Bloodmind (30 page)

‘Maybe I want them dead,’ I said. ‘But most of all, I want them gone.’

Later, they took me to see Khainet. They had put her in a holding cell, deep in the mountain, and I could see that they were afraid of her. Her eyes, as
she looked at me, flickered between appeal and defiance.

‘I’ll leave you two alone,’ Ettia said. ‘But the conversation will be recorded, and please don’t bother trying to open the door. You won’t be able
to.’

Then she went away.

‘They say they made me,’ Khainet said. ‘Created me. But I don’t remember.’

‘It’s all right, Khainet.’ But it was not. I hadn’t been able to save any of my children and I couldn’t save Khainet, either.

‘I didn’t mean to kill her,’ Khainet continued, after a long silence. ‘It was an accident. She said she wanted my blood. Just a little, she said, but I didn’t
believe her. I thought she wanted me dead. She came towards me with a needle. She tried to take my arm and I thought she was trying to poison me. They did that in the house of use. They’d
prick me in the arm and everything would go black and I’d feel sick when I woke up. So I knocked her backwards.’ She hesitated. ‘You and Seliye told me once in the colony that we
should not want to kill, that it would make us like the men and we should try to be as different as possible. I’m not like that. Are you disappointed in me?’

The sound that First Joy’s body made as he hit the wall. And then the silence.

‘No,’ I said with an effort. ‘I’m not disappointed. I wish things had been different, that’s all.’

‘They say we are to go to another world,’ Khainet said. My head went up at that: I thought she meant that Ettia had threatened to kill us. But then she added, ‘The place where
that woman who killed the Hierolath comes from.’

‘Why?’

‘To help find my sister.’

Ettia came back into the room, then, and I asked her if it was true. She said it was. We would leave in the morning. Others wanted to meet Khainet. But when I asked her why, she would not tell
me.

It was now some days later. When we’d returned from Mondhile, Eld and I had discovered that the Morrighanu had asked for Skinning Knife’s sister to be brought
from Nhem, and she had come to Muspell in the company of another woman named Hunan. I assumed they would be as cattlelike as the other women of Nhem, but to my surprise Hunan seemed as self-aware
as anyone else, although it was clear that she’d had little experience of technology. We taught both her and Sedra how to work the ration units and the light switches, the taps and flushes.
Sedra seemed to enjoy this: she stood turning the lights on and off for about ten minutes before Glyn Apt told her to stop, but Hunan seemed bewildered by it all. She was typically Nhemish in
appearance, at least from my limited knowledge of that world: a small dark-skinned woman, with long hair of which she was clearly proud. She told me a little about her home, the ruined city they
called Edge, and I was amazed she’d survived there for so long. She had a certain authority, but it was clear that something was troubling her. I didn’t need the seith to tell me that,
and I did not think it was related simply to being whisked through space. But I did not want to press her.

I watched Skinning Knife’s sister closely as she sat in the holding cell.
Khainet.
She’d killed, so Glyn Apt had told me, but I did not yet know the circumstances, despite
pestering the Morrighanu. Apart from that knowledge, there was nothing to suggest a killer. She seemed listless, but perhaps she’d been drugged. I could see it in Sedra, that same quality
that the dead Gemaley had possessed: a dangerous, feral stillness. Sedra made no secret of the delight that she took in the chase and the kill, and why should she? On Mondhile it was normal. But
Sedra had something that made her different to Skinning Knife, and to Gemaley: she was sane.

I wasn’t sure whether the same could be said of Khainet. She did not look like Hunan. But Khainet’s resemblance to the angular, pale-skinned Skinning Knife was there and it made me
chilly to look at her. I wondered how she felt about her sister: Khainet and Skadi might have been raised in a tank, their mother a captive alien, but whatever might have been done to them, the
women of Nhem – and Mondhile – still seemed to have feelings about their families. Did Khainet think about her sister – just as Sedra had – worry about her, long to meet her? I
hoped that the last wasn’t the case. Those same sentiments were unlikely to be shared by Skinning Knife, from what I’d seen.

Khainet couldn’t see me looking in through the one-way glass of the holding cell, but occasionally she raised her head and glanced up, as if she suspected that she was being watched. At
length, Eld came to join me and we watched her together. I should not have been surprised to learn that the same kinds of thought were going through his mind. At last he said, ‘She looks a
little like . . .’ – confirming my suspicions. As if she had heard, Khainet turned her face to the wall.

‘The other one is still in interrogation,’ Eld told me. ‘Hunan.’

‘I hope they’re treating her properly. She’s been through a lot and she isn’t young.’

‘They know that,’ Eld said. ‘Don’t worry. The Morrighanu respect women who survive things. Glyn Apt didn’t think she’d survive a mind ’ride. She might
seem fairly integrated, but she isn’t.’

‘Glad to hear that.’ I didn’t think they’d shown much respect to me, but then again, I was an enemy.

‘She’s hiding something, though.’

‘How do you know?’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time interrogating people. I don’t know what it is, but it’s bad. I can almost smell it on her.’ A black wing flickered
momentarily around his head.

‘She helped Khainet escape,’ I said, not really believing my own protest. I’d sensed it on her, too. ‘Maybe it’s no more than that. She felt guilty about the woman
Khainet killed, she told me that.’

‘I think there’s more,’ Eld said. ‘But the Morrighanu will get it out of her, eventually. They want to know why. And so do I.’

I looked at him, puzzled. ‘“Why”?’

‘Why some women break out of the genetic conditioning. Why those women, and not others? There weren’t many, you know. Hunan says a few hundred in her colony, more who didn’t
survive the journey south. The women’s resistance took in some of the refugees but then they started sending them south to Hunan’s colony instead, using information transferred by birds
that the Morrighanu gave them – the resistance colony was too close to Iznar, and they’d run out of room.’ He paused. ‘A few hundred only, out of a population of nearly five
million.’

‘Did they target, or did the birds just get drawn to particular individuals, I wonder? As for the numbers, even five million isn’t large. I hadn’t realized the population of
Nhem was so small.’

Eld’s lip curled. ‘They’re self-limiting. In the beginning of Nhem, the elders said that medicine and science were the work of a devil, so half of them died of disease. Then
all that changed and they embraced technology wholesale, but that meant they could wage more effective war and so another chunk of the population got wiped out. Their numbers have been climbing
slowly over the last century or so, in spite of the recent civil conflicts.’

‘Glad I was born on Muspell,’ I said.

Eld laughed. ‘Glad you were born in the Reach, you mean. You must miss the Skald, your women’s councils, all that support.’

I thought of some of the back-biting that took place in the Skald. ‘Yes. The support.’ I wondered how Hunan had found life in her colony of women, whether it was really surviving, or
collapsing beneath the weight of internecine strife. If we had the power, would we be any better than the men of Nhem? I liked to think so, but comforting thoughts aren’t the same thing as
reality. And if the Morrighanu and the valkyrie were anything to go by . . .

The door opened then and Hunan came in with one of the goat-eyed guards. She looked exhausted, but not afraid, and that made me think that Eld might have been right after all.

‘Is Khainet well?’ she asked me.

‘See for yourself.’ The young woman was sleeping, or feigning sleep. Hunan frowned.

‘How long are you going to keep her locked up like that?’ The tabula hummed and clicked beneath her words, and she seemed to stutter, as though speaking erratically. I wondered what
language she had learned to speak in her isolated home. The Mondhaith gained language quickly, according to Sedra, once they recrossed the moats of their settlements and their conscious awareness
clicked in. Was it the same for these women? It seemed odd to me that language could work like a switch.

‘Until we’re sure that she’s no longer a threat to anyone,’ Eld told her.

Hunan turned on me as if Eld did not exist, and I realized that for her it was too much to challenge a man. After her upbringing, I could not blame her. ‘How can you see her as a threat?
You, in this great fortress, with all these warrior women?’

‘She’s already killed someone,’ Eld explained. ‘That makes her dangerous.’

‘These others have killed,’ Hunan continued.
‘You’ve
killed, and the old woman – Sedra. She enjoys it – she told me so herself.’

‘True. But Sedra comes from a society where such things are normal and she knows that here, they are not. I don’t think Sedra kills without a reason. And those same wild genes are in
Khainet, but she doesn’t seem to have the same restraint.’

Hunan stared at him. ‘Do you think she’s not sane?’

‘I don’t know. Do you?’

‘I’m not even sure what “sane” means.’

And it was into the ensuring silence that a voice crackled over the receiver, to say that Skinning Knife had been located.

It was in the heart of Morvern, almost the geographical centre of Sull Forest, that traces of Skadi were found. I wondered whether there was any
significance in this. It was impossible to know what was going through Skadi’s head, child of three worlds that she was, and mad besides. Small wonder that she was mad: torn between the
conflicting heritages of Mondhile and Darkland and Nhem.

They’d tracked her down in the usual way.

She’d killed.

By the time we got there – Sedra and myself, Eld and Hunan, and the Morrighanu hunting party – she had long gone, but the traces of her remained outside the little cottage. Sedra
scented the air like a hound.

‘She smells like my sister.’ I thought there was a trace of satisfaction in that remark.

‘Can you track her by scent?’ Eld asked, sharply.

‘No,’ the Mondhaith woman said. ‘At least, I might be able to do so for a short distance. But if she is as good as you say, she will be able to hide her scent. And depending on
how far she is Mondhaith, she will be able to disguise her scent by means of her will.’

Eld looked as impressed as I felt at that, I am sure.

As we’d discussed, it wasn’t so much a question of finding Skadi, as taking her alive, and that, the commander said, was why we needed Sedra. Someone who knew how Skadi thought, who
could predict what she might do. But I wondered, too, whether Sedra might serve another purpose for the Morrighanu: a new source of Mondhaith genes, perhaps?

The person who had alerted the Morrighanu to Skadi’s presence was local, a woodsman. He seemed sharp enough: he’d gone to the cottage earlier that afternoon to borrow a tool, heard
no one there, and had looked through the window. When he had seen what was inside, he backed away, did not go in, touched nothing, and contacted the Morrighanu. Now he stood at the edges of the
clearing, staring at Sedra.

‘Vali, Sedra,’ Eld said. ‘Come with me.’

Inside, it was surprisingly neat, despite the blood. Skadi had not run amok, it seemed. The butchery of the occupants – an elderly man and his wife – had been done with her usual precision:
spines filleted and hung from the rafters, along with an arrangement of bones. There was no sign of a struggle; no doubt the pair had gone to their deaths convinced that it was the right thing to
do.

‘She is a dreamcaller,’ Sedra said. Her accented voice sounded startlingly loud in the blood-stained silence.

‘What’s that?’ Eld asked. But I thought I knew.

‘Like the feir,’ I said.

‘Like some of the feir,’ Sedra corrected me. ‘Someone who can lure other people to their deaths, make them see what isn’t real.’

‘How do they do that?’

‘It’s a gift. And sometimes they use a dust to enhance it.’

‘Narcotics,’ Eld said.

‘She wouldn’t have known about that, from Mondhile, though. Would she?’ Unless she had been there, the thought struck me. Or unless she’d simply discovered her ability by
trial and error. The feir, and battles that weren’t real. Experiments in Sull. The disappearing laboratory. The broch, with Skadi arriving so conveniently soon, and no trace of real
destruction apart from that psychic imprint.

Eld said, ‘You thought that Mondhile was a little-known backwater world. That the only thing known about it was an incomplete anthropologist’s report. Yet Frey Gundersson knew more
about it than you did, it seems, and so did the people who brought Sedra’s sister to Nhem.’

I looked around the cottage. A neat, clean place, now defiled by death. The bones had been hung in patterns: from certain angles, some of them made the same shapes.

‘Sedra,’ I said. ‘What
is
this?’

‘It’s like a hunting lodge.’ She sounded matter-of-fact. ‘We display the bones of the kill.’

‘In patterns, yes? What do they mean?’

The old woman looked taken aback, as though the question of meaning had never occurred to her. ‘There is no meaning. The patterns are ancient, ritualized.’ She thought about it.
‘Maybe they had a meaning once, but not any more. And they are not like these. These are new, as though someone has made them up.’

‘What’s bred in the bone,’ Eld said softly.

‘So Skadi is behaving like a Mondhaith person,’ I said, ‘but out of context.’

‘That can’t be the case, though. Cultural factors aren’t carried genetically.’