Bloodmind (7 page)

‘You must climb, now.’

‘Why?’ I asked. The fear started to creep, choking, up my throat. ‘What’s up there?’

‘One who will help you.’

Carefully, I stood up. The canoe rocked and the selk helped to settle it. I climbed up the old-fashioned way, striking the metal handholds into the wall, clinging on with the canoe’s ice
axe, clawing my way to the summit of the chimney with the surface scraping against the slickskin. I came out into the afternoon sun like something being born, a child of ice.

I was expecting to see another selk, but instead a bone-white sledge stood on the high shelf of the icefield, and a hunched figure upon it. It wore a cloak made from the pelt of snow lynx:
pallid and dappled with tips of black. The air around it was filled with the ghosts of birds: dark shadow wings beating around its head. I took a step back and narrowly missed falling down the
chimney.
Vitki.

Unhurried, the figure turned and the spirit-birds disappeared. I met cold grey eyes in a round, unremarkable face.

‘Hello, Vali,’ said Thorn Eld.

They say you’re not supposed to remember. Only snatches and fragments, of the life-that-was in the middle of the life-that-is-now. Childhood is not something to be
recalled: no real awareness, no language, only the feral game of kill-be-killed. And so many don’t make it back from the world. Their families wait, consult the books that tell us how many
moons the child has had, when they might stand on a town wall to watch a new person come out of the rainy dark or the burning day, and no one ever comes. But when some of them do come back across
the moat – that’s when your life begins. That’s when you’re given your name and your voice, when you begin haltingly to speak and have opinions, when you are no longer
animal – at least, for most of the time.

You’re not supposed to remember, but I did. Not all of it, true, but I remember
her,
and running with her, for months and maybe years, looking after one another. My sister, who
never had a name because she never came home. The one who must have died, out there in the wild world.

But she did not die. She was stolen, and I meant to find out who took her.

Again,
not supposed.
Yet I remember the day it happened. The year must have been just on the turn, because there was still a summer haze over the land. She and I had been up in the
Otrade, very high, along the glacier’s back, trekking down onto the area that’s known as Moon Moor. It was a bleak place – I’d only been there once since then, and that was
to a different part, for it’s deep in the mountains and there’s no real reason to go there: this was as part of a warband, and we’d got lost. The landmarks had changed with the
seasons, the snows creeping down and obliterating everything in their white wall. But when I was a child, it was a known place:
lai
upon
lai
of scrub and scree, with sinkholes in
which a child could shelter and rings of stones, too regular not to have been man-made, in which we hunted the small creatures and the ground birds. I remember seeing the moor as a good place, not
safe, but then nowhere was safe. I liked the soft black soil, the low-growing plants with their aromatic scent, which always seemed more intense at night to attract the huge moths.

Yet it was from here that she was taken.

Just as summer was turning away, with a sudden sharp chill in the air at night, so the day was turning. It was twilight; the air gentle and blue, with the first stars and the first moths coming
out together. We had been living in a burrow, not far from one of the stone rings, having chased out the family of little predators that lived in it. Their musk still stank out the burrow, but we
were not yet of an age to care about such things. We probably stank enough ourselves. Neither did we care whether it was day or night. So on the night that my sister was taken, we were not hiding
deep in the burrow, but out on Moon Moor, among the stones. I can’t remember what we were doing: playing, perhaps, as young animals do, at games of chase. Or maybe we were listening to what
the moor had to tell us: it spoke to us, in voices of water and earth, of stone and metal and the wind-blasted scrub, until we were dazed with its stories and its information. Others had been
there, animal and human. Warbands had marched across it, or fallen: its earth was soaked with their blood and their voices rose from Eresthahan, the land of the dead, and spoke to me, relating the
manner of their deaths. I was not afraid of the dead. They were thin ghosts, nothing more, blown by the night wind, gone when morning came. And sometimes the voices of the moor and the dead, the
voices of stars and moons, overwhelmed me like a tide until all I could do was hide my face in the thorny branches of the scrub and wait for it to go away.

We were part of Moon Moor. So when the thing appeared that stole my sister, it came as a rupture in the world itself.

At first we saw it as a light in the sky, very high up. I remember my sister’s panicked face and then the thing growing, glowing over the stones, accompanied by a roar. It landed not far
away on the moor: an insect that changed its shape to reveal three people. At the time, as far as I can recall, I saw them only as other predators, and perhaps I was not wrong. They were not human,
but ghosts: with no sense of the connection to the world that I had, not even as much as the voices from Eresthahan, insubstantial as they drifted across the face of the moor. Later, when I became
grown and self-aware, I saw them more clearly in my mind’s eye. They were tall and had pale hair and white faces, and they wore green armour that shone in the light from their carrier beetle,
a light that was itself a kind of watery iridescence. They must have been some kind of spirit or demon, for many are said to haunt Moon Moor. But they were also female.

One of them spoke in a hard harsh voice. Even if she had spoken in Khalti, I wouldn’t have understood her then. Two of the ghosts ran after us. My sister ran in one direction and I in
another, dodging between the towering blocks of the stones. Our pursuers were too large to fit into the burrow.

The ghost who chased me was quick. I darted into the scrub, but she was at my heels and her hand closed on my hair. I stumbled and she dragged me backwards. It hurt, but I was used to pain. My
hair caught on the thorns and it slowed her down enough for me to be able to twist round in her grip and sink my teeth into the ball of her hand. Her blood tasted wrong: metallic, true, but rank
and somehow old. Perhaps the blood of ghosts rots in their veins and does not renew itself. I don’t know. It hurt her, though, for she shouted out and struck me. But my teeth were still
embedded deep in her flesh and I would not let go. She punched me in the side of the head and I tore part of her hand away as I fell. She was shouting and grunting, blood pouring from the wound
I’d made, and I took to my heels and ran as fast as I could. The burrow was not far away and I threw myself into it and waited.

Nothing more to tell. The ghost did not come and drag me out, and she’d have had a hard job of it if she’d tried.

But my sister did not come, either. I waited, and grew cold. I thought I heard her screaming, but it was a thin, distant sound like a night bird and I could not be sure. I did not dare crawl out
of the burrow and look, in case the ghost was waiting. I have never blamed myself for this. Children are as they are: fiercely selfish, or they would not survive. They live in bloodmind, they are a
different kind of creature from ourselves, and there is no use in applying the same standards. So I do not blame, but I do regret.

I never saw her again. Next morning, I searched the whole moor, first making sure that the insect had flown away. There was no sign that it had ever been there, except for some long black marks
and flattened scrub, and spots of blood where I had savaged the ghost. I licked them but they had dried, and the rotten taste was even stronger. There was nothing else, and I know I searched hard.
They had flown away and stolen her with them, or eaten her so entirely that nothing was left. I kept a watch all the same, knowing of the night birds who spit out a mass of bones and hair in a
little ball. I think I half expected to find one of these little balls, all that was left of my sister, but I never did. Moon Moor was restored to peace and the uneasy balance of the things that
lived there, and in time I forgot I’d had a sister, though there was always the feeling that something was missing and sometimes I would check my hands and feet, to make sure that they were
still there. It was not until I returned to the clan house and became self-aware that I remembered, and even then people tried to persuade me that none of this had happened, for memories of
childhood are rarely real. But I remembered, and I knew, and when the warband took me back to Moon Moor I went out one night and looked for her still, but there was nothing there.

‘It’s you,’ I heard myself say.

‘It’s me,’ Eld agreed, mildly. He stood, chafing bare hands against the cold. I wondered why he was not wearing gloves, but then he flicked a finger and the slickskin slid down
to cover his hands in a shiny black coating. ‘That’s better. It might be spring in the Reach and in Hetla, but it’s certainly cold enough here, isn’t it?’

I gave an involuntary smile. Myself on the path of a murderer, fleeing an enemy invasion, our nations at war, and here were Thorn Eld and I chatting about the weather.

‘Are you here to bring me in?’ I asked Eld.

‘Do you mean into custody? No. I’m here to take you to Morvern, at the request of the selk.’

I must have gaped at him, for he made a little gesture towards the sled. ‘It’ll be a lot quicker than a coastal voyage and we won’t be detected, either, believe me. I’ve
taken good care to see to that.’

‘You’re helping me? Why? And why Morvern? I’ve just escaped from the Morrighanu.’

‘I’m aware of that. We need to get moving. Yes, I am helping you, but I won’t tell you why just yet. In case you take this for more vitki gamesmanship, let me note that
it’s simply that it’s hard to talk on the sled and the explanation can wait until later. I’m afraid,’ and here he gave a small, ironic motion that could almost have been a
bow, ‘that you are going to have to trust me.’

‘I can’t do that,’ I said.

‘Please don’t do anything foolish,’ Eld said. He nudged the lynx-fur cloak aside, revealing the black muzzle of a weapon. ‘Or I’ll have to insist.’

From below, a thin voice called, ‘He is here at our will. He is telling the truth.’

And the vitki were versed in mind control techniques. I glanced down the chimney, to see the sad gaze of the selk. ‘Go with him.’

‘All right.’ What else was I going to do, apart from stand here arguing? I’d go, but that didn’t mean I had to trust. I walked reluctantly around to the other side of the
sled and sat down on one of the ridged seats. The minute I did so, a slippery band shot out of the sides of the sled and confined my hands and waist. I turned a furious glance to Eld, who was
holding out placating palms. ‘This is only for a little while, Vali.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry. But I don’t want you bolting.’

‘Why would I—’ and then four fenris stalked out from behind a pinnacle of ice. Their eyes were yellow, their mouths scarlet, and their coats were as white as the snow, turning
them into ghost-beasts, all gold and red and pale. My throat grew dry; I felt myself turn to bone and snow, as though the spirit witch of the north had found me and brought her skinning knife
down.

‘These are the sled team,’ Eld explained, but I could not speak. I watched as the fenris padded to the front of the sled and stood patiently in the traces, one behind the other. They
were close enough for me to smell their rank odour. As they passed, each one gave me an incurious glance from sun-coloured eyes. They had been bred from wolf stock originally, but they were much
larger and there were other genes in there, too: the feline ancestry that had flattened their faces and tufted their ears, the long switching tails, and something else, something
knowing,
behind those hot yellow eyes. The vitki had crossed humans with beasts, a thousand years ago. The original colonists of Mondhile were said to have done the same thing. The fenris brought back too
many memories.

I watched, aghast, as Eld harnessed the beasts to the sled, and when I finally found my voice, it was stolen by the wind as he spoke a word to the team and we were hurtling across the
icefield.

I don’t remember a great deal about the journey. I was too afraid, and the slickskin and snow goggles robbed me of much of my sight. Eld either
said nothing, or could not be heard, and eventually I found it easiest not to look at what was pulling the sled, but to concentrate instead on a point between the dappled fur of Eld’s
shoulder blades. Occasionally the birds returned, gliding in shadow across the sunlit ice to perch on Eld’s shoulder and whisper in his ear. Vitki fancy had formed them into the shapes of
Odin’s ravens, just as Glyn Apt had been kept informed by her own white birds. But out here, on the ice, technology fell away to become no more than superstition.

I don’t know how long we travelled. The day went by in a cold blur, the fenris no more than great drifting shapes at the front of the sled. At one point I looked down and saw that the
bonds that had held me had disappeared. Eld had clearly come to the conclusion that I was no longer likely to flee. He was right: I had no intention of throwing myself from the speeding sled, no
matter what might be pulling it. I was very aware of the edges of the seith: flinched back, drawn tightly against my body, away from the humming electricity field that was how Eld’s own seith
felt to me. If I had ever had any illusions about the power of the vitki, then this would have dissipated them, but there was one thing for which I was thankful. Eld felt nothing like Frey.
Eventually I closed my eye and concentrated on maintaining my own seith: going down into the imaginary dark that was the source of it, envisaging black sparkling light, mined from space and stars,
from the deep earth itself beneath the ice, rising to protect me and encase me. The world fell away and I was enclosed.