Bloodsong by Melvin Burgess

Author:Melvin Burgess
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

This is Grimhild, mother of the house. It’s the very pitch black of night and she’s swishing smoothly down the dark corridors on a foldaway scooter. It’s a good way to get about, she’s been using them for years. Her perfect white hands, no bigger than a child’s and covered with perfect white fur, hold tight on to the handle while her neat little doggy foot pushes away down below. She keeps the scooters folded up in cupboards scattered throughout the palace—there’s always one on hand. Quick and quiet—just the job for an elderly lady moving to fat.

But in the black of night? Dark corridors? Why is there so little light down here? The Niberlins can afford generators and fuel. See there, as she drifts past a room where a small lamp glows—her eyes shine in the dark like a cat’s. Grimhild has see-in-the-dark eyes. You’d expect it, looking at her. She stands upright, she has hands, but she’s a dog through and through. Look at her mouth. Look at her tongue; there’s no speech. Look at her skull—there are no frontal lobes, either. And Grimhild can smell—boy, can she smell! She can smell a chewy-bar, a thief, or a fortune from a hundred meters.

She needs no light.

What was the old king thinking of, marrying a creature like that? Of course these days, things are different, we understand that. If you can have a conversation with your dog it does wonders for the relationship. Things . . . well, they develop, put it like that. Grimhild has a decent pair of breasts—we forgot to mention them when we were listing her more human attributes—covered in that same flat white fur. Ideal for stroking. But still! Kings have to think ahead. The bloodline, succession. They spend a lot of time on this stuff. When one of your children is going to lead the nation one day, you take your breeding seriously. There are the womb-tanks, of course, cloning techniques and so on—but that basic genetic material is still important. What was he doing, breeding from a sheepdog? It makes no sense. It’s not even good taste. He could have chosen a decent breed, an old English, or a spaniel of some kind, if he wanted to be traditional, or something grand—a wolfhound, or an Afghan even. Something with a bit of class.

But Grimhild wasn’t always like this. You should have seen her when she was first married! Frontal lobes? She had them in her elbows. Looks? She had them in her brains. She’s never been the same since the assassination. She lost everything— her husband, her looks, her brains, the lot. She barely got away with her life.

It’s a story that’s never been told. Grimhild and Ida were the only ones there, and they ain’t talking. The assassins got in and out of the royal apartments without leaving a sign— shape-changers, most likely. The king was dead on the floor, Ida lay tied to a chair, the blood all down her front and her tongue on the table beside her.

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