Bloodmind (26 page)

‘What’s this place?’ I shouted to Glyn Apt, over the landing roar.

‘It’s a moor. I don’t know what it’s called. It’s where the original team landed; there’s supposed to be an old base here.’

A sudden silence. We had stopped.

‘Well,’ said Thorn Eld. ‘This is going to be interesting.’

Early evening, Mondhile. Glyn Apt and the Morrighanu crew busied themselves with tests and readings, which from my point of view had all the character of
oracular divination. Morrighanu technical speak was encoded, with talk of runes and signs. If Eld understood it, he gave no indication of doing so. We were allowed to go for a walk, as long as we
didn’t pass from sight of the ship.

‘We’re tagged, anyway,’ Eld said. He held out a hand and I saw a thin red line on the skin at the back of his wrist. ‘You’ve got one, too.’

When I rolled back my sleeve, I saw that this was the case. So that’s why my wrist had been aching. Yet another invasion. Eld was looking at the scars of my adolescent cuts, again without
gloating or any visible pity. After a moment he said, ‘Do you have any idea when it gets dark?’

‘This is quite far north, and it’s spring.’ It had been early spring when I arrived on Mondhile, with the buds just coming out, but judging from the red trees I had seen on the
way in, spring came quickly here. Perhaps it was a short summer; that made sense. Despite everything that had happened to me here – everything that I had done, too – I still felt
strangely at home in this northern place, the quiet, bleak expanse of the moor suiting my sombre mood.

‘Glyn Apt said the person we’ve come to see was a relative of Skinning Knife. How are we going to find them?’

‘She’s a woman. Glyn Apt has some plan involving scanning for genetic markers,’ Eld replied. He seemed ill at ease all of a sudden, at variance with the usual vitki calm,
emotions held in severe check. ‘It’s a speciality of the Morrighanu.’

‘So why didn’t they just trace Skadi in Morvern?’

‘They did. Tracing her is one thing. Catching her, once she’s gone rogue, is another: Skadi can evade capture – you’ve seen how she can come and go in an eye-blink. And Glyn Apt
hinted that there was another problem, as well, that Skadi has a way of evading the detection mechanisms. Didn’t Frey change the appearance of his DNA? That’s part of why they want this
woman. She’s Mondhaith. She’s more evenly matched with Skadi than even the most enhanced Morrighanu and she might know things which will help catch her.’

‘But is she here?’ I looked out across the empty expanse of the moor: black earth, low shrubs whose leaves were indigo and dark green. ‘How do they know?’

‘We are here because she is,’ Eld said patiently. ‘We followed her in.’

Suddenly the evening chill seemed sharper, the moor’s expanse threatening rather than familiar. I thought of those bones, rattling in a forest cottage, of the man lying face down in an icy
stream, bleeding out into rosy snowmelt. I remembered a people who turn feral in the blink of an eye.

‘She’s here?’ I asked. The seith rippled at the edges, as though I might conjure her up.

‘So they tell me.’ Eld looked no happier than I did.

‘What if it runs in the family?’ I said, and started to laugh. That was, after all, the whole point.

‘I think we should go back to the ship,’ was Eld’s only comment.

It was growing dark, in any case; twilight creeping over the silent land like a lid coming down, casting the bushes into blue shadow. The lights of the Morrighanu ship looked almost
welcoming.

‘Did you see anything out there?’ Glyn Apt questioned us. ‘Sense anything?’

‘No.’ Neither Eld nor I wanted to tell her that we’d managed to spook ourselves very effectively without external help. But Glyn Apt herself did not look happy, and there were
the signs of weariness underneath the dataflow. Her pouchy eyes were red-rimmed.

‘All right. Vali, you know this place better than I. What kind of night predators do you get?’

‘Well, there are visen. They’re eyeless; they hunt by smell. Something called altru, which I didn’t see, but which everyone was afraid of. The creatures they ride – mur
– are wild, too. There seemed to be quite a lot of things, now you mention it.’

Glyn Apt nodded as though she’d expected this. ‘We stay in the ship. No one goes out until dawn, and then we do a scan first. We’ve just done one, by the way. There’s
nothing within a quarter of a mile.’

I had no problem with that and neither, from the look on his face, did Eld.

Morning. The seith told me that, and more reliably, so did the dawn light showing through the viewport. Mornings on Mondhile, not many of them, a few
days, but always that same quality of light, impossible to define, peculiar to every planet. Mondhile’s was redder than most, perhaps, the huge crimson sun rising over the reach of the
moor.

The curving cell door was unlocked. I stepped into the corridor and found light streaming in, and fresh air overriding the antiseptic no-smell of the ship. A single feather drifted down from the
ceiling and I was back in the Rock, watching that single betraying piece of information as it descended.

Glyn Apt crouched in the open doorway, face pasty in the dawn light. Her skin was entirely free of the dataflow and she was quite still.

‘Glyn Apt?’ I said and then, when she did not respond, ‘Commander?’

No reply. But by that time, I’d heard it for myself. There was a battle out on the moor.

I ran to the door and looked over the top of Glyn Apt’s head. There must have been a hundred or so: warriors on foot, or mounted on the terrifying fanged beasts that the Mondhaith called
mur, halfway between horse and wolf with snaking necks and knowing scarlet eyes. The warriors wore leather armour, like Ruan’s, and they carried bows and swords – intricate,
well-crafted weapons stained as red as the sun, or a beast’s eye. The front line was almost all female, perhaps the feir warriors that Glyn Apt had mentioned. They were naked to the waist.
Some of them had missing breasts, the skin stretched and shiny with scar tissue. Their hair was matted with what looked like black-and-white lime, and they were heavily tattooed. They reminded me
of my Viking ancestors. They looked like lunatics, with their long teeth and claws. I remembered Gemaley and something in me wanted to shrink back into the ship and lock the cell door behind me.
Something else in me, however, did not.

It was easy to sense the bloodmind. It washed against the edges of the seith like a hot red tide, lapping warm as sunlight, pulling me into the fray. I’d have joined them, I think, if the
spear hadn’t come out of nowhere.

Glyn Apt cried out as it shot over her head. I had a split
so-this-is-it
second to react and know, and then the spear hit me in the gut. The impact should have knocked me backwards
– it should have killed me – but instead there was no pain, only a spreading heat, and the spear had gone straight through me. I looked down in wondering shock. No blood. No wound.
Nothing.

Glyn Apt was staring at me as though I’d grown another head.

‘What did you do?’

I’d have loved to have pretended that it was some arcane Skald ability, just to carry on seeing the Morrighanu commander looking so panicked. But I hadn’t the faintest idea what
I’d done, or whether I’d even done anything.

‘It’s not real,’ Eld commented. He sauntered around the edge of the battle as though out for a morning stroll.

‘Then what is it?’ I looked out across the battleground. It seemed real. It even smelled real, blood and earth and shit.

‘Don’t know,’ Eld said.

‘What were you
doing
out there?’ I was surprised to find how angry I felt.

‘Glyn Apt opened the door and we saw it. There was nothing on the monitors – according to the scanners, the moor’s deserted. Then I saw an arrow go through the ship and I
thought it was worth a closer look.’ As Eld spoke, a raven soared down from the sky, perched on his shoulder for a moment, then disappeared. Eld gestured to the place where it had been.

‘Recordings. Information. I think that’s what this is.’

‘A recording? Broadcast by whom? They’re not that advanced. These people regard wheels as a luxury.’

Eld shook his head. ‘Again, I don’t know. I was hoping the commander here could shed some light on the subject.’

Glyn Apt looked uneasy. ‘It might be a Morrighanu device. It might not. There’s all sorts of tech buried in the earth of this planet, all kinds of data transfer devices. The moats
around the towns, the energy lines – it’s all a hangover from the ancient colony days. Don’t ask me how it works.’

‘And Skinning Knife’s relative?’ I looked again and the battle was gone. The moor was untroubled under the morning sun, mist burning off the black earth like steam. The air
smelled of herbs and frost.

‘Out there,’ Glyn Apt said. ‘Out there somewhere. And today is the day that we will find her.’

The search party consisted of Glyn Apt, Eld and myself, armed with Morrighanu weaponry and the DNA scanner. The scanner was a strange thing: I’d
expected a metal box, like a tabula, but this was organic, a lumpy thing like a bundle of lichen or moss, with filaments trailing from it. It did not look like any tech to be found on Muspell, but
then, I knew little of Morrighanu devices. I wondered whether it might be vitki, but from the curious way that Eld eyed it, perhaps not.

At least Glyn Apt had unbent sufficiently to endow us with weapons. But under present circumstances, she had no reason to suppose that we were not to be trusted. We’d come here on a
Morrighanu ship, after all; we had nowhere to run to on Mondhile, no means of contacting Muspell to ask for someone to come and rescue us. Even if Eld possessed any means of communication, I
wasn’t sure that the vitki would bother to rescue him, given the war situation back home and his exchanges with the old man. We were entirely dependent on the Morrighanu, and I wasn’t
even sure that they were the enemy, in any case. I suppose I wanted to see them as a kind of Skald, because they were women, and warriors, just as we were. Perhaps something in me had learned to
see the Skald as hypocritical, too, because it claimed to love peace, and yet used assassins such as myself, whereas the Morrighanu had no such pretences. But to me, the Morrighanu seemed too
reliant on technology; Glyn Apt’s constant dataflow was rendering her more inhuman and, at the same time, making her more vulnerable than the more basic practices of the Skald would. If the
dataflow failed, how would Glyn Apt fare then? On Nhem, I’d worried about becoming too reliant on the map implant, and there had been times when technology had let me down in a way that an
understanding of the land, of wind and light and shadow, of footprints in the soil and the direction of the flight of birds, never would. Maybe that was why I felt a certain kinship with the
Mondhaith.

And Skinning Knife’s relative, whom we were now setting out to find . . . Would I find the same kinship, the same connection, with her that I’d found with Ruan? Or was she – more
likely, I thought gloomily – another Gemaley, fierce and mad, a born killer? Seeing what Skadi had achieved I was beginning to doubt that she’d be anything but the latter. And what
about this supposed sister on Nhem?

Both Glyn Apt and Eld were silent as we made our way across the moor. Glyn Apt was, I thought, intent upon the information that was coming from the DNA device. The dataflow across her skin had
changed character: I still couldn’t interpret it, but it seemed denser, packed with odd flickering images. Once I glanced at the Morrighanu and saw that another face had become fleetingly
transposed across her own – Mondhaith, with white-on-white eyes and a fanged snarl. I must have flinched back, because Glyn Apt gave me a chilly look and asked what was the matter.

‘What are you seeing, Glyn Apt?’ Eld said, once I’d explained. It was a moment before she answered, then she said, ‘That battle we saw. It’s as though this moor is
haunted. I can see people – and more than that, I can
feel
them. It’s as though their lives and their concerns have become packed into a fraction of a second, and downloaded into
my mind. DNA alone would not account for that.’

No surprise if the moor
was
haunted, I thought. Such a dark, stark place: the black bushes and blacker soil, line upon line of it, undulating towards the mountains. Thunderheads were
building up, hiding the glaciated summits in their anvil mass, and I could smell a storm on the wind as it lifted the hair at my neck, making my scars and the socket of my eye ache and twitch as if
electric. I shook off the sudden prickle at my nape and said, ‘Mondhile’s people may not have much in the way of technology, but their world does, as you yourself said. The old energy
lines, the network set up by the original colonists . . . Who knows what that’s become? Or what kind of information might be conveyed through it?’

‘That’s a good point,’ Eld said. ‘We’ve no idea what kind of tech was really installed here, first off.’

‘They weren’t like Gaians,’ Glyn Apt explained. She tapped the tip of her gun impatiently against her boot. ‘They didn’t believe in manicuring planets, any more
than we do. They thought you should fit the inhabitants to the world. That’s why so many of the lifeforms here are genetically engineered.’

‘Not so different to the vitki,’ I remarked. ‘Or
your
lot,’ – this was to Glyn Apt.

Eld snorted. ‘That didn’t have an ecological basis. My ancestors just wanted to experiment.’

‘We
had purpose.’ Glyn Apt spoke coldly.

I thought of the selk, and of Skinning Knife. The Morrighanu had purported to want to help the women of Nhem, but was that really true? A tangled web of motivations and agendas, it seemed to
me. But I wasn’t all that different, and neither was the Skald.

‘Look,’ Eld said, sharply. We followed the direction of his pointing finger, to an outcrop of rock. Three people were standing on it: two women and a man. They were Mondhaith. The
seith prickled around me but even if it hadn’t, their long limed hair and tattooed faces would have shown me that they were feir warriors – that and the long bows they carried. They
were upwind of me and I could smell them, too: a sharp, animal astringency. One of them raised her bow.