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  SIX

  PLANET: MUSPELL (VALI)

  Inside the cell, I had time to think, but my thoughts circled like the white birds around Glyn Apt’s head. The image of Idhunn’s body was never far away: it was as though I could glimpse it out of the corner of my eye, a bloody jumble. Who killed you, Idhunn? I asked her spirit. Was it the Morrighanu? It must have been; I just did not believe Glyn Apt. Why slaughter her so violently? To paralyse us, to shock us, send the hive that was the Rock into chaos and mayhem while all the time that great warship was riding up, hidden under its stealth capacities, making ready for its crew to stroll in and club us down like sealstock pups. Idhunn’s death came as one more blow, one more tragic bead on the necklace that was my life.

  Mondhile. Nhem.

  I could not decide which had been worse. On Nhem, I’d killed the Hierolath. I’d used the seith, while he was raping me. An extreme measure for a female assassin, but I thought I could handle it, take control of the situation, own it. And then Mondhile, and torture at the hands of Frey and the Mondhaith girl Gemaley.

  But I’d been raped before, by my own brother, and survived. And I had handled the events of Nhem and Mondhile, taken control of them, owned that pain as all the counsellors taught me. Survived. Hadn’t I? But in this dungeon dark, I wasn’t sure of anything any more and the nightmares were back and swarming. I felt myself shutting down, withdrawing until I was nothing more than a little seed of awareness. Was this how it was for the selk, for the Mondhaith, for the women of Nhem? Just a spark in the darkness of unsentience? Maybe it would be better if I could stay this way, I remember thinking.

  Eventually, I dozed, but did not sleep. For a moment, though, I thought I was dreaming when I heard the sound. The selk were singing again. Their song echoed around the walls of the cell, and through the hollows of my head. I put my hands to my ears, but could not shut it out. It went on and on, penetrating, seeping through the cracks and shattering.

  I was engulfed in a rush of cold sea air. Loki’s light poured through the sudden gap in the wall with the glitter of the warship. The hulking form of a selk was crouching in the gap.

  ‘You must hurry. There is no time,’ it called me.

  I agreed. No more time for nightmares – regardless of what the selk wanted or were planning, I had to act. I threw myself through the gap and down the rocky outcrop on which the Skald’s fortress stood. Shouts sounded from high on the walls and something hummed past me, splintering rock and pulverizing seaweed into a stinking, pulpy mass.

  The selk were waiting at the base of the rocks. One of them pushed the back of my knees. I stumbled forward.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Quickly. You will see.’

  They guided me out onto the rocks. Behind me, the fortress had started to hum with voices, like a hive indeed. I could hear someone shouting: I thought it might be Glyn Apt. Then the sound of weapons fire, but surprisingly not aimed in my direction: could it be my own Skald, fighting?

  ‘Hallsdottir!’ That was Glyn Apt. Making my unsteady way over the sharp slabs of rock, I glanced back. The Morrighanu was standing in the ragged hole made by the selk’s sonics, a gun in both hands and sighted on me. Ahead, the warship had started to move, swinging round to train its port guns on the selk. Something singing and hot struck the rock not far from my feet, sending black wet splinters hissing into the sea. If I went in, it wouldn’t take me long to freeze. Another bolt, and the selk beside me cried out. At first I thought it had been hit, but then I saw that something was rising from the water.

  Glyn Apt snapped an exclamation that I did not catch. I was concentrating on the gleaming wing, coming up in a stream of sea with Loki’s light burning off its sides. The hatch was opening. I jumped, slipping a little on the rocks, nearly fell, grasped the edges of the hatch and threw myself inside.

  Outside, the selk were splashing into the sea and safety. The wing’s navigational array was already firing up, lit with unknown co-ordinates. The hatch closed behind me; though I was alone I was passenger, it seemed, not pilot. It took seconds for the wing to power up. I looked through the wet window of the hatch to see Glyn Apt running along the rocks, leaping sure-footed, weapon up and firing. On the other side, there was a sunlit burst of fire from the blastcannon of the warship, sending seawater spattering over the wing like a sudden storm shower. But the Morrighanu forces came too late. The wing was speeding off, taking me with it, under the warship’s guns and far out into the western sea.

  SEVEN

  PLANET: NHEM (HUNAN)

  Make that four hundred and one.

  The new woman came in over the ridge this morning, not long after dawn. The gate guard was the first one to catch sight of her and she called me. I was already awake – I didn’t sleep for long on those nights that were hot and stifling even when it rained. The heat reminded me of Iznar; the odour of old earth hung around me, the smell of roots, the closeness of a dark cellar.

  So I hurried down from the height, through the quiet, steaming streets to the gate. The walk left me breathless. Aches and pains that had not been so present when I was a younger woman were making themselves felt. I leaned against the warming stone of the guard gate for a moment to catch my breath. Pride perhaps, but even in the colony, I didn’t want to show too much weakness.

  The guard was a woman who was vaguely familiar to me, a squat girl, with stumps where some of her fingers should have been. But she was bright enough: I could see the glimpse of it in her face, and you learn to recognize that sort of thing here.

  She said, ‘High Counsellor, you’re here.’ She looked relieved; her own responsibility lessened by my arrival. ‘I think there’s another one coming.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I saw something up on the ridge. It was too tall for a carne and it moved in the wrong way.’

  I took her binoculars – more men’s tech, stolen and precious – and peered through them. Up on the heights of the mountains, the light lay heavy and slanted with the sun’s rise. Beyond the gate, the earth was already smouldering. But up in the mountains it looked pale and bleached and cold – an illusion, I knew, for the summits were baked bare by the long summer, the earth cracked and arid. Everything was in retreat: water, beasts, plants, sinking down into the earth and crevices of rock until the first of the day-rains. If someone had made it across, at this time of year, it was a miracle.

  And yet, in the next few minutes, I saw that a miracle had happened. The guard had been right to call me: there was someone there. Impossible to tell whether it was male or female from this distance, but I chose to believe it was a woman.

  She was stumbling as she walked, weaving from side to side. Illness, lack of water, fatigue, abuse, or perhaps all of these. I knew we were going to have to go out there and bring her in, and it might already be too late. Not many of them made it as far as the colony: those who did spoke of the corpses, mummified in the dry air, all of them gazing south as if the north was still something to turn your back on, even in death.

  I should not have offered to go myself. The walk down here had given me warning and I expected to pay for it later, with a night of wheezing and cramps in the chest. But that same old pride bit back now, making me say, ‘Fetch the land-car and Seliye. I’ll go with you.’

  It took a few minutes for Seliye, roused from sleep, to come down the stairs. After what she’d been through, she could have had a room in the central buildings – I’d offered her a chamber in the tower – but she preferred to stay here, facing north, watching and waiting. We all knew who for; knew, too, that the daughter she waited for would never come. But Seliye still held tight to hope, lived quietly and watchful in the guardhouse, was often the first one out whenever a new person was spotted.

  ‘Hunan?’ she said when she saw me. ‘You’re up early.’

  ‘I had good reason to be.’

  She raised an eyebrow, dark against the darkness of her skin, and I realized that the guard had woken her, not told
her.

  ‘There’s another,’ I said.

  Seliye grew very still, like a lizard.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Up on the ridge. She made it over. We saw her fall. We need to hurry.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s a woman?’

  We stared at one another. I did not need to reply.

  She gave a curt nod. ‘We’ll need water, a med kit,’ she said. She was speaking more to herself than to me, I thought. But then she gave me a sharp kind of look, the sort that told me she had taken in far more than I’d thought.

  ‘You’re coming with us, Hunan? Are you well enough?’

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  She nodded. ‘It’s up to you.’ But I could see from her face that she disapproved.

  At that time of the morning, the compound was quiet. Whirls of dust spun around the land-car as we started it up, the roar of the old engine loud in the morning silence. The land-car wouldn’t last much longer, it was already in its last days, and we had nothing with which to replace it. Someone had stolen it from Iznar, and I was amazed that it had made it this far and that the thief had been able to drive it. She’d been trained on a road from a mine, she said; back and forth, back and forth. She’d learned.

  We’d have to keep the land-car going, and yet, we couldn’t. It was one of the things I didn’t want to think about, but I had to. Pushing the colony along, moment to moment, not giving in or going under. But how to live, when you know that everything around you is failing, including your own body? You endure, I suppose. You can’t do anything else.

  We went through the guard gate, the engine starting to whine as the land-car hit the first rise to the ridge. Behind the walls of the colony, the ground went up sharply and it wasn’t long before you were in the mountains themselves, the range that the men apparently call Char Fen, the Death of Earth.

  Out here, the morning sun was already a blast of heat off the white-and-ochre rocks. The sand was criss-crossed with snake tracks, the thin windings that showed a deadly presence.

  ‘Watch your feet when you get down,’ I said, unnecessarily. Seliye had already seen the tracks. She nodded. I knew we were both wondering whether the carrion hunters had got to the woman first. The sky was free of birds, but that might mean only that the bigger predators had crept out from the rocks to eat her, keeping the birds away. As the land-car swung around, bumping over the stones, I looked back.

  The colony lay sharp against the black sea. The bell tower rose above it all, clear in the morning light, with the efreets circling the bell tower’s spike. I felt a little stronger: when the efreets came home to roost, shrieking and hissing, that’s when my day really began.

  And now the colony was falling behind us, lost behind arches and spires of rock. The wind had carved the stone into odd shapes out here. It was almost like a kind of art, as though the people who made it had gone into hiding, shy about their creations. Maybe once, women could be artists: maybe the artists who had created the wall-paintings of the colony were women. Now, we made do with wind and stone.

  ‘Where is she?’ Seliye whispered. I saw her knot her fingers in the ritual gesture for luck, a gesture only a few years old, already hallowed. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I can’t see her.’ Neither of us wanted to say it, that a carne had already got to her. They smelled blood quickly in the mountains, where food was so scarce. If they lived further north, then no women would make it here at all. But Seliye gave a stifled shout. ‘There!’

  She had crumpled and fallen, but she was alone. No carnes, no sign of snakes. The land-car wheeled up in a sweeping stop, showing the driver’s joy, but it was too soon to tell whether or not she was alive.

  ‘Take it easy,’ I said sharply.

  But Seliye was already down from the car and running across, sand puffing up from her sandal heels. In the early days, we’d been more careful, fearing traps. It was stupid when I thought about it. The men could come at any time, send a squadron down, kill us all. We expected it, erected makeshift defences behind the high earth wall of the colony, wooden spikes on the ground, defensive ditches – pathetic, because if they came, it was likely to be from above, and we had no guns, and no means to make them, although we’d scoured the colony for weapons and found none. The goddesses must have been peace-loving. Mustn’t they?

  But the men did not come. At least, not yet.

  And now here was another woman, another sister, lying unmoving on the bare baked earth with Seliye running, and myself hobbling – after my walk to the gatehouse – towards her.

  As I drew nearer, I heard Seliye give another shout, this time fully voiced.

  ‘Hunan!’ But I had already seen the woman stir.

  All those journeys back from the mountains stick in my mind, the journeys I had made as High Counsellor, though it was never a title I’d have given myself. I could give you details of every one. Morning or evening, day or night, summer or the short coastal winter, any season when the storms come and the mountains bloom . . . all the journeys. But I remember the time we brought Khainet back more clearly than all the rest, although she did not have her name until later.

  I’d never seen anyone like her. I suppose to an outsider, all the women of Edge – all the women of Iznar – must look a little similar. We are short, we are dark-haired, at least in youth, and brown-skinned, we have black eyes. We are the colour of the rich northern earth that they bring down for the gardens of Iznar. But Khainet was different. She was like a man; tall and pale, with hair that was the colour of the sand under the noonday sun: a blazing white. When we pulled back her eyelids to check her condition, they were a man’s blue.

  Seliye took a step back when she saw this.

  ‘Is she a man, do you think?’

  I laughed. ‘A man with breasts?’ Nor was there any telltale lump at her groin, though I would not check further. But I think it crossed both our minds that she might be some sort of spy, a man made to look like a woman, if such a notion were not too strange. Surely the men would not allow it, unless it was some kind of punishment.

  And her hands were badly scarred: the skin pink and shiny, twisted across the knuckles. A lot of us have scars.

  We carried her into the vehicle and the memory of that, too, is very clear. Bumping down the mountain, calling to the driver in an agony of anxiety to go more slowly, drive with more care, in case we jolted something loose in her head and she died. She had a head wound. Later, she said she didn’t remember how she had come by it, but I thought she must have fallen. There was a deep gash running down the side of her face, the blood matting her hair to the skin. The long hair suggested either that she had been travelling for a long time, or that she came from a part of the north where the women’s heads were not shaved. It had taken my own hair a year to grow out, and now, even though it too was white, and coarse like animal hair, I still could not bear to cut it.

  I wish now that I could say I’d a feeling of disaster. But there was nothing. As we jolted in through the city gate, the high walls rising on either side and the gate swinging shut with that creak that always meant sanctuary to me, I just wanted the new woman to wake, and smile, and know that she was among friends.

  EIGHT

  PLANET: MUSPELL (VALI)

  It was ac long ride across the sea. I had control over the immediate functions of the wing, but not over navigation: the settings were fixed and when I tried to access them, a notice informed me that they were hidden. The warmth of the wing could protect me only so far, and after a while, strapped into the pilot’s chair yet with no real function (let alone any idea of where we were actually going), I grew stiff and cold. The rushing sound of the water was hypnotic, sending me into a light trance. But I examined the nav-array and there seemed to be no way of communicating with the selk, who must be far behind now.

  I remembered Thorn Eld, smiling at me on the foreshore under the black-glass cliffs of Darkland; the things I had seen in that dreamscape forest outside Hetla. Travelling through the fores
t, with its hallucinogenic conifers and the ashy floor, redolent of ancient fires, I would have believed anything. It was no surprise that everyone in the Reach was so superstitious, given the nature of Muspell, and yet I doubt I could have lived anywhere else for long.

  Eventually I shut my eyes and entered into the liminal state provided by the seith, trying to keep out the chill. But I found my thoughts turning inexorably to the mess that I had left behind me on the Rock, to Idhunn and the selk.

  Now that I thought back, I realized how little I really knew about Idhunn. She had given me a sketch of her upbringing and I knew that she came originally from a place called Whitland, a small, remote island that was part of a chain called the Wraiths. They had gained their name because the region was so often shrouded in mist, a consequence of the differing currents that swirled around the north-western parts of the Reach. Not even the most hidebound northerners expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for that part of the world. I think it explained why Idhunn had spent all that time in the lamp room: that high tower from which one could see so much of the seas and the weather. But I knew very little about her family, or what had brought her from those misty islands to the Rock. It was as though she had always been a member of the Skald, as unchanging as the fortress that housed it, and of course this was not true. I remember being surprised to discover that she had become a Skald member only twenty years before, when she must have been in her mid forties at least. She had never spoken of her relationships, or children – I did not even know whether she preferred women or men, though some intuition told me that it was probably the former. The closest friendships she had possessed within the Skald were, as far as I knew, with Hlin and myself. Perhaps she had confided more in Hlin, since they were after all closer in age. I could not help wondering what had brought her to the Skald in the first place. People entered the Skald for all sorts of reasons: personal conviction, a desire to follow a more spiritual path, although the Skald was not a religious order as such. And then there were the casualties – myself among them.