Bloodmind (38 page)

‘I took precautions.’

He only asked me where we were going once we’d set off, which I thought showed a certain style. I told him.

‘And the ship, too, that takes us up from Morvern – that will be Morrighanu as well?’

‘Glyn Apt is a conscientious person, despite her faults. She understands obligation.’

Eld gave a thoughtful nod. ‘It’s generous.’ And I agreed.

Strange, to see my own world as a ball from space. Strange, too, to see Iznar again as the resistance ship flew low over it and headed south. What had seemed like such a
great city, such a place of horror and wonder, now looked shabby: the buildings low and clumsy. Even the green domes of the Hierolath’s palace looked fragile, like eggshells, and smaller than
I remembered. It had been a matter of days since I had left Nhem and it felt like years.

But Iznar was only a glimpse, quickly gone. After that, we were heading south across the Great Desert, the place where I had long ago expected to die, before I came through the pass in the
mountains and saw the city lying before the soot-black sea. And here it was again: the spiky turret of the bell tower, the sand-coloured roofs, the crumbling walls.

I had been afraid, somehow, that they would be sorry to see me back. But Tare embraced me and wept, and said that they had not known what had become of Khainet and myself, that they thought we
must have died, or that she had killed me.

‘There was always something about her,’ Tare said. ‘Something strange,’ – and the other women nodded in solemn agreement. Well, Tare was right, at that. And when I
told them exactly what that something strange had been – a tale that took us deep into the night with the tallow lamps guttering down – there was a much longer silence.

The three others had not stayed in the city. They had taken Mayest’s body back to wherever they came from: not by boat, this time, but in an airship like the one I had flown in. The other
women of the colony did not blame Khainet for killing Mayest, though perhaps they should have done. Mayest was different, they said, and had condescended too much. No one had liked her. I
remembered it differently. But this was not the time for either point. I knew that, and yet I could not argue the case too hard.

Since then, no one from the resistance had been back to the city, until the day that I arrived. I told them that this would almost certainly change. For the women who had flown down with me had
told me that more women would be coming – across the mountains, across the sea – as the cities that the men had ruled gradually sank into civil dispute and a growing war. The resistance
would keep sending out the birds, those strings of information that I now knew had been given to them by the Morrighanu, and slowly those birds would find homes in women of a certain genetic
line.

And what then? Would we end up fighting the male-run cities, as the resistance planned to do? Would we make weapons and vehicles, learn to mine the mountains or buy technology from sympathetic
outworlders? Would we free the cattle-women, the ones like ourselves? And if we did, liz williams

what would we do with them? They were not us. They were different from us.

‘They would work,’ Seliye said, when I voiced this thought. ‘They would work as we do.’

‘They would be
useful,’
someone else said, and several of the women nodded in agreement.
Wives,
I thought. They would be wives, except that they would be the wives of
women and not of men. How soon would it be before another set of hierarchies developed? How soon before the women decided that they were tired of being the low folk, that it was somebody
else’s turn? And what about the women from the resistance, used to names and words and tools and ships. What if they came here to live? How long before we became the under-women
ourselves?

I left the women of Edge discussing crops and growing, and what it would be like with more hands to help with the work, and I walked back to the bell tower through the steaming early morning.
Tare had offered me a bed for the night but I wanted silence. The streets were quiet but there were lamps burning in the houses and I knew that people would still be talking about the news.

Tare and Seliye treated me a little differently now that I had come back again. I was not the old Hunan, the Hunan whom they knew. I had seen things that they found hard to imagine, been to
places they had never dreamed of. I had new ideas, ideas which had come from beyond Edge –beyond Nhem – and I thought I had seen a faint flicker of unease passing across their faces like
cloud shadow, the same expression that they had worn with Mayest. I wondered

when the whispering would begin, but then I told myself that it was just that I was tired.

The bell tower had not changed. It was still a little cooler than the street, still rustling with dust and the echoes of the cries of the efreets. The goddesses were still patiently waiting on
the wall. I looked at their unhuman faces and wondered who they had really been. They looked like nothing that I had seen on my travels. Just some dead race: alien, gone. Then, as though a switch
had been flicked in my own head, I saw their pointed faces and hinged hands in the long beaks and wings of the efreets, and the capes were not capes at all, but wings. Not gone, after all, just
changed.

They flickered in the torchlight as though they were alive and it struck me then that Sedra and I had been closer than we knew. Both of us had gone out into the world to die, but each time the
world had gathered us up and swept us back into the thick of things again. Maybe now it really was time for me to go, or growing close. But not quite, not today. I climbed the steps of the bell
tower and when I reached the platform where Khainet and so many others had held their naming ceremonies, I paused and looked out across my city. Lamplight and starlight, a creamy smear in the sky
that told me of the approaching dawn. There was a wind blowing down from the mountains, smelling of rain and change. I did not look any more, but went into my chamber, and closed the door behind
me. The room smelled damp, of roots and earth. I shut my eyes and waited for what dreams might come.

BLOODMIND

Liz Williams is the daughter of a stage magician and a gothic novelist, and currently lives in Somerset. She received a PhD in philosophy of science from Cambridge, and her
subsequent career has ranged from reading tarot cards on the Palace Pier to teaching in central Asia. Her short stories have been published in
Asimov’s, Interzone, The Third
Alternative
and
Visionary Tongue,
and she is the co-editor of the recent anthology
Fabulous Brighton. Bloodmind
is her eighth novel.

Also by Liz Williams

The Ghost Sister

Empire of Bones

The Poison Master

Nine Layers of Sky

Banner of Souls

Darkland

The Snake Agent

For Tanith, for inspiration

Heartfelt thanks go to:

My agent, Shawna McCarthy

My editors, Peter Lavery and Stef Bierwerth

My parents

My unfailingly patient writing group

– and finally, to Trevor for all his encouragement, good

humour and for being here . . .

We buried her on Moon Moor, in the crumbling black soil under a cairn of stones. There was no sign of any life, except the endless circling of the carrion birds overhead.
I was sure there would be future battles on which they could feed. None of the feir came swarming out to cast their dreams, or to investigate the Morrighanu ship that rested on the scrub. But when
I placed the last stone on Sedra’s cairn, I looked up and I thought I saw someone standing on the ridge. It was close to twilight, and hard to see very well. She was wearing armour, and one
hand rested on the swell of pregnancy. Half her face had been torn away, but she was smiling. There was someone standing behind her, but I caught only a glimpse and only for a moment. Then they
were gone, and Eld and I stood on an empty moor, with a crescent moon rising in the east and a spring wind blowing.

First published 2007 by Tor

This edition published 2008 by Tor

This electronic edition published 2010 by Tor
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publisher Limited
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ISBN 978-0-330-53069-9 PDF
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Copyright © Liz Williams 2007

The right of Liz Williams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, repduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital,
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liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims of damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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