Bloodmind

by Liz Williams

  ‘Why is she here?’ a woman said, frowning at me. At first I thought she was as old as I: her head almost completely bald, apart from a few wisps of white hair. But her face was a young woman’s, with ancient eyes set in stretched skin. She looked as though her face had been taken apart and then put back together again; there was something not right about it.

  ‘Commander Glyn Apt’s lieutenant asked for her to be brought. It was thought she might calm the prisoner down.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ the old woman went on. ‘I think it’s already too late for that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘Let me see her!’

  The old woman shrugged. ‘Very well. If you want to.’

  The shrieking had stopped now, and in its place was a waiting silence. I went to the door and looked through the grille. Khainet was there, crouched in a corner of the room. Her long hair had come loose and it was all over the place as though she’d been running her hands through it. She was chewing a strand of it, and she looked up and her gaze met mine.

  There was no one there, no recognition. Her gaze slid away from me, roving over the room. She looked like a trapped animal. As I watched, she opened her mouth and howled. I thought of her mother, kept in a cage. I thought of her sister, of Skinning Knife.

  ‘Yes,’ the old woman said at my shoulder. Her eyes sparkled with something: I would have said malice, except that there was no real enjoyment in it. She seemed even less human at that point than the girl in the locked room. ‘You see it, don’t you? She has gone to join her family.’

  I turned on her. ‘What did you do to her?’

  ‘Why no more than give her back her heritage. Flicked a switch, you might say. A pity. She doesn’t have the strength to carry it. It seems we can turn her on but not off. But maybe she’ll come out of it of her own accord.’ A pause. ‘She asked about her sister, when we took her to the lab, wanted to know if she could meet her. And now she has. In a way.’

  ‘What you people do,’ I managed to say through my fury, ‘it’s monstrous. You play with other people’s lives.’

  ‘That’s true,’ the old woman said, ‘and if we hadn’t, you would not be standing here as a thinking thing, would you? You would still be an un-named sheep, serving a man in Iznar.’ She raised a hand and a bird grew out of her fingers, white as fine sand. She threw it into the air and it flew down the corridor and away. I was taken back to my cell after that. I did not see Khainet again, and they would not talk to me about her, even though I asked each time the guard came by.

  THIRTY-NINE

  PLANET: MUSPELL (VALI)

  Sedra met me on the deck, chafing gloveless hands against the early morning cold. Glyn Apt had offered her a pair of gloves but she said it made you soft. I didn’t feel like competing; I was bundled up in a slickskin over a woollen fisherman’s jersey. Sometimes you don’t need high tech, true enough.

  ‘This is a good land,’ Sedra said.

  I smiled. ‘There’s nothing here.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. You have too many settlements on this world. I’ve been looking at maps.’

  ‘It’s sparsely populated in comparison to most.’ I stared out over Therm. The volcano’s peak was pallid in the dawn light. Loki’s ragged face hung over its shoulder, the moon seeming closer than it should. There was a last drift of electric glow across the icefield, casting shadowy reflections, and then the red sun was coming up once more.

  ‘Today we go to Therm,’ Sedra said.

  ‘Or as close as we can get. We’re going by boat. Do you think you—’

  ‘I’ll make it,’ She interrupted. Then her head went up. ‘There’s life here.’

  ‘Life? Well, this ship has a large crew . . .’ But then I saw what she meant, the first few heads bobbing in the water. The selk had found us.

  Sedra was curious, and, I think, charmed. She wanted to talk to the selk, but I asked her to hold back. I persuaded Glyn Apt to bring me a wire and I slid down it, to hover over the oily churn of the sea.

  ‘Are you who I spoke with before?’ I called. ‘Are you the ones who helped me?’

  They came closer, sinewing through the icy water. But it was with an animal’s curiosity. There was no flicker in their eyes, only the spark of light from the red sun. It was spring now and their sentience had fled with the winter. There was no sense to be got out of them: the chasm had opened up once more. I signalled to Glyn Apt to draw me up on the wire and found Eld waiting on the deck.

  ‘I thought it was probably too late in the year, that they’d changed and lost their sentience,’ he said. ‘Pity They know the waters. They might have been able to help.’

  ‘They might have seen it as nothing more than a human affair,’ Glyn Apt said. ‘And even so, they aided Vali before because they thought she might help them. But if they had their awareness now, they would see that she is in no position to do so.’

  That made me wonder how the captive selk were faring, in the tanks beyond Hetla.

  ‘They are like us, those water creatures,’ Sedra said. She’d been paying close attention. ‘Like my people.’

  ‘But not so fierce,’ I said, teasing.

  Sedra grinned. ‘How do you know what they get up to when the humans’ backs are turned?’

  True, I thought. I had no way of knowing what their lives were really like.

  Glyn Apt had arranged for two canoes: one for Eld and myself, and the other for herself and Sedra. Interesting that she’d trust an almost-alien warrior over one of her own countrymen, but I couldn’t be surprised. Then it was back down the wire for all of us. I was worried about Sedra – it was only a few days, after all, since she’d been at death’s door– but I needn’t have been. The situation seemed to be giving her a new lease of life. She went fast down the wire and slid into the canoe. Glyn Apt and Eld took the front oars; the canoes had a form of wing power, but it wasn’t enough for these narrow channels. Manual dexterity was necessary.

  I looked back once, to see the warship swinging around on the morning tide. I wondered if I’d see it again. Ever since the fenris attack, something in me believed that I would die out on the ice: the place I found the most beautiful, and feared the most. Had Sedra felt the same about the moor? I wanted to ask her, but the canoes were pulling too far apart.

  Eld and I fell into a rowing rhythm, almost hypnotic. The morning wore on. Soon, the spring sun was casting brilliance across the icefield and I had to turn the goggles up to maximum to shut out the glare. Even so, it made for slow going. Sometimes the cone of Therm seemed very distant, at other times, disconcertingly close. I couldn’t seem to get a grip on its location, although when I checked the map implant, the volcano lay in a steadily decreasing handful of miles to the northwest. Wings fluttered around Eld’s head and a moment later, the vitki’s voice said through the map implant: ‘We should reach the edge of Therm’s glacier in another three hours.’

  Close, then. And would she be waiting for us? Could she see us coming, two little dots snaking through the maze of channels that ran between the floes? Did she have plans? I’d long since ceased to think of her as any kind of human, I realized. Perhaps, remembering that glimpse of her in her woodland lodge outside Hetla, polishing the skull in her lap, I never really had. She was like Gemaley, her distant kin, assuming fairy-story proportions in my head, the wicked witch in her castle of ice, the spirit-woman with the skinning knife. That castle wasn’t very far away now, just a part of my own world, and she was one woman against four trained fighters. But I thought of the dreamcallers, of the feir, and my heart leaped and poked in my chest.

  Early afternoon, and the red sun was at its peak with the snow bloody across the icefield. Therm, too, was stained red and when, in a moment of cloud shadow, I turned the goggles down to see what it was really like, I saw that the whole of the western sky was a delicate pink, fading to a deeper crimson at the horizon’s edge. It looked barely real, not like my world at all. Therm was huge, and now that we had come further I coul
d confirm with my own sight that it was not one volcano at all, but part of the great arctic ring of fire. The peaks marched into the distance, to be lost against the rosy sky.

  We halted at the edge of a slab of ice, sheltering under its lea just in case, to eat some of Glyn Apt’s rations. The Morrighanu seemed to rely heavily on dried fish, which suited me. Sedra made no comment on the food: I suppose she was used to eating whatever she could forage. And this wasn’t such a barren land after all. Down in the clear waters around the ice, I saw shoals of many different kinds of fish gliding through the green depths. The floes, breaking up as they were, seemed too fragile to support fenris and that improved my mood as well. By the time we set out again, I was almost cheerful.

  Later in the afternoon, we reached the edges of the glacier of Therm. No mistaking the closeness of the volcano from here: it was immense, dominating the landscape. Now that we were so close to it, I could see how irregular it actually was, not really a simple inverted cone at all but a towering summit of shards and pinnacles of rock. I thought of that fairytale ice castle all over again. We left the canoes tethered to a spire and assessed our options.

  According to Glyn Apt, who of all of us knew this land the best even though she had never been to Therm itself, the old volcano was riddled with caves.

  ‘I don’t know what kind of set-up she could have in there. Depends how much technology she’s appropriated.’

  ‘Or whether she’s bothered with it,’ Sedra said. There was an odd note in her voice, almost of pride, and I gave her a sharp look. Something about her tone worried me, but I told myself it was natural enough. Even given the nature of Skadi, she and Sedra were both Mondhaith – of sorts, at least – and we were not. People clustered in packs. Especially when they weren’t really human at all.

  Between them, Glyn Apt and Eld made the decision that it was too late in the day to strike out across the glacier. There was perhaps a mile or so before the slopes of the volcano really began. Even though it would be late by the time we reached them, the arctic sun stayed only just below the horizon at this point in the year and we’d have enough light to travel by. But we were also tired and would need to rest, and Glyn Apt did not like the notion of being closer to Skadi’s lair when we slept. She did not say, but I knew what she was thinking, that Skadi had managed to cast her hallucinatory lure over an entire garrison of Morrighanu warriors. We would need Sedra alert and awake.

  So we made camp at the edge of the ice. Sedra and I would sleep for the first part of the evening. We held to the pretence that Skadi was more likely to attack at night, but I think it was just that this reflected our own vulnerabilities. After all, she’d never waited for darkness before. She didn’t need to.

  Sedra, as far as I could tell, fell asleep within minutes, but I lay wakeful. Glyn Apt and Eld occasionally conversed in low voices and once a grey bird shot out across the ice, flying low towards the water. When it reached the sea it split into two birds, black raven and white, and each flew off in a different direction. I assumed this indicated some kind of joint report and I felt an odd, faint sensation that I eventually identified as jealousy. I rolled over in my sleeping pack and looked at Sedra. The sky had darkened to green and the old woman’s peaceful profile lay against the clear sky. She did not even seem to be breathing, but then I saw her breast stir. Her hawk face had smoothed a little in sleep; I could see the beautiful girl she had once been, saw, too, the resemblance to her niece. I’d rather not have noticed that. I closed my eyes, expecting the horror of being on the ice to overwhelm me.

  And perhaps it did.

  I thought I was dreaming. I remember falling asleep, and I think I recall Eld bending over me to tell me that it was up to Sedra and myself to keep watch. I even remember turning to Sedra and asking her whether Mondhile had the veils of light that were now sweeping across the northern sky. But that is all. The next thing I recall, I was out on the glacier.

  I turned back, but there was no sign of the others, nor of our canoes. Therm still towered in the near distance, but the land looked different, somehow: grander, and even more ice-locked. Looking out over the sea, there was less water, and the bergs clustered closer together, floating whales of ice. I could hear something singing and knew it was the selk. A great gladness rose in me and I went in search of them, stumbling out over the ice. It was hard going at first, but then it became easier until I was gliding across the thin covering of snow towards the shattering sweetness of the song. The sun had long since risen and the sky was again that hazy rose.

  The snowstorm came up out of nowhere. One moment the sky was perfectly clear, and then next, I was staggering through a full blizzard. Icy needles of snow hissed against my face but they did not hurt and I was not cold. I knew that this was a very bad thing, that it meant that I was close to death, but I could not bring myself to care. Anyway, I could see a light through the snow and that indicated safety. I went towards it and saw that instead of one light, there were two, shining in beacon brilliance through the falling whiteness. And even when I realized that they were not lights after all, but eyes, I still did not care and walked on. This is how it should have been that last time, the time of my ingsgaldir, I told myself. Either the fenris should have killed me or I should have killed it. Now, I’d have another chance.

  It was very close now. I saw the round cat ears, tufted with fur, the long canine face and the glistening teeth. Its fur was banded black and white, shading into grey beneath. It had a bright, quick light in its golden gaze: it knew who I was and why I had come, and when I stopped a few feet away from it, I saw that it was not an animal at all, but a woman.

  Skadi was no longer wearing her armour. She was dressed all in furs, with small neat boots and gloves made of something soft that I thought might be catskin. Her hair was loose and she was smiling, but the golden eyes were the same. I had not thought her eyes were golden.

  ‘It was you,’ I said. ‘It was you, out on the ice that time. You tried to kill me.’ But that beast was dead: it had been shot. They could not be the same and she shook her head.

  ‘Not I. But not a beast, either. Someone you never knew. A vitki, brother of Frey Gundersson.’

  ‘Frey had a brother?’

  ‘I can’t remember his name.’ She looked dismissive. ‘The purpose of your ingsgaldir wasn’t to permit you to control animals, as Frey tried to convince you – more mind games. It was to see through illusions to what lies beneath. Yes, pack control is part of being a vitki, but only a part.’ She came close to me. I could smell her and she was rank and musky. Woodsmoke clung to her like a pall. She leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. Her lips were icy.

  ‘Congratulations. You’ve passed. It’s a good thing to achieve, before you die.’

  And that’s when I saw the blade.

  The witch of the north, who pares you, frees you from your frail unnecessary flesh. The woman who, with her skinning knife, flays you and strips you down to the whistling bone, the hollows of your body, so that the north wind whips through. The woman who liberates your spirit, allowing it to wander the earth while she and her beasts feed on your discarded, rotting meat. That’s who Skadi was. I’d been right. She wasn’t human.

  Everything slowed. The blade drifted down through the air like the arctic lights, floating towards my throat. I felt its breath before I felt its bite – but the bite never came. Years ago, the fenris had exploded in a burst of bone and brain, as my rescuer fired a bolt into its head. Now, it was as though the whole world exploded: the ice shattering, the sky breaking apart and the stars cascading down. It was only for a moment, as Sedra threw me backwards and my head hit an outcrop of icy rock. I heard Eld and Glyn Apt, shouting out, and I sat up.

  I was still alive. So were Eld and Glyn Apt. But Sedra and Skadi were gone.

  FORTY

  PLANET: MUSPELL (SEDRA)

  We watched them searching for us, from the vantage point of a nearby crag. They could not see us, of course, and my niece’s magical birds
made sure that we would not show up on any of their mechanical devices. I’d have gone down and reassured them, but I wanted to keep an eye on my niece.

  Skadi was sulking. But she wasn’t in the bloodmind that the feir warriors love so much; she was perfectly self-aware.

  ‘What did you think you were doing?’ I asked. ‘Were you going to kill us all?’

  ‘Maybe not you,’ she muttered. ‘But the rest – why not? They want to kill me.’

  ‘Niece, you are a liability.’

  ‘Why don’t they just leave me alone?’ She sounded like a young girl, newly returned from the world. ‘That’s how this started. I did what they told me to do, in Sull Forest. I killed who they told me to kill. I linked my mind to their machinery; I folded the forest.’ That made me prick up my ears, but she went on, ‘But then they began asking me questions – how did I kill so well? How is it that I can cast such illusions, when even the foremost vitki struggled to do so?’

  ‘It’s because of what you are,’ I said.

  ‘I know that now. But they didn’t bother to tell me, so how was I to know?’ She paused. ‘Her lover – the one called Frey – he understood me. He took me to a hunting range in Morvern, set me against the captives. I killed as many as I could find and he was very pleased. But then the vitki insisted that I came back and be tested.’

  ‘I can see how you would not want that.’ I looked at her. ‘So what do you want, niece?’

  She hesitated. ‘My name is Skadi, not “niece”.’

  ‘A good name,’ I said, though it seemed outlandish for this almost-Mondhaith girl to bear a foreign word, and it grated on me to be speaking to her through the medium of the box, that she did not understand her own tongue. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It means “Shadow”. And you ask me what I want. I want to be myself, nothing more. To do what I am called to do.’ She reached out and grasped me by the arm. It was a warrior’s grip. ‘And you can help me, can’t you? You can show me what kind of thing I’m supposed to be.’