Bloodmind (20 page)

‘All the same, tell me what they do. I’m curious.’

I looked across. He was sitting on the edge of one of the rough beds, leaning forward a little, once more in that fur-collared coat. There was nothing on his face, no pity, no amusement.

If there had been, I would not have told him what he wanted to know, running through the meditation, focusing first on the soles of the feet, then the ankles, then each part of the body in turn.
It knitted me back together again, not whole, but enough to allow me to sit up.

Eld’s face was still that bland, unreadable mask.

‘How are you feeling now?’ he asked.

I grimaced. ‘Sick. Disoriented. It’s to be expected.’

Eld nodded. ‘As you say. It will pass.’

‘I’m surprised to see you in here.’ This was a one-person cell, clearly: a single cot, limited washing facilities. I’d been grateful that it hadn’t been another
stone dungeon, but perhaps they didn’t trust me in that. But that they’d put Eld in here with me was odd.

‘There’s some kind of panic on,’ Eld said. ‘I don’t know what’s happening. They brought in some people – I didn’t see them but they were making
enough noise on a psychic level to wake an army.’

It puzzled me. ‘Darklanders? Or my people?’
The war.
What the hell was happening back in the Reach? And I was here, not safe, in enemy territory, but still unable to do
anything to help my home. I tried to stifle the guilt and failed.

‘I don’t know. Glyn Apt wasn’t exactly forthcoming. I think they needed the cell space, so they put us together.’

I’d already communicated to Eld how I’d broken out of the previous cell, and I wanted to discuss options with him, but we were probably under surveillance. I strolled over to the
doorway and closed my eye, hoping he’d understand what I was trying to do. Eld was silent, but when I opened my eye again, a black bird was in the room.

I looked a question. ‘They didn’t have time to look for my final implant,’ Eld said. ‘Their loss.’ He gestured towards a socket on the wall. From most angles, it looked
like nothing more than a lump of moss, an artful conceit, I thought, especially since the Morrighanu hadn’t bothered to make it all that convincing. ‘It’s safe to talk. I’ve
shortcircuited the camera.’

‘But can you open the door?’

Eld laughed. ‘Unfortunately . . .’

‘I could try again.’

‘They’re probably wise to that by now. But Vali, one thing – you told me that you accessed one of their birds. That should mean that you still have its co-ordinates in your
head. Can I try to contact it?’

I hesitated. ‘I think it was just a door lock. And anyway, you’re probably right. It will have changed by now.’

‘But even though it might not open the door, it’s still encoded information. We don’t know what it will do until we try.’

‘No, we don’t know.’

‘Will you let me try?’

‘What exactly does that
involve,
Eld?’

So he showed me.

The last man who had touched me had been Ruan. He was Mondhaith, it’s true, but really just a gentle boy with a feral side. I’d cared what happened to Ruan, but I hadn’t loved
him. Before that, it had been the Hierolath, and before that Frey, and before that, my brother. Best not to go to those places, best to stay away – or so I told myself, even though I knew
that keeping away was not an option, for why in that case did I keep going back? Letting Eld into my head might have been another violation, but he’d already been there, he already knew me
better than anyone else, except perhaps Idhunn, and she was dead. I told myself this, and I winced as he touched me, and he understood. Hands on either side of my ruined face, that was all, a brief
and flickery touch, and then it was gone. Eld’s mind brushed my mind and it was icy cold, with the promise of heat far within. I didn’t want to look at the possibility of that furnace,
either. I jerked my head back, but Eld had already seen what was to be seen. I looked up to see white wings. Eld said, ‘Well, well, well.’ He made a gesture. A raven swooped.

I felt the brush of feathers against my skin and then I was
inside,
Eld’s raven breaking down barriers. The white bird was no more than a sketched ghost: they had stripped it of
most of its encoding, but it was still showing the raven the way.

Snowstorm.
Tendrils of ice licking my flesh, leaving paradoxical fire in their wake. Dimly, through the snow, distant lights: a homestead, perhaps, or the landing lights of a rescue
craft. I struggled towards them, battling cold and the weakness of cold, but they danced away from me like marsh fire. I walked on, thinking that at any moment the fenris would come at me out of
the storm and the dark, that the lights were its hot yellow eyes, laced with sunbright death. At that thought, I tried to turn away, cowering – knowing that my body was still in the cell and
that Thorn Eld’s wary hands were hovering around me, hoping to steady without touching. Eld had learned something of me, and did not want to breach any more barriers. That, by itself, almost
made me cry.

Snowdark.
I knew there was something I should be looking for, but I didn’t know what it was. I moved towards the light, as the ancient myths tell you to do when you are at the
moment of your death, but the light was information, cascading around me in skeins and torrents, data scrolling too fast for me to grasp its significance. I wondered whether this was what it must
be like for Glyn Apt, perpetually in the heart of a data gale.

And someone was calling my name.

‘Eld?’ I said, or thought I heard myself say. But there was no reply from the man at my side, or if there was, I did not hear it.

Vali.

‘Who are you?’ I knew the voice, that was the strange thing.

Vali. I’m here. Walk towards me.

Very clear now. I did as the voice – it was a woman’s – told me.

Vali!

‘Oh, the gods of my mothers,’ I said, because it was Idhunn.

She was standing in the middle of the streams of data, like someone who stands beneath a waterfall. The data poured down, dripping from her long white hair and over her hands, but she made no
move to brush it aside. She looked much younger, and as I stepped closer I saw that she
was
younger: this was not Idhunn as I had known her, but a woman in her late twenties, close to my own
age, and this Idhunn was herself composed of data. She wasn’t real, but she’d been encoded.

At first I thought she was some kind of trap. But there was a weird rightness to her, as if this was her home and her place and one couldn’t properly expect her to be anywhere else.

‘Vali?’ she said.

‘It’s me. How do you know who I am?’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I’ve updated myself, on a regular basis.’ She paused. ‘But there hasn’t been an update for a week. Am I still alive?’

I didn’t want to lie to her, but I didn’t want to tell her the truth, either. I made myself face it. ‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘You died, back on the
Rock.’

‘I did?’ She frowned. ‘How did
that
happen?’

‘You were murdered.’

The frown deepened. ‘By whom?’

‘By a creation of the Morrighanu. A woman known as Skinning Knife.’

‘Ah,’ Idhunn said again. ‘You know, I always thought that would lead to disaster in the end. I spoke about it to Rhi. She’s the only one who’s ever really believed
me. All the others are too convinced of their own rightness. It’s what drove me away in the end.’

‘You
belonged to the Morrighanu?’

‘My mother did. I lied to you, to the Skald. I falsified records, when I came there. I had to; they wouldn’t have taken me in, otherwise, and I had nowhere else to go. It was at
another time of crisis: they didn’t ask too many questions. People had defected and they wanted trained personnel to rebuild the organization. But I was born here, in Morvern. I joined the
Morrighanu as a young woman, and fifteen years after that, I ran away.’

The first question from my lips was, ‘Did Frey know?’

‘No. At least, I don’t believe so. He had dealings with the Skald; you know that. Maybe he knew and never said anything, because I was also in exile and he wanted us to believe that
he was, too.’

‘And Skadi? Skinning Knife?’

‘I knew about the project. I wasn’t directly involved, but my mother had been and she kept me informed. She shouldn’t have done it, but mother was always an iconoclast. She
thought someone outside her sept should have the information. Just in case.’

‘Why should Skinning Knife have killed you? What do you know?’

‘Here,’ Idhunn said. She opened her mouth and spat something delicately into the palm of her hand, like a cat spitting. It was a single, glowing coal. ‘Take this.’

‘What is it?’

‘Information. Everything I know about Skadi. You won’t be able to access it immediately; you’ll need Morrighanu tech for that. As for why she killed me – revenge, I
should imagine. Revenge for being the creation of her creators, one of whom was my mother. They made her what she is and she never forgave them.’

‘I thought she was supposed to be the ultimate warrior.’

‘She is a weapon,’ Idhunn said. ‘She feels she needs to kill, otherwise she herself will die.’

‘Is that true?’

‘I doubt it. But it’s what she believes, and that’s what matters. Would you like to believe yourself to be such a being? With an in-built addiction?’

‘Sounds to me like it’s more of an excuse,’ I said, but who was I to talk? I’d sliced up my own arms, before I became an assassin for hire. I reached out and took the
coal from Idhunn’s hand. And as I did so, her image wavered, blanking into snow, fading, and then gone.

It was only when I came out that I became aware that Eld had been riding alongside me. I felt us separate and that was much too close for comfort. Instinctively, I struck out. Eld caught my
hand; we sat eye to glaring eye for a moment. Then he said, with that vitki mildness, ‘Sorry. I needed information.’

I had to force myself to be polite. ‘You’ll ask me, if there’s a next time.’

‘Unlikely that there will be. In the next few minutes they’ll cotton on to the fact that we’ve been inside their system – I imagine there’s even more of a panic
going on right now.’

‘If they know it’s us, can they do a mindwipe?’ The thought of that filled me with weariness.

Eld looked smug. ‘Not on me. I’ve buried my information too deep for that. Oh, and yours as well, by the way.’ As he spoke, a raven perched on his shoulder, holding a glowing
coal in its beak. It winked a jet-black eye at me and disappeared.

‘Idhunn was Morrighanu,’ I said, expecting Eld to nod – he knew everything else, after all. But instead I saw his eyes widen with the faintest of shocks.

‘The leader of the Skald, from Darkland? That’s – that’s startling, to say the least.’

‘You didn’t know?’

Eld was frowning. ‘We checked her out, obviously. All the details added up.’

I couldn’t resist a smile. ‘So it’s not only the vitki who can cover their tracks, then?’

‘Apparently not.’ Eld looked sour. It was the most gratifying moment of my day. It lasted for perhaps a minute, until the door hissed open and Glyn Apt stormed in.

How do you explain what makes something beautiful? I could tell you about crimson and pale, about hardness and flow. I could tell you about the softness of marrow at the
bone’s crack, about the raspberry seep of spinal fluid. The contrast of scarlet against the snow and the dark trees; old fairy tales that my new mothers told me, about red and white and
black. About sorrowing and the thin sound of a spirit snatched by the wind, of how it makes me feel when I set something free, save it from its prison of flesh and its cage of the skull, release it
into the sunset storm and taste the salt of its passage on my lips.

I could talk to you for hours of beauty, but I don’t think you’d understand. No one else has, after all.

I still didn’t understand why Mayest considered Khainet to be so important. After telling me about some family trait that Khainet was supposed to possess, she became
vague: said that they needed to run tests. I did not like the sound of this. I sat, up in the bell tower, then thought about things.

Khainet had regained her awareness of herself, true. But so had everyone else in the colony and I didn’t think that her story had sounded very different from other people’s. My own
was similar.

I’d been down in the cellar where the root crops were kept. I liked it down there: it was dark and quiet and smelled of earth. Down there, I couldn’t hear the voices of House Father
or his friends. I did not put this in words: it was more the sense of
quiet/roots/earth/darkness/peace/safe
that came to me.

I had lit the dim lamp and was bending over the roots, stacking them in neat rows as I had been trained to do. And suddenly, there was the beat of wings around my head and a voice was shouting.
I don’t know what it said – it was loud and startling, echoing around the walls of the root cellar, and I jumped. The bird was whisking round my hair, wings filling my sight. I
remembered the bird during the execution ceremony: it meant death and the stink of blood, a woman crumpling to the floor, her head shattered. My heart pounding, I knocked into the side of the box
in which the roots were being stored. The box overturned, sending them rolling across the floor. I whipped round and struck out. I was aiming for the bird, but next moment, it was gone.

My son was sprawled on the floor. His face was white in the lamplight, and I remember noticing for the first time how different the colour of his skin was from mine. I stood over him, looking
down. It felt as though the walls of the root cellar were closing, faster and faster, crashing over me in waves. I thought he said something: the word that meant ‘mama’. There was blood
running down his face.

The world had changed. Before, I mirrored it; now it mirrored me. I looked out of my own skull for the first time. There were no words, not yet. The old me was still there, wailing over her
injured child, terrified of what I had done, horrified at the blood, loving First Joy, but there was also a person who stood in the root cellar, thinking in a clear sequence of images.