but I didn’t care. I looked out of the viewport. Muspell was invisible now against the starfield, Grainne still hot and yellow-gold. I stared at my sun until it faded. Glyn Apt, meanwhile, was staring at me: I could feel her gaze on the edges of the seith, wrinkling it like fire.
‘You’re going back,’ she said. I couldn’t tell what she meant.
‘I’ve no choice,’ I retorted.
‘Yet you’re going.’
‘Obviously.’
‘I have never been,’ Glyn Apt admitted, sitting companionably down on the edge of the bed. I didn’t see her as being one for girlish chats. The dataflow had stopped now, apart from the occasional tick of information, and without it, she again looked older, more human. I wondered what her history was, what it had been like for her as a part of the Morrighanu.
And it seemed a banal thing for her to say. ‘Of course you’ve never been. It was virtually uncharted until Frey got his hands on that anthropologist’s report.’
‘Is that what he told you?’ she asked.
‘Well . . . not in so many words. It’s what we surmised.’
‘The original data on Mondhile were held by the Morrighanu. One of our ships picked up the transmission. We first went there fifty years ago.’
‘The Morrighanu went there? Why?’
‘The original intention was to set up a colony. We were persecuted at the time – vitki and our kind do not always get along – and we wanted another option. We looked at Nhem, and did not like what we saw: at the time, the vitki were in contact with the then-Hierolath. We did not like the idea that what had been done to the women of Nhem might be done to ourselves. So we looked at other worlds.’
