Bloodmind (24 page)

‘Come and see for yourselves, vitki, Skald.’

We followed her down the turf passage. My senses were flinched, waiting for horror: the stench of blood and torn flesh, the sights of bodies snatched wantonly apart. But in the command chamber,
and the cells, and the interrogation chamber beyond it, there was nothing to be seen. The place was clean, empty and quiet, as though everyone who had been there on the previous day, the whole
humming hive, had simply packed up and gone.

‘Where are they all?’ Glyn Apt whispered. Her eyes were wide. But now it was Eld’s turn to grow pale and lean back shakily against the wall.

‘Vali,’ he said, and it was then that I unfurled my senses, reached out with the seith and felt what he felt.

It was pure destruction, sheer violence, as though it was still going on around us, an unceasing pageant of horror. It was all sensation, unaccompanied by imagery, running down my nerves and
neurons, filling me with the knowledge that I was being slaughtered and also with a cold, alien joy in the slaughter itself. Skinning Knife was in my head, all at once, overwhelming, and with a
great effort I shut the seith off. The psychic shrieking stopped. I found that I had fallen to my knees and that my hands were clamped over my ears.

‘So it was with me,’ Glyn Apt said, ‘when we stepped in here earlier.’ She reached down a hand and pulled me up.

‘She’s trying to blind us,’ Eld said, ‘so that we’re limited to the physical senses, to technology. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel that either
is likely to get us very far.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I told him. ‘I’m used to being blind.’

Together with the Morrighanu, we made a thorough search of the broch, but found nothing. One of the women, whose names I still did not know despite
repeated requests, went back to speak with the traumatized child and learned that she had run out in the first minutes of the attack. She could not say what she had seen, but the Morrighanu felt it
from her, and it had been killing, sure enough.

‘And yet there is no sign of anything,’ Eld said in frustration. ‘No blood, no bones. Nothing.’

‘Well, she can’t have conducted her slaughter and then spent the rest of the night mopping the floor. She left Idhunn’s body, after all. And that corpse we found. There must be
DNA traces, at least.’

‘I’ve done multiple scans. I can’t find any physical evidence at all, apart from the usual – shed skin cells and hair. But there’s no trace of blood. This is
impossible.’

It struck me now that the leaving of Idhunn’s body and the other man’s might have been intentional, rather than the result of disturbed flight. A calling sign, a warning. Whereas
maybe this had been business as usual.

‘I can hear something,’ Glyn Apt said suddenly.

We listened, but all I was aware of was silence. I didn’t dare use the seith again, and open myself up to that beyond-sense shrieking. Eld, too, was looking at the Morrighanu
strangely.

‘What can you hear?’

‘I don’t know.’ Glyn Apt frowned. But I realized she was right. It was not so much that I could hear something, however, as feel it. It seemed to be travelling up through the
floor and down through the walls at the same time, and it made me first queasy, then nauseous. Eld and the Morrighanu were glancing around them in alarm.

‘Is it an earthquake?’ Eld asked.

‘Not here, surely. We’ve never—’ Glyn Apt shook her head furiously, like someone who has wasps in her hair. ‘We have to get out. Now.’

And once more we fled from the broch, coming out into the silent morning. But the tremor, or whatever it was, that had so displaced us inside the broch was no longer in evidence in the clearing.
Here, all was peaceful. When we had reached the shelter of the rocks, we looked back. But the broch had gone.

‘That’s impossible,’ Glyn Apt echoed. The rocks extended down to the floor of the clearing in an unbroken seam. There was no sign of the broch.

‘Where is it?’ Glyn Apt said, raw-voiced. ‘Where has it gone?’

Someone, somewhere, must be having a good laugh at our expense, I thought. We searched the clearing, but there was no sign that anything of human construction had ever been there. Glyn Apt stood
to one side, speaking rapidly and anxiously into a hand-held communicator. The private channel had, she confessed, been linked in with the broch, and now that, too, was gone.

‘There is nothing but static.’ Glyn Apt sat glumly down on a nearby rock.

‘But you can get through on the hand-held?’

‘Yes. High command is sending a wing.’

‘Not for us, it isn’t,’ Eld said.

Glyn Apt was staring at me absently and I knew what she was thinking. I crouched down in front of her and looked up into her pale, pouchy face. With the dataflow gone, she seemed to have aged
overnight and I could not say that I was surprised.

‘I have no intention of becoming a prisoner again, Glyn Apt. If we are to go with you, we work together, and this is to be made clear to your high command.’ What was left of it.

‘They will not accept you,’ Glyn Apt stated, very cold. ‘You are Skald. An enemy.’

‘This is not a time to start making parochial distinctions,’ Eld said. ‘She is working with me, and I am vitki. Do you not think we should be thinking more widely, about a
common enemy?’

‘Parochial?’ Glyn Apt spat. ‘You expect me to set aside a thousand years of hate, against all policy of my high command?’

‘Yet you defended me against your own commander,’ I said. ‘What was all that about?’

‘I was prepared to defend you,’ Glyn Apt said, tight-lipped. ‘You are a woman, with reason for vengeance. But I would have let her kill the vitki.’

‘That’s not a reason. Glyn Apt, if I need to do so, I will contact the high command of both vitki and valkyrie and ask them to put pressure on your organization in this
matter.’

‘You think they’ll respond?’ Glyn Apt said. ‘I’ve had time to do a little more research into this quest of yours. It isn’t even approved by your own command,
is it? This foreign enemy was the only person you could talk into accompanying you. And I know that you have been outcast from the vitki ranks as a result of your vendetta against the project of
Skinning Knife.’

‘Eld? Is that true?’ I said into the sudden silence.

‘Yes, it’s true,’ he answered after a moment. ‘But you should know that I believed that Skadi killed Idhunn. I don’t think you have much doubt about that yourself,
do you?’

I gave a slight nod. I didn’t want Glyn Apt to know that I’d actually spoken with Idhunn, or what was left of her in the Morrighanu information system. I hadn’t had time to
investigate her coal of information, either, and that frustrated me. So what, then, was Eld’s story?

Both Glyn Apt and Eld were on their feet now, facing one another. I did not fancy Glyn Apt’s chances against the vitki. I moved so that I was an equal distance from both of them.

‘Glyn Apt,’ Eld demanded, ‘be reasonable. Whatever you think of me, whatever denial you might be engaged in, at least let me talk to what’s left of your high
command.’

‘They will not listen to you,’ Glyn Apt said, but I had already made my choice. I had the Morrighanu on her knees with her own knife at her throat before anyone else could move.

‘Give him the hand-held. Put him through, or I’ll kill you.’

After a moment, Glyn Apt complied, as I watched her hands carefully. Eld took the communicator aside and spoke into it, out of earshot. I gripped Glyn Apt, keeping the knife steady. The other
women watched me, with wary goat-eyes.

After a few minutes of conversation, Eld came back to our tense little group and held the communicator to Glyn Apt’s ear. She listened, with every evidence of distaste. At last she said,
‘Very well, then. It seems you’ve convinced someone, at least. We are all to go back to High Command, and discuss the situation.’

‘Good,’ Eld said. ‘Vali, you can let her go now.’

I did so, pushing the Morrighanu so that she sprawled across the still-frosty ground. It gave me a little satisfaction,
at that. She huddled together with the other women, speaking in low, fluid voices, occasionally casting unreadable glances in the direction of Eld and myself. A short time after that, the
silver-and-black wing blasted down out of the sky.

Whatever my feelings about the Morrighanu, it was good to be out of the clearing and away from the vanished broch. Glyn Apt’s colleagues remained
below. I saw the little figure of the goat sledge, tiny as a toy, retreating through the forest below and then it was gone.

The sense of the broch still lingered around me and inside my head, as though the edges of the seith had been withered and blasted by fire. When Glyn Apt had stalked off to speak to the pilot of
the wing, I put aside what remained of my Skald pride and spoke of this to Eld, who just gave a grim nod.

‘I don’t know what we’re doing here, Eld. We seem to be thrashing about in utter confusion, whilst our enemy walks in and out as she pleases and leaves havoc in her
wake.’

‘Perhaps that’s the point. Weaken us with a sense of our own powerlessness until she chooses to strike. She seems to like to play.’

‘Well, it’s working.’ I stared out of the porthole of the wing as we swept low over the forest: a grey-and-white waste, touched with columns of flame. I could almost smell the
burning. Spring, it seemed, was coming fast, in fire.

Skinning Knife had saved our lives. A few moments later, we’d have been shot. It could not be coincidence that she’d arrived when she did. Would she have killed us too, if we
hadn’t escaped? There was a game being played; I could feel pieces of puzzle and I didn’t understand them. I wasn’t ready to share these speculations with Eld, but he was watching
me, clearly wondering what I was thinking. So I said, ‘Which is worse, Eld? Something that kills for the love of it, like some beasts do, or something that schemes and plans and wants to see
what will happen?’

‘Assuming they’re even separate. It’s a mistake to think that hot and cold cannot exist in the same being – a passion for pain combined with clinical precision.
I’ve seen that in Skadi, Vali. So have you.’

At that point, Glyn Apt returned, looking even more sour than usual.

‘We’ll soon be making the descent to High Command,’ Glyn Apt said. The pilot is expecting turbulence. You’d be advised to strap yourselves in.’ She looked as though
she would much rather not have told us that part.

Coming down to the High Command was not a journey I like to remember. The wing rocked, buffeted by the winds that tore through the gaps in the mountain
wall. I tried the map implant, but could not determine whether this was the wall of rock down which Eld and I had descended only a few days ago. Like all the terrain in Darkland, it was black and
glassy: I looked out of the porthole of the wing to see a snaggled line of teeth, cresting up from the snow below like the spine of a dragon. Shortly after that, a blizzard whirled up and the
desolate scene disappeared as completely as the broch, behind a wall of white. The wing hung for a long time, riding the wind, veering from side to side as though we rode the waves. Eventually the
pilot must have got clearance or spotted a gap, because the wing surged forward and the tumult outside was abruptly curtailed by darkness.

‘Is this it?’ I said, into the quiet. For all I knew, we’d suddenly died.

‘It is.’ Glyn Apt released the door catch and the door fell open into a blast of air from the stabilizer jets. We followed her out into a hangar, carved from the rock of the
mountain.

‘They’re waiting for us now,’ Glyn Apt explained. Her manner had changed: she seemed nervous, almost eager. I wondered whether she had experienced a change of heart in bringing
us here, or whether she was planning some further trap.

She led us along a narrow passage and through a set of doors, into a room that immediately reminded me of the council chamber of the Skald. It had the same high-arched roof, spanned by ribs of
stone, and even a round table; and it felt as though it had been carved in very ancient days, perhaps when the ancestors of the Darklanders had first come here. The room was, like the Morrighanu
themselves, familiar, and therefore disturbing in its familiarity.

Around the table sat a number of people, perhaps twenty in all. It was impossible not to notice the ebb and flow of tension in the room, twinging across the edges of the seith, and when I
studied those who were seated there, I understood why. They were not all Morrighanu. At least a third of them were men, and therefore presumably vitki, and three were clearly valkyrie, as chilly as
their vitki counterparts. Their blank silver stares rested upon me as I followed Glyn Apt through the door, lingered without interest, until they fastened their gazes upon Eld and did not let go.
Eld showed no sign that anything unusual had occurred. With Glyn Apt escorting us, we took two seats on the farthest side of the room. Thorn was the first to speak.

‘Am I to take it, Heldur, that you’ve actually decided you have something to say to me after all?’ He addressed a man sitting opposite us: elderly, perhaps in his late
seventies, with a shaven head and the rapacious face of a gannet.

‘It seems you may not have been entirely mistaken in your conclusions, Eld. The rescindment of your position still stands, however, until we have additional evidence.’ I had been
expecting a harsh caw of a voice, but the man spoke like an academic, in a thin, reedy tone. A single feather fluttered down from the ceiling and he caught it in his palm, closing a wrinkled fist
over it. When he opened his hand once more, the feather had gone. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see word has finally come.’

‘It makes no difference,’ one of the other councillor women said. She, too, was old: completely bald, with dead black eyes. ‘Our weapon is gone. What do you have to say about
that?’

‘I have nothing to say,’ the old vitki answered, and added, ‘Madam, I think you may mistake me for someone who cares.’

At once the Morrighanu were on their feet, but the elderly woman waved them impatiently down again. ‘Sit. You cannot expect sympathy. I would not extend it, were the circumstances reversed
– oh, I was forgetting. Of course, they have been so.’