Authors: Liz Williams
Bloodmind
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BLOODMIND
TOR
P
LANET
: M
USPELL
(V
ALI
)
The other women of the Skald had crept from the room, leaving me alone with Idhunn’s body. The investigation team had been summoned and were on their way. Someone
had opened one of the tall windows of the lamp room and the sea air streamed in, diminishing the reek of death.
I stood in the fading twilight and looked down at her: friend, mentor, Skald superior and the woman I credited with saving my life. And now she was nothing more than a mutilated bag of flesh in
a slow seep of blood. For what seemed like a long time, I could not look away, but eventually I dragged my gaze up from the filleted corpse. I felt like the ghost of the Vali Hallsdottir I had been
so little time ago: Skald assassin, just returned from a mission, home safe, or so I’d thought. But now I was no more than a glimpse in the curve of the lamp casing, face a white oval in the
gathering shadows, the scars livid against my skin as though those long-ago claw-tracks had only just been made. The hollow of my empty eye-socket was a well of dark and my good eye looked wide and
sightless. I put a hand to the breastplate of my borrowed alien armour and it felt as though my heartbeat was pounding a hole through the leather. The gleam of Muspell’s evening star shone
over my shoulder and it struck me then that the thing on the floor at my feet had been named for that star, but the spirit that ruined corpse had housed would never again stand at the windows of
the lamp room and look for its burn in the heavens. I dropped to my knees beside Idhunn, taking care not to disturb the pooling blood.
‘Idhunn,’ I whispered. I reached out a hand, but did not touch her. Instead, I held my palm a little distance above her body and, closing my good eye, I called upon the senses that
on Muspell are known as the seith, as if I shut off my physical vision in order to look through my ruined eye, like those old tales from ancient Earth where the people of the huldra and the fey
steal sight away, only to replace it with other gifts. My ancestors had brought those old tales with them across the star roads, but they were only stories, nothing more. My nightmares were
real.
The impression of another person present was very strong. I felt that I could see a shrouded figure crouching over Idhunn’s body, making the first of many delicate cuts in order to detach
my friend’s spine. I could even smell this other person: a pungent, musty odour like an old and bloody cupboard. But there was nothing more. A haze lay over the body, a deliberate masking. I
rose, still with my eye closed, and walked to the door. The trail led no further. Whoever had committed this murder had taken pains to cover their tracks in the non-physical world, and if that was
the case, then the likelihood was that they had also gone to the trouble to hide more tangible evidence, too. And that suggested one thing to me:
vitki.
A cry came from beyond the windows of the lamp room: a thin shocked wail. For a moment, I thought it was a seabird calling, but then the seith kicked in once more, telling me it was a human
sound. It had come from somewhere in the fortress below me.
I ran to the windows of the lamp room and looked out. The sky was stained red in the east, all crimson and flame, but Muspell’s moon, Loki, was already well up and casting a pale light
across the water.
In the light of the moon a ship was riding. As I stared at it, I felt myself grow cold. When I’d come into the Rock a scant hour ago, returning from out-world, nothing had shown on the
navigational array of my little seawing. In order to make a swift return to the Rock, I’d avoided the main naval forces of the Reach, which were gearing up for war with Darkland; something
this size would have shown up like a bonfire on the screens. Yet I’d seen nothing and no one at the Rock had mentioned it, even during the traumatic aftermath of Idhunn’s murder.
And anyway, this was no ship of the Reach.
The thing was huge, perhaps a quarter of a mile from stern to prow. Not as big as the gigantic war-wings that I’d seen being constructed in the shipyards of Darkland, but big enough.
Frigate on top, bristling with antennae and gun placements, blast-cannons all along the sides, but icebreaker below. I could see the long ram of the ship riding just under the water, catching the
moonlight. It bore no insignia that I noticed, but as I watched, a spiral of wings, shadow on shadow, coiled up from behind one of the spiked masts and soared upward towards the moon. Then, in the
blink of an eye, they were gone. I’d seen those birds before – Darkland ravens, not real birds at all, but representations of information, metaphorical constructs carrying data between
the vitki. A vitki ship, then.
But in that, I was wrong.
I turned from the window and hastened for the door. Going down the steep spiral stairs, I ran into an old woman, hair streaming in disarray, another one with a face like a ghost’s. Hlin
Recksdottir, one of the Skald elders, clawed at my arm.
‘The vitki – the vitki are here! Vali, I’ve given orders for everyone to arm themselves. We’ll fight them if we have to.’
‘Has that ship sent any communication?’ I asked, but I wasn’t really expecting it to be a social call. The vitki were old enemies and the Reach had already gone to war with
them, with the whole of Darkland. The vitki ship would aim to take the Rock and the Skald, controlling the strategic shipping lanes that led through into the most developed part of the coast. I
clenched my fists to stop my hands from shaking.
‘Nothing.’ Hlin’s shocked face grew grim. ‘We’ve asked them what they want – as if it wasn’t obvious. I’ve put the data stores on a destruct
timer.’
There were backups in the Skald keeps on the mainland, on the secret islands on which we maintained tiny outposts. I nodded my agreement. Leaving Hlin to follow, I bolted down the stairs to the
main doors. Women raced around me: the Rock going into lockdown. As I reached the primary entrance, the blast-doors slammed shut, leaving us in a sudden, eerie silence. The guards were already at
their posts, weapons raised. The rest of us in the hall – Hlin, myself, a handful of Skald members – stopped dead, waiting. I don’t know what made me glance up into the dark arch
of the ceiling, but I did so and against old cold stone I saw a single feather drifting down, caught in a shaft of light. Mesmerized, I watched it spiral to rest on the floor and as it touched the
flagstones, it disappeared. I had a split-second glimpse of each pinion streaming out, turning into data: numbers, letters, co-ordinates, streaking across the floor and melting into the walls. Next
moment, there was the creak and grind of hydraulics as the blast-doors started to go up. They had hacked the fortress.
I seized Hlin by the arm and pulled her behind a desk. I’d not even had time to grasp a proper weapon: all I had was the alien bow I’d brought back as a memento from Mondhile, a
light, quick thing, lethally effective against a medieval foe but a useless antique against modern weaponry. Better that than nothing, though. I had three arrows in the shoulder pack: I notched one
of them up and waited to fire.
My chance came in the next minute. The main doors blew open and behind the boil of light and fire I saw someone standing on the steps. I didn’t wait. I drew back and loosed the arrow, just
as one of the Skald guards opened fire with a much more effective handgun. But neither bow nor finelight made any appreciable difference. My arrow clattered harmlessly to the floor after hitting an
invisible shield; the finelight bolt dissipated into a shower of sparks.
The person stepped forward. A black-and-silver uniform encased a tall female form. Her hands were gloved, but the dataflow of enhancements ran across the exposed skin of her face. Blue eyes
sparked silver, set in a gaunt countenance. White birds, like albino crows, circled around her head. And again a single feather fell. The woman reached out and took it and her gloved hand closed
over it. I thought I saw her smile.
She said, ‘My name is Rhi Glyn Apt; I am a commander of the Morvern Morrighanu. Put your weapons down. You’re out-numbered. There’s a blast-cannon trained on the keep. We have
your access codes.’ A pause. ‘I suggest you consider terms of surrender.’
It was useless to believe that I would tell them nothing. They may not have been vitki, but they were still from Darkland and they seemed to know all the
tricks.
Glyn Apt had me taken to the lower regions of the keep: what had once been a dungeon in the older, and bloodier, days of the Reach, and was now used as a meditation chamber. It was windowless,
built of thick, dovetailed slabs of stone, furnished only with a settle. The Morrighanu commander took the settle, and had me bonded to the wall. It wasn’t torture, not quite, but she made it
clear that there wasn’t going to be a choice. First, she had me injected with a mnemonic over-ride, and then she wired up the map implant in my head to her own information system. To anyone
who watched, it would have looked as though a white bird perched on my shoulder, plucking at the socket of my eye.
They wanted to know about Mondhile. They made me relive it, over and over again.
The tower. Gemaley’s home, rising mottled from the rock, the stone lit by its own shifting light. Inside, a ruin containing a bloody heart: the energy well that motivated both Gemaley
and the animal pack that lived there. My former lover Frey, prowling through the dungeons, luring me with weird vitki promises that I still didn’t understand.
Then, my escape to a nearby town – an ordinary, not-yet-tech settlement, transformed by the bloodmind, the feral state into which the Mondhaith were prone to fall. Gemaley’s beast
pack had attacked then, just to see what would happen. I’d seen elderly grandmothers battling wild animals, and not always losing.
Human and animal. Animal and human.
Why were they asking me all these
questions?
They made me go through it again, and then again.
I didn’t even realize when they’d stopped, or understand that I was no longer in the interrogation chamber. At first I thought I was back in Gemaley’s dungeon, but then it
changed, shifted, to somewhere alien and smelling of musk, the Hierolath’s chamber on Nhem where he had raped me before I’d killed him, and then – still bleak, still cold –
the room I’d shared with my brother in Scaraskae and he was the one on top of me, in me and I shrieked as I’d never allowed myself to do in my parents’ house, because he would
tell them it was my fault—
