Bloodmind (15 page)

I sighed. ‘But we do have a choice, don’t we? Follow her advice or follow our own wits.’

‘The trouble is,’ Eld said gloomily, ‘that the two might very well prove to be one and the same.’

By this time, the sky was glowing green with the light of approaching dawn.

‘You ought to get some sleep,’ I said to Eld.

‘I don’t need it.’

‘You’ll need to sleep some time, surely? You didn’t get much last night.’

Eld rose abruptly and started packing up our scattering of possessions. What was I, I thought, his wife?

‘It’s all right,’ he insisted. ‘We are depending on one another’s fitness, mental and otherwise. It’s right for you to be concerned about mine. But I assure
you, we’re trained in sleep deprivation. I’ve certainly had enough practice in it.’

And with that, we set off. By unspoken consent, we were heading in the direction of Therm. It was still cold, with a bite and snap to the air, but I could smell spring on the wind and also,
sometimes, the sea. I checked the map implant for the configuration of Morvern, but it was incomplete. When I mentioned this to Eld, he said, ‘Morvern is also called the Unknown Land, even in
the rest of Darkland. There are legends of ships approaching charted bays, only to find impenetrable cliffs; hunters realizing to their doom that the land has shifted and changed around
them.’

‘Are the legends true?’

Eld hesitated. ‘I would like to say that they are not.’

Certainly, I would not have been surprised to find that the forest was prone to shape-shifting. The grey needles of the trees drifted above us, merging with the rise of snow-clouds that massed
far to the north. It was late in the afternoon when we saw our first fire.

Fortunately, Eld and I were not close to the tree when it went up. It exploded in a hissing cascade of sparks, sending burning cones shooting out through the snowy branches like fireworks. Eld
pulled me back as a blazing cone landed at our feet and smouldered to ash in the snow, releasing its cargo of hot seeds, which sizzled down through the snow to the earth beneath. The rest of the
tree was soon consumed, branches withering to black twists in the intense heat, needles transforming into a welded grey mass, soft as wool hung on wire. Eld and I hurried on.

‘What makes them burn?’ The air was still bitter, snow still patching the ground. I could see how wood might spontaneously ignite in hot desert climes, but not here.

‘Legends say,’ Eld explained, with an arch look, ‘that these trees are linked to the fires of Hellheim and sometimes those fires blaze up within them and take their spirits
down to the underworld. But that’s just a story. In fact, the fires are caused by some kind of internal photosynthetic reaction that is triggered by light and not heat – now that the
days are getting longer, the trees are starting to respond. The seeds are activated by heat.’

‘So we’ll see more of this?’

‘Almost certainly.’

Not reassuring,
I thought. I could see one of us easily being felled by a burning branch: the trees might look frail from a distance, but among them, you could see how substantial they
were. The tree had gone up without warning; had barely registered in the seith before it was ablaze. And there was no way of avoiding them. We would just have to be extra careful, and hope.

As we gradually trekked further south, the snow that covered the ground began to merge into ash, until we were ploughing through ankle-deep grey drifts. It was softer than snow, but clung to my
boots so that I began to develop bears’ feet, shaggy with ash. Perhaps, I thought hopefully, it would at least serve to muffle my footsteps, assuming anyone was listening. I could still sense
Skinning Knife, a thin, eerie presence hanging on the air, faint as the scent of the sea. But I began to feel a little easier, knowing that the trees through which we walked had already blazed up
to release their seed load. Surely, I thought, they would not do so twice . . .

We camped in another grove that night, one filled with the stench of fire, and I took the first watch. No one came out of the shadows to visit us this time, neither ally nor enemy. Eld sank into
immediate sleep and remained unmoving until I woke him in time for his own shift. I did not expect to sleep, but when I next awoke, it was morning.

The mountains for which I had always longed hung in the air beyond the moor, the foothills invisible in a sea of mist, the glacier summits floating like islands. Now, with
memories of my time in the warband still echoing in my head, I set off in the direction of Moon Moor.

And it wasn’t just the mountains that were calling me. I wanted to see that strange underground place again. I wanted to find out if I’d just imagined it, under the enemy
dreamcallers’ thrall, or whether it had been real – and if so, what it was. There were all manner of weird things in the north – ruined towers, ancient abandoned fortresses. But
I’d never heard of anything like the underground chamber, with that shifting half-beast half-human figure, and I’d never heard of anything like the insect that had descended onto Moon
Moor and stolen my sister, either. The Moor held mysteries and I was at the end of my life now, not far from dying. I didn’t think I had anything left to lose.

By the time I reached the old earth road that led to the Moor, it had started to snow. I’d taken warm clothes with me: the same thick cloak and stout gloves that I’d worn in the
warband all those years ago. No point in getting rid of them if they were still good. The cloak was a little bloodstained, but I didn’t mind that, though I couldn’t remember now whether
it had been my blood or someone else’s. So much war, resulting in nothing. But we’d all had a good enough time, even the dead, so I suppose that was what counted. There weren’t
many of the warband left these days: most of them had died in other battles, or from fever, or had gone out into the world when their death drew near, just as I was doing. I counted myself lucky to
have made it this far. So I pulled the stained cloak a little closer and trudged on through the snow.

It was only a light fall, this early in the winter, just enough to dust the scrub. The mountains were lost in it, but towards late afternoon, the clouds rolled back to reveal those floating
peaks, still very far away. I looked back to where the sun was settling in a red smear over the coast, staining the snow with a bloody light. I started looking around me for shelter, reading the
lines of the land, and finding it in a heap of rocks like a cairn, piled high above the path. The lack of a knife bothered me as I climbed the low rise of the slope: if this was a beast’s
lair, visen, altru, perhaps even wild mur, or if a child was hiding out here, I’d be in trouble. But so be it, I had to remind myself. This was what I was here for: to meet my death, no
matter what form it took.

But not today. There was no sign of any animal up at the cairn, no spoor, or footprint, or telltale smell. Altru stink: it’s something in the glands under their tails, and they say that
people in the south keep tame altru and make perfumes of it. Still, I wouldn’t fancy smearing myself with something out of an animal’s arse. They’re a funny lot down there,
though. If you keep yourself clean, what do you need perfumes for?

At the back of the cairn, facing the mountains, was a pile of rock with a hole in it, a good place to spend the night. I gathered ferns, dry and crackling now with the cold, dusted off the snow
and made a bed. A few minutes after that, I had a fire lit. Then I found a heppet burrow, sat in front of it in silence for a while, and started drumming on the earth with my fingers. You have to
get the pressure right, or they won’t fall for it. But I’d had a lot of practice over the years and soon enough the heppet stuck its head out of its burrow for a look, and that was when
I collared it. It didn’t have time to be surprised. I broke its neck and skinned it with my claws, leaving the skin for those nightbirds that eat fur. The rest of the heppet went on a
makeshift spit over the fire and it made a good supper, once I’d found some late herbs to go with it. I thought of eating it raw, but my teeth weren’t as good as they’d once been.
Then I buried the bones and lay down, though it was a while before I slept. The clouds were still hanging over the mountain wall but directly overhead the sky was clear enough to see the winter
stars: the Island, and Visen, and Cold Castle. I traced them all, and thought of my sister. I felt very close to her then, as though she was just around the corner of the rock, waiting for me. And
then I slept. But I do not remember what I dreamed.

The snowfall had taken the edge off the air, but during the night another wall of freezing air rolled down from the mountains and touched the land with
its breath. When I woke, the embers of the fire were grey and the edges of my cloak were stiff with frost. I got to my feet, with a bit of difficulty. Growing old is just the way of things but
I’ve never stopped resenting the way it traps and ambushes you, so that what you never used to think about is now a constant pre-occupation. Maybe dying in battle is better after all.

And maybe not. The land was silent, locked in snow halfway down the slopes and frost below that, magnificent under a sharp blue sky. The mountains were very clear this morning: seeming so close
that I felt I could reach out and touch them, run a fingernail down the ridge of a glacier and scrape out snow. And at the base of the frosty hills lay a black line, very well defined and rolling
like a snake. That, maybe fifteen
lai
away from where I stood, was Moon Moor. Well named, for the moon Embar was hanging above it, its chewed face transparent enough to show the sky behind.
The ghosts that lived on Embar would be sleeping now, although someone had once told me that it is always night on the moons, with no real sky.

I broke a thin rim of ice on a nearby pond, more a shallow puddle at the bottom of the cairn, and washed as best I could. There’s no excuse to go dirty to your death. Then I wrapped myself
in the cloak again, ate some of the heppet and made a small parcel of the rest, and scuffed over the ashes of the fire. I did not want to leave tracks behind me, just in case – a legacy of
warband days. It would have been a small luxury not to have bothered, I suppose, but old habits die hard. Then I set off, towards Moon Moor.

I’d hoped to keep the moor in sight all the way, though I don’t really know why this seemed so important to me. Perhaps I thought it might vanish, shimmer into mirage if I took my
eyes off it. But the best path led me down into a dip, following a crashing stream, through groves of satinspine and cruthe. The black bark was peeling into strips now, and a few red leaves still
hung from the branches like banners. But most of them were gone, and the summer vegetation – the ferns and dream-plants – had rotted too, sinking down into the earth for their winter
sleep. I’d heard – another family story – that the plants appeared in Eresthahan, growing out of the sky in the land of the dead as though it lay beneath our feet instead of the
place-between. But the thought made me smile, all the same. I even looked up, to see if roots and coiled shoots were hanging down from the clouds, but the sky was empty, bright and bare even of the
promise of snow. I must be growing senile, I thought, and I walked briskly on. Towards noon the woods thinned out and I took a beast track up through the trees to a ridge. I was at the edge of the
Lakeland country now: pools and ponds were strung like a skein of beads below the ridge, all the way to the edge of Moon Moor. I dropped down to them once, to pick up a bird whose feet had been
frozen into the ice. A kindness to kill it, and I did so. That took care of my night meal, and then I made my way back up to the ridge and on. As the glaciers started to shine in the sun’s
dying light, I reached the edges of the moor, in sight of the place where the warband had been ambushed.

It had been long ago. Maybe forty years, or more: I’d been a young woman then. Good days. I liked to think that I could still see the scorch marks on the scrub, still smell the smoky,
dream-laden air. But now the moor was peaceful and overgrown, the ridge far smaller than I remembered it, lost in growing bushes. Yet I could still feel the dead beneath the earth, their bones
pulling and tugging at me like the tide, and I could hear their faint angry voices as they lamented their death. Their spirits had perhaps not gone to Eresthahan, but had become part of the
substance of the moor, just as the pregnant warrior with the shattered jaw had done. I remembered her well, her fierce broken grin, her exultation in the latest killing. Maybe my own dreamcalling
had summoned her up but I hoped I would meet her again, that she would be the one to greet me at my death and take me down to hell. She reminded me of me.

I pushed my way between the bushes, looking for the entrance to the cave. Nothing. There was no sign of any opening, not even a hole small enough for a heppet. When I had finished scrabbling,
and emerged scratched from the thorny scrub, the sun was low on the horizon and I knew that I had to find somewhere to make a shelter for the night. In the end, it was the back of the ridge itself,
the spine of rocks. I lit a fire and cooked the bird, wondering whether it had been a dream only, or whether there really was another world beneath my feet.

*

And then the dream came back. I woke, or thought I had, and it was night. The moon Elowen hung in a sword’s curve where the sun had been, and Embar was still at its height, sailing the
summit of the sky. The darkness was dusted with stars and the cold roared into my throat when I sat up and took a breath.

At first I didn’t know what had woken me up, and then I heard it.
Voices.
People were speaking, in hushed tones that occasionally rose like the sound of the sea. I thought for a
moment that they’d seen me, were discussing me, but then I realized that the voices were coming from the other side of the ridge.

I might be old, but I could still move quietly. I crept up over the top of the ridge, relying on soldiers’ tricks of stealthy movement. They came back quickly enough. When I reached the
summit of the ridge and could look through the rocks, I did so.