Bloodmind (29 page)

‘Is she dead?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

I bowed my head, but only for a moment. At least I’d be seeing her soon.

‘You ought to know that she had a child. A daughter.’

‘A daughter?’ I smiled. ‘I’d like to meet her.’

‘Well,’ Vali said and she did not look so happy. ‘I’m not so sure that you would.’

I stood on Moon Moor, looking out across the black heath. The lowest horn of Embar was touching the line of the horizon and Elowen was already up,
trailed by its attendant star, the Hunter. The lowest moon was washed with rose light, the last of the day’s sun. Vali-the-ghost came to stand by me as I stared at the sunset.

‘This is a beautiful world, this Mondhile of yours.’

‘You said you’d been here before.’ I still found it difficult to accept that she was from another planet, even though I had now met some of her companions. It was easier to see
her as coming from another clan. ‘Where did you go?’

‘It was south of here, but not far south. Still cold. Those mountains look a little familiar. I consulted my—’ I looked at a map I have, and I think this is the northern end of
them, seen from the other side. Thick forests . . . a tree with black bark and red leaves.’

‘I know where you mean. Do you know people there?’

‘I met a . . . family. They lived on a black line of energy.’ She was looking at me sidelong, staring at me to see how I might take this.

‘A black line? You’d have done better to avoid them, then.’

Vali gave a short laugh like a bark. ‘You can say that again. They were wild – at least, one of them was. A killer.’

‘People who live in such places enjoy killing,’ I said. ‘For no good reason. They’ll go to war, but not with any goal in mind, or to protect their lands or clan. They
like to see shed blood. What happened to that family you met?’

‘The girl – the killer – she died. A young man whom she’d taken prisoner killed her.’

I approved. ‘Good.’

She laughed again. ‘You’re a violent people, you Mondhaith.’ She did not sound as though we disappointed her.

‘I suppose so.’ I’d never really thought of it like that before.

I still did not know what to make of that story. Vali had told me more of it and I had spent most of the day turning it over in my mind, trying to see how I felt about it. My sister, stolen away
to another world. Her child, bred from her without a man (and where was the fun in that?), and trained to be a warrior. And not any warrior, but a kind of ultimate killer. That was a strange idea:
we all do the best we can and some of us are better than others, but there is no need to think that any one person could or should be better than
everyone
else. It did not seem realistic to
me. I liked to think of my sister’s child, a daughter, alive and well and with such skills, but I wasn’t sure about the use to which she was putting them. It sounded too much like the
people who lived on the black line to me. But perhaps my niece had some goal in mind that Vali-the-ghost did not understand, or had misunderstood. After all, she’d said that she wasn’t
like us. With a great effort, I tried to imagine how it must be for my niece, raised in a place that could not understand her. It must be like someone from the inner lands, who is snatched by
island raiders and put to work on a ship. All at sea, not understanding anything properly.

‘Tell me about your place,’ I said to Vali. ‘What is it like? Is it like the moon, or like here?’

And so she told me. Her story took us into the night and halfway through we went back down the hidden steps to the old store, to avoid the biting moths and the creeping frost. The ghost had
brought some kind of liquor with her, a fiery stuff, almost as good as the one that my own clan made. Then, after many stories and when the bottle was half down, she told me that if I really wanted
to see what her world was like, I should come and see for myself.

And this is what I did. Perhaps it hadn’t been my destiny to die out here after all.

When I saw the thing that was to take me to my niece, however, I nearly told Vali to forget the whole idea; I’d stay where I was and end my days on
Moon Moor. I’d like to say that I was brave, and happy to travel above the surface of the world with no more care than if I set foot on a ship bound for an island in sight. But the truth was
that it horrified me. The thing in which we were to travel looked like the insect that had carried my sister away: multi-legged, with a humming body and a strange smell. Vali told me that it was a
Morrighanu ship, and she told me, too, a little about the Morrighanu’s counterparts, the vitki and valkyrie. They did not worry me. I’d met people like them in the warrior clans, the
feir who live too close to animals and mimic their ways in war; and in the south, the clever people in the political assemblies who are as bad, but in a different way. Perhaps, from what Vali said,
I might have something to fear from the vitki, but I was dead already, or may as well have been. And from the sound of it, I thought with an odd burst of pride, it seemed that they had something to
fear from me, or at least from my niece.

In the end it was curiosity as much as anything that made me step through the door of the insect, and allow Vali to bind my hands to the arms of my chair. Had she not done so herself, there was
no way I would have allowed this, death-seeking or no death-seeking. The insect responded to the speech of the warrior Glyn Apt; she did not need her hands. It was most obedient. Vali said that
they could give me medicine which would make me unconscious, but I wasn’t having any of that, either . . . until the plunge and roar as Moon Moor fell away beneath me, perhaps forever, and the
mountains spun up and then down until they were as small as patterns in the snow and I saw my world as a ball. I did not beg her for the medicine then, but I did say through gritted teeth that it
might be easier for her if I slept, and did not pester her with questions when she was busy. To her credit, Vali did not smile, but touched something cold and then hot to the bare skin of my wrist,
and that was that. When I next woke up, we were flying through night.

I lost all track of time and it was dreadful to be away from the surface of the world and the sense and pressure of metal and water beneath my feet. I
did not know which way was up and my blood sang in my head so that my sight grew dark and then bright and then dark again. Vali gave me something for that, too – she was quite the satahrach
in her way, though so young. I did not entirely like what I heard about her world – although her own home seemed to be well run, and people lived in a normal enough way, even though they were
at war. But I was used to war and it sounded interesting, if nothing else. I was pleased when she told me that her home of Muspell was not far away now.

We had time to talk, on the way to it. She struck me as an honourable woman, a warrior, though her childhood had been very strange and some cruel things had happened to her. She told me, with an
air of one confessing a terrible thing, that her brother had slept with her. I did not at first see why she was so ashamed, but then I realized that she had been very young, and it had been rape. I
told her it was an honour breach, and she should track him down and make him pay. Then she had been seduced by a man who had betrayed her trust, and been raped twice more, once by an old man who
ruled some city, and then by the girl of my world. The last two were dead and I told her that it was clear that she was learning. But she must look for patterns, I said also, and see why such
things kept occurring, for clearly she was seeking them out. She should not see herself as foolish – many folk will rape and torture if they have the chance, and they are the ones at fault.
But they are best avoided, all the same. Vali-the-ghost looked startled when I said this and told me that their satahrachs said the same thing.
Of course,
I replied. It was obvious. She was
quiet after that, for a long while, and I suppose she was thinking about it. It’s often the case that we can’t see as far as our noses, however wise we might be in the ways of others,
and there’s no shame in that.

Shortly after this conversation, a glowing sphere appeared in the window of the insect and Vali told me that we had reached Muspell.

I had been afraid that we would go to a big town. I don’t like towns: there are, obviously, too many people in them, all living side by side like ghats in a hive. Vali said that she was
not fond of towns either, and in any case we would not be going to one if she could possibly help it. From the window of the craft, I saw that she did not lie. I caught a glimpse of one settlement,
bigger than any I had ever visited or had heard of, with huge buildings like stone slabs around a wide bay. Its name was Hetla, so Vali told me, and we flew over it.

Soon, the ship was flying above trees and forest. I could feel the pull and tug of the world beneath me and it was not my own place, but it was earth and stone and metal and therefore was real.
The trees were different to those of my north: grey and fleecy, with smoke drifting up from them, and there were scars in the forest, great crumbling swathes which looked as though they had been
made by fire. Then the craft was falling, twisting over the grey trees and sailing over them to the face of a mountain wall. I thought that we were going to hit it but I would not close my eyes,
and then a gap opened in the stone and we were through. The craft stopped and it was strange no longer to be moving.

‘We’re here,’ Vali explained.

She unstrapped me from the bonds and helped me as I stepped stiffly down from the craft. The stiffness earned me a sharp look.

‘We can give you something for that, if you want,’ Vali said. ‘Medicine. It’ll make it easier for you.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I told her. I was tempted and annoyed at the same time. I wanted to get outside, out of the chamber in which the ship now sat, to smell this different
air.

Vali obliged me. Together, we walked to the mouth of the cave. It was close to twilight and I was surprised that this world had the same kind of time: I don’t know what I expected. But
there was a smear of sun above the trees, and the air was cold and fresh after the stuffiness of the craft. The rock on which we stood was metal-rich, but I could not tell what kind it might be,
only that it streaked the mountain wall with veins that were as thick as rivers.

‘This place is called Morvern,’ Vali said. ‘And that is Sull Forest.’

‘People live here,’ I observed. I could feel them – knots and pockets of life in the wasteland before us. This was a sullen landscape, the kind beloved by warrior clans. It
reminded me of the forests around Moon Moor. I thought of my niece, and smiled.

‘Yes, they do,’ Vali said.

‘And they are your enemies.’

‘They are not my friends, that’s for sure.’ The sun was a dying gleam as she added, ‘Come with me, Sedra. Come and meet the hunting party.’

They had carved the stronghold out of the rock. Mayest’s double, Ettia, told me that in the beginning it was done with fingernails, with chunks of rock and sticks
taken from the shrubs which surrounded the cavern system. Then, when outworld help had come, it was done with machines, which were, to the folk of other worlds, primitive enough. I tried to tell
myself that we had done well enough with the colony, for we’d had no such help, but looking at the gleaming surfaces around me, I was not so sure. What had we really achieved, after all,
except camp out in the ruins of someone else’s city?

I asked Ettia about the goddesses in our bell tower, but she had never heard of them and did not know who the city builders had been. To my amazement, she told me that the people of Nhem had
originally come from other worlds and that Nhem was not known to have had any native folk, so perhaps the city was itself built as an outpost by people from somewhere else. Ultimately, Ettia did
not know and did not seem greatly curious, although she spoke with interest enough about the colony and what we had done there.

And then she took me to the growing tanks.

It had never even occurred to me that such things were possible. I stared numbly at the creatures within, the women. All of them were human, or so I suppose. But some of them had fingers that
were too long, with claws, and there were long sharp teeth in the round faces of children. As I peered into the murky waters of a tank, the eyes of the child within snapped open, to stare back at
me, and they were hungry. I stepped back. Ettia was looking at me too, without expression.

‘They’re alive,’ I said.

‘I told you. They’re being grown.’

‘And Khainet – she came from one of these tanks?’

‘Khainet and her sister.’

‘You grew them together?’

‘No. Khainet comes from further down the line. She was a later model. An improvement. Psychologically, at least.’

‘Women warriors,’ I said. It tasted strange on the tongue, like poison.

‘Weapons won’t be enough. The
will
won’t be enough. Our enemies have both, as well. We have to have elite troops, born killers.’

‘Isn’t there another way?’

‘What would you suggest?’ Ettia’s face was curious, but only slightly. She had already made up her mind, I could see, and was listening to me just to be polite.

‘Do as we did. Go somewhere else. Try to forget the anger we feel, mould it into something else. Use it as compost, to grow.’ I thought of the root cellar. Had I grown from that
bloody compost?

Ettia nodded, but absently. ‘Perhaps. One day, it will be possible, I’m sure. But for now, we’re too far down another path.’ Then she looked at me more closely, as if
seeing me for the first time. ‘Don’t you want the men dead, Hunan? For what they did to you?’

I thought about this. I thought again about the root cellar, the cool damp dark, and my son’s body flying backwards to hit the wall, crumpling, lying still. Had I wanted him dead then? I
did not know. I had reacted because the bird had startled me, hadn’t I? Surely I had not attacked him simply because he had been there, because House Father had struck me the night before and
the memory was as vivid as a bruise in my cattle-mind? I had run because I had been afraid, hadn’t I? I had not used the tools on the wall of the root cellar to dig down beneath the stored
roots, finding earth, scraping out a grave, piling the small body in it, covering it over again . . . I had not done that.