by Liz Williams
I lost all track of time and it was dreadful to be away from the surface of the world and the sense and pressure of metal and water beneath my feet. I did not know which way was up and my blood sang in my head so that my sight grew dark and then bright and then dark again. Vali gave me something for that, too – she was quite the satahrach in her way, though so young. I did not entirely like what I heard about her world – although her own home seemed to be well run, and people lived in a normal enough way, even though they were at war. But I was used to war and it sounded interesting, if nothing else. I was pleased when she told me that her home of Muspell was not far away now.
We had time to talk, on the way to it. She struck me as an honourable woman, a warrior, though her childhood had been very strange and some cruel things had happened to her. She told me, with an air of one confessing a terrible thing, that her brother had slept with her. I did not at first see why she was so ashamed, but then I realized that she had been very young, and it had been rape. I told her it was an honour breach, and she should track him down and make him pay. Then she had been seduced by a man who had betrayed her trust, and been raped twice more, once by an old man who ruled some city, and then by the girl of my world. The last two were dead and I told her that it was clear that she was learning. But she must look for patterns, I said also, and see why such things kept occurring, for clearly she was seeking them out. She should not see herself as foolish – many folk will rape and torture if they have the chance, and they are the ones at fault. But they are best avoided, all the same. Vali-the-ghost looked startled when I said this and told me that their satahrachs said the same thing. Of course, I replied. It was obvious. She was quiet after that, for a long while, and I suppose she was thinking about it. It’s often the case that we can’t see as far as our noses, however wise we might be in the ways of others, and there’s no shame in that.
Shortly after this conversation, a glowing sphere appeared in the window of the insect and Vali told me that we had reached Muspell.
I had been afraid that we would go to a big town. I don’t like towns: there are, obviously, too many people in them, all living side by side like ghats in a hive. Vali said that she was not fond of towns either, and in any case we would not be going to one if she could possibly help it. From the window of the craft, I saw that she did not lie. I caught a glimpse of one settlement, bigger than any I had ever visited or had heard of, with huge buildings like stone slabs around a wide bay. Its name was Hetla, so Vali told me, and we flew over it.
Soon, the ship was flying above trees and forest. I could feel the pull and tug of the world beneath me and it was not my own place, but it was earth and stone and metal and therefore was real. The trees were different to those of my north: grey and fleecy, with smoke drifting up from them, and there were scars in the forest, great crumbling swathes which looked as though they had been made by fire. Then the craft was falling, twisting over the grey trees and sailing over them to the face of a mountain wall. I thought that we were going to hit it but I would not close my eyes, and then a gap opened in the stone and we were through. The craft stopped and it was strange no longer to be moving.
‘We’re here,’ Vali explained.
She unstrapped me from the bonds and helped me as I stepped stiffly down from the craft. The stiffness earned me a sharp look.
‘We can give you something for that, if you want,’ Vali said. ‘Medicine. It’ll make it easier for you.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I told her. I was tempted and annoyed at the same time. I wanted to get outside, out of the chamber in which the ship now sat, to smell this different air.
Vali obliged me. Together, we walked to the mouth of the cave. It was close to twilight and I was surprised that this world had the same kind of time: I don’t know what I expected. But there was a smear of sun above the trees, and the air was cold and fresh after the stuffiness of the craft. The rock on which we stood was metal-rich, but I could not tell what kind it might be, only that it streaked the mountain wall with veins that were as thick as rivers.
‘This place is called Morvern,’ Vali said. ‘And that is Sull Forest.’
‘People live here,’ I observed. I could feel them – knots and pockets of life in the wasteland before us. This was a sullen landscape, the kind beloved by warrior clans. It reminded me of the forests around Moon Moor. I thought of my niece, and smiled.
‘Yes, they do,’ Vali said.
‘And they are your enemies.’
‘They are not my friends, that’s for sure.’ The sun was a dying gleam as she added, ‘Come with me, Sedra. Come and meet the hunting party.’
THIRTY-TWO
PLANET: NHEM (HUNAN)
They had carved the stronghold out of the rock. Mayest’s double, Ettia, told me that in the beginning it was done with fingernails, with chunks of rock and sticks taken from the shrubs which surrounded the cavern system. Then, when outworld help had come, it was done with machines, which were, to the folk of other worlds, primitive enough. I tried to tell myself that we had done well enough with the colony, for we’d had no such help, but looking at the gleaming surfaces around me, I was not so sure. What had we really achieved, after all, except camp out in the ruins of someone else’s city?
I asked Ettia about the goddesses in our bell tower, but she had never heard of them and did not know who the city builders had been. To my amazement, she told me that the people of Nhem had originally come from other worlds and that Nhem was not known to have had any native folk, so perhaps the city was itself built as an outpost by people from somewhere else. Ultimately, Ettia did not know and did not seem greatly curious, although she spoke with interest enough about the colony and what we had done there.
And then she took me to the growing tanks.
It had never even occurred to me that such things were possible. I stared numbly at the creatures within, the women. All of them were human, or so I suppose. But some of them had fingers that were too long, with claws, and there were long sharp teeth in the round faces of children. As I peered into the murky waters of a tank, the eyes of the child within snapped open, to stare back at me, and they were hungry. I stepped back. Ettia was looking at me too, without expression.
‘They’re alive,’ I said.
‘I told you. They’re being grown.’
‘And Khainet – she came from one of these tanks?’
‘Khainet and her sister.’
‘You grew them together?’
‘No. Khainet comes from further down the line. She was a later model. An improvement. Psychologically, at least.’
‘Women warriors,’ I said. It tasted strange on the tongue, like poison.
‘Weapons won’t be enough. The will won’t be enough. Our enemies have both, as well. We have to have elite troops, born killers.’
‘Isn’t there another way?’
‘What would you suggest?’ Ettia’s face was curious, but only slightly. She had already made up her mind, I could see, and was listening to me just to be polite.
‘Do as we did. Go somewhere else. Try to forget the anger we feel, mould it into something else. Use it as compost, to grow.’ I thought of the root cellar. Had I grown from that bloody compost?
Ettia nodded, but absently. ‘Perhaps. One day, it will be possible, I’m sure. But for now, we’re too far down another path.’ Then she looked at me more closely, as if seeing me for the first time. ‘Don’t you want the men dead, Hunan? For what they did to you?’
I thought about this. I thought again about the root cellar, the cool damp dark, and my son’s body flying backwards to hit the wall, crumpling, lying still. Had I wanted him dead then? I did not know. I had reacted because the bird had startled me, hadn’t I? Surely I had not attacked him simply because he had been there, because House Father had struck me the night before and the memory was as vivid as a bruise in my cattle-mind? I had run because I had been afraid, hadn’t I? I had not used the tools on the wall of the root cellar to dig down
beneath the stored roots, finding earth, scraping out a grave, piling the small body in it, covering it over again . . . I had not done that.
‘Maybe I want them dead,’ I said. ‘But most of all, I want them gone.’
Later, they took me to see Khainet. They had put her in a holding cell, deep in the mountain, and I could see that they were afraid of her. Her eyes, as she looked at me, flickered between appeal and defiance.
‘I’ll leave you two alone,’ Ettia said. ‘But the conversation will be recorded, and please don’t bother trying to open the door. You won’t be able to.’
Then she went away.
‘They say they made me,’ Khainet said. ‘Created me. But I don’t remember.’
‘It’s all right, Khainet.’ But it was not. I hadn’t been able to save any of my children and I couldn’t save Khainet, either.
‘I didn’t mean to kill her,’ Khainet continued, after a long silence. ‘It was an accident. She said she wanted my blood. Just a little, she said, but I didn’t believe her. I thought she wanted me dead. She came towards me with a needle. She tried to take my arm and I thought she was trying to poison me. They did that in the house of use. They’d prick me in the arm and everything would go black and I’d feel sick when I woke up. So I knocked her backwards.’ She hesitated. ‘You and Seliye told me once in the colony that we should not want to kill, that it would make us like the men and we should try to be as different as possible. I’m not like that. Are you disappointed in me?’
The sound that First Joy’s body made as he hit the wall. And then the silence.
‘No,’ I said with an effort. ‘I’m not disappointed. I wish things had been different, that’s all.’
‘They say we are to go to another world,’ Khainet said. My head went up at that: I thought she meant that Ettia had threatened to kill us. But then she added, ‘The place where that woman who killed the Hierolath comes from.’
‘Why?’
‘To help find my sister.’
Ettia came back into the room, then, and I asked her if it was true. She said it was. We would leave in the morning. Others wanted to meet Khainet. But when I asked her why, she would not tell me.
THIRTY-THREE
PLANET: MUSPELL (VALI)
It was now some days later. When we’d returned from Mondhile, Eld and I had discovered that the Morrighanu had asked for Skinning Knife’s sister to be brought from Nhem, and she had come to Muspell in the company of another woman named Hunan. I assumed they would be as cattlelike as the other women of Nhem, but to my surprise Hunan seemed as self-aware as anyone else, although it was clear that she’d had little experience of technology. We taught both her and Sedra how to work the ration units and the light switches, the taps and flushes. Sedra seemed to enjoy this: she stood turning the lights on and off for about ten minutes before Glyn Apt told her to stop, but Hunan seemed bewildered by it all. She was typically Nhemish in appearance, at least from my limited knowledge of that world: a small dark-skinned woman, with long hair of which she was clearly proud. She told me a little about her home, the ruined city they called Edge, and I was amazed she’d survived there for so long. She had a certain authority, but it was clear that something was troubling her. I didn’t need the seith to tell me that, and I did not think it was related simply to being whisked through space. But I did not want to press her.
I watched Skinning Knife’s sister closely as she sat in the holding cell. Khainet. She’d killed, so Glyn Apt had told me, but I did not yet know the circumstances, despite pestering the Morrighanu. Apart from that knowledge, there was nothing to suggest a killer. She seemed listless, but perhaps she’d been drugged. I could see it in Sedra, that same quality that the dead Gemaley had possessed: a dangerous, feral stillness. Sedra made no secret of the delight that she took in the chase and the kill, and why should she? On Mondhile it was normal. But Sedra had something that made her different to Skinning Knife, and to Gemaley: she was sane.
I wasn’t sure whether the same could be said of Khainet. She did not look like Hunan. But Khainet’s resemblance to the angular, pale-skinned Skinning Knife was there and it made me chilly to look at her. I wondered how she felt about her sister: Khainet and Skadi might have been raised in a tank, their mother a captive alien, but whatever might have been done to them, the women of Nhem – and Mondhile – still seemed to have feelings about their families. Did Khainet think about her sister – just as Sedra had – worry about her, long to meet her? I hoped that the last wasn’t the case. Those same sentiments were unlikely to be shared by Skinning Knife, from what I’d seen.
Khainet couldn’t see me looking in through the one-way glass of the holding cell, but occasionally she raised her head and glanced up, as if she suspected that she was being watched. At length, Eld came to join me and we watched her together. I should not have been surprised to learn that the same kinds of thought were going through his mind. At last he said, ‘She looks a little like . . .’ – confirming my suspicions. As if she had heard, Khainet turned her face to the wall.
‘The other one is still in interrogation,’ Eld told me. ‘Hunan.’
‘I hope they’re treating her properly. She’s been through a lot and she isn’t young.’
‘They know that,’ Eld said. ‘Don’t worry. The Morrighanu respect women who survive things. Glyn Apt didn’t think she’d survive a mind ’ride. She might seem fairly integrated, but she isn’t.’
‘Glad to hear that.’ I didn’t think they’d shown much respect to me, but then again, I was an enemy.
‘She’s hiding something, though.’
‘How do you know?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time interrogating people. I don’t know what it is, but it’s bad. I can almost smell it on her.’ A black wing flickered momentarily around his head.
‘She helped Khainet escape,’ I said, not really believing my own protest. I’d sensed it on her, too. ‘Maybe it’s no more than that. She felt guilty about the woman Khainet killed, she told me that.’
‘I think there’s more,’ Eld said. ‘But the Morrighanu will get it out of her, eventually. They want to know why. And so do I.’
I looked at him, puzzled. ‘“Why”?’
‘Why some women break out of the genetic conditioning. Why those women, and not others? There weren’t many, you know. Hunan says a few hundred in her colony, more who didn’t survive the journey south. The women’s resistance took in some of the refugees but then they started sending them south to Hunan’s colony instead, using information transferred by birds that the Morrighanu gave them – the resistance colony was too close to Iznar, and they’d run out of room.’ He paused. ‘A few hundred only, out of a population of nearly five million.’
‘Did they target, or did the birds just get drawn to particular individuals, I wonder? As for the numbers, even five million isn’t large. I hadn’t realized the population of Nhem was so small.’
Eld’s lip curled. ‘They’re self-limiting. In the beginning of Nhem, the elders said that medicine and science were the work of a devil, so half of them died of disease. Then all that changed and they embraced technology wholesale, but that meant they could wage more effective war and so another chunk of the population got wiped out. Their numbers have been climbing slowly over the last century or so, in spite of the recent civil conflicts.’
‘Glad I was born on Muspell,’ I said.
Eld laughed. ‘Glad you were born in the Reach, you mean. You must miss the Skald, your women’s councils, all that support.’
I thought of some of the back-biting that took place in the Skald. ‘Yes. The support.’ I wondered how Hunan had found life in her colony of women, whether it was really surviving, or collapsing beneath the weight of internecine strife. If we had the power, would we be any better than the men of Nhem? I liked to think so, but comforting thoughts aren’t the same thing as reality. And if the Morrighanu and the valkyrie were anything to go by . . .
The door opened then and
Hunan came in with one of the goat-eyed guards. She looked exhausted, but not afraid, and that made me think that Eld might have been right after all.
‘Is Khainet well?’ she asked me.
‘See for yourself.’ The young woman was sleeping, or feigning sleep. Hunan frowned.
‘How long are you going to keep her locked up like that?’ The tabula hummed and clicked beneath her words, and she seemed to stutter, as though speaking erratically. I wondered what language she had learned to speak in her isolated home. The Mondhaith gained language quickly, according to Sedra, once they recrossed the moats of their settlements and their conscious awareness clicked in. Was it the same for these women? It seemed odd to me that language could work like a switch.
‘Until we’re sure that she’s no longer a threat to anyone,’ Eld told her.
Hunan turned on me as if Eld did not exist, and I realized that for her it was too much to challenge a man. After her upbringing, I could not blame her. ‘How can you see her as a threat? You, in this great fortress, with all these warrior women?’
‘She’s already killed someone,’ Eld explained. ‘That makes her dangerous.’
‘These others have killed,’ Hunan continued. ‘You’ve killed, and the old woman – Sedra. She enjoys it – she told me so herself.’