Art of Hunting Page 5

  But then she sensed movement nearby. One of her father’s replicates was close. She hurled herself into its mind and glimpsed its metal-shod boots compressing the soft earth, and suddenly she was in another part of the forest. Putting her mind inside these sorcerous creations felt odd – quite unlike the sensation of occupying another person. All the senses were there, but still something was missing. Something indeterminable. Ianthe looked out through the replicate’s eyes and realized that it was getting too close to her physical body for comfort. She vacated the thing at once.

  And ran.

  She avoided the replicates easily and soon found herself picking her way along a deep gully in a quieter part of the forest. Granger’s sorcerous copies were off to the west – near one of the gun emplacements, where numerous tracks made the terrain easier to traverse. But Ianthe had come to know the forest trails well during her time as a Haurstaf student and this short cut would see her reach the palace before any of her father’s copies. Occasionally she heard the snap of gunfire. Hunters, probably. She sensed deer moving a few hundred yards further up the slope to her right, and when she closed her eyes and let her mind perceive the forest through its birds and insects, the world became a soft and dreamlike labyrinth of light and sound.

  For several hours Ianthe wandered onwards through the forest and finally, as the sun was heading for the mountains, she reached a rocky outcropping overlooking the former Haurstaf palace.

  Smoke still rose from the shattered eastern wing of the palace, where Maskelyne’s explosives had reduced the grand carved façades and tall windows to a great clutter of rubble. Dozens of palace guards and servants were working in teams, clearing away the debris as they hunted for survivors. Several lines of men and women passed stones and buckets of dust and grit down and emptied them beyond the area of destruction. Ianthe was surprised to see a few Unmer among them.

  As she watched, a group of riders approached through the forest. She recognized Prince Marquetta among them. There could be no mistaking his regal bearing and sunburst yellow hair. The prince dismounted and went over to the nearest line of workers. He spoke with one of the palace guards and then turned and waved his riding companions over.

  Ianthe watched with delight as the majority of the riders, along with Prince Marquetta himself, joined the guards and servants moving rubble. Any fears she might have had regarding the reception she was likely to receive from the Unmer were somewhat allayed.

  They were still clearing rubble an hour later when Ianthe strode out of the woods.

  The prince and two palace guards were squatting on a great mound of stone and mortar, using a beam to lever up a fallen section of wall when Ianthe approached them. He was covered in dust and sweat and so preoccupied with his exertions that he merely glanced her way at first. But then he suddenly stopped what he was doing and turned and gaped at her. The palace guards looked up, too, and reacted at once, dropping the beam in what was almost a panicked scramble to reclaim the bows they had placed nearby. Their hands went to the hilts of their swords.

  Ianthe realized she was still wearing Haurstaf robes. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I won’t harm you.’

  The guards continued to watch her cautiously. But then Prince Marquetta’s eyes suddenly widened and he said, ‘It is you. Ianthe. The girl from my dream.’

  She gave a nervous nod.

  ‘But your father . . .’

  ‘My father and I have come to a disagreement over my future.’

  The young prince climbed down from the rubble and dusted his hands. He approached her, his violet eyes burning with curiosity. ‘I have the chance to thank you, at last,’ he said. And then he took her hands and grinned and dropped to his knees right there. ‘So thank you, my dear Ianthe. We Unmer owe you a debt of gratitude we can never repay.’

  Ianthe felt her face blush. Everyone was looking at her.

  ‘We Unmer use dreams to speak to our patrons,’ Marquetta said. ‘The entities your kind call elder gods. I was in such a dream when we met. You interrupted my conversation.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t—’

  ‘Please don’t be,’ Marquetta said. ‘Gods can be tedious. You, most certainly were not. I remember it vividly. And how delightful it is to discover that you are even more beautiful in the flesh.’

  Ianthe felt her cheeks burn with even greater insistence. ‘Thank you, Prince Marquetta.’

  ‘Call me Paulus,’ he said, and kissed her hand. ‘Now tell me, Ianthe: where is your father? I imagine he’s looking everywhere for you.’

  In his present state of physical exhaustion Granger had no option but to allow his power armour to do the work for him. The suit augmented his limbs and made him inhumanly strong. The razor-thin whorls etched into the metal plates scattered light, endowing the suit with a patina of rainbows. His boots pounded the soft earth, leaving deep depressions in his wake. He weighed, he supposed, more than three men combined.

  And as he ran he let a part of his overworked mind control his eight replicates.

  He used them as he would have utilized a small unit of real soldiers. The five furthest away he forced to fan out ahead and to the sides, flanking his position through the forest while maintaining a defensive perimeter. The others he called closer. He wanted them near: three more blades to bear upon whatever dangers he might run into.

  He looked for Ianthe but did not spot her and soon he had reached the place where he had, through one of his replicates, encountered the Unmer prince and his retinue.

  Bursts of sunlight lit the forest canopy to the west, the greens and yellows now beginning to shudder at the edges of his vision. He felt that his eyesight might fail him. But down in the defile wherein the riders had passed it remained rest-fully gloomy. Earth-scented mulch compressed under his heels as he climbed down, his great mass sinking his boots in deep. He ordered his sorcerous companions out into the forested slopes on either side, and then proceeded along the firmer ground of the trail itself.

  He had not gone far when a shot rang out.

  A bullet glanced off his armour at the shoulder and pinged into the woods. No . . . Not his shoulder. It took him a moment to realize that one of the sword replicates had been hit, and in that instant of confusion came the crack of two more shots. He felt the bullets strike the replicate’s chest plate and heard the metal emit an angry buzz and crackle that sent involuntary spasms through his own muscles. His subconscious reacted, willing the replicate to dive for cover, while he amassed and collated feedback from the others in order to locate the source of the gunfire.

  There.

  They were crouched behind boulders on the summit of a rise, a hundred yards or so north of his current position. Haurstaf riflemen: most likely scouts or simply soldiers on hunting detachment. Each of them possessed a light carbine rifle. Their location offered them a good view of the trail and a good place to ambush travellers, but it was on the forest east of the trail that their attention was now fixed, the very spot where one of Granger’s replicates now crouched behind a smooth grey boulder. They did not appear to have spotted the others.

  Granger sensed his other replicates, now moving to flank the gunmen. Had he ordered them to do so? He could not recall. His thoughts stuttered. And suddenly he found himself standing a dozen yards further along the path, with no memory of having actually moved. Instantly he felt dizzy. Another ten yards would have brought him into plain view of the ambushers on the slope ahead. In a moment of terrible confusion it had seemed to him that he was a replicate himself, a slave to one of the others.

  Were they using him as a distraction? A target to draw the riflemen’s fire?

  He gathered his willpower.

  Crack.

  Something slammed into his eye and knocked him round. Green and golden sunlight whirled, fractured by branches. As he turned, he glimpsed ferns spattered with blood and brain and fragments of his own skull. He fell. His face struck warm ground, felt earth between his teeth, the smell of wood and dirt, liquid
trickling down his neck. Was that his blood? His mouth was dry – a crabbing pain moving up the side of his head.

  And he was standing at the bottom of the rise again with the blade clenched in his fist and the echo of the shot that had killed him rolling away through the forest. The Unmer sword shuddered faintly, expelling the fallen replicate to non-existence. And then it trembled again and, with a hideous sensation of dislocation, a fresh copy of himself appeared on the trail before him. The thing simply materialized out of thin air, its arrival announced by a faint pop and an inrush of wind. It looked at Granger with its corpse-flesh eyes before turning towards the riflemen and loping away up the slope in their direction.

  Again, Granger could not recall having ordered it to do so.

  Stop. His mind groped for the other replicates. Stay where you are.

  Suddenly he was running again.

  Why?

  He stopped, unsure.

  When he heard screaming, Granger finally understood that he had lost control. He sat down on the ground and began to laugh. Images flashed through his mind: of wide white eyes and teeth and flesh cleaved open. The steel barrels of carbine rifles bent double by powerful gauntlets. He was no longer in a woodland of sun and leaves but in a forest of green glass, a mass of shards that split his vision into innumerable planes. Rifts of shadow clashed with light as white as pain. And somewhere in that frenzy of broken images he witnessed the brutal murder of the Haurstaf riflemen on the rise.

  Drop the sword.

  He wanted to drop the sword, but he could not.

  Drop the sword.

  Some part of him begged his hand to release his grip on the weapon. But yet another part was using the blade up there on the summit of the slope – in three hands, in four hands, in six of his hands. And that part of his mind refused. He growled with impotent rage, powerless to do anything but watch as his replicates hacked and hacked at the unfortunate men and his splintered vision turned from green to red.

  They gave Ianthe a suite of chambers overlooking the meditation garden in the westernmost courtyard. This accommodation had previously belonged to a high-ranking Haurstaf official, and Ianthe wondered if the prince had chosen this suite merely because the official was as close to Ianthe’s size as the servants could find. Everything in the wardrobes fitted her like a glove.

  On the morning after her arrival here she paced back and forth before the mirror on the gilt and onyx wardrobe and tried on the clothes of a woman she had probably murdered. In addition to the white Haurstaf robes were scores of other garments: gowns in gold and silver and alabaster colours and spider-silk blouses and quilted hunting outfits and shoes by the dozen woven with fine precious metals. A dragon-bone chest in the corner of the room held enough jewellery to buy a house.

  However, as beautiful as they were, none of clothes felt right. She would try something on, and stare at herself and then inevitably feel guilty and miserable. How could she delight in wages of her sins? She stood in the bedroom and gazed around at the myriad piles of sumptuous fabric. And then she piled it all unceremoniously back into the wardrobe and went through to the bathroom. There, she removed her own threadbare and mud-stained robe, washed it in the bath using hand soap and hung it up to dry.

  The servants brought her bowls of fruit for breakfast and she dined at an elaborately sculpted glass table beside the window. The light pouring through the window made the table sparkle like a frost-crusted bush.

  Ianthe was so nervous about breaking the blasted thing that she became tense and clumsy. It was probably inevitable that she should knock her mug over, spilling coffee that dripped down through the transparent intricacies. In her panic to mop it up, she knocked over a vase, which chipped the table surface and then rolled off and hit the floor and shattered.

  She stopped, breathing hard, and stared at the destruction she’d caused and almost wept.

  When the servant girl came to collect the breakfast plates an hour later she found Ianthe sitting on the floor in her damp and wrinkled robes, scrubbing at the glass table with a napkin.

  ‘Please, ma’am,’ the girl said. ‘Let me.’

  Ianthe stopped what she was doing, and said, ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean . . . I . . .’

  ‘The prince has asked for you,’ the girl said.

  Ianthe stared at her.

  ‘He’s waiting for you in the garden below the window.’

  ‘He’s there now?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Please don’t call me that. My name is Ianthe.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Ianthe.’

  ‘You say he’s waiting there now?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Ianthe.’

  ‘Can you take me there?’

  ‘Yes, miss. Now?’

  ‘Please.’

  The servant studied her a moment. ‘Would you like to change first, miss?’

  Ianthe looked down at her miserable robes, then glanced at the wardrobe again.

  She found Paulus sitting waiting for her on a bench beneath a whitewashed wall against which the Haurstaf gardeners had trained fans of pears and almonds. He was reading a small leather book in Unmer, but looked up when she approached.

  ‘Ianthe,’ he said, rising and taking her hand. ‘How wonderful you look.’ His gaze wandered approvingly over her pale silk skirt and a cream quilted jacket with its gold filigree. ‘I see that everything was the correct size?’

  ‘Thank you, Your—’

  ‘Call me Paulus,’ he said. ‘I insist.’

  He led her along the crushed-shell path and under a vine-smothered arbour dripping with plump grapes. Fruit, he explained, that was ripening earlier in the season, thanks to sorcerous heat blades driven into the soil. Yet another aspect of Unmer culture borrowed by Haurstaf.

  And so they walked among the lavender and sage and inhaled the scent of wallflowers and Paulus talked eagerly of the future Ianthe had given his people. The air seemed ripe with possibilities. His uncle Cyr had, he explained, come to a provisional agreement with the Haurstaf military. Some four thousand soldiers in bases around the palace now had new paymasters – a transition that had been remarkably uneventful. There were enough riches in the palace to keep an army that size paid for decades to come, with enough left over to build a fleet of ships should the Haurstaf navy prove less cooperative.

  ‘However,’ Paulus explained. ‘Our priority is our people in Losoto.’

  Thousands of Unmer remained imprisoned in the ghettos there, under the guard of a unit of Haurstaf psychics – an arrangement which was paid for by Emperor Hu himself at Guild insistence. Presumably Hu had heard of the Haurstaf’s demise in Awl, but as yet there had been no response from him.

  There had been survivors among the Haurstaf in Awl, but almost all of them had fled to join their sisters in Port Awl and arrange passage away from the island altogether. Paulus had sent word to these estranged psychics, offering a truce. Since none of the Haurstaf knew what had really been behind the slaughter at the palace, they had naturally assumed that Maskelyne’s bombardment had been a decoy to allow the Unmer to launch their own attack using some as yet unidentified sorcery. This worked to the Unmer’s advantage. The Haurstaf now feared them enough that they accepted Paulus’s terms and were unlikely to retaliate.

  They left the garden by a small wicket gate and stepped out into the forest. Ianthe knew the woods around the palace well. On any given day you could be sure to find students wandering the worn pathways or sitting studying in quiet glades. Now it seemed woefully quiet. Ianthe let her consciousness reach out, out of habit, and search for anyone around her. In the back of her mind she sensed the birds and insects, the skittish deer. She could see and hear the work of palace guards and manservants still clearing the wrecked palace wing, and further away a unit of soldiers marching along a trail further down the hill.

  But then she sensed something horribly familiar. A group of people with unnaturally sharp perceptions – and yet edgy, corrupted, tainted by sorcery. She had missed them in
itially because they were moving around the shattered wing where so many other people worked. She had overlooked them in a crowd of perceptions. But now those workers had stopped clearing rubble and were staring at the newcomers. Eight men. They were close enough to make her stop suddenly and clench Paulus’s arm.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  Ianthe looked along the palace façade to the corner. She knew what was coming and almost stamped her foot with frustration. It wasn’t fair. Why should her perfect moment be spoiled?

  ‘Can we go,’ she said.

  ‘Why? What is it?’

  But then it was too late. Granger’s replicates came into view around the corner. Their identical faces each bore scorch marks caused by immersion in brine. Their eyes were hot and red and utterly devoid of human emotion. They wore bulky power armour that whirred faintly and altered hue in the patchy forest light, as nacreous swirls danced across sorcerous alloys.

  The lead replicate was holding the body of a man before him, supporting him as easily as if he weighed nothing. And suddenly Ianthe’s breath caught in her throat. She’d seen the replicates from afar, but she had overlooked the figure they carried. She’d overlooked it because the man was dead. He didn’t have perceptions she could hijack, nor even a consciousness she could inhabit.

  But of course Ianthe recognized him at once. His face was well known to her. A face that would have been identical to the seven other replicates, were it not for the bullet hole in his eye.

  Paulus beckoned the replicates inside, and they followed without a word. He got them to lay Granger’s body on a large table in one of the schoolrooms and then he sent a servant to fetch his uncle.

  Ianthe stood beside her father’s dead body while his eight ghoulish likenesses looked on. They unnerved her. Just looking at them filled her with nausea and revulsion. She resented them being here, sharing this moment. Her hand hovered over her father’s breastplate – the scorched and battle-scarred metal, with its weird rainbow patina – but she couldn’t bring herself to touch it.