Bloodmind

by Liz Williams

  Now, I had somewhere to compare it to.

  I turned my back on the colony and looked north. The mountains were almost lost in heat haze. Beyond that lay the desert, and then, hundreds of miles away, the sprawl of Iznar. I’d never really considered what might lie north of the city, apart from fields and irrigation ditches and then desert, and beyond that the lakes, but now I knew. Mayest’s women had come in a flying machine that had hit the storm and turned itself into a boat. They had come from the north. For after the lakes were more mountains, and within them, caves. And in those caves lived another colony of women: much older, founded by a particular family, sisters who had been born self-aware and who had fled from Iznar years before and somehow made contact with other worlds. Made contact with women who had built places called laboratories and practised the things they had learned and created daughters who were all alike, daughters who, within the last year, had hired a woman from another planet to kill the Hierolath of Iznar and set the city in a turmoil. I could scarcely believe that.

  And all we’d done had been to run away, and eke out a living in someone else’s long-dead city. I should have felt proud, Mayest had said. They were proud of me and what we had done here. So why did I feel so ashamed?

  The anger came up in me then like a storm surge and I couldn’t hold it back. It roared over me, just as the sea had roared when it tossed the women of the north against the coast, like House Father when he shouted at me, and First Joy shouting too, because his father did. I’d felt that anger then, but it was locked in the fear and I’d never let it out. Except, there was that smell of earth and roots again, the sound of something striking stone.

  ‘Hunan?’ a voice said. I turned to find Khainet standing hesitantly at the door of the bell tower. ‘Tare told me you were here.’

  ‘I wanted to think,’ I said. After a pause, I added, ‘Have you talked to the strangers?’

  ‘No. Not yet. I wanted to see you first. The strangers – they scare me.’ She knitted her fingers together and yet something flared in her eyes that did not look like fear to me. I smiled.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, and I did not mean to sound so bitter, ‘they are just what women are meant to be.’

  ‘Tare said they aren’t like us. That they have . . . machines, which help them do things. That they didn’t spend their childhoods without minds, but always had them.’

  ‘Tare has been listening at doors.’ But that wasn’t fair. Maybe she’d found the courage to speak to Mayest.

  ‘Hunan – what will happen to the colony, now? To Edge?’ She came forward, into the sunlight, and she looked older than I’d thought: her skin showing lines around the eyes, the promise of more lines at her mouth. And I thought that she had touched the truth. The colony wouldn’t survive this change, this new knowledge – couldn’t and shouldn’t. Either we would go there, or Mayest’s group would come here, and whatever happened it would never be the same and already I missed that. I could feel my power settling around Mayest’s head like a cloud of efreets.

  I said, abruptly, to Khainet, ’Do you blame me, for yesterday?’

  She grew hot with embarrassment, her face darkening. ‘No! I was so ashamed of myself. I was weak.’

  ‘You weren’t weak. You’ve just been through a terrible ordeal.’ Your life is an ordeal. But would Mayest and the others grasp that? Thick resentment flooded me, too, and I wasn’t prepared to face that now. I went over to Khainet and put my hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s hot up here. You need to rest.’

  ‘Are you going to make me see them?’

  ‘Khainet, I can’t make you do anything that you don’t want to do. I’m not the . . . the Hierolath. I’m just the elder here, because I’m the oldest and I’ve been here the longest, that’s all. If you want to talk to them, then that’s fine. If you don’t—’ I paused. I wasn’t quite sure what we’d do then. ‘We’ll find some way round it, I promise you.’ I heard my words but they sounded hollow. I’d always been respected because I was the first one here, but now Mayest’s knowledge made that seem a slight thing.

  She still looked unhappy. ‘I don’t understand why they want to see me. I don’t know anything. I don’t remember more than anyone else.’

  ‘Go and rest,’ I repeated. ‘I’ll find out what they want.’

  When I returned to Tare’s house, I found Tare herself hovering in the hallway.

  ‘They’re still here,’ she explained. She spoke in that hushed voice again, as if given a great honour.

  ‘Good. Have you spoken with them?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Mayest’s been telling me all sorts of things, about how they live in the north. It sounds wonderful.’

  ‘Does it.’

  ‘Yes, Mayest says that they have weapons and machines of their own. That women can talk to people from other planets, and learn anything they want to learn.’

  ‘That does sound wonderful,’ I agreed.

  ‘And Mayest says—’

  ‘I’m sure it’s all very interesting. But I need to talk to Mayest now myself.’

  ‘Of course,’ Tare replied, looking shocked that she might be keeping me away from this wonder.

  The four women were sitting in a huddle by the window. Shadows of one another, all so similar. If it hadn’t been for the blue marks and the clothes, I still wouldn’t have been able to tell Mayest from the others. I wondered if the blue marks were how they identified themselves among their own kind, or whether they had other means of telling who was who.

  ‘Hunan,’ Mayest said, looking up as I came in. ‘I was going to come to find you.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you something,’ I said, before she could continue. ‘Something about the person you want to see.’

  She nodded, as if she understood. ‘You want to know why. Why do we want to talk to this woman, out of the hundreds who have made the journey? If I were you, I’d want to know that, too.’

  ‘Did you follow her? Did you give her directions? If you did, then how is it that you know about us and yet no one from your colony has ever visited ours?’ There was that resentment, back in my voice . . . while we were struggling on, you were living in your safe caves with your free minds and your borrowed machines . . . Unfair, maybe, and yet . . . And yet the biggest question of all. ’And the men of Iznar. Why haven’t they come here? Why have they allowed us to live?’

  The thought of House Father coming here – I’d stopped seeing him so much in my dreams, in recent years, but at first I’d seen him all the time, out of the corner of my eye, starting awake at night at the thought that he was in the room. He’d be an old man now. But when I looked into the shadows at the far end of the room, there was House Father, as young and angry as ever.

  ‘They’ve let you get away with it,’ – the second woman spoke unexpectedly. I’d become so used to Mayest being the spokeswoman that I blinked – ‘because they can’t allow themselves to believe that you exist. If they let themselves think that women had regained their identities and memories, that they’d become human beings instead of just breeding stock and slaves, just female animals, then the foundation on which their ideology is based becomes a lie. They persuaded themselves that women were no better than animals. And then, when that didn’t quite work, they made sure that women weren’t. They bred self-consciousness out of the female population, and then they could believe what they liked to their hearts’ content. I could guarantee that ninety-nine percent of the male population of Iznar would refuse these days to credit that women had ever been genetically engineered. So you – and us – are anomalies, which cannot be allowed to enter their theories about how things are, because those theories cannot sustain us. So they pretend.’ She spoke in a hot, angry rush. I understood that, though I didn’t understand everything she had said and that made me feel stupid again.

  ‘And that will be our saving and their downfall,’ one of the other women – Hildre? – commented. She had a surprisingly deep voice, quite unlike the others.

  �
��But why don’t they just kill us? Then we really wouldn’t exist.’

  ‘They’re afraid. They are afraid to come here, because they think it’s a place of demons. And maybe they think, too, that because you are not supposed to exist, you are the stronger for it: that the sight of you will cause their reality to unravel and crack.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe,’ was all I could say.

  ‘You’re used to seeing men as all-powerful, and to you, when you lived among them, they were. But we’ve never lived among them, and to us, and to the rest of the galaxy, they’re a bunch of superstitious barbarians who – from somewhere – have got the ability to tinker with DNA at a sophisticated level. We’ve been trying to find out where they got that knowledge from.’

  ‘And do you know?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Mayest said, and there was the slightest flicker of her eyes, downward, to where lies are kept. ‘But we’re still trying.’

  ‘And the woman you want to meet?’

  ‘That woman is the key.’

  ‘To what? To where this genetic knowledge comes from?’

  ‘No,’ Mayest said. ‘To where it’s going.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  PLANET: MUSPELL (VALI)

  For a moment I convinced myself that it had been nothing more than a nightmare from that blighted land, but it was real. I was still in the dripping, black stone room. Cautiously, I raised my head and looked around me. No one was in sight. At one end of the room stood a tall, arched doorway. I got to my feet, my joints stiff and aching. I felt as though I had run a marathon and there was a buzzing in my head. But there was no accompanying headache and my vision seemed clear. The seith, still present, gave me an immense sense of oppression, as though we were deep underground, but it was more than that: there was a conscious weight of anguish and old sorrow. It reminded me strongly of Gemaley’s tower on Mondhile, a mad, sad place that I had no desire ever to visit again. I walked swiftly to the arched doorway to see if there was a way out.

  The doorway looked empty, but that meant little in this day of force fields and restraining capacitors. I took off my jacket and threw it through, and just as I’d expected, there was the crackling sizzle of energy.

  I stepped back. The seith could help disguise me, could confuse my enemies, but it wouldn’t enable me to walk through either stone wall or force field. I checked the cell carefully: no way out. Then, as I was examining the doorway, taking care not to activate the field, something flickered across the corner of my vision.

  White wings, not black this time. And that meant Morrighanu.

  Thinking back to the capture of the Rock, I remembered standing in the hallway and watching that single white feather drift down towards the flagstones. A key, encoded information to open the doors of the labyrinth that was the Rock. Eld’s ravens, too, were information: many hugins and munins, thoughts and memories, data and details.

  I thought it was time for some experimentation.

  The map implant was the only piece of internal technology that I possessed. I didn’t have the enhancements of the valkyrie – nor, from what I’d seen of Glyn Apt, the Morrighanu themselves. The map implant had served me on Mondhile: I’d been able to download information from it, into a sink of what had been described to me as dark energy. I still didn’t know what that energy sink had really been: Mondhile was apparently riddled with ancient technology and the most likely explanation was that this had been a rogue piece of that. But the map implant wouldn’t even serve me so well here: it was Skald tech, not Morrighanu. I didn’t have their passwords and runic codes. But I did have the seith.

  I sat back down on the bench and closed my eye. In one of the old tongues of Earth, one of the tongues of my ancestors, the practice of the seith was also known as ‘seething’. It had been a shamanic practice then, not the modern meditative, neurologically linked discipline that it was in my day. But it didn’t matter how it was seen. What mattered was what it could do, and I’d never really even reached the limits of it yet. I sent out the seith, just as I’d been taught, just as I’d done a thousand times. I reached out and called to one of the white birds: I could see them, a flock of wings, with my mind’s eye, just beyond the doorway.

  They ignored me. But with the seith, I could see the data of which they were composed: skeins of numbers and letters, like the information that had flowed over the stones of the Rock and caused the fortress to fall, or that which flowed across Glyn Apt’s face. But gradually a knowing red eye would turn in my direction and as if the birds saw me watching, they formed a tight, protective spiral.

  Then, one of the birds – less cautious than the rest, just like a real creature – fluttered too close to the door. I think it was the lock of the door itself, the closing and opening mechanism, come to check itself in the light of this weird new presence.

  Closer, I told it. Closer.

  And it came, closer and closer yet, until suddenly its pinions brushed the edge of the force field and it disintegrated in a burst of unreal light. I heard the force field singe down and knew I might be free. I had absorbed the lock. I flicked a stray pebble through and, this time, nothing happened.

  I stepped through the doorway unscathed and found myself in a corridor, the walls towering above my head. I wondered where Eld was being kept. I made my way down the corridor, expecting at any moment to hear alarms going off and heralding my capture. But the place remained silent, with only the constant drip of water as a backdrop. Running my hand along the wall was like touching the petrified trees in the blighted forest: the same unnatural hardness. And when I looked more closely in the dim light from sconces set high on the wall, I thought I could see an odd pattern within the wall’s ebony surface: the fronds of ferns, branches, leaves – as though the wall itself was the remnant of some ancient forest. If we were underground, I wondered whether the corridor had been carved out of some prehistoric strata. The weight of age seemed to fall in upon me, making me reel. And then the whispering began.

  It was definitely the murmur of voices. I crept along the corridor as quietly as I could, weaving the walls into the seith, trying to disguise my presence as best I may. I followed the whispering to its source: the end of the corridor. This led out onto a narrow gallery and I could see light beneath it.

  Two figures stood below. As I looked, dodging behind one of the columns that formed the spine of the gallery, the closer figure moved into a pool of light. A black uniform; long, tightly bound black hair. I did not need to see the dataflow across her face, nor the white wings which clustered briefly about her head, to recognize her. It was Rhi Glyn Apt.

  The second woman was wearing a similar uniform, but it was partially covered by a coat of pelts, rougher than Eld’s luxurious fur and held together by a series of silver loops and leather thongs. It looked home-made, as though it had been cobbled together by its wearer – or stolen from someone more savage. I thought with a moment of regret of my Mondhaith bow. Without a weapon, I felt that I might as well have been naked. This woman’s hair was as white as Glyn Apt’s was black, falling down her back in a complex arrangement of braids. I had a dreadful feeling, quite suddenly, that when she turned around I would see that she had Gemaley’s face, that I’d see the Mondhaith girl’s blue drowned visage staring up at me. Perhaps the Morrighanu picked up a twitch in the seith, for she did turn round and look up then. But her skin was tanned, unlike Gemaley’s pallor, and instead of chilly blue eyes she had the yellow eyes of a goat, with slitted pupils. She gave no sign of having seen me, and neither did Glyn Apt, but the sight made me move back.

  ‘It should be done now,’ Glyn Apt said to the other woman. ‘See to it. I don’t want another failure.’

  Goat-girl touched her forehead, presumably in acquiescence. More hints of animal-human crossbreeding: I’d never seen or heard of anything like Goat-girl before. But maybe the eyes were just implants, some local affectation.

  I did not like the sound of what Glyn Apt had said, and what I saw next, I liked even less
. Goat-girl touched a strap set into the wall, tugging at it. The wall opened and out of a wide slit, a thing like a mortuary tray glided forth. A row of scalpels and other instruments stood in a holder along its side. On it, unconscious and stripped of his lynx-fur cloak, though not his slickskin, was Thorn Eld.

  Was he dead? I couldn’t tell. I wondered how soon it would be before the missing bird was discovered – and the missing prisoner. I didn’t know how good a chance Eld and I had of getting out of here alive, nor just what the Morrighanu were planning to do with captured vitki and Skald. I didn’t feel like waiting to find out, either.

  Dropping over the rim of the gallery, I snatched up a scalpel and seized Goat-girl, placing the weapon at her throat. The Morrighanu gave an inhuman squeal of shock and struggled; she was strong, but I kicked her feet from under her and pricked her skin with the point of the scalpel. A drop of dark blood oozed out, slow as tar, and strong-smelling. Glyn Apt stared at me with pallid impassivity. I gestured to Eld.

  ‘Let him go. Or I’ll kill this one.’

  Goat-girl opened her mouth and hissed at me, displaying very un-goatlike pointed teeth. ‘Kill me, then,’ she spat. ‘See what that does for you.’ I did not think she was bluffing. I made a swipe at my captive’s throat, hoping to draw Glyn Apt off guard, but she did not move. The feint, however, bought enough time for the apparently unconscious Eld to surge up off the couch and clip the Morrighanu commander across the back of the neck. She turned just a little too late and folded like a falling sapling soundless to the floor. I put Goat-girl under as well and turned to face Eld.

  ‘Any clearer ideas as to where we are?’

  Eld’s pale face was even whiter than usual. ‘I still have no idea. This is one of the Morrighanu strongholds, but I don’t know which one.’