by Liz Williams
‘What are you seeing, Glyn Apt?’ Eld said, once I’d explained. It was a moment before she answered, then she said, ‘That battle we saw. It’s as though this moor is haunted. I can see people – and more than that, I can feel them. It’s as though their lives and their concerns have become packed into a fraction of a second, and downloaded into my mind. DNA alone would not account for that.’
No surprise if the moor was haunted, I thought. Such a dark, stark place: the black bushes and blacker soil, line upon line of it, undulating towards the mountains. Thunderheads were building up, hiding the glaciated summits in their anvil mass, and I could smell a storm on the wind as it lifted the hair at my neck, making my scars and the socket of my eye ache and twitch as if electric. I shook off the sudden prickle at my nape and said, ‘Mondhile’s people may not have much in the way of technology, but their world does, as you yourself said. The old energy lines, the network set up by the original colonists . . . Who knows what that’s become? Or what kind of information might be conveyed through it?’
‘That’s a good point,’ Eld said. ‘We’ve no idea what kind of tech was really installed here, first off.’
‘They weren’t like Gaians,’ Glyn Apt explained. She tapped the tip of her gun impatiently against her boot. ‘They didn’t believe in manicuring planets, any more than we do. They thought you should fit the inhabitants to the world. That’s why so many of the lifeforms here are genetically engineered.’
‘Not so different to the vitki,’ I remarked. ‘Or your lot,’ – this was to Glyn Apt.
Eld snorted. ‘That didn’t have an ecological basis. My ancestors just wanted to experiment.’
‘We had purpose.’ Glyn Apt spoke coldly.
I thought of the selk, and of Skinning Knife. The Morrighanu had purported to want to help the women of Nhem, but was that really true? A tangled web of motivations and agendas, it seemed to me. But I wasn’t all that different, and neither was the Skald.
‘Look,’ Eld said, sharply. We followed the direction of his pointing finger, to an outcrop of rock. Three people were standing on it: two women and a man. They were Mondhaith. The seith prickled around me but even if it hadn’t, their long limed hair and tattooed faces would have shown me that they were feir warriors – that and the long bows they carried. They were upwind of me and I could smell them, too: a sharp, animal astringency. One of them raised her bow.
‘More hallucinations?’ Eld started to say, but before he could finish I’d grasped him by the arm and dragged him down into the scrub. An arrow hissed over my head and buried itself in the black earth. Glyn Apt’s weapon was up and firing; a bolt sending warning splinters from the rocky outcrop. The feir vanished as swiftly as they had come, melting down into the moor. The arrow remained, quivering.
‘I couldn’t feel them,’ Eld said. He looked most put out; I suppose the episode had offended his vitki pride.
‘Neither could I,’ I said. ‘I’m just not taking any chances.’
‘They showed up on the dataflow,’ Glyn Apt said. She was checking her weapon. ‘That’s how I knew they weren’t a hallucination.’
‘I don’t suppose this person we’ve come to find was among them?’
‘No. Besides, they were too young. This woman is old. But she came this way. There are traces of her here, and recent ones, too.’
We went on. But I did not think we had seen the last of the feir, and we were right. All of us remained wary, but Glyn Apt needed to concentrate on the business of tracking our quarry and so the burden of look-outs fell to Eld and me. No one said much. The bleakness of the moor was starting to have its effect on me: the silence, broken only by an occasional bird rocketing up from the scrub, the long distances ending in the mountain wall, shimmering with cold . . . Perhaps if I had been a different kind of person it might have depressed me, but as it was, the harshness of this place lifted my spirits. Unlike Morvern, there was no human heaviness hanging over it, despite the still-present threat of the feir and what I knew of the Mondhaith. The land felt untouched, untainted, even though I was aware of some of what the early colonists had done.
We were at the very edges of the moor now and had been walking all day, with only a break for a ration pack. Glyn Apt seemed to have withdrawn even further into herself; Eld appeared merely sombre. I wondered what Glyn Apt would decide to do if we didn’t find our quarry: camp out, or ask the ship to fly over? But that would depend on the suitability of the terrain to provide a landing place, and on whether the Morrighanu wanted to risk scaring away our target, if she was indeed so near. But the sun was sinking down into a red mist at the horizon and I did not like the idea of camping out all night. We’d seen three of the feir, but what if there were more? They’d made their intentions plain enough. I hoped Glyn Apt’s weapon had given them second thoughts, but then thought wasn’t the feir’s strong point. Remembering the people under the bloodmind in Ruan’s town, it seemed to be a state that consumed normal caution like brushfire. And for all I knew, there were enough of them for a few to be expendable . . .
We walked on. The sun fell, its lower rim touching the horizon and smearing out into a crimson pool. I had expected the feir to come after the true darkness fell, but they were upon us just as the moor sank into a hazy grey twilight, swarming out of the shadows like moths and all the more frightening for their silence. There were perhaps a dozen of them. Eld killed two of them immediately, bolts striking easily through their leather harnesses and into the sinew and bone beneath. One was a man, one a woman, but they died as silently as they had attacked, teeth bared, seeming almost not to notice as their spirits fled. Perhaps those spirits had already gone on ahead, fleeing the animal flesh. I killed another, a woman, and saw in her face the echoes and traces of Gemaley, whom I had not been able to kill. I don’t believe in scapegoats, but maybe the world does, providing me with someone on whom to take out my rage and hate. But I’d never met this woman before and she died quickly. It did not make me feel better.
Beside me, Glyn Apt gave a sharp exclamation. One of the arrows had nicked her throat. Blood spilled through the data stream and I saw the data rearrange itself around it, flowing over the red thread. The Morrighanu cursed and swatted at her throat, but it wasn’t a deep wound and in moments the one who had shot her was dead.
And then the feir stopped. They had been rushing towards us; now they halted in their tracks and turned. The wildness in their faces was replaced by a peaceful blankness. I saw the berserker rage of the bloodmind drain out of them, the light of consciousness come back behind their eyes. And that light was filled with fear. They melted away into the rocks, still moving, without a sound.
Cautiously Eld stood, ignoring Glyn Apt’s warning hiss.
‘Who are you?’ he breathed. I stood in turn, and saw through the gathering dusk that we were no longer alone. Someone was walking where the feir had been.
At first I thought it would be another of the Mondhaith – who else would it be, after all? – but then I saw that it wasn’t human even to the extent that they were. It was tall, dressed in robes that looked as though they had been woven out of grass, or moss, and its face was elongated into a long muzzle. The eyes were red, like a mur’s eyes. It reminded me of those ancient gods of Earth, part human and part animal, but the feral quality of the mur, that predatory ferocity kept in difficult check, was missing. When I sensed it with the seith, it reminded me of the selk: something sad and wrong, that should not be. The tabula hummed as it spoke, feeding information into my map implant that told me it was speaking in Khalti, the local Mondhaith tongue.
‘You are the women from outside the world. Why have you come back? You told us that you could do nothing for us,’ she addressed Glyn Apt.
Beside me, the Morrighanu’s face was wary. She dabbed absently at the blood on her neck and then she said, ‘I don’t know who you think we are. I suppose you saw the ship, back there upon the moor. It is not the same ship that first came here, and we are not the same people.’
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The being radiated uncertainty. It continued, ‘You came here last three hundred moons ago – the small moon’s turn. When we were young.’ From the use of the pronoun, I couldn’t tell whether it was referring to itself in the plural, or others like itself. ‘We told you how we had been driven away by the settled people. You said that you had made us, beneath the earth, and when we asked you to take us with you, you refused. You said that we must stay here.’
‘It was not I who told you these things,’ Glyn Apt said harshly. Guilt? I didn’t know whether the Morrighanu even entertained such a concept.
‘But you are of the same people,’ the being said.
‘Yes.’
‘How did you control the feir warriors?’ Eld interrupted.
‘I did not. They are afraid of us. They think we are from hell.’
I nudged Glyn Apt. ‘Do you know who or what that person is?’ I whispered.
‘An earlier experiment,’ the Morrighanu said. She spoke very low, but the being heard her.
‘You made us, and you left us,’ it said. It sounded like the selk, too, remote and sorrowful, with no real anger at what had been done, but only bewilderment.
‘A child was taken from here, many years ago,’ Glyn Apt said. ‘We’re looking for a woman who is of her family. We believe she is here, on this moor, now. She would be old. Have you seen her?’
‘I have seen her,’ the being replied. ‘I saw her when she was a child, with the child who was taken, and again, years later when she was grown.’ Eld glanced at me at that, and I could see why. How old was this being? ‘She is here now, and has been with us for moons in the still place, but perhaps she is dead. She was ill when she walked the moor and that was in the winter.’
‘We need to find her,’ Glyn Apt said. ‘Can you help us? What is the still place?’
The being looked at her. ‘Why should I help you?’ it asked.
‘You spoke of the settled people, who drove you from the towns. And the feir, who are afraid of you. The daughter of the child who was taken was an experiment that succeeded on one level – she has many abilities – but failed on another, because she is mad. I would ask you if you wish to see more people hurt by this project, which I grant you, has been misguided from start to finish.’
The being looked at her. ‘It is too late,’ it said. ‘I do not care.’ And then it was gone, between one blink of an eye and another, into the twilight land.
Glyn Apt summoned the ship after that. None of us wanted to be alone with the feir, and though no one said so, I could not help wondering if it was the being itself that made us more afraid.
I slept in the same small cabin and now it felt like sanctuary rather than cell. But I dreamed that I woke, and went to the door of the ship, and looked out. The moor had gone, and in its place was a sea, heaving and dark and cold, a sea of Muspell rather than Mondhile. A selk was coming through the water, arrowing and sleek, and it spoke to me. It said, ‘Our kin is right. It is too late. No one cares for us and so we, in turn, have ceased to care.’ Before I could ask it any questions, it was gone beneath the waves and then the sea was gone, too, with nothing more than ice between my feet and the distant horizon.
In the morning I asked Glyn Apt if she knew of any more experiments. The selk had disturbed me; the being on the moor had disturbed me more. Three very different worlds and yet with threads all in common: the Mondhaith themselves, engineered long ago, if reports were to be believed, to fit their environment. Crossed with predators, perhaps the ancestors of the mur. I remembered the glint of a wicked intelligence within a blood-red eye. Sentient beasts and unsentient humans; the legacy of a common heritage that said why not? Why should we all be one manner of thing, one species? Mixing and matching, splicing and shaping . . . And what was intelligence, after all, but an accident of humankind?
I found such philosophical questions difficult. Ultimately, Glyn Apt and I were the same, I thought, and so perhaps was Skinning Knife herself. Just give us something to kill.
And as if on cue, Glyn Apt came in then, to tell me that her team had found the traces of Skadi’s relative.
She was underground. We thought at first that she must have gone there to die. The signal trace came from beneath a ridge of rock at the heart of the moor; a high spine of bare granite-like substance. The Morrighanu and I brushed aside scrub and eventually we found the entrance to a cavern. Both of us paused at that point.
‘She might be injured,’ Glyn Apt said. ‘On top of that, there’s the feir and that thing we spoke with. I don’t like the idea of meeting any of them down there in the dark. And I don’t know what it meant by “the still place”.’
I agreed. With Eld keeping watch at the entrance, the Morrighanu and I switched on a torch and made our way down into the cavern.
It was Morrighanu technology. I knew that from the glimpses I got of Glyn Apt’s face noting the curvature of walls and ceilings, and flickering with recognition at the runic inscriptions carved into the doorways. The dataflow was busy, numbers and letters tumbling over her skin in the reflected light from the torch, presumably transmitting data back to the ship. At last she said softly, ‘It’s hard to know how far this was authorized.’
I stared at her. ‘You think it wasn’t?’
The Morrighanu shrugged. ‘Hard to say. We’re an organization of sects, whatever people like to pretend. We’re as divided as the vitki.’
Or the Skald, I thought but did not say. ‘Could a rogue sect have set up something like this? Maybe they wanted to establish a stronghold, even if a colony was out of the question.’
‘This?’ Glyn Apt waved a hand. ‘This is just a cave, nano-lined with blast-film. It’s nothing special. But what’s in it might be. And here on this little world, well away from Muspell, well away from the main star stations, where no one will ever find it . . . what were they trying so hard to hide, I wonder?’
‘Their genetic project,’ I ventured. ‘To keep it out of the reach of the vitki?’
‘Or out of the reach of their sisters,’ Glyn Apt said, and marched on behind the beam of the torch.
As we went, I saw what she had meant by the blast-film shell. Further into the cavern, the walls crawled with technology, sheets of data sliding endlessly across the film like the data display across Glyn Apt’s skin. And I was able to interpret none of it.
Neither, from her uneasy glances, was the Morrighanu commander. ‘I can’t believe this is still running,’ she said.
‘What’s powering it? Is it solar?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘And is it actually doing anything?’
‘I don’t know.’ But at that point, Glyn Apt leaped back and cannoned into me. We both fell against the wall and I felt, rather than saw, the data stream pause and glide across my own skin, like a swarm of insects.
‘Glyn Apt, what—’
‘Sorry.’ As far as I could remember, it was the first time that the Morrighanu had offered a word of apology, however perfunctory. ‘I thought it was real.’
I looked over her shoulder and saw an image, a holographic rotation: the being we had met, or something very similar, changing from child to adult, withering and dying, an infant once more.
‘A display,’ I said. ‘What they were trying to achieve?’
‘Perhaps they kept it as a warning,’ Glyn Apt murmured. ‘They hoped to come back, knew that the feir were afraid, held the image in place to prevent anyone from coming in here.’
A nasty thought struck me. ‘Unless the reason the feir are so afraid is because this image has another function.’ I could see Glyn Apt taking this on board.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Let’s see.’ Taking a knife from her belt, she threw it towards the image, into the shimmering field that surrounded it. I think we were both expecting something dramatic to happen, but instead the weapon simply clattered to the floor and the image continued to rotate in unceasing transformation.
‘It won’t hurt you,’ someone said from
beyond the next doorway. The tabula hummed in translation and I saw the animal-faced being, or another very like it. ‘There is nothing here that can hurt . . . no longer.’
‘No longer?’ Glyn Apt echoed.
‘Feir came, and feir died. I and my siblings came and went as we pleased, the place is safe for us. But others – no. It is the one place where we can be safe.’
‘So if the feir died,’ Glyn Apt said, weighing consequences, ‘how is it that Vali and myself are still standing here?’
‘Things changed here, over the years. The weapon that was is a weapon no longer. One by one, things have stopped working – the machine that fed us as children has been silent for many years; the heat has failed also.’
So Glyn Apt had not been entirely correct. The Morrighanu outpost was powering down, bit by bit. Perhaps the display did not take up a great deal of power, and so had remained. But I still did not like this talk of weapons.
‘She’s here,’ Glyn Apt said, getting back to the matter in hand. ‘The woman, the relative of the child who was taken.’
‘Yes, she is here, in the still place. She is ill, on the verge of death. We cannot help her. You might.’
I turned to Glyn Apt. ‘You’re carrying a med kit, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, but since we don’t know what’s wrong with her . . .’
‘Then best find out.’
Curiosity was burning me as we stepped through the doorway, and in its wake came memories and fear. It wasn’t a rational thing, for I knew this woman was old and ill, but when was the legacy of the past ever rational?
We walked up to what was evidently some kind of stasis chamber. It hummed faintly, and I could see the gleam and glisten of a life-support web. Lucky for her that this hadn’t powered down, too.
And what came over me when I set eyes on her was simply and only pity.
Clearly, she had once been a tall, strong woman. Even curled as she was about herself, the ropy muscle and taut sinew was still visible in her bared arms. Her flesh had shrunk back from the bones of her face, but you could still see the beauty that had been in it, the fierce cold kind of beauty that seemed commonplace on Mondhile, looks to match the landscape. Her eyes were fanned with lines: she had more humour than Gemaley, then, but a sense of humour had not been Gemaley’s strong point, and if Skadi had one, then it was twisted in the extreme.
