Art of Hunting Read online

  The Unmer had made a deal with the elder gods, creatures they called entropaths who lived in the dying embers of another cosmos. In their desperation they had helped those gods open a door between their world and ours. The brine flowing through was somehow important to those gods. Perhaps it was the source of their power, or was used to prepare the way for their coming. Granger didn’t know. They didn’t need it to breathe. The entropath he had seen at the transmitting station in Pertica had breathed air. Nevertheless, these entities valued it above all else. And when they had brought enough of it through, they would follow, abandoning their own dying universe for ours.

  To save themselves from genocide, the Unmer had sacrificed everything – our own world, our own universe.

  The applause had died down and now the young prince addressed the crowd again. ‘But we are also here to celebrate a second relationship,’ he said. He turned and reached over and took Ianthe’s hand, gently ushering her to her feet. She stood beside him, blushing fiercely.

  Something in her eyes, her stance, warned Granger. He found himself watching events unfold through a giddy cloud of apprehension. Standing on the brink of an abyss with a gale rising at his back, and he didn’t know if he could keep his balance.

  The prince smiled. ‘May I present Ianthe Cooper of Evensraum, my fiancée, and the future queen of the Unmer.’

  Furious applause shook the banquet hall. Granger felt the blood drain from his face. He glared at Ianthe. He wanted to stand up and shake her and say, Are you insane? And he wanted her to look at him so she would see that question burning there in his eyes but she avoided his eye, just as she avoided the looks of astonishment from everyone in that room. She merely stared at her plate, blushing like a foolish child.

  Granger felt sick. He made to rise.

  Perhaps it was a mixture of the wine and the heat and his already weakened state, but his legs gave out before he had taken two steps. He stumbled drunkenly towards Ianthe, who recoiled instinctively.

  But then strong arms caught him. He found himself looking directly into the young prince’s eyes.

  ‘Steady on, sir,’ Marquetta said. ‘You’re less than a day out of that suit.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Granger said, trying to push away.

  But Marquetta held on. ‘I fear we have pushed you too, far too quickly,’ he said. ‘You need to lie down, rest some more, accept your present state.’ He took Granger’s elbow and led him along the back of the stage, waving away the servants who came rushing to assist them. Amidst the fug of his weakness and indignity, Granger spied Duke Cyr. The old man was watching him carefully, perhaps studying Granger’s reaction.

  Granger’s head swam. He said, ‘What do you want with her?’

  ‘I want an heir, Mr Granger. Can you imagine an Unmer child with her powers?’

  ‘You’re using her.’

  ‘She’s happy, Mr Granger. Why can’t you be happy for her?’

  ‘Because I know how deceitful you people can be. You don’t care about her. You’re liars, all of you.’

  Marquetta’s face twisted into an angry scowl. He clenched Granger’s elbow more tightly, and Granger felt a sudden piercing pain, as though he had been stung there. When Marquetta removed his hand, Granger spied blood on his elbow.

  ‘Forgive me,’ Marquetta said, looking at the wound he had just given Granger. ‘I’ve displaced some of your skin. A lapse of concentration, I fear. Sometimes I forget how vulnerable your kind are to decreation.’

  Granger leaned close to the young man and growled into his ear. ‘Harm my daughter, and I’ll kill you.’

  Marquetta laughed. ‘You think?’ he said. ‘Mr Granger, you are being consumed by a parasitic sword. With each hour that passes, it gains more control of you. Don’t you feel a yearning to go and collect it? To feel its weight in your hand? Do you think that is your will? A week or a month from now you will be nothing but a phantom, compelled to obey the sword’s every desire. And there is nothing you can do about it.’

  ‘I’ll destroy it.’

  ‘The sword will not let you.’

  ‘I’ll cripple myself.’

  ‘You do not yet understand.’ The young prince studied Granger for a moment. ‘Look at yourself. It already has too much of a grip on you. You cannot escape the inevitable. You are no longer the wielder with the sword as your weapon. Now the sword is the wielder and you are its weapon.’

  Granger said nothing. He knew the prince had spoken the truth. He didn’t want to destroy the power armour, nor even the hellish blade that was destined to devour him. Even now, he yearned to reclaim the weapon with every pore and shredded nerve in his body. He wanted to succumb to it.

  ‘You might have stood a chance against it,’ Marquetta said, ‘if you hadn’t slept so long.’

  Granger growled. ‘You kept me asleep deliberately?’

  ‘But I woke you as a gift to Ianthe,’ Marquetta said. ‘She has been hovering around your bedside for days. She wanted you to know about her marriage. She desperately wanted you to be . . .’ He smiled. ‘Proud of her.’ He fixed Granger with a penetrating stare. ‘Can you do that one thing for her, before you die?’

  CHAPTER 4

  THE DRAGON ISLE

  Briana Marks watched a flight of four dragons skim the seas to port, each clad in massive banded leather armour, their great aquamarine wings agleam in the sunlight. Curse Maskelyne for his selfishness, she thought. The man cares more for his own neck than he does for his species. Her last hope now lay here in this strange and treacherous place.

  Her hired captain – a thin and bearded Valcinder named Acanto – wrung his hands and clicked his tongue against the top of his mouth for the umpteenth time. He’d been making these sounds ever since they’d caught sight of the Dragon Isle.

  ‘The flag is clearly visible, Captain,’ she said.

  ‘And yet they flew so close that time,’ Acanto said.

  ‘They’re simply testing your mettle,’ she replied. ‘They won’t attack a Haurstaf vessel.’

  He nodded meekly and wrung his hands again. ‘As you say.’ But he didn’t look convinced.

  Oars dipped and rose on either side of the hull as Acanto’s ship, the Silver Flame, rounded a fang of dark rock protruding from the red Mare Regis waters and made for a shingle beach backed by monstrous black cliffs. Briana’s Haurstaf Guild flag hung limply from the bowsprit. She could see nest sites on ledges high above and great jagged cracks in the rock that led into the serpents’ network of caves and the rude stone homes they’d built there. Waves crashed and fumed against massive tumbles of bone and cartilage lying under the cliffs – the remains of whales and sharks and a hundred other forms of marine life.

  Acanto was peering at the beach. ‘If Conquillas is here,’ he said, ‘then where is his ship?’

  She snorted. ‘Really?’

  He looked at her blankly.

  ‘You think Argusto Conquillas needs a ship?’

  Acanto seemed uncomfortable. ‘I always assumed the tales were exaggerated.’

  ‘This is one Unmer lord whose exploits require no exaggeration. This is the slayer of Duna, daughter of Fiorel, the lord who rallied the dragons against his own kind.’

  ‘You say he is a friend to the Haurstaf?’

  Briana nodded. But, truthfully, she wasn’t certain. Conquillas had fought for the Haurstaf leader, Aria, nearly three hundred years ago. He had betrayed his own kind because of the love he had for her, not for the Guild she presided over. And yet he would not wish to see Marquetta’s heir reclaim his throne in Losoto. An Unmer king would seek to punish Conquillas for crimes against his race.

  She had encountered the dragon lord three times before: twice when she’d been a young woman, the last only three years ago. He’d been in Awl to demand from her the release of a particular serpent who’d been caught in a hunter’s net. Demand, not negotiate. Some pet of his, she’d presumed. She’d simply bought the dragon from the hunter and then released it to him to avoid any unpleas
antness from either party. She recalled how cold he’d been.

  The Silver Flame drew nearer to the beach, where the waters of the Sea of Kings had left a line of flesh-coloured scum running along the shingle. More remains lay scattered everywhere: the huge skeletons of whales and sharks and clusters of smaller animals. Some of the larger specimens were over sixty paces from jaw to tail, the lines of their ribs running like bleached driftwood fences. And strewn everywhere were human limbs and pelvises, the hands and feet and grinning skulls of the Drowned – the dragon’s favoured prey. Briana sensed eyes upon her and looked up into the caves overhead, but she saw no sign of life in those dark rents.

  When the leadman called two fathoms under the hull, Acanto’s coxswain ordered the oars banked and the anchor dropped. The crew cranked winches, lowering the Flame’s tender into the blood-red waters. The breeze had stiffened and so Briana and Acanto donned their cloaks and goggles before descending by rope ladder.

  The tender’s small engine coughed into life with a puff of acrid fumes, and the small vessel bore them across seawater that glittered like rubies. The wind blew puffs of pink foam from their wake.

  Briana wrinkled her nose. ‘This engine,’ she said, ‘is it fuelled by whale oil or dragon venom?’

  Acanto shot her a fearful gaze. ‘Oh my . . .’

  She grinned. ‘Relax. I’m kidding. I doubt they can smell the difference.’

  ‘You’re certain?’

  ‘Not certain, no.’

  ‘May the gods save us.’

  The sunlight had a peculiarly clear quality that seemed to sharpen everything around Briana, yet it was becoming bitterly cold. Again came the feeling of being watched. Acanto cut the engine a yard from land and the keel scraped tiny metalled stones. They stepped ashore with the bones of giants looming over them like sculpted ice.

  ‘That’s odd,’ Acanto said. ‘Weird. Do you feel it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘An edge to the air, to the sunlight maybe.’

  ‘There is a foul odour, now that you mention it,’ she admitted. ‘But I think it’s the same one I’ve been smelling since I stepped aboard your ship.’

  But there was something in the air, and perhaps even in the rock and the bones: an invisible force that enveloped the island itself. It felt as though everything here was under constant stress by some unseen power. And it struck Briana that here among the dragons of the Mare Regis she might be sensing the residue of powerful Entropic sorcery. To forge these beasts the Unmer had ripped apart and reconstructed nature, dragging the minds of their victims through oblivion, only to reassemble them in new and ghastly forms. Was she now sensing that lingering damage? That distant echo of their once-human screams? For all a dragon’s terrible beauty, one could always sense in them a fatal flaw – a deep fracture or sickness lurking behind their eyes. Rarely did one encounter a dragon that was not, to some degree, insane. Like all Unmer creations, they were the product of imperfect minds striving for perfection.

  She wondered why Conquillas loved them so.

  Steps cut into the rock led them up towards the black throats of the caverns overhead. Briana could hear the wind keening up there and it seemed to her a chilling, forlorn sound.

  After a few hundred paces they stopped to rest on a small terrace.

  Briana raised her goggles and stood looking out to sea, her cloak snapping in the cold wind. Some distance to the south she could see a long dark shape skimming the crests of the waves – a serpent of considerable size. Its head turned and it wheeled inwards towards the island, wings thumping languidly.

  Acanto clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. ‘That beast is large enough to be Gruinlahg herself,’ he said.

  ‘Or one of her daughters, perhaps,’ Briana remarked. ‘It’s said they live here.’ Gruinlahg had been one of the largest and most ferocious dragons ever to hunt the Mare Regis. Unmer sorcerers had fashioned her, it was said, from the mind and spirit of a simple nursemaid. With such a humble heritage, no one could explain how she came to be such a terror. But her rage had been legendary. She sank one-tenth of the Imperial Navy and then at least twenty privateers Emperor Lem subsequently sent to kill her, before finally meeting her end in a sea battle near Praxis over a hundred years ago.

  ‘A woman scorned,’ Briana said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Gruinlahg. Never underestimate a woman scorned.’

  ‘Do you think her daughters could still be alive? After all this time?’

  ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Everything tainted by sorcery seems to resist nature’s attempts to unravel it. Conquillas himself must be nine hundred years old by now.’

  Acanto whistled. ‘Nine hundred years.’

  And as bitter as the sea, Briana thought.

  They resumed their ascent and soon reached the mouth of a vast cavern, into which the path now meandered, snaking onwards through taluses of shattered black rock and mounds of white bones into the subterranean heart of the island. Now their footfalls echoed under a canopy of stone and, looking up, they could see where, on the walls of the cave, the dragons had built their nests.

  ‘They look like limpets,’ Acanto observed.

  It was, Briana thought, an accurate metaphor. The dragon’s nests clung to the naked rock in the manner of limpets. They were constructed of mortared stone and roughly hemispherical, and each possessed a single opening through which the serpents came and went.

  ‘They buy the cement from Valcinder traders,’ Briana remarked.

  ‘Buy it?’

  She grunted. ‘At exorbitant prices.’

  They passed through the ribcage of a whale and moved on into an area littered with post-human remains licked clean and gnawed. Skulls etched with tooth marks. Tibiae and fibulae cracked open for the marrow inside. Here and there the cavern floor bore the scrapes of claws. And soon Briana could smell the dense musk of the beasts themselves – an odour so powerful she could actually taste blood and sweat and sulphur on her lips.

  Acanto pointed. ‘Look there.’

  Ahead of them the path meandered onwards through slopes of rock and bone, following the downward incline of the cavern floor, until it reached a relatively flat and open area. There, cradled between two specially constructed piles of mortared stone, rested a ship.

  She was an antique, an Unmer yacht the likes of which had not been built nor sailed for over a thousand years. Eighty feet from bow to stern, straight and slender, her heartwood hull had faded to a bone grey and was still clad in its original metal scrollwork – filigree so exquisitely wrought it reminded Briana of the finest Valcinder concertinas. Her windows were intact, the rounded lozenges of thick yellow duskglass set in patterned alloy frames. Her single funnel, also forged from a forgotten alloy, rose behind a wheelhouse inlaid with hardwoods and precious metals and a mast with a single yard and wire-wound shrouds. On her prow there stood a harpoon gun and cable spindle, while various hunting spears and nets had been lashed both to her bulwarks and to a sturdy fore-deck rack. Her gangway had been lowered from the side of the yacht and rested on a series of stone slabs forming a rude stairwell down to the cavern floor.

  Acanto blew through his teeth. ‘That’s a dragon hunter,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen one so old. I’ll bet that girl sailed before the seas were poisoned.’ He examined the ship for a moment longer, then frowned. ‘But why would a dragon lord choose to live in a dragon-hunting ship?’

  ‘You’re missing the point,’ Briana said. ‘It’s not a dragon-hunting ship. It’s a captured dragon-hunting ship.’

  How like Conquillas to live in a trophy, Briana thought.

  ‘How on earth did he get it up here?’

  ‘Strange, isn’t it?’ Briana remarked. ‘Presumably, it would have to have been carried here by something large that could fly. I can’t imagine what sort of beast that would be.’

  Acanto gave her a thin smile.

  She smiled back. ‘Let’s hope he’s in.’

  ‘What? All this way and
you don’t even know if he’s home?’

  ‘I’m prepared to wait.’

  ‘The place is crawling with dragons.’

  ‘You should have expected that,’ she replied. ‘The clue is in the name.’

  The yacht lay just inside the arc of sunlight defined by the cavern roof and had, Briana suspected, been placed just so to take advantage of both the low slanted winter light and the available shade in summer. As they drew near, she was relieved to hear the bright tones of a lute or similar instrument coming from within. She and Acanto climbed the rocky stairwell and strolled across the gangway.

  ‘That’s far enough,’ said a voice from above.

  Briana halted and looked up.

  Argusto Conquillas was slouching in the shrouds, staring down at them with cold violet eyes. In his pale hands he held a bow, the arrow aimed at Briana’s head. How could she possibly have missed him before?

  ‘You won’t shoot,’ she said.

  ‘I hadn’t planned to,’ he admitted. ‘But now I’m tempted, just to prove you wrong.’

  ‘That shot’s too easy for you.’

  He grunted, but he lowered his bow. In one smooth motion he slid down the shrouds and landed lightly on the deck.

  Conquillas’s eyes were the same peculiar hue as those of his relative, Prince Marquetta, but he was much older, with a long, almost skeletal, face and grey hair woven into a dusty plait that hung between his shoulders. Physically, he appeared to be in his late forties, although Briana knew this to be misleading – Conquillas was probably older than the ship upon which he now stood. He was tall and possessed an angular body softened somewhat by the puffs and frills of his woollen jacket and trousers. His calfskin boots made no sound as he approached.

  He regarded Briana with cold intensity.

  His eyes betrayed his great age; there was something both intense and deeply savage about them – a brutal intelligence coupled with a cold detachment that seemed to Briana to border on inhuman. Conquillas didn’t perceive people as friends or allies, lovers or threats. When he looked at you, it was with eyes that merely determined what could be gained from your death. Briana looked away, unable to meet his gaze for more than those few moments.