Bloodmind (16 page)

There were four of them. They were standing in Elowen’s light. They were human, at first sight, and then I saw that this was not true, not quite. They wore clothes – long tunics like robes,
and boots made out of leather strapped with thongs, like the people who live in the deep forest. But I could see their faces quite clearly in the moons’ light and their faces were all wrong.
Not muzzles, but too long for human faces, with eyes that were either too big or too small. Their jaws looked mangled, as if their owners had met with an accident. They had patchy, mangy hair, and
fingers that were little more than stubs. I had never seen anything like them before and I did not want to see them now. The teeth that I could glimpse through their mangled jaws were sharp. I
could not understand them – it was no language that I’d ever heard – and they smelled rank, an abnormal smell, like sickness, which drifted through the clean scents of scrub and
cold earth.

I did not fancy challenging them, or making them aware of my existence. But perhaps they were aware of it already; had been watching me from secret places as I made my way across the Moor. I
didn’t like that thought. And it raised the question of how long they had been here.

I began to draw back among the rocks, but as I did so, they vanished. It made me blink. They had simply gone, as if they were shadows. I did not want to investigate the place where they’d
stood: that would wait for morning and daylight, which in any case was not now far away. I went back to the remains of my fire and huddled wakeful until dawn.

By mid-morning the trees were starting to grow thinner, and the ash that coated the ground was now banked in great drifts against the curves of the land. Eld frowned when
he saw this, but said nothing, and I remembered the woman in Hetla telling me of Sull Forest and its blight when I was in the capital on a previous journey. This, perhaps, was the real start of it
and when we came out of the trees and found ourselves on a long, empty slope of hillside, with the blackened stumps of trees across the distant lee, I knew that I was right.

Eld stood unmoving for a long time, staring across the slope. At last he said, ‘It’s worse than I had imagined. Worse than I was shown.’

‘You’ve seen images of this?’

He nodded. ‘At the top levels of the vitki high command. And now I am finally telling you something that is not common knowledge.’

‘Eld – what caused this destruction? That woman I met in Hetla said that it was the war effort. What did she mean?’

‘The common people were not told, Vali. Everyone in Morvern knew about this, but only the vitki and the upper echelons of the valkyrie were informed. I don’t know aboutthe
Morrighanu. The vitki knew, of course, because we caused it.’ He glanced uneasily around him, as though the wind was listening. ‘It was a weapon. Something new, something
prototypical.’

‘But this is a huge tract of land, Eld,’ I said. I could see the wasted hillsides rolling as far as the horizon. A thought crept into my head and nestled there like a worm.
‘This wasn’t nuclear, was it?’

‘You know that’s illegal, planet-side,’ Eld said, perfunctorily, as though paying lip service to some impossible ideal. ‘But no, in fact it wasn’t nuclear. It was
something else, developed in a vitki lab.’

‘Then what was it?’

‘I don’t know.’

I stared at him. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘No one knows except the people who engineered this thing, and activated it.’ Eld grimaced, as if embarrassed. ‘I told you about vitki arrogance, vitki short-sightedness. This
is probably the best example of that.’

‘“Probably”?’

Eld pointed to the distant wastes. ‘The lab was over there, somewhere. The epicentre was at some point in that direction, according to the map implant.’

‘It blew up?’

‘It vanished. And it seems to have dragged the rest of the land with it, like water down a plughole.’ Eld took a handful of his own cloak, pulling it taut and poking a finger in the
centre of the stretched fur. ‘Just like that.’

I looked down again at the ashy ground and now that he had shown me this, I could see the long striations in the soil, running north to south.

‘But of course, no one knows what they were working on, or what actually happened, because there’s no one left. One minute the lab was transmitting data back to Hetla, the next
– it was gone, blinked off the screen. And when my colleagues investigated, they found that it had taken a large chunk of Sull with it, as well.’

‘But you said “vanished”. Surely an explosion would have caused the same effect on a monitor?’

‘It could have done, yes, but later the high command received raven reports which showed the lab at the time of the catastrophe. It simply blinked out of existence and a firestorm raged
through the forest. Some ravens are partially satellite-generated, so the data stream remained constant. If there had been any recording devices actually here, they would have been
incinerated.’

‘And you really have no idea what they were working on?’

‘No. I suspect that other people in the high command do, but the trouble with the vitki hierarchy is that it is highly cellular and compartmentalized. Our right hand doesn’t know
what our left hand is doing, and that’s the way we prefer it.’ Eld spoke sourly; I did not think it was a policy with which he agreed. ‘And if someone knows, they’re not
telling.’

‘What was a
vitki
lab even doing out here? I thought you said that Morvern is a law unto itself. The Morrighanu are a different sect. Why would it be safe to plant one of your
operational facilities in the middle of what amounts to hostile territory?’

‘It’s not that simple. There are connections, negotiations, informal treaties. The existence of the lab would have been agreed with the Morrighanu, at least.’

‘Do you have any idea whether it’s even safe to walk through this region now? Might there be some kind of . . . taint, like radiation?’

‘Vali, I have no idea. But if we are to get to Therm, then the swiftest way is through the blight itself.’ Eld and I stared at one another for a moment. ‘But it does have one
advantage,’ he added, with a smile. ‘No one from Morvern is likely to come in here after us.’

‘Very well,’ I said at last. ‘Then we’d better start walking.’

The only pity was that Eld was wrong.

It was only towards evening that I began to realize how extensive the blight had been. Sull stretched ahead and behind us, a wasteland of shattered tree
stumps, black and glossy as if vitrified. When I tentatively touched one, it felt as hard as stone and was icy even through my glove. It reminded me of the cliffs that surrounded Darkland’s
shores. Eld watched me sidelong.

‘Best left alone,’ was all that he said.

The rest of Sull Forest had seemed barren enough, but this area looked absolutely lifeless, without even a wind stirring. The ash still covered the ground, but there were many places in which it
had worn away and there was no earth beneath it, only something hard and, occasionally, polished, as if the whole region had been carefully paved. It was often slippery underfoot and I began to be
grateful for the ash. When I reached out with the senses of the seith, I felt nothing: an absence of life, of presence, as though this land was no more than a stage set, an unreal shell, concealing
nothing. And the air itself smelled strange, hollow, as sterile as a hospital wing.

Eld and I again made camp, again kept watch. Nothing came to disturb us, but I did not sleep well this time. And when it was my turn to take watch, I felt increasingly as though I was merely
playing some kind of role, detached from the world. I did not want to tell Eld how much this alarmed me, but next morning I could tell that he, too, was spooked. I noticed that we were keeping
close together, that he kept darting glances at me from those pale eyes as if to reassure himself that I was still there.

‘How far is it to Therm from here?’ I asked him, towards noon.

‘About fifty miles. I’d estimate that we have another couple of days in the blight.’

‘How are you doing for rations?’

‘I have enough. Although I must say that I’m growing very tired of strip-food and pills.’

‘So am I. If we could only hunt . . .’

‘Ah, yes. I sometimes forget that you are a huntress, Vali.’ I wasn’t sure whether it was admiration or amusement that I glimpsed in those colourless eyes.

I chose to laugh. ‘Used to be.’

‘But still are in a way, of course. Only these days you hunt your fellow killers, rather than animals. You don’t eat much meat, do you?’

‘You know so much about me,’ I said, trying to keep my tone light. ‘I remember from our very first conversation in Hetla that you know that.’ I did not like being
understood. Frey had understood me, and had used it.

‘You will have wondered why.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘You told me, Vali.’

‘But I don’t—’ I broke off.

‘You don’t remember? That is what I mean by “subtle”. These mind-reaping techniques used by the Morrighanu are not subtle. The valkyrie use similar ones. They are too
much of a blunt instrument for my own preferences.’

‘And what techniques do you use, Eld?’ My voice sounded very quiet in the forest silence, and very cold, but I think we both knew there would be no follow-through.

‘I had you taken into captivity, interrogated you myself, made a few memory adjustments, fed it back to you to check that you had no recollection of the process, and you still do not
remember. Whereas I am prepared to say that you could cheerfully murder Glyn Apt for what she put you through on the Rock.’

‘You’ve made your point,’ I said.

‘Yes, I think I have.’ A statement of fact, no smugness or gloating. There was little point in engaging with him on this. He was vitki, I was Skald. That was the game that was
played, I told myself. And the name of the game was violation.

Neither of us spoke further about it. I felt I’d lost yet another piece of the puzzle that was myself. As we trekked through the blight, I began to become aware of something else, too. The
memory of the fenris’ onslaught was itself becoming unreal, hollowed out and stripped of its previous emotional content, the fear and rage and trauma. Paradoxically, now that I was finally
beginning to lose this fear, I clung to it, but it was no use. Memories of Frey, of the beast, of Mondhile and Nhem and the rape and torture I had undergone on those worlds, Frey’s death
– all of it was ebbing from me like some slow tide, leaving me empty and clean. Perhaps it was an effect of the journey, of the land itself, or even of Eld, but whatever it might be, I did
not find myself grateful for it. I felt that it was stealing my soul away.

Surreptitiously, when I thought that Eld could not see, I rolled up one sleeve and checked that the old scars were still laddering my arm, the ghosts of pain. They were still there. They
anchored me.

That night, camped among the ruined trees, I sensed that someone was there. Without saying anything to Eld, I sent the seith senses out again, cautiously
opened my eye and glanced around me, careful to remain still as if in sleep. Eld sat no more than a few feet away from me, hunched under the lynx-skin cloak. I could tell that he was awake. I could
see and hear nothing – but someone was there, I was sure of it.

Then the person next to me rose and cast off the cloak and it wasn’t Eld at all. It was a woman, someone I’d never seen before, with a beaky, intense face. Eld was lying a short
distance away, face down and motionless. I scrambled to my feet. The beaky-faced woman whistled and the sound tore at my ears. Glyn Apt came at me out of the darkness in a rushing crouch. She
struck out, caught me a glancing blow on the side of the head that, had it connected properly, would probably have knocked me unconscious. I kicked her in the midriff, but she was already dancing
backwards out of the way. She whirled, twisted, and a moment later was high in the air above me, leaping upward to grasp a branch and swing herself forward. I was too slow. We both fell in a tangle
on the floor.

‘You,’ Glyn Apt said, quite conversationally, ‘are coming with me.’ The forest was suddenly flooded with light, eclipsing the faint glow of the moon and casting us into a
monochrome tableau. A wing was gliding down out of the heavens: a black-and-silver craft, with the outlines of birds etched along its hull. The Morrighanu were flooding the rocks, and half-stunned,
I was picked up, slung over a woman’s shoulder and taken on board.

This time, I was conscious all the way there, tightly bound to a stretcher as the wing lifted up from the forest. I do not know whether I was angry at
being taken by the Morrighanu, or relieved at being out of Sull – out of the trees, anyway. At least, I thought, where we were going would be likely to have a roof, no wild animals, and some
form of heating and food – even if they tortured me.

The interior of the wing was dim, and I could not see anyone very clearly from where I had been placed. I could not see Eld at all and the thought that they might have left him behind or, worse,
killed him, was not a pleasing one. And I couldn’t help wondering when I’d become so attached to someone who was, after all, a vitki.

I kept my ears open, but heard nothing of use, though I thought I detected the word ‘Skald’. The Morrighanu were no longer speaking Gaelacht, but one of the tongues of Morvern with
which I was unfamiliar, and Rhi Glyn Apt had taken care to detach the tabula from my belt when I was brought on board. It was impossible to tell where we might be heading. The wing encountered
turbulence at one point, lurching and churning like a ship at sea. I heard the women cursing, and then the wing righted itself and we glided on. Before long, I felt the stabilizer jets go on and we
drifted downward to settle to a halt in somewhere unknown.

It was snowing hard, that much I could tell. The blast of air as the doors of the wing slid open was bitter and I flinched. I heard Glyn Apt shout something and saw another stretcher being sent
past, with a muffled form on it. I hoped the form was Eld and that he was still alive. Then it was my turn. I was carried down a ramp to a waiting vehicle and loaded unceremoniously inside. Rhi
Glyn Apt followed me and sat on an opposite bench, pensively chewing a thumb.