Bloodmind (25 page)

‘Indeed,’ the old vitki said. ‘Our laboratory.’

Glyn Apt’s mouth quirked in a humourless smile. ‘At least the vanishing of our little broch did not take half the forest with it.’
Same phenomenon?
I wondered.

‘And so,’ the old vitki continued, turning to Glyn Apt, ‘you were the one who followed the quarry to the Rock, were you not?’ I sat up a little straighter at that. Had the
quarry been myself? Or Skinning Knife?

‘That is so,’ Glyn Apt said.

‘And found another prize instead,’ the vitki murmured. His gaze passed over me to Eld, as if I was not only of no consequence, but had not even been seen. If that was the way they planned
to treat an enemy agent, I thought, it was fine by me. I was still hoping to hear something about the progress of the war.

The valkyrie stared blankly ahead, as ever. The Morrighanu continued to look fierce and angry. I decided that I had little useful to contribute. Eld had brought me here; he could handle the
difficult questions. But his next comment surprised me.

‘So,’ he said. ‘What else has vanished?’

‘It is not “what else”,’ the old vitki said, ‘but “who”. People are vanishing.’

‘People are being killed. By the girl you championed.’

The old vitki ignored Eld’s remark. I realized, with a sick sense of dismay, that the old man was now staring directly at me, and saw me all too well.

‘Skald girl,’ he now said, soft-voiced. ‘You know, do you not? You spoke with the avatar of your leader?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ My voice seemed to ring out very loudly in this tall stone room, and echo.

‘Don’t you? The woman who called herself Idhunn, who years ago belonged to the Morrighanu, whose mother went to another world and stole someone away?’

‘What are you talking about? Which other world?’

‘A world named Mondhile. A place you know as well as anyone here.’

I kept silent. Frey’s ripped spirit seemed to hover about the chamber, as suddenly as if summoned.

One of the valkyries finally opened her mouth. She spoke hollowly, as if from the bottom of a well. ‘She knows it. She killed your kinsman there.’

I started to say something, but Eld put out a hand. The valkyrie continued, ‘And was it not the Skald who ordered us to be sent to the cliffs of glass, who exiled us, prohibited our return
so that we had to eke out an existence on the glacier and in the forest?’

One of the vitki gave a harsh laugh and said, ‘Don’t you think we ought to be thanking them for that?’

‘Never mind what the Morrighanu girl is doing. If she wants to kill, then let her. She will only weed out the weak. Is not our war against the Skald itself?’ the valkyrie said. Her
silver eyes turned to me, and again it was as though she did not see me, but was looking through me. I remembered an old story of the Reach: that a dog with silver eyes can see the wind. I wondered
what she was really looking at. But above all this was the thought: the Skald exiled the vitki, and those who became the valkyrie. Had the original valkyrie, perhaps, even been members of the Skald
itself? It was an extremely disquieting thought, that our own might have turned against themselves and been sent away. But Idhunn too had said as much, when I spoke with her avatar. And what
happens once, can happen again: the tritest lesson of history.

‘Did you know this?’ Eld asked.

‘No, and I do not know whether it is true.’

The valkyrie stood, bristling. ‘Of course it is true. Every child knows it. We were exiled by witches.’

‘What is taught is not always what is true. I’d have thought you would have known that, living here.’

‘This is pointless,’ one of the other vitki said. ‘Glyn Apt has looked into her head. We know what she knows of Mondhile. That is the matter at hand; everything else is
irrelevant.’

‘Trial by combat,’ the valkyrie declared. She either wasn’t listening to the vitki or didn’t care: she had her own agenda.

‘She’s my associate,’ Eld said. ‘I won’t allow that.’

‘I should like to see you stop me,’ the valkyrie replied. She put her head on one side, regarding me coldly, like a hawk. ‘Shall we test it, you against me? The soft path against the path of iron?’

‘Look,’ Eld said wearily. ‘Internecine squabbling is all very well, but it won’t get us anywhere.’

The old vitki was staring at Eld, with sparkling malice. ‘When we last spoke, you suggested that the war has been a mistake. Because that could be construed as treason, you know.’

‘I did not speak of the war, as you should remember,’ said Eld. ‘I spoke of common cause with the Reach over this Morrighanu woman. Nations may have such, even when they are
at loggerheads. It is simplistic to think otherwise.’

‘Are you calling me a fool?’ the old man asked, as if he was hoping that the answer would be ‘yes’, but Eld merely smiled and did not answer. ‘But still,’ the
old vitki went on, ‘the woman from the Skald will be permitted to stay, at least, for a while, before the expedition sets off.’

‘Expedition?’ Eld asked, neutrally.

‘The Skald girl has experience of Mondhile.’ The vitki looked at me, with seeming blandness.

‘What?’ I said. ‘You want me to go back to Mondhile? Why?’

Back to what passed for the graves of Frey and Gemaley, and a feral people.

‘Not alone. Eld will go with you. And Glyn Apt.’

None of us, I thought, could look very pleased at the prospect of
that.

*

We left the next morning, on a little Morrighanu space craft. Muspell does not have a large space fleet; the war at present was confined to planet-side, apart from a few skirmishes. Eld and I
were confined separately – I don’t know what they thought we might try, but seizure of the ship was probably in their minds. My cell had a portal screen and I was able to watch my world
fall away, serene and clouded, the northern seas already more free of ice than they had been when I came back home, with spring on the way and war in its wake.

When Muspell was no more than a marbled sphere, the door opened and Glyn Apt came in.

‘Mondhile,’ she said.

I gave her a hostile glare. ‘You know everything I know.’ But there was that coal of information that Idhunn had given me, information that was buried so deeply it would be difficult
to access . . . I tried to keep the unease from my face.

‘No,’ Glyn Apt replied. ‘In fact, I don’t.’ The data began to run across her face with increased density and speed, until her features became obscured behind its
moving blur. ‘When you went there, in search of your faithless Frey, what did you know about it?’

‘All I know came from a report that had been sent into space a generation ago, broadcast but incomplete. An anthropologist, who went to Mondhile with a Gaian religious mission and never made it
off-planet.’

‘And people who enter a state called the bloodmind. You mentioned that, during interrogation. Interesting.’

‘Yes, a fascinating spectacle, seeing humans and animals tear one another to pieces. Made my week.’

‘I would have liked to have seen that,’ Glyn Apt said, as though agreeing.

‘I’m sure you’d have been right at home.’ Perhaps that was unfair, but I didn’t care. I looked out of the viewport. Muspell was invisible now against the starfield,
Grainne still hot and yellow-gold. I stared at my sun until it faded. Glyn Apt, meanwhile, was staring at me: I could feel her gaze on the edges of the seith, wrinkling it like fire.

‘You’re going back,’ she said. I couldn’t tell what she meant.

‘I’ve no choice,’ I retorted.

‘Yet you’re going.’

‘Obviously.’

‘I have never been,’ Glyn Apt admitted, sitting companionably down on the edge of the bed. I didn’t see her as being one for girlish chats. The dataflow had stopped now, apart
from the occasional tick of information, and without it, she again looked older, more human. I wondered what her history was, what it had been like for her as a part of the Morrighanu.

And it seemed a banal thing for her to say. ‘Of course you’ve never been. It was virtually uncharted until Frey got his hands on that anthropologist’s report.’

‘Is that what he told you?’ she asked.

‘Well . . . not in so many words. It’s what we surmised.’

‘The original data on Mondhile were held by the Morrighanu. One of our ships picked up the transmission. We first went there fifty years ago.’

‘The
Morrighanu
went there? Why?’

‘The original intention was to set up a colony. We were persecuted at the time – vitki and our kind do not always get along – and we wanted another option. We looked at Nhem,
and did not like what we saw: at the time, the vitki were in contact with the then-Hierolath. We did not like the idea that what had been done to the women of Nhem might be done to ourselves. So we
looked at other worlds.’

‘Did you set up a colony on Mondhile?’

‘No. The people there communicated with us, as they had not done with the Gaians, but they were clans, at war with one another, and there was no land for us to take. It was clear that the
scouting party would be killed unless they left, but in any case they had seen enough for a colony to be unnecessary.’

For once, I was ahead of her. ‘They witnessed the bloodmind.’

Glyn Apt nodded. ‘They saw women fighting alongside the men – warriors known as feir, who had lost conscious awareness and the power of speech for much of the time, who were in
essence feral. Human animals. The condition was partly genetic, and partly tied into ancient technology that runs under the earth of Mondhile, and affects behaviour. Technology that could be
replicated, and genes that could be altered.’

‘So it wasn’t all Frey’s plan,’ I said. ‘He stole your ideas.’

‘We took what we needed to protect our own,’ Glyn Apt said, bristling, ‘and Frey took that for the same reasons. But his understanding was incomplete, and that’s why he
went to Mondhile, to find out for himself.’

‘And Nhem? Why did he go to Nhem?’

‘After what we had seen on Nhem, we sold information to the women of the Nhemish resistance. We hoped they could breed it into the next generation of Nhemish women: release it as a
mutagenic virus so that when the women reached puberty, they would turn on the males.’

‘It’s that precise? Wouldn’t they turn on one another?’

‘Maybe. I doubt if it can be made that precise, to be honest. But you saw what Nhem is like. Any chance of destabilizing the existing order, they take.’

‘It can’t have worked – or hasn’t it had time? When did you sell it to them?’

‘Several decades ago. And no, it has not had time to work yet. They are still experimenting with it; it was never properly implemented. You’ve met one of the results.’

I could not think who she meant at first, and then I realized. Something flared deep inside my mind. Idhunn’s coal of information? ‘Skinning Knife?’

‘Skadi was created and born on Nhem, one of the first products of the breeding program. Her mother is Mondhaith – they bred her, and another girl, pathogenetically.’

‘What happened to the other girl?’

‘She’s still on Nhem. There’s a situation developing. But I haven’t had recent word.’

‘How did Skinning Knife get from Nhem?’

‘The resistance camp was attacked. Skadi was rescued, but the sister was taken. Skadi was sent to the Morrighanu, for training. I suspect that in any case she was more than the Nhemish
resistance could handle – perhaps she had already killed, I don’t know, and they realized that they had created a monster, not a saviour. She broke away from her foster mothers, who
were one of the extreme sects, lived wild for a time, then was picked up by the vitki. She has had a violent, confused history on Muspell.’

‘So why are we going to Mondhile?’

‘To find Skinning Knife’s closest living relative,’ Glyn Apt said.

Strange, to be returning. After all, I had left Mondhile only a short time before, and I’d thought never to go back again. A beautiful, savage world: one where I had
made friends, and enemies. But the enemies were dead now, and there was no reason to be afraid. Perhaps I should seek out Ruan – but something else in me told me to leave him to his life,
trouble him no further. I no longer had his sister’s bow: it was back at the Rock, or maybe taken by a Morrighanu as a keepsake. That was appropriate, in a way. I could see why the Morrighanu
had sought out Mondhile; they were two of a sort – wild, aggressive, preferring remote places. And perhaps that was true of me, too.

Skinning Knife: an intended nemesis of Nhem. Given what they’d done, the ruling classes of Nhem deserved everything they’d got. I wondered once more about the aftermath of the
Hierolath’s death: had it really had any effect, made any appreciable difference? The women of the Nhemish resistance, desperately grasping at straws of solutions. But it explained why Frey
had come with me to Nhem: he’d been looking for clues to Skinning Knife. Maybe he’d known her: was she the link between myself and Gemaley? Lost girls, all with warrior talents, and
some missing part of Frey that made him want to be their mentor, their controller? He was dead; I could not ask him, and found that I had no real wish to do so.

The door whisked open then, and Eld was standing on the threshold.

‘They’ve decided to give us a freer rein now we’re out in space.’

‘Glyn Apt told me why we’re heading for Mondhile.’

‘Yes, she had a word with me, too. This is a fast ship; we’ll be there in a couple of days. She wanted to know whether you wanted to be put out for the duration.’

‘I’d rather use the seith,’ I said.
Or rather, what’s left of it.

‘As you wish.’ Eld withdrew. I lay back on the bed – alone at last – and sank into as much of a trance state as I could muster. Later, it became sleep, an uneasy,
unsettled state that eventually turned to deep unconsciousness, mercifully without dreams. When Glyn Apt once more came to wake me, it was to tell me that we had reached Mondhile.

It looked as it had the last time: a dark world, mottled with crimson that I now knew to be the red leaves of satinspine coming into their spring
promise. The immense peaks of arctic mountains split the pole, running down in ridges across the northern continent. As the Morrighanu ship twisted downward, I recognized the glaciated wall of the
mountains known as the Otrade, or Snakeback, ghost-white in the sunlight against that oddly green sky. The ship came in fast and low, turning over great river estuaries, the skeins of islands
visible along the coast. We were heading inland, towards the mountains. I glimpsed roofs and turrets: settlements few and far between. Despite its clan system, Mondhile was not designed for
co-operation. I dreaded seeing Gemaley’s ruined tower rising from one of the crags, but I thought – or hoped – that we were too far north. I was certain that I recognized some of
the lakes, however, strung among the mountains like beads. But then we were coming in over a black expanse, a high plateau at the edge of the Otrade, marked with patches of white that I was unable
to identify. Some kind of vegetation? Ice? We were coming down, the ship hissing as the stabilizer jets came on.