by Liz Williams
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I’ve updated myself, on a regular basis.’ She paused. ‘But there hasn’t been an update for a week. Am I still alive?’
I didn’t want to lie to her, but I didn’t want to tell her the truth, either. I made myself face it. ‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘You died, back on the Rock.’
‘I did?’ She frowned. ‘How did that happen?’
‘You were murdered.’
The frown deepened. ‘By whom?’
‘By a creation of the Morrighanu. A woman known as Skinning Knife.’
‘Ah,’ Idhunn said again. ‘You know, I always thought that would lead to disaster in the end. I spoke about it to Rhi. She’s the only one who’s ever really believed me. All the others are too convinced of their own rightness. It’s what drove me away in the end.’
‘You belonged to the Morrighanu?’
‘My mother did. I lied to you, to the Skald. I falsified records, when I came there. I had to; they wouldn’t have taken me in, otherwise, and I had nowhere else to go. It was at another time of crisis: they didn’t ask too many questions. People had defected and they wanted trained personnel to rebuild the organization. But I was born here, in Morvern. I joined the Morrighanu as a young woman, and fifteen years after that, I ran away.’
The first question from my lips was, ‘Did Frey know?’
‘No. At least, I don’t believe so. He had dealings with the Skald; you know that. Maybe he knew and never said anything, because I was also in exile and he wanted us to believe that he was, too.’
‘And Skadi? Skinning Knife?’
‘I knew about the project. I wasn’t directly involved, but my mother had been and she kept me informed. She shouldn’t have done it, but mother was always an iconoclast. She thought someone outside her sept should have the information. Just in case.’
‘Why should Skinning Knife have killed you? What do you know?’
‘Here,’ Idhunn said. She opened her mouth and spat something delicately into the palm of her hand, like a cat spitting. It was a single, glowing coal. ‘Take this.’
‘What is it?’
‘Information. Everything I know about Skadi. You won’t be able to access it immediately; you’ll need Morrighanu tech for that. As for why she killed me – revenge, I should imagine. Revenge for being the creation of her creators, one of whom was my mother. They made her what she is and she never forgave them.’
‘I thought she was supposed to be the ultimate warrior.’
‘She is a weapon,’ Idhunn said. ‘She feels she needs to kill, otherwise she herself will die.’
‘Is that true?’
‘I doubt it. But it’s what she believes, and that’s what matters. Would you like to believe yourself to be such a being? With an in-built addiction?’
‘Sounds to me like it’s more of an excuse,’ I said, but who was I to talk? I’d sliced up my own arms, before I became an assassin for hire. I reached out and took the coal from Idhunn’s hand. And as I did so, her image wavered, blanking into snow, fading, and then gone.
It was only when I came out that I became aware that Eld had been riding alongside me. I felt us separate and that was much too close for comfort. Instinctively, I struck out. Eld caught my hand; we sat eye to glaring eye for a moment. Then he said, with that vitki mildness, ‘Sorry. I needed information.’
I had to force myself to be polite. ‘You’ll ask me, if there’s a next time.’
‘Unlikely that there will be. In the next few minutes they’ll cotton on to the fact that we’ve been inside their system – I imagine there’s even more of a panic going on right now.’
‘If they know it’s us, can they do a mindwipe?’ The thought of that filled me with weariness.
Eld looked smug. ‘Not on me. I’ve buried my information too deep for that. Oh, and yours as well, by the way.’ As he spoke, a raven perched on his shoulder, holding a glowing coal in its beak. It winked a jet-black eye at me and disappeared.
‘Idhunn was Morrighanu,’ I said, expecting Eld to nod – he knew everything else, after all. But instead I saw his eyes widen with the faintest of shocks.
‘The leader of the Skald, from Darkland? That’s – that’s startling, to say the least.’
‘You didn’t know?’
Eld was frowning. ‘We checked her out, obviously. All the details added up.’
I couldn’t resist a smile. ‘So it’s not only the vitki who can cover their tracks, then?’
‘Apparently not.’ Eld looked sour. It was the most gratifying moment of my day. It lasted for perhaps a minute, until the door hissed open and Glyn Apt stormed in.
TWENTY-FIVE
How do you explain what makes something beautiful? I could tell you about crimson and pale, about hardness and flow. I could tell you about the softness of marrow at the bone’s crack, about the raspberry seep of spinal fluid. The contrast of scarlet against the snow and the dark trees; old fairy tales that my new mothers told me, about red and white and black. About sorrowing and the thin sound of a spirit snatched by the wind, of how it makes me feel when I set something free, save it from its prison of flesh and its cage of the skull, release it into the sunset storm and taste the salt of its passage on my lips.
I could talk to you for hours of beauty, but I don’t think you’d understand. No one else has, after all.
TWENTY-SIX
PLANET: NHEM (HUNAN)
I still didn’t understand why Mayest considered Khainet to be so important. After telling me about some family trait that Khainet was supposed to possess, she became vague: said that they needed to run tests. I did not like the sound of this. I sat, up in the bell tower, then thought about things.
Khainet had regained her awareness of herself, true. But so had everyone else in the colony and I didn’t think that her story had sounded very different from other people’s. My own was similar.
I’d been down in the cellar where the root crops were kept. I liked it down there: it was dark and quiet and smelled of earth. Down there, I couldn’t hear the voices of House Father or his friends. I did not put this in words: it was more the sense of quiet/roots/earth/darkness/peace/safe that came to me.
I had lit the dim lamp and was bending over the roots, stacking them in neat rows as I had been trained to do. And suddenly, there was the beat of wings around my head and a voice was shouting. I don’t know what it said – it was loud and startling, echoing around the walls of the root cellar, and I jumped. The bird was whisking round my hair, wings filling my sight. I remembered the bird during the execution ceremony: it meant death and the stink of blood, a woman crumpling to the floor, her head shattered. My heart pounding, I knocked into the side of the box in which the roots were being stored. The box overturned, sending them rolling across the floor. I whipped round and struck out. I was aiming for the bird, but next moment, it was gone.
My son was sprawled on the floor. His face was white in the lamplight, and I remember noticing for the first time how different the colour of his skin was from mine. I stood over him, looking down. It felt as though the walls of the root cellar were closing, faster and faster, crashing over me in waves. I thought he said something: the word that meant ‘mama’. There was blood running down his face.
The world had changed. Before, I mirrored it; now it mirrored me. I looked out of my own skull for the first time. There were no words, not yet. The old me was still there, wailing over her injured child, terrified of what I had done, horrified at the blood, loving First Joy, but there was also a person who stood in the root cellar, thinking in a clear sequence of images.
I have hurt a male.
I am in danger. House Father will kill me when he finds out.
I have to get out of here.
And I forced the weak, wailing, helpless person away and ran up the stairs of the root cellar, pushing back the training which told me that I should not move too quickly, should keep my head down at all times, should be quiet. My footsteps slapped on the floorboards a
nd they sounded like my heart. When I reached the door, I looked into the main room and my daughter Luck-Still-to-Come was kneeling on the boards with a scrubbing brush. The scent of strong soap filled the room. Her face was screwed like a fist: she was concentrating. She did not look up, and I wrenched my gaze away. I pulled the folds of the slip-gown down over my head and went out into the burning day. Just another woman going about her errands, just another thing.
I knew the layout of my neighbourhood, but with this new understanding, everything looked different, seen through my fear and my need to survive. I knew where the gate was, because the household women weren’t supposed to go near it, though the farm-wives came and went. I remembered my one trip through the gate to a farm: the green fields beyond, the sprinkler systems. I wanted to go there now, to see the trees and the river.
No one paid any attention to me as I made my way through the marketplace. I kept my head down, looked at my feet, and now, it was difficult. I felt as though there was something hanging over my head, bright as the sun, telling everyone that I had changed. Then the gate was there: huge slabs of packed earth, with a flash of green beyond. It was open, but guarded. I scurried through. The guards were talking to a farmer; they paid no attention to me. It was easy and there I was, out among the fields.
That was that. I just kept going and going. Sometimes the bird came to me and at first I ran, but later I grew used to it. It never hurt me – in fact, I could not even feel its feathers as they brushed against my face. I slept in the ditches and stole roots and leaves. Every time I did so, I learned more. I started applying words to things – words that I’d heard before, but never understood. ‘Tree’ and ‘night’ and ‘sun’ and ‘wind’.
No one stopped me or spoke to me: I was just a woman. When I reached the end of the farmlands and there were no more fields, I hesitated for a moment, but fear drove me on. The desert was ahead and I went into it. I walked and walked, doing so at night because it was colder, and hiding in the rocks during the day. I sucked a pebble and once or twice, it rained. In the morning, the desert was a sea of flowers and I ate some of them, picking them as I walked. Sometimes my stomach hurt. I came to a riverbed that was almost dry and I followed it, sipping muddy water. I had no idea where I was going, only that it was away, and that this was a good thing. My daughters came to me, running through the rocks, and once I saw First Joy, standing on a high crag and staring at me. I was glad, because there was no sign of blood on him.
And then I came down from the rocks and there was the city. I was afraid at first, and waited to see what kind of men came in and out of it. But no one did and eventually I screwed up my courage and went in through the eastern gate. There was rainwater in stone tanks, and leaves growing along the cracks of the pavements. Later, I found the old fruit trees. I made a nest up in the bell tower, because it was high and safe and the figures on the wall were there. I talked to them, at night, making meaningless sounds. Six months after that, another woman came. And she had more words, and we put them together.
My story. Different from Khainet’s, because by that time – some years before, in fact – the women who reached the city had started talking about voices in their heads, more maps and pictures, instructions. And unlike me, they found women to welcome them, although sometimes, deep in the night, I missed the peace of those early days, the silences.
And yet. Khainet had followed a familiar if mysterious pattern; how extraordinary could she be? I needed to speak to Mayest again, maybe persuade Khainet to talk with her in my presence. But I still didn’t trust Mayest, and I still didn’t know why.
It was late in the afternoon now, and the rain had completely burned away, leaving a slightly steamy heat. I went down through the winding streets to Tare’s house complex, expecting to find Tare herself there, hanging about the four women. But the house complex appeared to be empty and quiet, with only a big insect zooming around in the kitchen, trapped and unable to find its way through the window spaces. I picked up a rag and flapped at it, and after a few minutes it shot through the window in a flash of blue-green and out into the day.
I cannot say, now, that I felt something was wrong. Looking back, it seems that there should have been something, some clue to what was to come, some message in the shafts of sunlight. But as I went up the stairs, looking for Mayest, there was no sign that anything was wrong.
I heard the breathing first. I was walking along the corridor that led to the guest chambers, relieved at being in this cool earthen place and out of the hot sunlight, even though the complex reminded me too much of the root cellar. But something was disturbing the quiet: rhythmic gasps that reminded me of House Father and those sudden dreadful flurries of sex.
I knew that some of the women slept together. I never had; I did not want to be touched after my life with House Father, and every night I was thankful that there was no one else to share my bed. But I had no objections to what the women did, if that was what they wanted. Perhaps Mayest’s group were lovers, or contained lovers among them. I did not want to intrude – to be more honest, I did not want to see – and so I hung back for a moment, but there was something in the sound which was not pleasure, more as though the person was trying to draw in enough breath to survive.
I stepped through the door of the nearest guest chamber. Mayest was lying on the floor in a crumple, with one arm outflung. There was a seep of blood from the back of her head. Her eyes were open and staring. I thought at first that her face was white, and the room was darker. There was the smell of roots and earth, but only for a moment. Then it was gone.
Khainet was crouching over her, the source of that painful rasping breath. Her arms were wrapped around herself, clutching herself tight as though she might fly apart if she let go. But she was not rocking, and when she glanced up I saw a flash of something fierce in her face.
‘What happened?’ I barely recognized my own voice. My first thought was that Khainet had killed her, but I pushed it away, down to the cellar of my mind.
‘She fell.’ Her voice was loud and defensive. ‘She slipped on the tiles and she hit her head.’
We stared at one another for a moment.
‘Then that’s what happened,’ I heard myself say, as though I hadn’t believed her, as if saying it would make it real. ‘Where’s everyone else?’
‘Tare and the women went to the orchards for the last of the fruit. Tare wanted to get it done. They took the other three women with them, to show them the fields and how we do things here. I think Tare wanted Mayest to go with them, too, but Mayest stayed behind and she caught me in the hallway. She asked me to come and see her. I didn’t know how to say no.’
I looked at Mayest’s body and felt a sort of pity, because at the back of it lay waves and waves of root-smelling horror and I could not allow myself to feel that.
Khainet said, ‘I don’t want to stay here.’
‘I understand.’ I was blocking out everything except the need for flight, including what she had done. It was like that first knowledge of self-awareness, the overwhelming impulse to get out. Everything else that I was: elder of Edge, the responsible person, the one who sorted out problems – it was as though the thick rind of this had been pared away and left me nothing but a desperate skin. I was again the woman who had fled across the desert, nothing more.
But there was no other ruined city waiting for us, I was certain of that. Only Iznar, where I would not go, and the mountain colony where – if Khainet had really killed Mayest – we could not go. I would have to take Khainet into the mountains near the city, and hide her, then return. There was water there, and I would find a way of getting food to her. No one knew I had come here, to Tare’s house. If we left now, by one of the wall passages, I could be back before nightfall and could pretend to be surprised at the death, which would be discovered by then. But they would think that Khainet had fled alone.
The other choice would be for her to stay here, and face the questions. If the woman she’d killed had been
one of the colony, one of our own, I would have put her in bonds myself. But Mayest was different, Mayest was an outsider, and in some way that I did not yet understand, Mayest was a threat.
‘Hunan?’ Khainet spoke in a whisper. ‘What are we going to do?’
We. If I had been unable to decide before, I’d made up my mind now.
‘We’re leaving,’ I said.
I expected the household to return at any moment, and Mayest’s companions with them. All we took with us – gathered in haste from Tare’s kitchen – was food and water: the dried vegetable and fruit strips which the women had laid down for the winter, and strung gourds filled from the well bucket. Then we were out through the back of the house, into the winding streets where no one lived, the ruined hives that we had still not properly explored. Old wood creaked and groaned in a rising wind and I didn’t like the sound of that; it meant another storm was on its way.
I saw Khainet look around her as we drew closer to the little-used eastern gate; recent events did not seem to have made her less curious. And I was curious, too. I wanted the truth about what had happened to Mayest, but something told me that Khainet would not give me that truth until we were both well away.
More ruins, their windows eyes onto black earthy rooms, like that place where I had once felt so safe.
As we neared the eastern gate, the streets grew narrower, so that someone in the windows of one house could have touched the fingers of someone in the house opposite. I’d never understood why the districts were so different. But I was glad of the change, because it meant that the streets now lay in shadow, and were cooler. Khainet was shivering, however, and I did not think it was a result of the changing temperature. I touched her shoulder, and she reached back without looking and clasped my hand in a grip that hurt. We were nearly at the gate. I kept listening out for shouts behind us, for Tare’s household to have come home and raised the alarm, but the city was silent.
When we finally reached the eastern gate, there was no one there. The gate itself was massive: slabs of solid stone surrounded by earthen bricks that had long since caved in to block the entrance. An enemy could not have forced their way through it without heavy firepower. It reminded me of the massive gates of Iznar. Once more I seemed to see a screaming woman fall.