Bloodmind (11 page)

There were people living in it, of course. I didn’t want to inhabit a ruin. But soon I had the place to myself, and I settled down for a month or so to get the lodge into shape. I enjoyed
decorating. I went out on little expeditions to get what I needed and soon the place was looking like it had in my mind’s eye. The bones chimed when the wind blew and the sound made me feel sad
and filled with longing, as though for somewhere that I’d never been.

I still think of it. I’ll go back there one day, when I’ve done what I need to do, or perhaps it would be more realistic to re-create it somewhere else. Maybe then, it will be time
to settle down.

I don’t know what woke me. I came up out of sleep, or thought I had, with a strong, unquenchable conviction that there was someone in the room besides Eld and
myself. I could be dreaming, I thought, but it seemed too real: the musty smell of old blankets and the distant hum of a generator somewhere didn’t feel dream-like to me. Willing myself to
lie still, I sent out the senses of the seith and encountered nothing, but the feeling lingered on. Eld still lay in an unmoving huddle.

I pictured someone tracking our thoughts, sensing our trail – this was paranoia, but I could not seem to shake the idea away. I lay there in a kind of half-waking doze, imagining something
coming closer and closer yet.

And then someone
was
there, but I felt quite calm about it. I looked up into black blank eyes. The person – I could not have said whether it was male or female – gazed down on
me with compassion as their hands moved, busy with something that I could not see, but functioning with a discernibly brisk efficiency. It would not take long, I thought. The person – it was
a woman, I knew now – regretted some of what she had to do, but we both understood that it was necessary. It must have been the same with Idhunn – something deep inside me shrieked that
this was Idhunn’s murderer, the person I’d vowed to find in such grandiose vengeance, and soon, she would be my murderer too. But, strangely, I couldn’t manage to feel upset at
the idea. In a little while, I would be dead, and she would go on her way. I wondered, with detached curiosity, whether she had plans for Eld as well, or whether he would simply wake to find me
there on the bed, filleted as Idhunn had been. I could even find a little trace of amusement in the notion—

—and the room exploded. The person was gone, hurled away from me. I heard a crash as something struck the wall and then everything was bursting with light. I shielded my eyes but it did no
good: I could not see a thing. And then there was nothing, and after that, hot swimming dark.

When I came round, Eld was sitting on the opposite bed, wrapped in his lynx-fur coat, hands resting lightly on his knees and his gaze turned inward in
the manner of someone examining a newsfeed. The air was thick with wings; feathers showered around him like autumn leaves and disappeared.

‘Eld?’ My voice sounded as small and frail as that of a mouse.

‘Vali?’ He did not look at me. ‘You’re awake. How are you feeling?’

I felt as though I should have been fragile and bruised, as though someone had spent a lot of time and effort in kicking me as I lay helpless, but the sensation was more psychic than
physical.

‘Battered,’ I said, honesty overcoming pride.

Eld gave a small grim nod. ‘I’m not surprised.’

‘What the hell happened?’

‘Seems Idhunn’s assassin has found us.’

I sat up straight on the bed and this time he did look at me. I did not like what I read in his face, or in his eyes.

‘Thorn, what’s going on?’ Glyn Apt had said she’d tell me, and so had Eld, but neither had kept to their promises, not that I expected them to. It simply infuriated me to
think that they knew, and I and the Skald did not. Idhunn’s bloody ghost seemed to stand before me for a moment, in unspeaking reproach, and behind her I thought that I glimpsed the
Mondhaith girl, Gemaley. There were silver stars clasping the ends of Gemaley’s braids; her face was frozen and blue, her lips gleaming with ice as she smiled. She didn’t mind being
dead, it seemed to me. She barely noticed the difference. I blinked, and both of them were gone.

‘Eld?’ I prompted. I expected a degree of prevarication, but not what the vitki subsequently said. ‘You did a good job, with Frey. Was it hard to kill him?’

I thought for a moment before answering. ‘Hard to get to the point of killing him. But not hard to kill, no. Do you mean that in an emotional sense, or a practical one?’

‘Both.’

‘I longed for his death. And he died.’

‘How did you do it, exactly? We picked up from your report to the Rock that you’d killed him, but you didn’t say how you’d done it. Did you shoot him?’

‘I set a pack of wild animals on him.’

That captured Eld’s interest. He swung around, the pale eyes wide. ‘Wild animals? That has a certain brutal elegance, especially considering what he did to you. It was supposed to be
your ingsgaldir, your journey of initiation, wasn’t it, when the fenris attacked you? But it went wrong.’

‘He wanted me to realize that I could control other life-forms – animals, and other people. He told me that I had Darkland blood.’

‘Did he tell you what I told you? That you could have been vitki? That you were special?’

‘Yes. I didn’t believe him and I cared less.’ I spoke quietly, to show that this was truth and not bravado. Eld gave a slow nod.

‘I see. Frey was always very concerned about status, about hierarchy, even though he pretended not to be. I thought it would be his downfall in the end.’

‘You don’t believe that the vitki are special? Superhuman? I thought that was the whole point of your sect.’ I did not see the aim of this discussion. The bruised sensation was
beginning to fade, a little.

‘It was, and to most of us, it still is. But some of us see beyond that, and I am one of them.’

I rose and walked slowly to stand a little distance away from him. The window was a sea of night, boughs tossing in a rising wind. I could see the tip of the moon, hanging like a weapon in the
branches. ‘Does that mean that you don’t agree with the war?’

Eld laughed. ‘They can go to war if they wish. People’s ambitions are very small these days. I don’t care about the Reach, Vali. Darkland can subdue it, or negotiate with it,
or destroy it, or sail away and leave it alone for all I care. I have other goals.’

‘You said you know who the quarry is. Idhunn’s murderer. You said she was here. Where is she now?’ I rose to face him, backing him against the window. ‘What is she? Tell
me, Eld.’

‘You’ve met her, Vali. I could feel her on you, around you, the last time we met. Here, in Darkland, near Hetla on the shore. A little piece of her presence, fluttering around you
like a moth.’

I thought back. Ashy woods, with trees that erupted into sudden blaze as the resin caught in the heat of Darkland’s fleeting summer. A forest like a gathering of cloud, captured mist above
the thundering sea. A woman in a house in the forest depths, sitting in a room full of bones with a skull in her lap, staring at me, unblinking.

‘That cabin,’ I said. ‘In the forest. It’s her.’

‘I told you that you knew her,’ he said.

‘But who is she?’

‘She isn’t a vitki. She’s Morrighanu. I don’t know what else she is.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Her name is Skadi. But they called her Skinning Knife, when they first found her in the forest. That was over ten years ago now. She had no papers, no documents, no clothes – she
was living on her own and no one knows how she survived. Occasionally you find children who are feral – on the world you visited, Mondhile, that seems to be the norm. On more – human
– worlds, you sometimes find children who are cared for by animals. But in the case of this woman, nothing would go near her. She was maybe twenty or thereabouts, and she took down two of the
men who tried to catch her. Eventually they brought her back to Hetla and she was studied in an institute. No one ever found out who she was. They gave her a name but she wouldn’t use it even
after she learned to speak, and she learned damn fast. Feral children usually don’t do very well once they’re returned to civilization. This one did. This one did very well for
herself.’

‘They called her “Shadow”,’ I said, for that was what her name meant in one of the old Earth tongues. The goddess Skadi: the winter warrior, whose symbol is the snow
itself. I could see why they’d given her the name. I thought of the spirit woman with her skinning knife. ‘You said she isn’t a vitki but she is Morrighanu.’

‘Yes, she never joined the vitki. Although that’s not entirely true. She initially became a valkyrie. She had considerable innate ability. Usually there’s an argument with some
of the upper echelons if we try to take outsiders in: valkyrie and vitki keep to their own. Not with this one. Everyone wanted the kudos of having her in their sect. She killed like an animal kills
– quickly, with no remorse.’ He paused. ‘She was said to enjoy it as well as being good at it, and that always gives one a cachet in certain quarters.’

‘And now she’s working for Darkland,’ I said, ‘and may have murdered my mentor, though I don’t know why.’ Glyn Apt
had
lied to me, no surprises there.
‘In that case, why are you trying to find her? And how did she find us? Was she ordered to kill Idhunn?’

‘I am trying to track her down,’ Eld gave a small ironic snort of laughter, ‘because she isn’t working for Darkland any more. At least, not for the central Parliament of
the security forces – any more than Frey was. As for why she killed Idhunn, I’ve no idea.’

You do not have to be versed in the seith to sense the webs tangling around you, part of a greater, unglimpsed weave. In that dingy room the air seemed to thicken.

‘So if she wasn’t working for you, who was she working for?’

‘I don’t know.’

I frowned. ‘But Frey was working for himself?’

‘I don’t know that, either. Tell me, Vali, what do you know about Nhem?’

That surprised me. ‘Nhem? It’s one of those extreme religious worlds. Founded by a fleet of cultists who’d captured a group of women and taken them along for breeding stock.
There’s a disparity between the actual races – the women are small and dark, the men are tall and light-skinned, a classic form of discrimination on old Earth. And the women are bred to
be non-sentient, but some of them have reverted and banded together. They approached the Skald and hired me for a mission.’

‘To assassinate the leader. Which you did. At no small personal cost, I think.’ The pale gaze was seeing too much now, boring into me, and I turned my face away. ‘You were
raped, after all.’

‘And then I killed him.’

I could almost taste the question Eld was too sensitive, or perhaps too cunning, to ask.
Who was he standing in for, Vali? Which part of the past were you trying to avenge?

‘It was worth it, if they can use it,’ I said curtly. ‘Besides, I’d been raped before.’ There was a little silence, filling the hollow of my words.

‘Nhem always struck me as a very . . . black-and-white world. The men are cruel and ruthless, the women are victims.’

‘Perhaps.’ Eld was too clever to make trite observations, or to expect me to agree with them. I’d suffered at the hands of men: first my brother, then Frey, then the Hierolath.
After Frey, I’d sworn off men, wanted nothing more to do with them. But I’d killed two out of three; my brother was long gone. And after all of them, the last person who had sexually
assaulted me had been a girl: Gemaley. A young man had helped me, risked his life, and since then I’d teamed up with Eld. Well, in a manner of speaking. Nothing is simple.

Eld, watching me closely, went on, ‘Not many shades of grey, on Nhem. But genetic engineering is a sloppy process; they must have realized that. It was bound to breed sports, not to
last.’

‘Switching sentience on and off,’ I said, ‘That’s the common pattern – on Nhem, on Mondhile, here.’

‘Do you know why you were hired to assassinate the Hierolath? After all, the infrastructure of Nhem doesn’t depend on one man.’

‘We were told that it would destabilize things enough to let the free women create some changes. I don’t know what they were planning, though.’ I’d had my doubts at the
time. ‘Do you, Thorn? What does this have to do with Skinning Knife?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But you’re not the only one to have seith senses, Vali. I do, too. And something keeps prodding at me.’ He paused. ‘Frey’s visit
to Nhem with you wasn’t his first visit.’

‘I can see him getting on with the Nhemish like a house on fire. All those claims of male superiority.’

Eld’s mouth quirked. ‘He tried to give
you
an ingsgaldir.’

‘Yes, but without bloody asking first! It’s the same mentality, Eld, and you know it. Either they strip women of their identities by engineering them, or they apply psychological
abuse that has the same effect. After Frey, I barely knew who I was. It’s a difference in sophistication, that’s all.’ And Eld had tried much the same thing. More vitki mind
games.

And last night, when
she
had bent over me, and made my death seem so perfectly reasonable. Vitki tricks and secrets . . . ‘Where is Skinning Knife now?’

‘You should have some understanding by now of how we operate. The vitki and the Morrighanu both are well versed in disguise, deception, sleight of eye. We use skills that we’ve been
honing for the past thousand years.’ He gave a brief smile that, after a moment, I realized had been intended to be reassuring. ‘I don’t think she came here to kill you, Vali,
though I’m sure that’s what you thought at the time. She came as a warning of what she is capable of doing. As soon as she saw me, she was out of here and in case you think I defended
you, then think again. I did nothing, Vali. I could not. I sat here paralysed until several minutes after she had disappeared into the forest dark. And that terrifies me.’

I stared at him. I had not thought him to be the kind of man who would be terrified at anything. When we had met in Hetla, when he had brought me in for questioning, he had seemed all-powerful,
knowing my head and my heart, completely in control. And now, as I stared into the cold grey eyes and saw the fear that he was no longer hiding, I understood that I had once again made the same
mistake. I had invested him with powers and with an authority over me to which he was not entitled. It was unconscious, but potent nonetheless. It was exactly the same mistake I had made with
Frey.