Bloodmind (14 page)

He shook his head. ‘Not any more, but I confess I can’t be sure. Help me bring him up, Vali.’

Even through slickskin gloves, the water chilled me to the bone. Together we pulled and tugged at the filleted corpse, which had either become wedged, or had been deliberately secured, amongst
the rocks on the stream bed. With Eld taking the head, and myself the feet, we managed to bring the body over to the opposite bank and set him down on a carpet of curling fern shoots. Eld rolled
him over, revealing a young man with long dark hair, now matted into a sodden mass. His jaw was wedged open in rictus, a soundless shout. Sea-blue eyes stared up at us. Eld and I stood looking down
at him, noting the patched slickskin, the knives at his belt. She had not bothered with his weapons and they had not been enough to save him. A hunter, clearly, probably a local. I wondered whether
he had crossed her in some way, or whether he had simply been unfortunate enough to be the first one she met who would serve as a demonstration model, a gory clue to be thrown carelessly in our
path. Somehow, I had no doubt that we had been meant to find him.

Then the man blinked. Both Eld and I leaped backwards and clutched at one another. It must have looked comical, had anyone been watching. The locked jaws released, clattered together with a
click.

‘Better look harder,’ the corpse said, in a soft and mocking woman’s voice. I barely heard it through the clamour of questions in my own head:
he cannot be alive, can he?
His backbone is gone, this is madness, am I really seeing this?
– a tumult of atavistic, superstitious horror that was broken only when Eld gave a muffled curse and dropped to his knees by the
body. He reached into the opening mouth and swiftly extracted a small gleaming pellet.

‘Holographic recording. He’s dead as dead can be, Vali.’

I pretended that I was kneeling by his side, as opposed to sinking into the ferns with relief.

‘She’s teasing,’ Eld said softly in turn.

Rapidly, we searched the man’s pockets but found no trace of identification. Eld rolled him over and parted the mass of hair at the back of what remained of the corpse’s neck.

‘What are you looking for?’

‘Identification coding. Everyone in Darkland whom the state can reach has a code embedded in the skin.’ He brushed the hair up to reveal an area of thick grazing, already bled pale
and puffy by the action of the stream. ‘Nothing. I wonder whether she’s mutilated him to hide the code, or the fact that he hasn’t got one?’

‘You said: anyone the state can reach. Presumably that wouldn’t mean the forest clans?’ We were a long way from Hetla, and my experience with the Morrighanu had taught me that
Darkland was filled with different sects. And if Skinning Knife
was
Morrighanu anyway . . .

‘No, it wouldn’t. They’re an unknown quantity.’

‘Do you know what she does with the spines?’

‘Trophies, perhaps. Or maybe not. She collected the bones of previous victims but I don’t know whether that’s still the case.’

‘If this was the Reach,’ I said, ‘we’d bury him with as much honour as we could.’

‘But this is not the Reach. This is Morvern, where bodies are put in the branches of the blaze trees, or sent out to sea, or left for the beasts,’ Eld said. And so we learned what we
could from the corpse and walked away, leaving the dead among the first fronds of spring.

*

I could feel her on the air, now: a clotting trace of rage. It was intermittent, a sensation which came and went, sometimes curling insidiously over my skin when I was least expecting it,
sometimes casting a shadow over my senses like a rush of dismay. It reminded me of Gemaley, but it was much stronger and more assured: Gemaley if she had been older, trained, more subtle.
Angrier.
This made me nervous; it felt too much like my own fury, the rage I’d lived with after my brother, after Frey. The rage I pretended I didn’t have, that I’d tried
to cut out of my skin, carving its runes in my own flesh and blood. It made me feel a connection with Skinning Knife and I didn’t want that. How much had dead Gemaley reminded me of myself,
hurting because she could? I was a career assassin, she was an isolated psychopath. We were not the same, nothing like.

I wondered whether Skadi had left such a trail on purpose, if she might be luring us in with gleeful patience. Eld had suggested, and I had felt, that she was mad. Still, it was impossible to
second-guess the insane, without following them too far into the dark. And I did not like feeling so trapped. Eld and I could leave Sull, return to our respective nations, hide out, but she would
still find us if she chose.

We made a rudimentary camp in the middle of a small grove of trees. The ground here was bare of ash and snow: we were moving steadily south into Morvern, away from the ice, and the snow was
growing patchier.

‘How long does summer last here?’ I asked Eld, as we sat around a small glow-pack.

‘Not long. The same as the northern parts of the Reach in these latitudes, but Morvern has always had a reputation for being colder than elsewhere. In Hetla, the snow is almost gone
now.’ He held out his palms to the glow-pack, the faint light flickering across his face. He looked unreal in the half-light, and harmless: a slightly soft middle-aged man. I was having to
remind myself more and more often that he was vitki, that I shouldn’t let my guard drop.
My enemy’s enemy is my friend.
An old and bitter saying, and I wondered in this case how
true it really was.

‘What about you, Thorn Eld?’ I asked him, curious. ‘You know all about me and I know nothing of you. What’s your life like, in Hetla?’

Eld gave me an indulgent smile. ‘The same as any vitki’s. I have a small apartment in security headquarters, the fortress. My work takes up most of my time. I live quietly, outside
it. You are too subtle, Vali, to think that the vitki spend all their free time in torture and espionage simply because of the love of it, but I have met people who think this. I do what needs to
be done. That’s all.’

‘And so if you’re not spending all your free time torturing dissidents, what do you do?’

‘Listen to music, read, study history, play chess. Very dull really.’

‘Are you married?’

‘No, I never have been. Vitki tend not to form permanent attachments. The natural partners are the valkyrie – a lot of the younger men go from one to another, and vice versa. But
they can be a little . . . demanding.’

‘I can imagine. The valkyrie are enhanced, aren’t they? The one I once saw in your office had some kind of visual implants.’

‘They’re heavily enhanced, the more so as one goes up the ranks. The upper echelons are really barely human any more and have no wish to be. Ultimate strength, ultimate fighting
capability, no time for emotional weakness – they draw on mythology. Like the Morrighanu.’

‘In mythology they were also celestial bar girls.’ I had a hard time imagining a modern valkyrie with a pitcher of beer and her hair in braids.

Eld laughed. ‘I know that, but I’ve never dared mention it. They pay a price for what they undergo. Some societies have a far greater technological efficiency than we do. The
modifications one can undergo on Muspell are not always that . . . effective. The body rejects, starts to break down. A lot of the valkyrie have immune problems.’ He paused. ‘It makes
them tetchy.’

‘And this woman – Skadi, Skinning Knife? What enhancements did she have?’

‘She had none at all. That’s what worries me. She claimed not to need them, claimed innate genetic superiority – and believe me, among the valkyrie, that’s a claim that
can get you challenged or dead. But they left her well alone. Perhaps they sensed that it was true.’

‘She’s psychotic. But what else is she?’

‘Of course she’s psychotic. But to the valkyrie, that’s an advantage. Like the Morrighanu, they practise disciplines that aren’t all that far removed from those of your
Skald, but which rely to a greater extent on personal suffering as a tool for self-discipline. They go through extremes of self-denial, mortification, pain.’ That explained Glyn Apt’s
ill humour, I thought.

We fell silent. After a while, Eld said, ‘If you want to sleep, I’ll sit first watch.’

I did not want to say:
I’m too afraid to fall asleep,
like a child in the dark. I thought,
I have the seith,
but the seith had not protected me from her last time, and it
hadn’t protected me from Gemaley. It was erratic, tied too closely into my emotions. Maybe that was why the valkyrie tried not to have any.

I thought of waking again to find Skinning Knife standing over me as I lay, passive and helpless. I had not minded that she had been about to subject me to terrible death and I wondered whether
the man we had found in the stream had also slid indifferently down into the dark, convinced of the rightness of it all. This seemed to me to be the most dreadful thing about her: that she could
kill you and you would not mind.

As if he had read my thoughts, Eld said, ‘Use what powers you have. Now that we know what she can do, I will remain vigilant.’

‘And if she overpowers you?’

‘She will not,’ Eld reassured me out of the dark. In the light of the glow-pack, I glimpsed the beat of wings and strangely, this made me believe.

When I woke again, Loki was high above me and Eld was touching my shoulder.

‘What is it?’ I came awake immediately, as if doused with snowmelt.

‘There’s someone out there.’ Eld’s voice was a breath in my ear; even so close as he was, I barely heard him.

‘It is her?’ I hated myself for sounding so fearful, but Eld ignored it. I rose to my feet, listening.

‘I am fairly sure that it’s not,’ Eld said. ‘See what you can feel.’

Shadows. I sent out the seith, probing cautiously into the darkness. It was like putting a hand through a hole in the cellar wall, expecting the bite at any moment. But the bite did not come. I
could feel traces in the night, a strange, half-hesitant expectancy, as if someone out there was waiting for something to happen. Power, and pain, and loss – all of these things were
waiting.

‘I don’t think it’s an animal,’ I murmured to Eld. ‘I think it’s human.’

There was a soft laugh behind us. Eld and I span round. Someone was standing at the entrance to the grove. Eld brought the glow-pack up, along with his weapon.

‘You won’t have to shoot,’ a voice said. Female, and not young. The wavering light played across the figure of an old woman, wrapped in a mass of skins and pelts from which a
seamed face peered.

‘And who the hell,’ said Eld, with an uncharacteristic quiet fury that I thought was born of fear, ‘are you?’

‘A herder, once. I live here, now. I know you’re looking for someone, a shadow-woman. A killer. She passed this way, as she did last spring and then again in the winter. They know
her, in Sull, after the massacre. But no one goes near her.’ The Gaelacht of this part of Darkland was different to that of the Reach, although I had a tabula with me. But this woman spoke
clearly, in a strong voice and I had no difficulty in understanding her accent. I would not have expected this, from the remoteness of Morvern. And what ‘massacre’?

‘Then where is she now?’ Eld spoke with urgency.

‘The place where she always goes. Her home.’

I felt Eld become still and tensed by my side, like a hunting dog. ‘And where might that be?’

‘In the heights. The oldest place of all Morvern.’

‘Can you take us there?’

The woman snorted, in an
are-you-joking?
manner. ‘Why would I?’

‘Well then, can you tell us where it is?’

‘You can follow her yourself, vitki. Tell your ravens that it is in the crags of the far northern icefield, close to where the blight has crept. It is hidden, high in the rocks, in the
volcano known as Therm. Tell your ravens to look for the heat traces, seeping through the rocks above it. You’ll find her there.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I told you. It is her home. Or as close as she seems to get to one.’

‘And how do you know this?’

‘They would not go near her, even when she first came here, a grown girl. Her foster mothers lived there.’

‘Her
foster
mothers?’

‘What, you thought the fenris raised her? Perhaps they would have been kinder kin.’

‘Are any of her foster mothers still alive?’

‘Oh no. The forest clan that the last one ravaged killed her, when they finally tracked her down. It was the talk of Morvern, but of course no one would speak to an outsider of
it.’

‘Yet you are doing so now.’

‘I can see what you are. You are vitki, and her enemy – I can feel it on you. I also want her gone. This one is worse than the foster mothers, much worse. The forest clans have had
their fill; they are preoccupied with fighting the fenris and the other beasts that have been driven north out of blighted Sull. But make no mistake, they want her gone, and so do I.’

‘All right,’ Eld said warily. ‘We’ll do as you suggest.’ I glanced at him, and when I glanced back again, the old woman was gone. Eld and I, keeping close together,
made a quick search, but she was nowhere to be found: it was as though she had been snatched up into the trees.

‘Therm,’ Eld said bitterly, when we were once more sitting over the glow-pack trying to warm our numb hands. ‘If there’s a worse bit of Morvern, I don’t know of
it.’

‘Could she have been lying? And what was that about a massacre?’

‘Very possibly. And there was a massacre here, a couple of years ago, but I don’t know anything more about it. I thought it was some clan thing. Anyway, I’m reluctant to go off
on a wild goose chase on the word of a fucking Norn.’ Eld sounded more harried, and more human, than I had ever heard him. The vitki polish was beginning to wear thin.

‘So am I. I’m reluctant to
be
here, Eld. My nation’s at war; I should be back there.’ But Skadi was Idhunn’s murderer. That gave me a reason to go after her,
but I still wasn’t sure about Eld’s own reasons.

‘But you’re not back there, are you? And there’s no way of getting back.’