The Art of Hunting

by Alan Campbell

  But, no . . .

  Some trace of it still remained. The lines, she now perceived, were becoming brighter with each passing moment. And yet more of them appeared, gossamer-like, forming in the air a hundred yards from where Ianthe stood. Like a phantasmal drawing, something was taking shape out on that black ocean. And, as she watched, it became recognizable. A pale and ghostly sailing ship, wreathed in ethereal fire. Her four masts and square-rigged sails identified her as a barque, albeit of an unusual and seemingly archaic design. She was much larger than the Haurstaf man-o’-war they had so recently been forced to abandon – heavier, bulkier and yet infinitely more insubstantial. Her decks and masts were not constructed from timber and iron, but from the ghosts of those materials. Her hull seemed formed from lightning and liquid fire. Her masts and shrouds were opaque, mist-like. There were moments when Ianthe thought she could see clear through the whole ship.

  Upon her decks there stood strange cannon-like devices, each formed of the same pale energy and fronted with a series of sparkling discs.

  And how she burned!

  Streams of pale fire coursed across the barque’s timbers and played in her rigging and shrouds. Every nail and knot and dowel crackled with the same mysterious ethereal energy. And yet down below the waterline, where the keel met the brine of the Mare Lux, the white flames became fierce and angry – a mass of bonfire golds and reds that gave Ianthe the uneasy impression of a funeral barge recently set alight.

  ‘Fiorel has a morbid sense of humour,’ Duke Cyr remarked.

  Ianthe frowned. ‘How so?’

  The old man pointed. ‘See the name etched on her bow?’

  It read: St Augustine.

  In response to Ianthe’s puzzled frown Paulus said, ‘Cyr’s patron has conjured us a ghost ship. The St Augustine has a dark past. She was once a plague ship. King Uten the First requisitioned her to carry plague victims from Galea to an isolated colony on the Herlon coast.’

  ‘Over a thousand years ago now,’ Cyr added. ‘Before the seas began to rise.’

  ‘But there never was a colony,’ Paulus said. ‘It was merely a ruse. A frigate of the king’s navy escorted her for three days out into the open sea. On the fourth day they opened fire on her. The St Augustine sank, taking all eight hundred souls onboard with her to the seabed.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ Ianthe said.

  ‘But it wasn’t the end,’ Paulus went on. ‘If the stories are to be believed, then the St Augustine has been seen many times since then. Her appearance was always said to foretell disaster for any who spotted her.’ He leaned closer and lowered his voice. ‘Fiorel has given careful thought to this name. Enemies of ours who look upon this ship will see her as a harbinger of doom.’

  She nodded. ‘Why does the ship glow?’

  ‘It is wrought from light,’ Paulus said.

  Ianthe looked back at the ship. It burned with ghostly fire, lighting up the seas all around. Indeed, its very fabric seemed to surge between solid and ethereal, fading in and out of existence before her eyes. She could see the waves crashing against its fiery hull, but occasionally she’d catch glimpses of the sea through that same hull. It remained, to her eyes, a phantom vessel.

  All except in one place.

  There was a cubic object within the ghostly timbers – a box or perhaps a room – that appeared consistently solid. While the vessel around it phased back and forth between the corporeal and the ethereal, this one component remained a solid white block. At no point could she see through it.

  Captain Howlish and his men had seen the apparition too and now gathered on the promontory around Ianthe, Paulus and Duke Cyr. Howlish said, ‘I’ve seen Valcinder magicians pull whistles from the air, but never a ship.’

  Cyr grunted. ‘Whistles we don’t need.’

  ‘Well, I applaud you, sir,’ Howlish added. ‘And your good sense. That barque, I see, is well anchored.’ He hesitated. ‘Assuming it is more substantial than it looks, we’ll pull the gear across at first light.’

  Cyr wandered over to one of the crates that they’d rescued from the Irillian Herald. He grabbed one of the heavy metal rings he called an amplifier and then rummaged around until he found a gem lantern and what appeared to be a small stone sphere on a chain. He slid the ring over his hand and wore it like a huge bracelet. And then he attached the chain to a hook in the lantern’s peaked cap. When he released the stone, it floated upwards, pulling at the lantern as though it meant to carry it skywards. Cyr opened one of the gem lantern’s metal shutters.

  The crewmen gasped and shielded their eyes or else turned away from the fearsome glare emitted by that lantern. Its wide beam shone far across the waters. Then Cyr opened the other two shutters and released the lantern. It floated upwards, blazing like a small sun.

  Ianthe marvelled at the sudden change in her surroundings. The sky above remained black and dense with thunder-heads, but here the sea now shimmered like the brightest jade, and the halls of Carhen Doma basked in strange daylight.

  Cyr turned to Howlish. ‘First light,’ he said.

  The gem lantern remained hovering in the air, several hundred feet above them, for several hours – which was more than enough time, as it turned out, to ferry people and supplies out to the St Augustine. Howlish’s men regarded the barque with unease, cautious of the spectral inferno that rippled across her bulwarks and yards and even plucked at their own boots as they carried cargo across the decks.

  Ianthe stood on the deck with the prince and his uncle, while Howlish’s men worked around them. The translucent timbers beneath their feet emitted an eerie glow, and yet they supported their weight as effectively as any plain wooden board. Howlish had sent men to explore below decks. Now he turned to the prince and said, ‘We could plunder the Herald for more supplies, if you like, but it’s a risky business in these seas and we’ve more than enough food and water now to reach Losoto.’

  Paulus’s eyes were inscrutable, but Ianthe had the feeling he was weighing something up. ‘No, you are quite correct,’ he said. ‘Let’s not linger here a moment longer.’

  ‘Captain.’ The call had come from behind, and Ianthe turned to see one of the crewmen peering out from an open hatchway built at a forty-five-degree angle to the deck, through which steps led down into the ship’s interior. ‘Your Highnesses, My Lady,’ he added quickly,‘we’ve found something odd down below.’

  ‘Odd in what way?’ Howlish asked.

  ‘It’s a room of mirrors,’ he replied, glancing between the captain and the two Unmer lords. ‘I’m not sure how best to explain it. You really need to come see it for yourself.’

  He led them down the steps, which then turned around and descended a second flight. They arrived in a short wooden passageway from which there led many doors – cabins, Ianthe supposed. The walls around her glowed with soft ethereal light. The sailor, whom Howlish introduced as Gaddich, then brought them to a single door at the end of the passageway, where waited another, younger, man.

  Gaddich picked up a gem lantern from the floor and opened the door to admit the party.

  They found themselves in one of the strangest rooms Ianthe had ever seen. It was about ten paces across on each side, and yet seemed infinitely larger, for both the floor and the ceiling of the room each consisted of a single huge and flawless mirror. This arrangement of mirrors produced an optical illusion. To look up or down was to see countless copies of the room and its occupants, each marginally smaller than the last one and stacked one upon the other to infinity. The walls of this strange room consisted of regular panels of some dark and polished hardwood. And in each panel there hung yet more mirrors – these of varying shape and size and age and yet all presented in exquisitely carved gilt frames. There were four on each wall and two more flanking the door, fourteen in total.

  It was only then that Ianthe realized something was different here. Neither the mirrors nor the panelling upon the walls looked unusual: they did not glow nor pulse nor coruscate with ethereal flame. T
his was the only room in the ship that looked perfectly normal.

  ‘It gets weirder,’ Gaddich said. ‘Have a look in one of the mirrors. Any one you like.’

  The party separated, each approaching one of the mirrors hung upon the walls, except for Ianthe, who clung to Paulus’s arm and walked with him. The first gasp came from Captain Howlish . . .

  . . . and before she realized it, she had cast her own consciousness into his mind . . .

  He was looking into the mirror and yet the mirror did not return a reflection of his face. Instead it showed a ghostly figure peering out from darkness. The visage before him could almost have been human – perhaps distorted by some warp or sorcery within the glass. Otherwise he was looking at the true image of an alien being. It had a long backward-sloping forehead and an out-thrust chin as sharp as a horn. Its flesh was as hard and white as bone, its eyes oddly elongated and wholly white with mere pinprick dots for pupils. It had its mouth open in a peculiar smile or grin, revealing too many tall and narrow teeth.

  She heard Paulus give a sharp intake of breath . . .

  . . . and returned her mind to her own body . . .

  Her fingers were clutching Paulus’s sleeve. The mirror before her now was larger than the one into which the captain had been gazing. And in this glass she perceived something even stranger and more terrible than the apparition Howlish had witnessed.

  Again it stood against darkness. But this monster lacked any hook by which one might attach it, however tenuously, to humankind. It was a writhing mass of blood-red tentacles – more like some hideous nest of engorged leeches than a single organism. And yet Ianthe saw that the part before her now was merely a fraction of a much larger creature – the tip of an arm that was itself one of countless more such appendages that flailed in the deep abyss behind the glass.

  Other looking-glasses held yet more horrors: one humanlike but horned and bestial and clad in mountains of bronze armour, another corpse thin and encased in a queer geometry of metal wire and glass, a spinning box from which peeled arcs of light, pulsing blue things like squid, a vast maze of grey stone paths wreathed in lurid green veins of vegetation. This last structure retreated for untold miles into the void.

  In the periphery of Ianthe’s mind, she sensed all of them lurking nearby. Even the maze had a discernible presence. Their minds were oddly distant and yet, at the same time, terrifyingly near, as though they inhabited a rift or fracture in the Sea of Ghosts. She understood the mirrors to be membranes through which she could propel her own consciousness if she chose to. But nothing in the world could have persuaded her to send her mind into any of those foul intelligences.

  ‘They are travellers,’ Cyr said.

  ‘Travellers?’ Howlish said. ‘I don’t understand. What is this place?’

  ‘It is merely a viewing room,’ Cyr replied. ‘Entropic sorcerers once used such chambers to gaze into the void that lies beyond the universe. To stare into the infinite dark. The travellers you see before you now have ventured into that void and become trapped, or else they were exiled there. These mirrors are used to lure them to this boundary, so that one might learn from them.’

  Howlish stared in horror and disbelief. ‘Learn what?’

  ‘Whatever can be learned.’

  ‘Is it safe?’ Howlish said.

  Cyr frowned. ‘In what way?’

  ‘I mean, can they get out?’

  ‘No,’ Cyr said. ‘They can never escape.’

  Howlish gave an immense sigh of relief.

  Cyr smiled. ‘Come, now, I suggest we lock this room and forbid the crew from entering. There is nothing to be gained here.’

  They left the room and, after a quick search, located a padlock for the hasp. Cyr locked it and took the key himself.

  It was only later, when Ianthe found a moment alone with Paulus, that she asked him, ‘Did the original St Augustine have a room like that?’

  He seemed momentarily startled. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘She would have been a merchant vessel.’

  ‘Then why should such a room exist now?’

  ‘Because this is Fiorel’s own ship.’

  ‘He made it for himself?’ she asked.

  Paulus smiled. ‘A fine wedding gift, don’t you think?’

  CHAPTER 7

  YGRID

  Ygrid soared over the Mare Regis and Granger knelt between her shoulder blades and clung to the alloy hoops in her spine. His cloak was sodden and heavy with rain and pulled at his shoulders in the icy, rushing air. The plates of his armour chilled and grated his brine-burned shoulders and his gauntlets chafed his wrists, but he knew that without their sorcery he would have collapsed with physical exhaustion days ago. And yet there was no escape from mental exhaustion. Another sleepless night had taken its toll on his nerves. He had to rest, and rest soon.

  When he pulled off his gauntlet to examine his hand he saw that his flesh looked grey and dead and he could not move his fingers at all. He struggled for a while, concentrating with all his might, trying to force one finger to twitch, but he failed. The effort left him gasping with pain and exhaustion.

  He pulled the gauntlet back on.

  The dragon’s great wings stretched out on either side of him, glimmering aquamarine in the morning sun. The ocean below was an immense crimson slab that changed to the clarity of thin wine in the shallows around the island of Peregrello Sentevadro.

  There were other serpents in the sky, but they kept their distance. Granger could see them towards the south, their wings folding as they dived, their long lithe bodies plunging deep beneath the poison waves in explosions of candy-coloured froth. They would not be hunting for food this close to the Dragon Isle, for they would long ago have stripped the seas here bare. It seemed more likely they were tending to some ichusae hoard, supping at the source of the very drug that had corrupted the oceans of the world.

  Ygrid had hardly spoken for the duration of the trip, but now as they neared this mass of black rock and scallops of beach she said, ‘Conquillas is absent.’

  Granger shouted over the wind. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘There are signs,’ she said. ‘Signs a dragon can read.’

  ‘Well, where is he?’

  Ygrid made no reply. As she banked in the air, the sunlight flashed briefly across the scales of her back and over Granger, and for one glorious moment he felt warm. And then she swooped down into the shadow of a vast cavern in the island’s cliff face. Her powerful wings thumped at the air, raising a storm of grit and sand and sending smaller stones scuttling across the uneven ground. And then she landed.

  Ahead, Granger could see a rare and antique Unmer yacht set amongst pillars of black rock and the scattered bones of the Drowned. A vessel such as this was old enough to have sailed untainted seas. She was exquisitely crafted. Her grey wooden hull still possessed its original metal scrollwork cladding. One of the duskglass portholes lay open and from this he could hear music. Someone inside was playing a lute.

  Conquillas?

  A sudden loud and bestial huff grabbed his attention.

  To the right another dragon appeared. He was a young male, half the size of Ygrid, and had been lying curled in a hollow as black as his hide. Now he uncoiled his slender body. His claws shifted a mound of skulls and bones that spilled and clattered across the rocky ground. He raised his head and gave a low growl, followed by a curious clicking sound.

  Ygrid reciprocated, making a similar noise.

  It seemed to Granger that they were talking in a language he had never encountered before.

  Ygrid seemed troubled by whatever was said. Finally she turned to Granger and said, ‘Conquillas is unavailable. No one will be able to reach him until Marquetta’s tournament in Losoto next month.’

  ‘Next month is no good,’ Granger growled. There was no way he would be able to hold out against the sword that long. He might only have days, perhaps a week, before it had complete control of him. He could no longer even use the blade. His own replicates now o
beyed the weapon, not him. He shot a glance at the yacht’s open porthole. ‘I only want to speak to him.’ He spoke loud enough, he hoped, to alert the lute player within the yacht, for it must surely be the man he sought.

  Now the smaller dragon bared his fangs. ‘Your daughter has made this necessary,’ he said to Granger. ‘Our master does not want to be spied upon. Nor does he want to be targeted by assassins. And, as much as I imagine he’s deeply concerned with your predicament and anxious to help you, Colonel Granger, we have our orders. Conquillas is indisposed until the contest. No dragon will help you locate him before then.’

  Granger glanced at the yacht again. The music had stopped. ‘Your master is in great danger.’

  ‘Conquillas likes it so,’ the black serpent said.

  ‘There is no way to send him a message,’ Ygrid said. ‘We must wait until he resurfaces before we can warn him. Or else we must expose Marquetta’s plans at the tournament. Let it be known that Fiorel himself intends to be among the competitors. Perhaps we can force him to reveal himself.’

  ‘But what about me?’ Granger said. ‘I can’t last till then. You must take me to Ethugra.’

  Ygrid’s great neck curled and she brought her head down to Granger’s level. He turned away from her chemical exhalations. She said, ‘You pin your hopes on Ethan Maskelyne?’

  Granger cast another glance at the yacht. ‘Do I have a choice?’

  Ygrid spoke with the other dragon in that strange language for a few moments. It seemed to Granger that the small male chuckled. Finally Ygrid turned back to him. ‘Ethan Maskelyne is not in Ethugra. His dredger was spotted passing the Clutching Rocks, three days to the south of the prison city.’

  ‘Will you take me there?’

  ‘This news is over a week old. He might be anywhere by now. I will take you to Ethugra if you still desire, but I think you should travel onwards to Losoto to await Conquillas’s arrival. If he knows Ianthe’s father is looking for him, he might seek you out.’