by Liz Williams
Then it was cold confusion for a while. When my head was clear again, I was staring up at the riveted black ceiling of the Morrighanu warship. I sat up. Glyn Apt sat across from me: they must have brought her round.
‘We’re heading for Morvern,’ she explained. ‘Eld tells me he’d mentioned going to Mondhile.’
‘That depends on the war.’
‘The weapon is with us now,’ Glyn Apt said. She rose, but paused as she reached the door. ‘Rest. We’ll decide what to do with you once we reach Morvern.’
The weapon is with us, now.
I am the weapon.
I could feel it, a coal-glow deep within, like that coal that Idhunn’s avatar had given me, making my head burst with hurt. Some kind of genetic switch, encoded information, compressed inside my head and ready for release – and with that, I thought I realized why Skadi had run. She wasn’t the key, as everyone had thought; she was the key-bearer. And now, I was.
The white bird endlessly circled the coal. It wouldn’t take much to strip it from me. They’d shown me that already.
We had returned to the Morrighanu High Command. I’d been awake for some time, but all of a sudden I became aware that the old vitki was sitting opposite me in the cell, staring at me out of sea-ice eyes.
‘So, you’ve noticed at last,’ he said. ‘I expected you to do better than that. You killed my girl, after all.’
‘Was she ever yours?’
He shrugged. ‘She was our weapon. Now you are. I thought highly of Skadi, and she had many useful abilities which you don’t possess, but it seems she was more expendable than I thought.’
‘Doesn’t bode well for me, does it?’
He grinned. ‘No.’
‘What about the other one? The sister?’
‘Ah, the sister from Nhem. I’m afraid she’s gone beyond hope. Couldn’t hold it.’ Poor Khainet, I thought. And poor Hunan.
‘What are you planning to do? Mine my head again?’
‘You’re a weapon,’ he said, rising. ‘You’re to be activated.’
And then he was gone. I didn’t even see him go. Later, Thorn Eld came to see me.
There had been a council of war, Eld told me. But when I said that I knew what they had planned for me, his gaze slid away and I wondered whether whatever tenuous bond had been created between us was now effectively over. I hadn’t expected that to last, either. I was surprised at how desolate it made me feel though. But I was used to desolation, and I was not defenceless. I had the seith, still. I had the white bird. And I was the weapon.
When the guards took me up on deck, I was expecting to see the coast of Morvern, not the Rock. But there it was, rising out of the churning spring tide, a black crag with the round towers of the fortress clustering around it. Now, three warships bearing the insignia of Darkland rode at anchor around it, and further south, I saw something huge rearing from the sea: one of the war-wings I’d seen in the yards of Hetla. For the only time in memory that I’d set eyes on the Rock, my heart sank.
Tiree was still under siege, Eld said. The Rock was the first place to have fallen, which I found plain embarrassing. But given Idhunn’s apparent antecedents, it was ironic, too. They wanted to experiment with the weapon. They thought it would be interesting, to do so where we had begun. The Rock was a confined space, with a limited population against which the vitki high command had long held a grudge. The weapon would be copied and then released from my head, and the prisoners of the Skald would lose awareness, enter bloodmind. The fortress would be like that town on Mondhile, the corridors running red. Sedra would have considered this normal; I did not. Or perhaps it would be like Nhem, and they could simply walk in and slaughter the prisoners like the sheep they had become.
And perhaps it would not work at all, but I couldn’t rely on that.
Eld and Glyn Apt had no say in matters now, even if they were predisposed to do so. Though it was still a Morrighanu ship, the ones who came to take me to the Rock were valkyrie: glacial women in white armour with hair like blonde glass.
One of them, however, was Morrighanu: Glyn Apt’s CO, the woman I’d last seen in a broch in Morvern, who had ordered Eld and myself to be shot – the woman who had been slain by Skadi, or so I’d thought at the time. I looked closely, at first not believing, but she was the same. Recognition sparked in her eyes when she saw me. It confirmed that suspicion I’d had, that they had called on Skadi’s powers of illusion, to see how far others – vitki, Morrighanu, Skald – could be fooled. And that raised the question of just when Skadi had gone absent without leave: Glyn Apt had clearly not been in on the plan, and neither had the goat-girls. Was that simply a matter of Morrighanu sectarianism? I tried to catch Glyn Apt’s gaze when the commander walked in, but she was staring straight ahead and would not look at me.
They did not speak to me, but put me in restraints and led me down to a small waiting wing. We bounced across the sea to the foot of the fortress, to those sea steps which I had climbed so often before, but never as a prisoner. The damage done by the selk’s sonics was still evident to someone who knew the fortress, although the hole had been patched.
There were no signs of any other prisoners: I assumed that the women of the Skald were being kept deep inside the Rock, where I’d been imprisoned under Glyn Apt’s brief reign. With Eld and Glyn Apt following, I was taken up the spiral stairs to the lamp room. Although Idhunn’s broken body was long gone I could still feel her lingering presence, a rueful ghost perhaps, or only my own imagination. But the lamp room looked the same as ever, with the great light turning to alert passing ships of the Rock’s presence, in the ancient way. From here, the war-wings looked even larger, bristling with weaponry as it rode the tide against a reddening sky.
I’d expected torture, but the pain was quick. The old vitki simply reached out his hand and my vision was filled with raven’s wings. There was a needle-hot twist inside my mind and I felt the weapon flee further in. The raven disappeared. The old vitki looked as sour as old milk as he said, ‘It’s not working. She’s hanging on to it.’ It seemed to me that Glyn Apt gave a trace of a smile. Eld looked merely thoughtful.
The old vitki was wrong. I was not hanging on to the weapon; it was hanging on to me. I could feel it twining around my neurons, becoming part of me, linked somehow with Idhunn’s coal. And the weapon whispered and promised: blood, blood and more blood. It was pure predator and now I understood how Skadi must have felt, even worse, probably given that she was feir. Impossible to shut it out, even with the seith.
They could not get it out, so they locked me in the lamp room with it while they debated what to do. Maybe they hoped I’d tear myself to pieces and save them the trouble. But I remembered Mondhile. I remembered townspeople running through the streets, ready to kill whoever they found, fighting tooth and nail with a pack of wild animals. I remembered the light going out behind a woman’s eyes as everything she was drained away into the sink of the bloodmind, and I thought again: enough. I could feel it in me, waiting and whispering. It was almost like a presence in my head: it might have been a kind of meme, an information virus, but it felt as though it had a personality, somehow.
I went to the thick glass window of the lamp room and rested my face against it. The glass was cold, frosted on the outside with a tracery of winter lace. I could break it, maybe, shatter it if I could tear one of the metal struts from the lamp casing. There was no way down, in safety. Skadi’s falling form came before my mind’s eye, twisting, turning towards her death. Maybe it was time for that, I thought, but as I leaned against the window, with the great cold sea swinging under the little moon and the ships cresting the swell, I heard something singing.
The selk were back. I could see them, gliding through the waves at the foot of the tower. Their sentience would be gone now; they were migrating up through these northern waters towards the poles, shoals of them, unaware of the danger posed by the war-wings of Darkland. But their singing was as sweet as ever as they navigated through the
strait and it gave me an idea. If the weapon could turn humans into animal-consciousness, if the weapon was no more than a switch, then why not the reverse?
I still had a bird in my head. The bird was a piece of code, but I’d learned that it could be a little more than that, a carrier of information. I sat by the window, and sank into the seith, and listened to the song of the selk, and I wove it all together as best I could. The weapon was a glowing coal, fragments of DNA twisting like a falling girl, turning within the coal’s gyre as I placed it into the bird’s beak and sent it from me. The weapon tore things as it went out of my head; I felt something shift and warp inside my mind. There was a vision of tattered rags and filaments fluttering behind the bird as it shot away and I believed that I saw the coal go within it: shooting through the glass like a meteor and out over the open sea. I saw the coal fall into the shoal of selk, just as a single feather had fallen in the great hall below me, and caused this fortress, too, to fall. A ripple spread out from the place where the coal had gone, lighting up the sea and the heaving bodies inside it. For a moment I felt the group consciousness of the selk as it changed from animal dark to something that was close to human. I felt them realize; I felt them know.
I’d used the weapon. I didn’t know what the result would be, but now all I could do was wait.
It was quiet up there in the lamp room. I could hear the slow engine that drove the lamp, a humming from somewhere deep in the fortress. I almost thought I heard Idhunn’s voice, a whisper in the shadows, and I turned, just as all hell broke loose.
All the glass in the lamp room was blasted inward. If I hadn’t been sitting on the floor by now, it would have taken my head off. The sound ripped through my mind, causing me to clap my hands to my ears. Down in the fortress, someone was screaming. It was barely audible in the waves of sound. I staggered to my feet and held tight to the sill in the rush of freezing air that billowed through the lamp room. Below, there was a black arrow in the sea, a mass that after a moment I identified as the shoal of selk. The sound grew and grew. The Hetla war-wing was swinging around, the arrow of the selk coming to meet it. I saw its guns start to charge and flare, sparks springing down the flanges, but then a cavernous hole tore open in the wing’s side.
The sonic song of the selk, that once before had sent vitki down into the icy water . . .
The wing tried to rise, but the sea was already pouring in. I watched as the wing tilted, listed, and rolled. It went down in an immense shower of spray, hauling a vortex after it. The Morrighanu ships heaved in the aftermath, and the arrow of the shoal bunched itself together and shot through the sea. I expected them to attack the ships, but they were gone, down the strait in the direction of Portree.
Shortly after that, when my ears were still ringing, Glyn Apt came to tell me that the Morrighanu command had ordered its forces back to Morvern. Given that, the vitki could no longer sustain their assault on the Reach. They fought hard, but so, I understand, did we.
Within a week, the war was over; a ceasefire declared between the nations of Muspell. The Skald was reinstated by the Morrighanu, a graciousness for which it was thankful, but which it never quite forgave. Glyn Apt had already gone, home to whatever quarters she had in Morvern. Eld stayed behind on the Rock, declaring himself a political prisoner of the Skald. He was, he explained, in enough disgrace to make going home an uncomfortable option.
‘My fellow Skald are looking a bit oddly at me,’ I told him. We were talking through a force field wall but I didn’t really expect him to try anything. He’d been given one of the more comfortable cells.
‘Well, what do you expect? You keep running off with vitki, after all.’
I sighed. I’d already discussed the situation at length with Glyn Apt, before she went home. She’d given a faint hint that the Morrighanu might not be entirely unreceptive if I wanted to seek exile, but I wasn’t sure whether that was what I wanted, either. I’d like to have found that I’d healed my wounds, come to terms with the past, forgiven and forgotten, all those things. But life isn’t tidy like that. Eld and I . . . I didn’t know where that was going. I thought of him as a friend and even that felt like a betrayal of myself, after Frey.
‘And Idhunn’s coal still sat deep within my head and I could not grasp it to see what it might contain.
‘Running off, indeed.’ I nodded towards the security camera and there was a flutter of white wings. ‘Eld?’ The raven made it to the edge of the barrier before the white bird met it. Shades of grey are an inevitable result in monochrome circumstances. I strolled out of the cell complex and left Eld to mull things over.
At midnight, I waited on the sea steps. I thought at first that the information transfer had failed, but then there was a blur of shadow and Eld stepped out of it.
‘That looks like a Morrighanu wing,’ he said, nodding to the sleek little craft at the edge of the sea steps. ‘I hope your cameras are off.’
‘I took precautions.’
He only asked me where we were going once we’d set off, which I thought showed a certain style. I told him.
‘And the ship, too, that takes us up from Morvern – that will be Morrighanu as well?’
‘Glyn Apt is a conscientious person, despite her faults. She understands obligation.’
Eld gave a thoughtful nod. ‘It’s generous.’ And I agreed.
FORTY-FOUR
PLANET: NHEM (HUNAN)
Strange, to see my own world as a ball from space. Strange, too, to see Iznar again as the resistance ship flew low over it and headed south. What had seemed like such a great city, such a place of horror and wonder, now looked shabby: the buildings low and clumsy. Even the green domes of the Hierolath’s palace looked fragile, like eggshells, and smaller than I remembered. It had been a matter of days since I had left Nhem and it felt like years.
But Iznar was only a glimpse, quickly gone. After that, we were heading south across the Great Desert, the place where I had long ago expected to die, before I came through the pass in the mountains and saw the city lying before the soot-black sea. And here it was again: the spiky turret of the bell tower, the sand-coloured roofs, the crumbling walls.
I had been afraid, somehow, that they would be sorry to see me back. But Tare embraced me and wept, and said that they had not known what had become of Khainet and myself, that they thought we must have died, or that she had killed me.
‘There was always something about her,’ Tare said. ‘Something strange,’ – and the other women nodded in solemn agreement. Well, Tare was right, at that. And when I told them exactly what that something strange had been – a tale that took us deep into the night with the tallow lamps guttering down – there was a much longer silence.
The three others had not stayed in the city. They had taken Mayest’s body back to wherever they came from: not by boat, this time, but in an airship like the one I had flown in. The other women of the colony did not blame Khainet for killing Mayest, though perhaps they should have done. Mayest was different, they said, and had condescended too much. No one had liked her. I remembered it differently. But this was not the time for either point. I knew that, and yet I could not argue the case too hard.
Since then, no one from the resistance had been back to the city, until the day that I arrived. I told them that this would almost certainly change. For the women who had flown down with me had told me that more women would be coming – across the mountains, across the sea – as the cities that the men had ruled gradually sank into civil dispute and a growing war. The resistance would keep sending out the birds, those strings of information that I now knew had been given to them by the Morrighanu, and slowly those birds would find homes in women of a certain genetic line.
And what then? Would we end up fighting the male-run cities, as the resistance planned to do? Would we make weapons and vehicles, learn to mine the mountains or buy technology from sympathetic outworlders? Would we free the cattle-women, the ones like ourselves? And if we did, liz williams
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bsp; what would we do with them? They were not us. They were different from us.
‘They would work,’ Seliye said, when I voiced this thought. ‘They would work as we do.’
‘They would be useful,’ someone else said, and several of the women nodded in agreement. Wives, I thought. They would be wives, except that they would be the wives of women and not of men. How soon would it be before another set of hierarchies developed? How soon before the women decided that they were tired of being the low folk, that it was somebody else’s turn? And what about the women from the resistance, used to names and words and tools and ships. What if they came here to live? How long before we became the under-women ourselves?
I left the women of Edge discussing crops and growing, and what it would be like with more hands to help with the work, and I walked back to the bell tower through the steaming early morning. Tare had offered me a bed for the night but I wanted silence. The streets were quiet but there were lamps burning in the houses and I knew that people would still be talking about the news.
Tare and Seliye treated me a little differently now that I had come back again. I was not the old Hunan, the Hunan whom they knew. I had seen things that they found hard to imagine, been to places they had never dreamed of. I had new ideas, ideas which had come from beyond Edge –beyond Nhem – and I thought I had seen a faint flicker of unease passing across their faces like cloud shadow, the same expression that they had worn with Mayest. I wondered
when the whispering would begin, but then I told myself that it was just that I was tired.
The bell tower had not changed. It was still a little cooler than the street, still rustling with dust and the echoes of the cries of the efreets. The goddesses were still patiently waiting on the wall. I looked at their unhuman faces and wondered who they had really been. They looked like nothing that I had seen on my travels. Just some dead race: alien, gone. Then, as though a switch had been flicked in my own head, I saw their pointed faces and hinged hands in the long beaks and wings of the efreets, and the capes were not capes at all, but wings. Not gone, after all, just changed.