Bloodmind (4 page)

I wait, here in the bell tower, until twilight rolls down from the mountains and the bowl of the sky above my head glows with light, and then fades. Below me, the lights start to come on,
smouldering at first. Sea-burn lamps, from the weed gathered from the shore, stinking of the sea. A few candles, rarer, made from the casings and the shit of the wax grubs that are found in the
cool places between the rocks. Light is rare here, but we don’t mind the dark. Those lamps won’t burn for long, as people do the last few night tasks, then go to bed. I wait until the
efreets spiral up from the temple chamber in a great dark cloud, flit shrieking past my head on their stretched bone wings, hunting insects. I wait until the air grows cool, and then I go back down
through the hushed temple, with that unhuman golden gaze upon my back, to my own small room, and there I sleep.

When I next woke, it was to see Glyn Apt watching me from the other side of the cell field. The data stream was back and her birds were whirling around her head in a snowy
cloud.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Glyn Apt said, politely enough but with an undertone that suggested it was an order, ‘about the selk.’

‘I’ve told you all I know,’ I said. I thought she was referring to the ones in Hetla.

‘I’m more interested in your theories,’ the Morrighanu said. ‘About the selk, and about what the vitki are doing with them.’

I laughed. ‘You might almost persuade me that you care. I’m more interested in your own plans for the Rock. How about a trade?’

It was Glyn Apt’s turn to laugh. ‘I’ve already strip-mined your brain, Skald girl. Not much of a choice, is it?’

‘You’ve raided my memories. I’m not sure you can get me to spill my thoughts so easily.’ Bravado, it’s true. The seith field can protect you from only so much and
I’d already had the seith ripped from me. Not during the rape on Nhem – I’d killed a man with it there. But later, during Gemaley’s attack on me, the seith had been no help
at all: the Mondhaith girl had torn it into shreds and tatters. Perhaps Frey had taught her vitki tricks. And perhaps not.

‘You killed my leader,’ I said. ‘Why should I help you any more than I have to?’

Glyn Apt’s pointed black eyebrows went up. ‘Is that what you think?’

I stared at her. ‘Who else?’

‘We gained access to this fortress when you were down in the hallway, not before. We’ve killed only one member of the Skald and she went down fighting. I can prove it to you, if you
like. But we didn’t kill Idhunn Regnesdottir.’

‘Then who the hell did?’

‘Tell me what you think about the selk,’ Glyn Apt repeated, ‘and I’ll tell you what I think about Idhunn’s murder. How about
that
for a trade?’

‘Very well,’ I said after a pause. ‘I believe that what the vitki are doing to the selk in those tanks is directly related to the war effort.’

‘How?’

‘To isolate the switch within their genes that causes their sentience to be seasonally switched off, and create a virus which mimics it, to infect those of us of the Reach. To render us
unsentient.’ If she was closer than she claimed to the vitki, then this wouldn’t be news. And if that was the case, then she must be aware that I already knew. If Glyn Apt didn’t
know – well, that might be knowledge she could use, and which might make her better disposed towards me. Some hope.

There was a long silence. I could not read Glyn Apt’s expression. After a while, she said, ‘I read your report to your leader – that was what Frey was doing on Mondhile,
wasn’t he?’

‘Yes. He hadn’t got very far, luckily for us. I wasn’t long behind him. The people there undergo periods where they are unsentient, like the selk. They look human, but
sometimes their self-awareness, their consciousness, falls away and they’re just human-shaped animals, basically. They call it the Bloodmind. And the Nhemish men do a similar sort of thing,
too, to their women. Makes them no better than breeding-cattle.’

Glyn Apt, still unreadable, nodded.

I went on, ‘Release a geno-virus, wait for a while, then walk in and enslave us. The Nhemish women might be docile enough. But the Mondhaith weren’t – not in this state, Glyn
Apt. They turned into predators.’ I shivered, thinking of that town turned to nightmare, in which I had become trapped. ‘But they were engineered for that, and so, presumably, were the
selk, unless it was some kind of side effect. If the vitki could create a geno-virus that would make the rest of us no more than half-alive, to be used as slaves – I can see where their
research is going. I’d have said that makes these experiments a critical part of their war effort. And we don’t know how far they’ve come.’

Glyn Apt shifted position.

‘Let’s assume that Frey went to Mondhile to try and find an answer to this issue of sentience. Say he was sent there as part of the war effort. Yet the vitki I spoke to – Thorn
Eld – he wanted Frey dead. Why so, if Frey was doing the vitki’s own work?’

‘Perhaps he wasn’t,’ the Morrighanu said, after a moment. ‘Perhaps he was working for himself, against the rest.’

We stared at one another, frustrated, in what felt like a sudden, odd alliance. ‘We might never know,’ Glyn Apt added. ‘The politics of your own Skald are bad enough. Imagine
how much back-stabbing goes on in the Darkland sects.’

I sighed. Coming from Glyn Apt, that amounted almost to a girlish confession. If the Morrighanu commander had been telling the truth, the thought of sitting here while Idhunn’s killer
roamed free was chafing at me. ‘And what about the selk that came here?’

‘I’ll
go and speak with the selk, if it returns,’ Glyn Apt said. She spoke grudgingly, as if she was sparing me some social burden. ‘I will tell it that
we’re in no position to assist others. And now, I have to go.’

‘You said you’d tell me your thoughts about Idhunn’s murder.’

‘Did I?’ The Morrighanu commander gave a thin smile. ‘Maybe later.’

And later for the selk, too. But the selk were to prove more insistent than either of us knew.

It was on one of the coldest days of the year that I left the clan house forever. I’d insisted on taking the parting ceremony the night before, with the moon Elowen
hanging over the eaves of the house and the frost crackling and snapping like a live thing as I walked across the courtyard. I said goodbye to all of them in turn: from the next oldest man to the
youngest girl, only recently returned to the world. She turned her face away: she hadn’t yet felt the pull back. Some of them miss it and never adjust, but she wasn’t one of those. To
her, the outside meant beasts and nothingness, hunger and cold and constant danger, without words to describe it all. She could not understand yet why I had to go and why I wouldn’t be coming
home again.

‘It’s the way things are done,’ I told her. ‘Winter’s coming. Too many mouths to feed. What, would you have me die in my bed? As though I was cursed with sickness,
a weak old thing? You wouldn’t want that for me, would you?’

But she just stared into the fire and wouldn’t answer. The others took it well, of course.

‘So,’ Rhane said. ‘You’re off, then?’

‘Off and not coming back.’

‘Well, that’s as it should be.’ She gave an approving nod. I’d always got on well with her. I remembered her birth, her mother gritting her teeth against the pain and not
making a sound, as befits a huntress. I remembered, too, the day we’d put the infant out onto the hillside and left her to fend for herself for the next thirteen years. And the day
she’d returned, stumbling in out of the howl of the wind, a fierce small thing. Now, Rhane was one of the best huntresses of the clan, still fierce, still small, still doing what had to be
done. Just like me.

‘When are you off out, then? In the morning?’

‘I’ll go at dawn. It’s been good to me, this clan, this family, you. I’ll miss you all.’ I said it reluctantly. I don’t like sentiment, all those southern
poets’ ways.

‘I know. We’ll miss you, too.’ Rhane gave me a slanted glance. ‘It won’t be the same without you telling me what to do, old woman.’

‘Or without you ignoring my advice, chit of a girl.’ We laughed, and then I said goodnight.

I didn’t sleep well. Too many feelings, whisking round the chamber like birds, and none of them settling. I was glad when the thin light started to creep through the paper pane and I could
honour my decision and get up. I wasn’t planning to take anything with me; it was a pleasure not to have to pack, like going on migration. I told myself that this was all it was: just another
migration, my fourth, although this time it was to Eresthahan, to the nowhere-land of the dead. But I’d been there before, before my birth, before the one before that.

I did not take weapons, and in that respect it was nothing like a migration. Even when you’re in the bloodmind, it still helps to be armed. Instinct will carry you a long way, further than
claws or teeth. But this time, my death would come to meet me and take the form it was destined to take, perhaps at the mouth of visen or altru or wild mur. Or perhaps it would be the cold –
I confess, I was rather hoping for that. They say it’s a quiet death, though I’ve never been one for peace and quiet. I wasn’t afraid of pain, but I didn’t court it, either.
I’d no wish to go down fighting. Who are you proving yourself to? It’s your death; no one will know how you died, nor care. Perhaps it’s part of the men’s mysteries, though,
some old tradition. Perhaps you’re supposed to end up in some particularly appealing part of Eresthahan, with dancing girls and a lot of drink. I’d just be happy when it was over and
done with, but I admit, too, that part of me was looking forward to the chance for this one last trip. I hadn’t been out in the winter world for years – it hadn’t been my time to
die, before, and why court lung fever or worse? But now the time had finally come, no more excuses. I was off.

The fire had burned down in the grate overnight and the hall was cold, smelling of ashes. I did not look back. I closed the doors behind me, with the shock of morning air in my lungs and the
scent of blood coming from the murs’ stable. They’d brought the mur off the mountain pastures only a week ago, and already the snow had crept halfway down the slopes. The mountains
blazed in the new light, all glacier gold. I walked slowly to the end of the clan house and the moat twitched and tingled to let me through. I wonder sometimes whether the moats know when we are
leaving for the last time, earth-consciousness, whether in their own way they bid farewell. But it’s probably just a fancy, nothing more. I stepped over the invisible line of the moat and
felt the world shift a little. Then on, across the bridge that crosses the roaring waters of the Sarn, down the stepped streets to the town wall, with the morning town silent around me. We rise
late in winter, go to bed early, are glad of the rest.

The walls, and then the town gates. I pushed the gates open, felt again that twitch and snap, of the town moat this time. Then I was pushing the gates shut behind me and walking up through the
thorn path that leads to the pastures, the hunting grounds. By now, the golden light had spread to the bottom of the snowfield, though the narrow valley and the torrent were still in shadow.

I knew where I was going. Some people don’t. They just wander about, following this line or that line, listening to the energies and patterns below the earth just as they’ve always
done, depending on their particular speciality. My sister had been water-sensitive, but though we came from the same litter, I didn’t share that. I was drawn to metal: I could smell it in the
earth like the dinner cooking. I’d taken a lot of people to the metal lines, and they’d mined them, too. The town was famous for it: bracelets and cuffs, earrings made out of the
darksilver substance. I never used to wear it – it interfered too much, in what I was seeking. But now, the time of my dying, it did not matter and I wore a ring of it in my ear and one on my
finger. Vanity perhaps, in a woman so old, long past any attraction to men or her own sex, and yet it felt good to wear it, after so much denial. In my youth I’d been considered a beauty, but
that doesn’t matter when you grow old. I still had a sharp enough wit and a readiness to laugh and that makes men look past the face. Make them laugh enough and you’ll keep them, whilst
beauty fades and grows quiet. But this wasn’t a time for wit or beauty. I was alone, the town silent behind me, the mountains ahead. I turned my back to my home and went on.

By noon, I had already reached the foothills of the Otrade. It was slow going, with the tracks obscured by snow and the rocks slippery with ice, but I was in no hurry. I took it step by step,
until I reached a stone outcrop, jutting high above the valley, and then I stopped and finally looked back.

By now, my breath was wheezing in my chest and it hurt. I didn’t know whether this was a premonition of the sickness that would, eventually, kill me, or simply a sign of age.

The satahrach had not been clear about the nature of my death, saying simply that he had looked into my lungs with the aid of the fire and that they were diseased, gone beyond any help his herbs
might give me. But I already knew the truth myself. I’d woken too often in the night, my breath rasping, my throat tightening as though a hand had closed around it, the nightmare sense of
something huge and heavy crouching at the end of the bed. I dimly remembered being a very small child, and feeling the same sensation, although since we retain so little of our childhoods, I
thought I might be making this up. I remembered more than most, after all. Whatever the case, I didn’t speak of this to anyone except the satahrach. I did not want the clan’s pity nor
its care. No
fuss.
Someone in the family always fusses and nothing annoys me more. So I endured the night terrors as best I could, took the herbs that the satahrach gave me, and gradually,
as they failed to work, accepted that the time of my death was at hand. And now I was here, in the high cold hills, looking forward to it, because I would be with
her
again.