The Art of Hunting

by Alan Campbell

  He left her sipping her tea, while he assessed their situation. They were deep in the wooded foothills below the palace, but still surrounded by Haurstaf army encampments. Now that the fighting had ceased, there would have to be negotiations between the Haurstaf’s military commanders and whatever Unmer force had decimated the Haurstaf. On his way out of the palace, Granger had seen one Unmer lord still in possession of his mind. That single escapee ought to be enough to give the Haurstaf soldiers pause. Conventional warfare was woefully ineffective against these eastern sorcerers. What’s more, with their paymasters dead or fleeing, he doubted that the Haurstaf military would be in a mood to fight on principle alone. Some sort of parley was inevitable. It was the perfect time for Ianthe and him to escape.

  He looked back at his daughter, only to see her flinch. Had she been looking through his eyes then, even with her physical sight restored?

  ‘I won’t do it,’ she said.

  ‘Do what?’

  Ianthe actually growled. ‘I won’t find trove for you. Why does everyone think they know what’s best for me?’ She set down her tea, which toppled and spilled over the grass. And then she struggled to her feet, wincing and gasping.

  ‘Which way?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you being stupid on purpose? Which way back to the palace?’

  ‘We’re not going—’

  Granger stopped suddenly as an image of men on horseback flashed across his vision. Four, five riders. Metal tackle and buckles gleaming in broken sunlight. The huff and snort of the beasts. In a moment of confusion, he thought they were moving through the trees directly beyond his camp, but then he realized the truth. One of his sorcerous replicates was watching the riders from a distant part of the forest.

  He raised a hand to Ianthe. ‘Wait here a moment.’

  Then he shifted his full attention into the replicate.

  And suddenly he found himself crouched among ferns, thirty feet up on one side of a defile. It was cooler here than back in the camp. Below him he could see part of the trail he had walked that very morning, about half a league from where his real body now stood. Steep, heavily wooded banks rose on either side of a narrow track, the trees growing amid jumbles of great lichen-marred boulders.

  The riders were a mix of Unmer and human, he could see that now – five of them, relaxed in their saddles as their mounts stepped along the track below. The two in the lead were Unmer: tall and pale and wearing silk hose and shirts of light forest greens and greys and darker quilted tunics the colour of earth and rock. As they moved towards Granger’s hiding place, he spied gemstones glittering – their sword belts like seams of anthracite and emeralds, exquisite dagger hilts and jewel-encrusted quivers on their backs. The rider at the head of the party was a slender youth with golden hair. Granger recognized him as the young lord he’d encountered in the palace antechamber when he’d carried Ianthe to safety. Immediately behind him rode an older man with a noble forehead framed in white hair, a long jaw and the same dark violet eyes as the youth. Behind this pair came three human palace guards, clad in plain mail and steel epaulettes whose surfaces had been polished over many years to a dull metal grizzle.

  The presence of these turncoats with the Unmer lords clearly indicated the presence of some sort of agreement or truce between them.

  The boy raised a hand, halting his comrades. Then he looked directly up at Granger’s hiding place and called out: ‘I hope you haven’t been clutching that blade all this time. Those swords have a nasty habit of cooking men’s minds.’

  Granger felt a twinge of surprise and shame that the lad had spotted him so quickly, but now that he’d been detected he saw no reason to remain crouched among the undergrowth. He stood up and called down to them: ‘What do you want?’

  The young lord observed him for a moment. ‘I am Prince Paulus Marquetta,’ he said. His violet eyes continued to survey Granger while he waited for a reply. When none was forthcoming, he smiled. ‘Actually, I was looking for you, sir.’

  ‘I don’t know you,’ Granger said.

  ‘Nor I you,’ Marquetta replied. ‘And yet it would seem that I owe my freedom to your daughter.’Tackle clinked as he urged the horse forward. Marquetta’s jewellery gleamed in the dappled shade. ‘My uncle, Duke Cyr of Vale, and I are the last of the Unmer royal line on Awl,’ he said. ‘The Haurstaf have either murdered our kin or imprisoned them in Losotan ghettos. Or else taken their minds entirely.’ As he came forward, he touched the side of his left eye, indicating the place where the Haurstaf drove in their leucotomy blades. ‘Now we would not see our saviours struggle on through the woods on foot like fugitives,’ he said. He stopped his horse on the path below Granger. ‘Please, return to the palace with us and enjoy our hospitality. We will provide you with a carriage to Port Awl whenever you wish to leave.’

  Granger showed no emotion, but inside his thoughts were racing. Ianthe?The prince thought her responsible for the devastation that had set him free? He felt a sudden coldness in his heart, quickly followed by an overwhelming surge of despair for the girl. Every shred of his being yearned for it not to be true, and yet he feared it was the truth. The Haurstaf had been probing deep into his daughter’s mind – a mind with uncanny and possibly untapped powers. A mind they feared, that they were vulnerable to. They had been trying to discover Ianthe’s limits. What had they unlocked?

  The prince was frowning now, the searching look on his face turning to puzzlement.

  To purchase himself some time, Granger said, ‘You say the roads are open?’

  ‘We have reached an understanding with the palace guard, and a provisional agreement with the Haurstaf commanders,’ Marquetta said. He shrugged. ‘Although there still remains much to discuss, hostilities have now ceased. The roads are a good deal safer than they were last night.’

  ‘Then I don’t need your help,’ Granger said.

  ‘I’m quite sure of that,’ Marquetta replied. ‘But what about your daughter? The poor girl needs time to recover from her ordeal. Why walk all the way to Port Awl, when you can dine with us at the palace and sleep in feather beds?’

  ‘She’s fine as she is,’ Granger said. ‘We’re going home.’

  The older Unmer lord behind Marquetta now urged his horse forward until it was abreast of the young prince. He leaned over and whispered something to him.

  Marquetta nodded and turned back to Granger. ‘We will escort you to Port Awl.’

  ‘I don’t need an escort,’ Granger said.

  ‘It would be our honour.’

  ‘I said no.’

  The prince regarded him for a moment longer, his gaze lingering on Granger’s sorcerous sword. He possessed an arrogant twist to his lips that wasn’t quite a sneer and wasn’t quite a smile, and it seemed to Granger that the young man’s violet eyes now held within them a spark of anger. His face was as pale as spider silk, his hair like a burst of gold wire. The older lord was similarly gaunt, but carried himself with the confidence of a veteran warrior. On the back of his right wrist Granger spied a tattoo of the geometric design favoured by Entropic sorcerers and yet this man carried none of the amplifiers or other magical devices employed by those devils. The two Unmer men exchanged a glance and there was a moment in which it seemed to Granger that some unspoken communication passed between them. Suddenly Marquetta shook his head and said, ‘So be it. We will not force our hospitality upon anyone.’ His glass-shard eyes held Granger’s own for a moment longer, before his gaze returned to the replicating sword. ‘Be wary of that blade, sir, or it will consume you.’

  With that, he reined his horse around. The other riders parted to let him through. He set off back down the trail without as much as another glance at Granger.

  Granger stood there, gripping sorcerous steel in a hand that wasn’t his, and watched them depart. Once the riders had disappeared from sight, he took a deep breath and then shifted his consciousness from the sword replicate’s body back to his own.

  He had
been inside the replicate too long. Returning his mind to his own body was like coming to after a sound beating. The environment slurred and then abruptly changed. Sunlight pierced his retinas, bringing with it a sound like clattering carriage wheels that faded quickly but then lingered at the periphery of his nerves. For a moment, nothing seemed real. His stomach bucked, and he came close to vomiting. Instead, he fell to his knees and clutched the warm grass to steady himself. He retched and spat saliva, and then his nostrils filled with the odour of warm earth and wild flowers.

  ‘We’d better go,’ he said, turning to look for Ianthe.

  But she was nowhere to be seen.

  CHAPTER 3

  RETURN TO THE PALACE

  Granger cursed his own lack of foresight. How long had his attention been diverted? Mere minutes, it had seemed, and yet . . .

  A frantic search of the woodland all around yielded no sign of his daughter, so he closed his eyes and ground his teeth and let the perceptions of all of his sword replicates come crashing into his already exhausted mind.

  The green glow of ferns.

  Yellow leaves among inkscrawl branches.

  Insects drifting like plumes of pollen.

  Grasses nodding.

  Knuckles of green stone.

  Earth. Lichen.

  A butterfly flitting drunkenly between white flowers.

  With a growl of pain and exasperation, he tore his own mind back from the onslaught. His ears rang with echoes like clashing steel, like raiders with war chariots ravaging through his thoughts. He tasted blood on his lip.

  Not one of those sorcerous creations could see Ianthe.

  But of course she could see through their eyes if she chose to do so. She’d know where every one of them was, and thus be able to avoid them easily.

  Granger leaned against his sword and squeezed his temples as if that might alleviate his pounding headache. He gave a deep and weary sigh. How do you find someone who doesn’t want to be found and always knows exactly where you are looking for them? Did he even want to try? His eyeballs felt raw, scratched, his limbs leaden. His eardrums still reverberated with the smash and rattle of imagined steel while flashes of his replicates’ perceptions pulled his own thoughts away on wires of pain.

  He spied his shield resting against a fallen tree, and his heart fell further. Its crystalline facets now smouldered with green and black fire. No leaf nor bough nor blade of grass found its likeness in that glass. To look within was to stare into the fuming heart of the cosmos. And there lurked insanity. Granger considered leaving the hellish thing where it was. The merest touch of it clawed at his nerves. He wasn’t even sure if he currently possessed the strength to pick it up. And yet Herian had spoken of unimaginable powers spun into its prisms – far more subtle and dangerous than his stolen sword and suit. Nothing could penetrate that abyss-forged glass, not even a void arrow. Nor could it be unmade by the destructive touch of the Unmer. Such feats were possible, Herian said, because the shield existed in multiple places at once, shared by warriors across more than one cosmos. Granger could not be sure who else carried that same shield, or where in the vastness of the heavens they would presently be located, only that he would not recognize them as human. And then Herian had hinted that the shield possessed a still greater and more frightening power. He had implied that it might be possible to summon its other bearers.

  How could he abandon such a treasure?

  He picked up the shield and pulled the leather straps tight around his forearm. Colours boiled over the surface of the glass and, in a moment of sickening disorientation, its myriad facets became a great burst of scintillations upon a green and black ocean. He found himself turning around, staggering and dazed, suddenly uncertain of his actual location. He was at sea? Caught in a raging storm? But there had been a woodland. And then the trees and the flowers returned in a swirl of hot colours. The vision faded and the shield once more became a solid mass of glass. It had almost no physical weight and yet he could barely lift it. It exerted a different sort of pressure that – like a clutch of needles – cinched around his consciousness.

  He coughed and was not surprised to see blood in his spit.

  Granger raised his shield nevertheless and he slung his kitbag over his shoulder and gripped the replicating sword more firmly. And thus both hideously encumbered and unnaturally empowered he set off through the forest at a hard run. His bones and skin crawled with sorcery. Sorcery scratched the back of his eyes. But he forced his mind to focus on the task at hand. He might not know where Ianthe was now, but he knew where she was going.

  Despite being blind and deaf, Ianthe was rarely lost, for it was her habit never to venture too far from other people. After all, it had been their eyes and ears she’d always used psychically to perceive her own surroundings. All her life she’d struggled with the one frustratingly limited aspect of her ability: when nobody was looking at her, she couldn’t see her immediate surroundings. This constant yearning to be observed had led to what her mother had called attention-seeking behaviour. In Ianthe’s case, however, the attention seeking was a necessary survival skill.

  Her Unmer lenses had changed all that. She could see as well as anybody else. She could see the sunlight piercing the forest canopy overhead, the butterflies flitting between flowers, the warm moss and lichen-scarred boulders. A fly buzzed past her head and she batted it away. It still felt strange to be directly aware of such things. However, Ianthe’s unique supernormal senses continued to augment her newly won perceptions of the world, adding a comforting layer of normalcy to what still felt strange and unnerving. When she closed her eyes she could perceive the palace several miles to the north. For Ianthe, it existed as a great patchwork of light suspended in the darkness, a combination of the perceptions of everyone inhabiting the building.

  Weirdness aside, her Unmer lenses had opened up a world of freedom she could never turn her back on. They were, like most such spectacles, psychically linked to a particular sorcerer who had lived in the past. By turning the tiny wheel on the edge of the frames, she was able to perceive everything the original wearer had witnessed at any given moment during his lifetime. Her mind was linked, across time, to his, and she could roll back through a lifetime of his perceptions at will. The spectacles allowed her to see through his eyes and him to see through hers. For a normal, sighted, wearer of the lenses, the ensuing paradoxes resulted in a complete breakdown of the sorcery – what Ethan Maskelyne had called terminal feedback. The cosmos would not permit someone to see their own future.

  Ianthe was blind, however. She couldn’t use her own eyes to observe the world. But she could use his. And somewhere amidst these myriad loops of time and sorcery and metaphysics, lenses that were cheap and commonly regarded as useless gave her the power to see and hear the world she inhabited.

  As she marched onwards through sunlit woodland, a pang of misery clenched her heart. She recalled the moment Ethan Maskelyne’s men had thrown her mother, Hana, across a brine-flooded cell in Granger’s prison, leaving her badly wounded by the toxic water. Ianthe had been leagues away by then, crouched against the bilge of a boat heading for Maskelyne’s fortress on Scythe Island, but she had been looking through her mother’s eyes.

  Ethan Maskelyne – trove expert, metaphysicist, crime lord, psychopath. He had just been another link in the chain of people who’d wished to own Ianthe or use her peculiar talent for finding treasure. Her life had been a succession of such relationships. Ianthe had earned the money by which she and her mother had survived on Evensraum after the war. They had escaped cholera by working for a trove scavenger and smuggler. But Emperor Hu’s navy had put a stop to that illegal operation. She’d been passed through Interrogation and then shipped to Ethugra with thousands of other prisoners of war. God knows what would have become of them if Hana hadn’t identified Granger among the jailers.

  She had mixed feelings about having Granger as her father. Even though he had given them refuge, he’d still tried to sell Ianthe to
the Haurstaf, which was hardly surprising. That was before he’d known exactly what she was capable of – before he understood her value to him. But by then it was too late. Knowledge of Ianthe’s powers had reached both Ethan Maskelyne and Haurstaf leader Briana Marks.

  And so the course of Ianthe’s life was, as always, channelled by the needs and desires of others. The Haurstaf had taken her from Maskelyne for the same reasons that Maskelyne had stolen her away from Granger and then subsequently tried to wrench her back from the Haurstaf by bombarding their palace. Ianthe lived her life like a shuttle in a loom. And now Granger had come to take her away from Awl again. An endless cycle.

  Ianthe had had enough. She was tired of doing what other people wanted. Tired of being a victim. Tired of being that shuttle in the loom. When the Haurstaf realized the scale of Ianthe’s powers, they’d understood how much of a threat she could be to their whole way of life. But rather than trust her as an ally, they chose to kill her. And in their torture cell they’d dug so deep into Ianthe’s mind that they’d triggered something inside her. By trying to understand her powers they had inadvertently unleashed an even greater power. Ianthe had used it to devastating effect. Her rage had decimated her captors, giving the Unmer the chance to escape their prisons.

  When she thought of Paulus Marquetta, her heart took a fluttering leap. In him she recognized a kindred spirit. He, too, knew what it felt like to be enslaved. He wouldn’t judge her for what she’d done, she felt sure.

  He wouldn’t despise her.

  If Ianthe could find forgiveness anywhere, then it would be with the Unmer.

  With her prince.

  Ianthe halted in a forest clearing where a great profusion of tiny white flowers had sprung from the grass, carpeting the earth in swathes and hummocks so bright they might have been crystals of salt or ice. She recognized the delicate scent from the Evensraum woodlands of her childhood, but had no name for it. And she stood for a moment, filling her lungs with that natural perfume and marvelling at the freshness and intensity of the colours.