The Art of Hunting, Page 3

  ‘Ianthe.’

  ‘I am—’

  ‘Paulus Marquetta,’ she said.

  ‘You know of me?’

  If only he knew the truth. How many times had she gazed on him from afar? She had seen him through the eyes of his own captors, a lonely prisoner kept in a cell deep below the Haurstaf palace. She had looked upon his sleeping face, the golden tangle of his hair upon his pillow, so peaceful and beautiful, and him so utterly unaware of his power over her. And through his own eyes she’d read the letters he’d written to his dying princess; I was with you when she died, she wanted to say. In your loneliest moments, I was there beside you. In my mind I held your hand and kissed your brow and loved you. But she couldn’t talk of this, not even in a dream.

  ‘Everyone knows you,’ she replied. ‘Son of King Jonas the Summoner and Queen Grace.’

  ‘Jonas the Summoner,’ he said. ‘That is one of the kinder epitaphs you could have chosen. Those who blame him for the downfall of my race call him Jonas the Whiteheart.’ His brow wrinkled and he pursed his lips. ‘I’ve seen you before, Ianthe.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Yes. Twice. Once with Briana Marks . . . and then again at the palace entrance, after the attack. A man carried you away.’

  A man? Ianthe couldn’t recall anything about that.

  ‘You were unconscious,’ the prince said. ‘Your rescuer wore Unmer armour and carried Unmer weapons, but he was human. A soldier, but not Haurstaf, his flesh had been badly scarred by brine. He looked . . .’The prince snorted. ‘We have a saying in Unmer . . . The closest translation is: he looked like a battlefield.’

  Granger? She had peered through his eyes often enough, observed his brine-scratched hands gripping the wheel of the emperor’s stolen steam yacht as he pursued the Haurstaf men-o’-war. And destroyed them. She recalled the battle, the cannon fire, the smoke and screams. Granger had harpooned their own vessel and dragged it behind him like a dragon carcass, until Ethan Maskelyne had severed the cable. But then they had abandoned the sinking yacht. Granger had earned his death, for all his greed and for the suffering he had caused Ianthe and her mother, and yet she had felt no desire to watch him drown.

  He had returned for her?

  ‘My family owe this man a debt of gratitude,’ Marquetta said. ‘We would reward him handsomely.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He freed us.’

  ‘No.’ She tried to recall what had happened, but her memories of the attack skirled like snowflakes in the wind. There had been a concrete cell. A Haurstaf soldier. A man in a white coat. She remembered the door slamming shut, the soldier perspiring heavily.

  ‘Are you with him now?’ Marquetta said. ‘Does he watch over you while you dream?’

  They’d hurt her and she’d cast her consciousness away from that terrible place, dislocating herself from her own suffering. She had drifted through the Sea of Ghosts, that great void of perceptions and in her anguish and fury she had . . .

  Oh, god.

  ‘Will you bring him to the palace at Awl?’ Marquetta said.

  What have I done?

  ‘You have my word that neither of you will be harmed.’

  A gust of wind lashed her hair. She felt hail sting her face. The returning thunder boomed like cannon fire. A battle at sea. And all around her the mountains appeared to swell. Why had Granger taken her away? Why couldn’t he have just left her there to die?

  Marquetta glanced between Ianthe and the heavens. ‘I have made a mistake,’ he said. ‘This man . . . He didn’t rescue you. He abducted you?’

  Ianthe felt tears welling in her eyes. ‘He’s my father,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand. He didn’t free you. It was me. I killed them.’ She began to sob. ‘I didn’t mean to, I . . .’

  She turned and ran.

  ‘Wait!’

  He seized her wrist.

  She shrieked.

  But he held on. ‘Ianthe, wait, please.’

  And suddenly she felt pain – an acid burn, as though his touch was scalding her. She saw blood trickle between his fingers, heard a crackle as his sorcerous touch banished her skin to non-existence. He looked at her with horror, then immediately released her. ‘I didn’t,’ he said, his violet eyes fixed on her bloody hand. ‘I didn’t do that. It’s your dream, you’ve imagined this, I swear.’

  Ianthe struck out – not physically, but with an instinctive mental blow intended merely to push the young man away. He flinched and then gave a sudden violent shudder. His face became slack and he dropped to his knees.

  Ianthe turned and fled. The wind howled and the hail beat the frozen ground and chopped the surface of the brine pools into colourful froths. And from the depths of those pits the Drowned gaped blindly up at her, their faces distorted but full of accusation.

  In her panic and terror she lost her footing and stumbled. The world rolled. She hit the ground, her face mere inches from the edge of a yellow pool. The metal stench of it filled her nostrils and throat. She found herself gazing down at her own self. Not a reflection, but a real person trapped beneath that sunflower-coloured brine. The Drowned Ianthe sat upon a chair, gazing at something cupped in her hand. It was a locket, opened to reveal a tiny portrait. A young man with golden hair? Her prince? She could not be certain. The girl beneath the water didn’t look up at her air-breathing counterpart, merely stared wistfully at the image in the locket, her other hand resting on the pregnant swell of her belly.

  CHAPTER 2

  GRANGER

  After four hours of using the replicating sword, Granger’s nose began to bleed. He pressed the back of his gauntlet against his upper lip, then withdrew his hand, only to see the red stain disappear into the shallow whorls etched across the metal surface. A moment later the armoured glove began to thrum with power in response to the increased entropy. The whorls shifted, scattering rainbows. Moments later he sensed the power in the gauntlet flow into his sword, as if the Unmer blade was drinking it in. The gauntlet shivered, resisting the drain, and for several seconds he felt a tug-of-war between the two artefacts. The muscles in his hand tightened painfully, pressure built inside his head, and then abruptly it was over. The sword had won, as it always did. Granger tried to relax. He wanted to release the weapon, but he didn’t dare do so until he knew they were safe. The blade was his security. The sorcerous replicates it created were too useful to dismiss.

  The nearest of them was breaking wood and stacking it in a pile beside the fire, while another hunched over the flames, boiling tea in a spent shell casing. Both men were identical copies of him, summoned from somewhere by the hellish blade, versions of which they both gripped even as they toiled. Both of them wore Unmer power armour identical to Granger’s own, giving them the same increased strength and endurance he now possessed. They looked like him in every way – the same lean frame and tough, brine-scarred skin, the same savage and haunted eyes – and yet it was hard enough to think of them as men.

  He watched his duplicate boiling tea in one of the thousands of shell casings that had been scattered throughout the forest around the Haurstaf palace. Some of those shells had been fired at Granger’s own chariot during his decoy assault.

  The sword replicate reached into Granger’s kitbag, pulled out a handful of birch grass and sprinkled it into the steaming water. The Unmer shield Granger had taken from the transmitting station rested against a fallen log twenty paces away. He’d placed it over there to avoid catching a glimpse of the hellish visions that occasionally appeared within its colour-shifting glass. The last time he’d looked into that cursed shield, it had seemed to be filled with shadowy figures gazing out.

  Granger’s third sword replicate leaned against a tree and watched over Ianthe, while the remaining five were out in the deep woods, checking his snares or patrolling the perimeter of his camp. In the back of his mind he could smell the earth and feel the mulch give under their boots and sense the flickers of autumn sun, dreamlike, upon their faces: sharp, painful percept
ions that raked the periphery of his nerves. The Unmer sorcery was sustaining him and draining him at the same time. He felt exhausted, edgy.

  Granger exchanged a glance with the third replicate, but then tore his eyes away. It wasn’t the wretched, brine-scarred face that horrified him, but the other man’s empty stare. It had been like looking into the abyss itself.

  Birds darted through the woods, whistling and chattering. Shafts of sunlight broke through the canopy and lay in gold green pools upon grass and moss or illuminated bursts of wild flowers. Puffs of midges hovered in the dappled shade. The boles and boughs were warm and hoary to the touch. Granger could smell the wild psellia and nettles and even the shorn hay from the fields further down the valley, but these late summer scents were corrupted by the sulphurous tang of cordite and gunpowder. He hadn’t heard any gunshots or cannon fire for a while now. Whatever fighting there had been between the freed Unmer and the Haurstaf battalions had now ceased.

  He was just wondering whether he should wake Ianthe, when he noticed her stir. She groaned, then raised her head and groaned a second time. She sat up, slowly and with great effort, and gingerly touched the bruises on her face. Her lips parted.

  ‘Where are my lenses?’ she said in a dry, cracked voice. She shook her head and immediately began groping the grass around her. But then, abruptly, she stopped what she was doing.

  ‘It is you,’ she said. ‘Granger.’

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ Granger said.

  ‘It’s your name, isn’t it?’

  Granger said nothing.

  ‘Where are my spectacles?’ she repeated.‘The Unmer lenses? What did you do with them?’

  He wandered over to his kitbag. After a moment of rummaging, he found the small Unmer lenses and brought them over to where she sat.

  She held out her hand.

  But he hesitated. ‘These are Unmer.’

  ‘Give them to me.’

  Granger examined the small wheel fixed to the side of the frames. He touched it with the thumb of his gauntlet, but didn’t spin the cursed thing. There was sorcerous energy here. His own armour was already reacting, powering up in order to wrestle energy from the lenses.‘They’re probably dangerous,’ he said.

  As he spoke, a jolt of pain shot through his left arm and hand. He dropped the lenses. It had seemed as though those Unmer spectacles had tried to wrest a massive amount of power from the gauntlet.

  ‘Give them to me!’ Ianthe cried, snatching them up from the ground. She put them on at once, then turned the wheel and blinked several times.

  ‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what—’

  ‘Oh, what do you care?’ she said. She was staring at him now.

  Staring right at him.

  Granger had grown used to the blankness in her eyes, the dissociation evident whenever his blind daughter pretended to see through her own useless eyes. But there was no evidence of that now. Something had happened to her the moment she’d turned that wheel. Her eyes looked normal. They appeared to react normally to her surroundings.

  ‘You can see me,’ he said.

  Ianthe made a face, somewhere between an impudent smile and a sneer. She seemed about to say something, but then her demeanour changed abruptly. She frowned. ‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘I sense . . . There are nine people nearby, but . . .’ She hesitated, her brow furrowed in confusion. ‘What is that? It’s like they’re all the same person, nine perspectives, but . . .’ She raised her eyes and looked at Granger. ‘They’re all you,’ she said. ‘How are you doing that?’

  Granger felt the weight of the sword in his fist. A familiar sensation of unease crept over him, that same feeling he got whenever he realized Ianthe was looking out through his eyes, hearing the world through his ears. Part of him was repulsed – it instinctively wanted her out of his head – but his pragmatic side urged him to remain calm. ‘An Unmer trick,’ he said. ‘I don’t really know how it works. How do those lenses help you see?’

  She shuddered. ‘God, that’s creepy. They’re . . . empty.’

  ‘What?’

  She shook her head dismissively, then winced again. Gingerly, she touched the back of her neck.

  ‘Where did you get the spectacles?’ Granger said.

  ‘I found them. What does it matter?’

  ‘On an Unmer ship?’

  Her silence confirmed his suspicions. Ianthe had been aboard the same icebreaker that had taken Granger north to the transmitting station in Pertica. The same ship that brought him to the very weapon horde that had allowed him to rescue her. The ship with a dead captain. Something Herian said came back to him, an offhand remark the Unmer operator had made about that long-gone mariner: That didn’t stop him from delivering his package and then bringing you here, did it? Had the Unmer somehow placed those lenses in his daughter’s hands? And the rest? Granger finding the transmitting station, his training with the power armour, phasing shield and replicating sword, his escape and subsequent journey to Awl – had it all been planned?

  After all, the result of such unlikely series of events was that the Unmer were now free, their Haurstaf enslavers either dead or fleeing for their lives.

  The more he thought about it, the more he felt sure they had both been manipulated, moved like pieces on a chessboard. Herian’s remark made it impossible to dismiss as mere coincidence the events that had brought them to this place. And yet the logistics of engineering such an operation confounded him. How had the Unmer even known about Ianthe in the first place? Herian had described himself as an operator. Now Granger wondered exactly what kind of operator he was.

  ‘Where are we?’ Ianthe said.

  ‘A few miles south of the palace,’ Granger replied. ‘A league or so. The fighting has stopped.’

  ‘What fighting?’

  ‘The Unmer have seized control of the palace,’ he said. ‘They used some weapon – something that cut through the Haurstaf psychics like a scythe. Hundreds dead, thousands. Those who survived fled to the military camps in the forest or on to Port Awl. Haurstaf military units went to the palace to investigate. There were skirmishes. I saw leucotomized Unmer gunned down in the woods, but there’s been nothing for a while now.’

  Her thoughts appeared to turn inward again. Or had her consciousness merely drifted off into the mind of someone else? He could never be sure whose eyes his own daughter was peering through at any given moment. But then she shuddered and Granger noticed anguish in her eyes.

  She sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. ‘What are we doing out here?’

  ‘We’re leaving.’

  ‘To where?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You don’t even know?’

  ‘Port Awl,’ he said. ‘We’ll find passage on a ship—’

  ‘Which ship?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?’ she said with surprising bitterness. Her red-rimmed eyes now glared fiercely up at him. ‘Do you even have any money?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘I suppose you were counting on me for that?’

  Granger had had enough. ‘I got you out of that damned place,’ he growled. ‘Now shut up and leave the rest to me.’

  ‘You got me out?’ she said, with incredulity.

  The truth was that he’d found the palace in chaos, with Haurstaf corpses strewn everywhere and leucotomized Unmer freed from their torture cells to wander half-mad and gibbering through corridors choked with the dead. His arrival at that time had to have been more than just fortuitous. Again, he sensed the hand of a hidden manipulator at work, and it deeply unnerved him. It was time to get as far away from here as possible.

  ‘Can you walk?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ she replied.

  ‘You don’t have much choice.’

  ‘I’m going back to the palace.’

  ‘No, you aren’t.’ As soon as the words had left his mouth, he saw his daughter�
�s jaw clench and her nostrils flare and he knew what was coming. When Ianthe dug in, she really dug in.

  ‘You don’t have any right to stop me,’ she said. She tried to rise from the ground, but then winced and let loose a pitiful wail as her beaten limbs railed against the sudden movement. At once she looked much younger than her fifteen years. Or was she sixteen now? Only a few years younger than her mother had been when Granger first met her. Yet here she was now, a wounded child, sitting on the grass, about to cry.

  Granger’s nearest replicate crouched down as if to comfort the girl, although he hadn’t consciously instructed it to do so. He was about to pull it back when Ianthe reacted.

  She shrieked, ‘Get that thing away from me!’ And then she began to sob.

  Granger willed the replicate to leave. His control of them had become intuitive by now. It was like having numerous waking dreams running simultaneously in the periphery of his mind. He could switch over to any one of them (finding himself marching through the undergrowth and breaking branches and crouched over a fire) and yet they seemed to undertake the tasks he’d set for them without much conscious direction from him. He wondered if this was close to the way Ianthe saw the world.

  He stared at her dumbly for a moment, unsure of what to do, then he left her and went over to the fire, where his other replicate was straining tea into a tin mug. He couldn’t bear to speak to the thing, to treat any of these sorcerous manifestations as human, so he simply lifted the steaming brew from its hands and carried it back over to Ianthe. He could feel the warmth of the drink through his alloy gauntlets as a prickling sensation in the palms of his hands.

  ‘Drink this.’

  ‘Go away!’

  ‘It’ll numb the pain.’

  She blew her nose on her sleeve and wiped tears from her eyes. For a moment he thought she might lash out and knock the tea away. But then she seemed to calm down. She reached over and accepted the mug.

  ‘Smells like grass.’

  ‘Mostly it is,’ he said. ‘Birch grass, a couple of other things. We used to use this stuff in Aramo when . . .’ His voice tailed off. She didn’t want to hear about that.