Bloodmind (2 page)

The Hierolath was dead, and so were Frey and Gemaley. I did not know if my brother still lived and I told myself that I did not care. It should have made a difference.

But knowing, somewhere in back-brain, that Rhi Glyn Apt was witnessing all these events through the mirror of my mind, felt like violation all over again. I suppose some might say it could have
been cathartic, but I didn’t do catharsis very well: spiralling back to the same old nightmares was like trying to prove the past to myself. Trying to prove, and failing.

When the drugs wore off, and the white raven had sipped the last piece of autobiography from my mind, Glyn Apt came to stand before me. I managed to look her in the face. The valkyrie I had seen
in Darkland’s capital of Hetla had been perfect, a sculpted ice warrior. Beneath the chasing data, Glyn Apt was not so like that woman, more recognizably human: in her late forties, perhaps
more, with pouches under her eyes and the beginning of lines around her mouth. She had not bothered with corrective surgery any more than I had; I could see the tracery of scars around her jaw.
Accident or duel? I didn’t know enough about the Morrighanu to be able to tell.

She said, ‘You used to cut yourself.’

Without asking, she pulled back my shirt sleeve and revealed the myriad scars on my arm. An adolescent way of coping, and yet I’d kept my scars, just as she’d kept her own.

‘I haven’t done that in years,’ I said, and hated the way the words mumbled out.

‘No,’ Glyn Apt replied. I saw silver spark behind her eyes: something transmitted? Something incoming? ‘Now you get others to do it for you instead.’ There was no mockery
in her voice; she spoke as someone making a statement of fact. She turned my face to one side, not gently: I could feel the power of the servors in her glove. Turn up the ratio and she’d be
able to rip off my head as easily as a fenris. Data streamed across her face like moonlight. As though she’d read my thoughts she said, ‘Those scars on your face. They were made by an
animal, your records say. You were put on an ingsgaldir initiation, for all that you are neither vitki nor of Darkland.’

‘My ex-lover was vitki. Frey. You must know that by now. He put me through an initiation, with a fenris out on the ice. It would have been nice if he’d told me that it was
initiation. At the time, I thought he was trying to kill me.’

Again, I thought Glyn Apt might have smiled.

‘You’d have done better to seek out the Morrighanu than the vitki,’ she said.

‘You said it yourself,’ I told her. ‘I’m not from Darkland.’

But that night, when they’d set me free of the wall and put me in a cell, it was Darkland of which I dreamed.

I was once more standing on the headland overlooking the city of Hetla. It was night and Darkland’s capital was under curfew. Only a few red lights flickered along the coast, denoting
observation turrets and anti-aircraft installations, baleful scarlet eyes in the darkness. The only sounds, apart from the constant thunder of the spring sea, were the boom and crash of
construction work across the fjord in the wingyards. In my mind’s eye I could still see those massive war-wings sitting in dry-dock, awaiting completion before being sent out across the ocean
to the Reach, my home.

Then, above the sounds of preparation for war, I heard another noise: a thin, high singing, very sweet. And in my dream I remembered that when the equinoctial tides sweep across the seas of the
north, the semi-sentient species known as the selk come down with the arctic melt water, and sing. This voice I now heard was beautiful and cold, and it paralysed me. I stood, suspended in the
night, with the ocean ahead of me and the deep forest behind, and listened to the song of the selk as it curdled my blood to frost.

‘Do you hear that?’ a voice said at my elbow. I looked up, to see the vitki Thorn Eld. Friend of Frey’s, or foe? I’d never really known, but I wasn’t surprised to
see him there. Eld had known all about me, after all, and when he’d interrogated me in Darkland he hadn’t even had to give me any drugs to get the information. It had been as if Eld had
been living in my head.

‘Yes, I can hear it,’ I said.

‘When you killed Frey,’ Eld remarked, his round face bland in Loki’s light, ‘you used a beast pack to do so. A proper ingsgaldir in the ancient sense, to link yourself
with the world, with animal mind, with a gestalt. Do you think you can use the selk in the same way?’

‘It’s not even occurred to me,’ I told him with perfect truth, but suddenly we were out on the ice, and the selk were surging up under my feet, shattering the floe, sending us
down into cold dark and I was reaching out for Eld, to save him or to help myself, I did not know. But Eld was already gone and—

I woke, into freezing air, gasping for breath. It was a relief to find myself still in the cell, though the heating had evidently gone off. The knowledge of Idhunn’s death came crashing in
on me all over again.

Yet the selk-song went on. It was coming from beyond the cell, penetrating the chamber and lodging inside my head, echoing against the walls of my skull like the rush of blood when you hold a
shell to your ear. I waited for a moment, but the song continued insistent and summoning.

A moment after that, Glyn Apt was there on the other side of the cell shield. The dataflow had been temporarily switched off and her face was unremarkable without it, pale and plain, with blunt
features. Without the silver underlay of information, her eyes were a faded blue, like spring ice.

‘Can you hear that?’ she asked, just like Thorn Eld had asked me in my dream.

‘It’s not easy to miss.’

‘It’s coming from a group of the selk.’

‘They’re taking a risk, with a Morrighanu warship floating several hundred yards offshore,’ I commented.

Glyn Apt frowned. I didn’t know why she was choosing to confide in me on the subject. ‘The Morrighanu have no quarrel with the selk. That’s a vitki matter.’

‘It’s become a Darkland matter, and you’re from Darkland. I saw those sheds outside Hetla.’

Glyn Apt gave a little nod. ‘I noticed, from your interrogation. I repeat, it’s nothing to do with us. We’re a different sect from the vitki; you know that. Morvern isn’t
Hetla.’

‘Why are you bothering to justify yourself to me?’ I had no real idea what the connection was between vitki and Morrighanu, though the link with the valkyries, the female sect of the
vitki, was much clearer. Though I’d heard that the Morrighanu were a sect of Darkland’s far north, and that was after all where Morvern lay, I didn’t know how all these Darkland
security forces interrelated.

‘Because the selk are asking for you,’ Glyn Apt said.

She even let me out of the cell, but under heavy guard. It was in any case useless to try anything under the circumstances; I was weaponless and although the seith offered opportunities for
disguise, it wouldn’t have worked against people who were already versed in such matters. Glyn Apt took me up the stairs to the guard room and showed me the monitor that scanned the foot of
the Rock on the western side.

Lights played along the barnacle-encrusted ledges, ready to illuminate any vessel that might be approaching the fortress. I saw nothing, except rock and wave and the great bulk of the Morrighanu
warship, turning a little on the swell of the tide. Then – I was not sure if it was only the shadow of a wave, but it moved again and I saw that it was indeed a selk. It turned its blunt head
to the camera as though it sensed me watching.

‘Ask it what it wants,’ Glyn Apt demanded.

I leaned forward and spoke softly into the monitor, tracking the speaker setting.

‘Are you out there? Can you hear me? Can you understand me?’

I knew that the selk had their own language of Shelta, but it was only at certain times of the year that they possessed sufficient sentience to speak it. The tabula hummed as it translated my
Gaelacht.

Silence. The song had stopped. I had just convinced myself that there was nothing out there after all when a voice like running water said, ‘I hear you.’

‘Is it you who sings? Why?’

‘We have been looking for you. We came before, but you were not here. You saw our siblings, captured.’

Why hadn’t the Skald told me that the selk had come looking? But then I realized that there had not been time, and Idhunn’s death would have driven it out of everyone’s mind.
‘Those tanks outside Hetla? Yes, I saw them. I could do nothing to help them.’

I didn’t like sounding so defensive, when it was nothing more than the truth. I think I expected some kind of protest from the selk, some criticism, but it said nothing. And I was
surprised that Glyn Apt had brought me out here to speak with them at all, rather than blasting the selk out of the water. But perhaps it was true that the Morrighanu had a different relationship
with them to the vitki.

‘Tell it to come closer,’ Glyn Apt hissed.

‘Why? What are you planning to do?’

She gave me a glance of contempt. ‘Nothing. If I’d intended them any harm, I’d have done it by now.’

‘Come into the light,’ I called, and the selk did so, gliding with surprising swiftness and ease over the rocks. Seen through the monitor, it was larger and sleeker than the purely
animal sealstock that thronged these northern waters. Its complex, flanged nose and the gills that collared its throat glistened with seawater. Its eyes were obsidian and alien and sad.

‘What do you understand, about my kind?’ it continued.

I hesitated. ‘I know that the selk were engineered, genetically, by my ancestors.’ It’s one thing to know that most of the non-human life on one’s homeworld has been
created and altered, an unholy mash of genes, but it seemed an awkward thing to be discussing this with one of the results. It made me think of Mondhile, where humans had been altered instead.

‘You understand that we are now close to the time when our self-awareness will be lost, until the waters begin to grow cold once more? When sentience is gone from us, we will not be able
to help our captured kin.’

‘And you’re asking me – the Skald – for help?’ I thought of Idhunn’s ruined body in the Rock’s medical ward, of the vacuum of power she had left behind
her, now filled by the Morrighanu, and of the oncoming war. At the moment, the Skald was not in the strongest position to help anyone.

‘I am asking anyone who might listen. Most of your kind see us as beasts, nothing more.’

And that was true enough. It was illegal to hunt the selk, at least in the Reach, and during their periods of sentience it carried a murder charge. But even in the Reach I had seen what I was
certain had been selk fur, on the collars and coats of the pinch-faced wealthy, in plain view on the streets of Tiree.

‘Your kin are imprisoned in Darkland,’ I explained to the selk now. ‘And you must know that we not only have no jurisdiction there – at all – but that we are also
on the brink of war and this fortress has been captured.’ I did not look at Glyn Apt, and she said nothing.

The selk shifted uneasily against the wet shadows of the rocks. ‘We know this. Why else were our kin taken?’

It took a moment for this to sink in. ‘You mean the selk in those tanks are undergoing some kind of preparation for the Darkland war effort?’

‘So we believe.’

‘Do you know what it is? What the vitki are trying to do with them?’ That was Glyn Apt, surprising me. But perhaps it shouldn’t have been so startling that the Morrighanu
weren’t informed about vitki plans, given the nature of Darkland and its sectarian in-fighting.

‘Or what they were being used for,’ I murmured. I thought I might know the answer to that. Glyn Apt ignored me.

‘We do not. But ourselves and the kind you call the vitki have a long history, like the deeps beneath the ice, cold and black and little seen. Once, there was war between us.’

‘War?’ I knew nothing about this and this time I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice. Beside me, Glyn Apt shifted as if restless. But the selk itself spoke in so musical a
tone that I was sure there were cadences, nuances, that were missed by my limited human hearing. ‘When was this?’

‘A thousand thousand seasons ago.’

This was not a great deal of help: the selk calculated time differently to humans and there was little point in asking it to translate into our years if the tabula could not do so.

‘Who won the war?’ I moved on, picturing the icefields running red with the blood of the selk. Apart from a brief period in their long bleak history, the vitki had always been in
possession of technology; the selk had not.

‘We won. But not without great loss.’

‘You won a war, against men with machines?’

In the dim window of the monitor, the selk’s face contorted strangely, the ruffles of the gills rippling as though a strong wind blew across it. Perhaps the selk smiled. I could not
tell.

‘The outcome of a battle may depend on the place of its fighting. They followed us onto the icefields, at the start of the spring thaw. They thought we were few, and failing. But our kind,
The People, sang to the ice and in the spring it is brittle and treacherous. It gave way beneath our enemies. They thought the made-skins they wore would save them, but there were more of The
People under the ice, many more, and the enemy were attacked as soon as they were in the sea. The cold killed as many as we did. They did not make that mistake again. They kept to their land of
black glass cliffs and great mosses, we to the poles and these islands, where—’ the selk paused, with unexpected tact, ’—our losses
are
fewer.’

‘But if the selk and the vitki were to encounter one another again, on ground more congenial to the vitki—’ something was nagging at the back of my mind, ‘—do you think it
likely that your kind would lose?’ Considering those great war-wings I myself thought it more than likely: in fact, a certainty. But the selk hesitated before saying, slowly, ‘I do not
know.’

‘Tell me this. Do your kind possess weapons?’
The People sang to the spring ice.
That suggested some kind of innate sonic capability. But the selk answered, with only a hint
of irony in its musical voice, ‘Why? Your kind see us as no more than beasts, and soon, so we will be.’