by Liz Williams
THIRTY-SIX
PLANET: MUSPELL (SEDRA)
I saw Vali standing stone still by the frozen curve of the river and the person before her could only be my niece. I started to run, stumbling through the snow. When I was young, I could run like the wind, but now I moved like an old animal, stiffly, joints creaking. This dying business suddenly seemed appealing all over again.
I thought Vali would be dead before I could reach her, but I was wrong. As soon as she saw me, my niece made no move. She looked like me: light to my dark. She looked like my sister, if my sister had grown into a woman – as indeed she had, I reminded myself, but not on Mondhile. She wore the local armour and her hair was braided, very complicated, but other than that she was visibly Mondhaith. She was using illusion to shift her appearance, but I could see through it to what she was.
And she was feir. I would have been proud of her, except for that. I’d already seen that she loved killing. What I hadn’t realized before now was that she lived for it. I could see the feir light in her eyes. I could almost taste the blood on her tongue.
As I came towards her, she looked lost, but only for a moment. The feir light faded from her gaze. She said – in the local dialect, for I heard the box humming at her belt – ‘Who are you?’
‘I am your aunt,’ I said. ‘You are my sister’s child.’
‘You look like my mother,’ she whispered. I think Vali would have started to back away then, but I motioned to her to keep still. It’s difficult for us to see prey sometimes, unless they are moving, but she was not to know that. I laughed. ‘More like her than I used to do. I had black hair – it’s grey now, as you can see. But she was always as pale as a moon.’
‘You are from her homeworld,’ she said. ‘From Mondhile.’ It sounded strange, in that odd accent, and strange, too, to hear the longing in her voice.
‘Have you never been?’ I asked, but I knew she had not. ‘No? Then come back with me, niece.’
Now it was her turn to laugh. ‘You think they’d let me? They don’t like what I do.’
Neither did I, but she’d fit Mondhile better, at least. Vali’s face was grey with fear and shock and something was nagging at me: I could smell fresh blood and when I moved a little, I saw that someone was lying in a huddled mass further down the slope, towards the river. My niece had killed again. Well, so there was that.
‘I’ll talk to them—’ I said, but at that moment a bolt of something hurting-bright shot over my shoulder and hissed into the snow. My niece was gone, upward, I thought, into the trees. She had that feir swiftness. I’d thrown myself flat into the snowbank and when I scrambled up, Vali and Glyn Apt were running down the slope.
‘Where did she go?’ Vali gasped. She seized my arm.
‘She is feir,’ I said. ‘And she is a dreamcaller.’ And she is my sister, come again. But I did not think Vali would want to hear that.
They asked a lot of questions. Vali was present, but she said little. She leaned against the wall with her scarred face in shadow and I could tell she was thinking hard. The vitki Eld was patient; Glyn Apt demanded answers. I sympathized. Smooth, political Eld was not my kind, but I liked the Morrighanu commander well enough. She relied too much on machines, as these people did, but it might have been possible to train her out of that, given time.
They wanted to know about the feir, about dreamcalling. I told them all I knew: that the feir were closer to animals than humans, that they preferred to spend their lives in the bloodmind, without too much conscious thought. They had a degree of control over it, whereas most of us do not.
‘Perhaps it’s because we fear it,’ I said. ‘And they do not, so because they embrace what they are, it comes more readily to their hand.’ I thought Glyn Apt understood that very well.
‘What about dreamcallers?’ she said.
‘They bend reality to their will. They make us see what is not real, or make us fail to see things even when they are not there.’
Vali and Glyn Apt exchanged glances. ‘The moor. And the broch,’ Vali murmured.
Eld shifted, clearly restless. ‘But the machine readouts were negative.’
‘Maybe she made us see them as negative,’ Vali was trying to explain.
‘I’m not prepared to attribute that degree of power to a savage,’ Eld said.
‘But she’s not a savage, is she? She’s got Mondhaith abilities and Morrighanu tech, never mind what she might have picked up from the valkyrie. That’s a powerful combination. Assuming,’ Vali shifted awkwardly, ‘that she did not come in the company of your Commanding Officer. What if they wanted to see if she really could fool vitki and Skald, as perhaps she’d claimed?’
‘We know she could,’ Eld said quietly.
‘But maybe she wasn’t believed. Maybe they wanted to see for themselves what she could do. And then maybe she turned on them. Or again, perhaps she didn’t.’
Eld looked doubtful and I saw that my niece had already achieved one of the first ambitions of the dreamcaller: confusion and paranoia. I said as much. There was a short silence.
‘We’ve scanned the area,’ Glyn Apt said. ‘There’s no trace of her and after what happened earlier I feel this means nothing.’
Vali shifted position against the wall. ‘What happened to the body of the Morrighanu she killed?’
‘We brought it back. It’s in the morgue. It’s been autopsied,’ Glyn Apt replied.
Vali looked faintly disgusted, though I did not understand why. ‘You speak as though she’s no more than a piece of meat.’
Her disgust was mirrored by Glyn Apt. ‘You are a killer yourself, Vali. Why should you care?’
‘Because she wasn’t one of my targets, that’s why. And speaking of pieces of meat, what have you done with Khainet? Is she still in the cell?’
‘Yes, and will remain so until we’ve finished the tests.’
‘How long will that take? And what about Hunan?’
‘What about her?’
‘She’s old and she cares about Khainet as a daughter. She wants to know what’s happening. She asked me.’
As a daughter? I thought. These women seemed to care about their children as we did about our siblings.
‘Is anyone looking after her?’ Vali demanded.
‘No. We thought she would prefer to be left alone.’
‘Did anyone actually ask her?’
Glyn Apt looked surprised. ‘I didn’t think it was necessary.’
Vali sighed. ‘Very well. I’ll talk to her later.’
‘Odd though it may seem,’ Eld remarked, ‘we are still on track. Abred is thirty miles further north of the broch, and that in turn is fifteen miles north of where Vali and I found the corpse in the stream. Follow that line through, and it leads to the wastes around Therm.’
My niece was like myself, I suddenly thought. She was heading for a place to die, too, just as I had been.
Glyn Apt sat back in her seat. ‘Well, then. I should like to be waiting for her, when she reaches Therm.’
‘Hard going by air or sea,’ Eld said.
‘Why?’ That was Vali.
‘Remember when you arrived? The land up there – if one can call it that – is like that. All ice and shallow channels. You could get to Therm with an icebreaker but it would be a long, hard slog. Wings are quicker but there’s nowhere to land, the ground is too unstable. You’d need a small canoe.’
‘I want to go with you,’ I said.
Glyn Apt looked at me. ‘That’s why you’re here. You know how she thinks.’
Feir, and dreamcaller with it. I was beginning to understand, it seemed to me. ‘I know that,’ I said. But what I did not say was whether, if it came to it, I would allow them to kill her.
THIRTY-SEVEN
PLANET: MUSPELL (VALI)
Before we left, I spoke to Hunan and she was glad of the chance to talk. The Morrighanu and Mondhaith might wall up their feelings, but Hunan did not. Maybe having been denied speech for so long, she wanted to make
the most of it. But there was still something she was holding back and I did not know what it was.
‘She’s like my daughters,’ she said, after a while. ‘She doesn’t look like them, but she reminds me of them.’
‘What happened to your daughters?’ Knowing what I knew of Nhem, that could be nothing good.
‘I don’t know. Maybe they lived, maybe they were put to death because of what I did.’
‘Is there any way you could find out?’
‘No. They don’t record the deaths of women.’ She paused. ‘ All of Edge – I hoped with every one that came, that she might be one of my daughters. Perhaps they’re even there, and I just don’t know it. Khainet – she’s not human, is she? I saw her sister, Glyn Apt showed me the recording. But,’ she frowned, ‘Khainet spoke of her sister – she remembered her, and their mother. She said her sister tried to protect her, when the men raided the laboratory.’
‘Maybe so. But I think she’s changed since then.’
‘Maybe the raid was the start of her madness,’ Hunan said, but she did not sound sure. Then she added, ‘Sedra frightens me.’
‘Sedra is . . . more alien than you or I. She has a different way of doing things.’
‘You’re going after Khainet’s sister now?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve asked Glyn Apt to get us a passage back to Edge. I don’t know whether she’ll agree. I don’t think they’ll let Khainet go.’
‘The Morrighanu have ships of their own. Nhem doesn’t have the technology to protect its airspace, not now the Hierolath’s gone. The place is in chaos, apparently.’ I did not want to mention the tests on Khainet, and I thought Hunan was right. Khainet had been brought here as an experimental spare, I was certain, a backup if Skadi died.
‘I saw Iznar. It had been bombed.’
I felt uncomfortable. ‘I seem to have set the stage for a civil war.’
‘It would have happened sooner or later anyway,’ Hunan said wearily.
‘I’d be glad for your sake if you arranged passage home,’ I told her.
‘I don’t know what I’d find in Tesk,’ she said. ‘Everything’s changed. I’d have to tell them what I’ve seen and they know about the women’s resistance, now.’
I smiled. ‘You’re connected with women who could help you.’
‘I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. There are . . . things I have to face.’
I waited, but she did not say anything more and shortly after that a raven came and told me that I would be going to Therm.
The wing landed us on the deck of the same warship that had taken the Rock. It seemed strange to see it after so short a time, but when I asked Glyn Apt about the Rock, and about the war, she only smiled and said that it was going well. That meant: not well for the Reach, then, and my heart sank. I didn’t know whether the presence of the warship in Morvern waters meant that the Rock had been secured, or whether the Reach had repulsed the invasion. And since no one would tell me, I decided to find out.
Midnight. I was allowed a certain freedom on the warship, carefully curtailed from venturing into any restricted areas. The Morrighanu ship reminded me of their spacecraft: data streaming over walls and floor so that the interior of the ship seemed to be running with water. It made me feel cold. The air was filled with shadowy birds, so that standing inside the ship was like being outside on some glassy wet sea crag, the sky hidden by the beat of wings. From the deck, the wasteland of the northern sea stretched to the horizon, still rimmed by the hidden sun at these late spring latitudes, the heavens shimmering with arctic light. The breaking ice floes reflected that light, casting back against the watery sides of the warship, which ploughed through the thin edges of the ice like a footstep on frost. Later on, when we reached the thicker floes, it would be a different story.
At length, Therm became visible: a gleaming cone rising above the icefield. It was clear that it was huge, but from this distance it seemed insubstantial, a volcano’s ghost. I looked at it under the flickering curtain of light and thought of Mondhile and a woman who belonged nowhere.
No one was watching. I had been given my own small corner of a dorm, but I felt that I’d be more unobtrusive here on the deck, and the bleak silence – broken only by the distant hum of the warship’s engines and the churn of the waves against the hull – suited my mood. I ducked behind a stanchion. A pair of Morrighanu walked past, faces silvered in the moonlight. One of them spoke a word and a feather fell to the deck, to disappear. Then they were gone and there was only myself and the icefield and the seith.
I did what I had done before, went where I had gone earlier: diving inward into a place that was, I realized, as cold and dark and bleak as the northern sea. I did not want to look at what I had become. I swept through it, seeking warmth. Down through clouds of ash, billowing blackness, down past something that snapped at me with razor teeth and spoke in a man’s voice. I had buried it deep enough, after all, like some treasure that only the gods could find. Not even Glyn Apt could reach this, I thought with chilly satisfaction, not even dead, torn Frey.
And there it was. It glowed hot and red and gold: the coal that Idhunn had given me, carried in a bird’s beak. I tried to grasp it but I couldn’t: it swerved away from me and fell into darkness. But the bird itself was back; I felt its cold feathers brush against my skin, a drift of information. I had the key and I used it to slide under the gateways of the Morrighanu information network and into the system.
The Reach. Still at war, but not going as badly as I’d feared. Lots of vitki propaganda, labelled as such and kept separate from the real reports, the propaganda obviously destined for the masses of Hetla and the more southerly cities. Something about the selk, which I tried to grasp, but which whisked away from me like an eel in a river. Tiree had come under heavy fire, but was resisting, and the navies of the Reach had sent one of those massive war-wings to the bottom of the sea.
And then my goal: glimpsed as though it was reality, a report that contained an image of the Rock against a clear spring sky.
The Morrighanu had left a garrison at the Rock when the warship had been recalled to Morvern. That garrison was still there, but the Rock was intact.
Once I knew that the Rock still stood, that – assuming the rest of the war didn’t see it destroyed – I still had a home to go to, I felt a burst of light emanating out from that piece of information, dispelling a little of the cold and dark. Lighter than I had been since the Rock was taken, I called the white-winged bird back to me, folded it safely into the depths of my head, and sought my bed. I slept for perhaps three hours before Eld’s raven came to me once more, to tell me that it was dawn and the warship had travelled as far as it could.
THIRTY-EIGHT
PLANET: MUSPELL (HUNAN)
When the guard woman came for me, she told me that Khainet was ‘unsettled’. I did not know exactly what she meant by this: whether Khainet was ill, or simply unhappy. Small wonder if it was the last. They were so cold, these women, as cold as their country. The chill sank through to my bones; I did not think that I would ever be warm again. I asked them for a heating device, but the guard at my door told me that the room was as hot as it could get. She brought me a blanket, made from some unfamiliar fleecy stuff, nothing like the thin insect-weave blankets that we had in the colony.
I missed Edge. I missed the heat and the light. I even missed the shrieking of the efreets towards twilight, and the space: the views across the city and the sea. Here it was like living in an animal’s burrow, or a root cellar. I kept thinking that I heard a voice, crying out in pain, but there was never anything there.
I thought that Khainet would surely feel the same way, but when I had last spoken to her, she said that she liked it here.
‘How can you like it?’ I asked, amazed. ‘They have put you in a cage. They do tests on you – you told me so yourself.’
But Khainet just shrugged. ‘It’s better than the house of use, or the men’s city,’ she said. ‘T
hey are all women here. They have weapons and they know how to use them. They fight. My sister fought. She’s here, they told me that. I want to see her, but they won’t let me.’
‘They are all women in Tesk,’ I said. ‘And in the mountains where you were born.’ Made, or born? I still did not understand.
But she said, ‘In Edge and in the mountains, they are afraid the men will come. Here, they have no such fear. They despise men, one of them told me so. They use them for sport as the men of Iznar use us. They belong to no one.’
‘They are warriors,’ I said. ‘Is that what you want for yourself?’ The weapons carried by the Morrighanu frightened me, and so did the ease with which they could deliberately kill. Killing should be a hard thing, or so it seemed to me, but then I’d done it easily enough, hadn’t I?
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Khainet demanded, fiercely. ‘If I’d had a gun, when the men came, I could have killed them. If we had weapons in Tesk, we could hold them off if they came. At the least, we could kill one another, rather than go back.’
I wanted to tell her that the answer did not lie in what weapons we might have, but the truth was that I did not know. I had never known. The reason we had no weapons was because we did not have the ability to make them and so it was not our choice. If we had a choice, what would we do?
And now the guard was telling me that Khainet was ‘unsettled’.
I heard the noise before I saw her. Her voice carried down the corridor, high and shrieking, without words. I shook off the guard’s hand and ran, as quickly as I could. But the guard caught me and dragged me back. Someone came swiftly out of a door, with two other Morrighanu, and the door was slammed behind her.