Bloodmind (37 page)

I stood, looking down at her. Her face was white as the snow, in death. I regretted it, almost as much as Idhunn’s death.

‘If you wished,’ Eld said, ‘we could have her body shipped back to Mondhile.’

‘It’s a generous offer, Eld.’ Surprisingly so, but I didn’t say that. I wondered whether we should let the glacier take her, or whether she would prefer to be with her
niece in death. ‘I think perhaps we should. But there’s a war on.’

‘Well,’ Eld said. ‘You know my views about the war. We’ll take her anyway.’

I slept next to her corpse on the sled, all the way back to the coast. In my own sick dream state, she was company, and she spoke to me. I can’t remember what she told me, but she said
that the day would come when I would recall it. My enemies were dead, she said. I did not need the knowledge now.

Then it was cold confusion for a while. When my head was clear again, I was staring up at the riveted black ceiling of the Morrighanu warship. I sat up. Glyn Apt sat across from me: they must
have brought her round.

‘We’re heading for Morvern,’ she explained. ‘Eld tells me he’d mentioned going to Mondhile.’

‘That depends on the war.’

‘The weapon is with us now,’ Glyn Apt said. She rose, but paused as she reached the door. ‘Rest. We’ll decide what to do with you once we reach Morvern.’

The weapon is with us, now.

I am the weapon.

I could feel it, a coal-glow deep within, like that coal that Idhunn’s avatar had given me, making my head burst with hurt. Some kind of genetic switch, encoded information, compressed
inside my head and ready for release – and with that, I thought I realized why Skadi had run. She wasn’t the key, as everyone had thought; she was the key-bearer.
And now, I
was.

The white bird endlessly circled the coal. It wouldn’t take much to strip it from me. They’d shown me that already.

We had returned to the Morrighanu High Command. I’d been awake for some time, but all of a sudden I became aware that the old vitki was sitting
opposite me in the cell, staring at me out of sea-ice eyes.

‘So, you’ve noticed at last,’ he said. ‘I expected you to do better than that. You killed my girl, after all.’

‘Was she ever yours?’

He shrugged. ‘She was our weapon. Now you are. I thought highly of Skadi, and she had many useful abilities which you don’t possess, but it seems she was more expendable than I
thought.’

‘Doesn’t bode well for me, does it?’

He grinned. ‘No.’

‘What about the other one? The sister?’

‘Ah, the sister from Nhem. I’m afraid she’s gone beyond hope. Couldn’t hold it.’
Poor Khainet,
I thought.
And poor Hunan.

‘What are you planning to do? Mine my head again?’

‘You’re a weapon,’ he said, rising. ‘You’re to be activated.’

And then he was gone. I didn’t even see him go. Later, Thorn Eld came to see me.

There had been a council of war, Eld told me. But when I said that I knew what they had planned for me, his gaze slid away and I wondered whether whatever tenuous bond had been created between
us was now effectively over. I hadn’t expected that to last, either. I was surprised at how desolate it made me feel though. But I was used to desolation, and I was not defenceless. I had the
seith, still. I had the white bird. And I was the weapon.

When the guards took me up on deck, I was expecting to see the coast of Morvern, not the Rock. But there it was, rising out of the churning spring tide, a black crag with the round towers of the
fortress clustering around it. Now, three warships bearing the insignia of Darkland rode at anchor around it, and further south, I saw something huge rearing from the sea: one of the war-wings
I’d seen in the yards of Hetla. For the only time in memory that I’d set eyes on the Rock, my heart sank.

Tiree was still under siege, Eld said. The Rock was the first place to have fallen, which I found plain embarrassing. But given Idhunn’s apparent antecedents, it was ironic, too. They
wanted to experiment with the weapon. They thought it would be interesting, to do so where we had begun. The Rock was a confined space, with a limited population against which the vitki high
command had long held a grudge. The weapon would be copied and then released from my head, and the prisoners of the Skald would lose awareness, enter bloodmind. The fortress would be like that town
on Mondhile, the corridors running red. Sedra would have considered this normal; I did not. Or perhaps it would be like Nhem, and they could simply walk in and slaughter the prisoners like the
sheep they had become.

And perhaps it would not work at all, but I couldn’t rely on that.

Eld and Glyn Apt had no say in matters now, even if they were predisposed to do so. Though it was still a Morrighanu ship, the ones who came to take me to the Rock were valkyrie: glacial women
in white armour with hair like blonde glass.

One of them, however, was Morrighanu: Glyn Apt’s CO, the woman I’d last seen in a broch in Morvern, who had ordered Eld and myself to be shot – the woman who had been slain by
Skadi, or so I’d thought at the time. I looked closely, at first not believing, but she was the same. Recognition sparked in her eyes when she saw me. It confirmed that suspicion I’d
had, that they had called on Skadi’s powers of illusion, to see how far others – vitki, Morrighanu, Skald – could be fooled. And that raised the question of just when Skadi had gone
absent without leave: Glyn Apt had clearly not been in on the plan, and neither had the goat-girls. Was that simply a matter of Morrighanu sectarianism? I tried to catch Glyn Apt’s gaze when
the commander walked in, but she was staring straight ahead and would not look at me.

They did not speak to me, but put me in restraints and led me down to a small waiting wing. We bounced across the sea to the foot of the fortress, to those sea steps which I had climbed so often
before, but never as a prisoner. The damage done by the selk’s sonics was still evident to someone who knew the fortress, although the hole had been patched.

There were no signs of any other prisoners: I assumed that the women of the Skald were being kept deep inside the Rock, where I’d been imprisoned under Glyn Apt’s brief reign. With
Eld and Glyn Apt following, I was taken up the spiral stairs to the lamp room. Although Idhunn’s broken body was long gone I could still feel her lingering presence, a rueful ghost perhaps,
or only my own imagination. But the lamp room looked the same as ever, with the great light turning to alert passing ships of the Rock’s presence, in the ancient way. From here, the war-wings
looked even larger, bristling with weaponry as it rode the tide against a reddening sky.

I’d expected torture, but the pain was quick. The old vitki simply reached out his hand and my vision was filled with raven’s wings. There was a needle-hot twist inside my mind and I
felt the weapon flee further in. The raven disappeared. The old vitki looked as sour as old milk as he said, ‘It’s not working. She’s hanging on to it.’ It seemed to me that
Glyn Apt gave a trace of a smile. Eld looked merely thoughtful.

The old vitki was wrong. I was not hanging on to the weapon; it was hanging on to me. I could feel it twining around my neurons, becoming part of me, linked somehow with Idhunn’s coal. And
the weapon whispered and promised:
blood, blood and more blood.
It was pure predator and now I understood how Skadi must have felt, even worse, probably given that she was feir. Impossible
to shut it out, even with the seith.

They could not get it out, so they locked me in the lamp room with it while they debated what to do. Maybe they hoped I’d tear myself to pieces and save them the trouble. But I remembered
Mondhile. I remembered townspeople running through the streets, ready to kill whoever they found, fighting tooth and nail with a pack of wild animals. I remembered the light going out behind a
woman’s eyes as everything she was drained away into the sink of the bloodmind, and I thought again:
enough.
I could feel it in me, waiting and whispering. It was almost like a
presence in my head: it might have been a kind of meme, an information virus, but it felt as though it had a personality, somehow.

I went to the thick glass window of the lamp room and rested my face against it. The glass was cold, frosted on the outside with a tracery of winter lace. I could break it, maybe, shatter it if
I could tear one of the metal struts from the lamp casing. There was no way down, in safety. Skadi’s falling form came before my mind’s eye, twisting, turning towards her death. Maybe
it was time for that, I thought, but as I leaned against the window, with the great cold sea swinging under the little moon and the ships cresting the swell, I heard something singing.

The selk were back. I could see them, gliding through the waves at the foot of the tower. Their sentience would be gone now; they were migrating up through these northern waters towards the
poles, shoals of them, unaware of the danger posed by the war-wings of Darkland. But their singing was as sweet as ever as they navigated through the strait and it gave me an idea. If the weapon
could turn humans into animal-consciousness, if the weapon was no more than a switch, then why not the reverse?

I still had a bird in my head. The bird was a piece of code, but I’d learned that it could be a little more than that, a carrier of information. I sat by the window, and sank into the
seith, and listened to the song of the selk, and I wove it all together as best I could. The weapon was a glowing coal, fragments of DNA twisting like a falling girl, turning within the
coal’s gyre as I placed it into the bird’s beak and sent it from me. The weapon tore things as it went out of my head; I felt something shift and warp inside my mind. There was a vision
of tattered rags and filaments fluttering behind the bird as it shot away and I believed that I saw the coal go within it: shooting through the glass like a meteor and out over the open sea. I saw
the coal fall into the shoal of selk, just as a single feather had fallen in the great hall below me, and caused this fortress, too, to fall. A ripple spread out from the place where the coal had
gone, lighting up the sea and the heaving bodies inside it. For a moment I felt the group consciousness of the selk as it changed from animal dark to something that was close to human. I felt them
realize; I felt them
know.

I’d used the weapon. I didn’t know what the result would be, but now all I could do was wait.

It was quiet up there in the lamp room. I could hear the slow engine that drove the lamp, a humming from somewhere deep in the fortress. I almost thought I heard Idhunn’s voice, a whisper
in the shadows, and I turned, just as all hell broke loose.

All the glass in the lamp room was blasted inward. If I hadn’t been sitting on the floor by now, it would have taken my head off. The sound ripped through my mind, causing me to clap my
hands to my ears. Down in the fortress, someone was screaming. It was barely audible in the waves of sound. I staggered to my feet and held tight to the sill in the rush of freezing air that
billowed through the lamp room. Below, there was a black arrow in the sea, a mass that after a moment I identified as the shoal of selk. The sound grew and grew. The Hetla war-wing was swinging
around, the arrow of the selk coming to meet it. I saw its guns start to charge and flare, sparks springing down the flanges, but then a cavernous hole tore open in the wing’s side.

The sonic song of the selk, that once before had sent vitki down into the icy water . . .

The wing tried to rise, but the sea was already pouring in. I watched as the wing tilted, listed, and rolled. It went down in an immense shower of spray, hauling a vortex after it. The
Morrighanu ships heaved in the aftermath, and the arrow of the shoal bunched itself together and shot through the sea. I expected them to attack the ships, but they were gone, down the strait in
the direction of Portree.

Shortly after that, when my ears were still ringing, Glyn Apt came to tell me that the Morrighanu command had ordered its forces back to Morvern. Given that, the vitki could no longer sustain
their assault on the Reach. They fought hard, but so, I understand, did we.

Within a week, the war was over; a ceasefire declared between the nations of Muspell. The Skald was reinstated by the Morrighanu, a graciousness for
which it was thankful, but which it never quite forgave. Glyn Apt had already gone, home to whatever quarters she had in Morvern. Eld stayed behind on the Rock, declaring himself a political
prisoner of the Skald. He was, he explained, in enough disgrace to make going home an uncomfortable option.

‘My fellow Skald are looking a bit oddly at me,’ I told him. We were talking through a force field wall but I didn’t really expect him to try anything. He’d been given
one of the more comfortable cells.

‘Well, what do you expect? You keep running off with vitki, after all.’

I sighed. I’d already discussed the situation at length with Glyn Apt, before she went home. She’d given a faint hint that the Morrighanu might not be entirely unreceptive if I
wanted to seek exile, but I wasn’t sure whether that was what I wanted, either. I’d like to have found that I’d healed my wounds, come to terms with the past, forgiven and
forgotten, all those things. But life isn’t tidy like that. Eld and I . . . I didn’t know where that was going. I thought of him as a friend and even that felt like a betrayal of myself,
after Frey.

‘And Idhunn’s coal still sat deep within my head and I could not grasp it to see what it might contain.

‘Running off, indeed.’ I nodded towards the security camera and there was a flutter of white wings. ‘Eld?’ The raven made it to the edge of the barrier before the white
bird met it. Shades of grey are an inevitable result in monochrome circumstances. I strolled out of the cell complex and left Eld to mull things over.

At midnight, I waited on the sea steps. I thought at first that the information transfer had failed, but then there was a blur of shadow and Eld stepped out of it.

‘That looks like a Morrighanu wing,’ he said, nodding to the sleek little craft at the edge of the sea steps. ‘I hope your cameras are off.’