The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods

by Rebecca Levene

  Sang Ki snapped his fingers. ‘Or force the truth from a man unwilling to impart it. That is indeed said about your tribe, Min Soo. Or have we been misinformed about that too?’

  The physician looked startled, and then he nodded.

  The drug took two hours to work. Sang Ki returned to the tent when the time was up to find both Min Soo and Nethmi seated by the warrior’s bedside. She was wrapped in a silk sheet, perhaps the only thing she could bear to have touching her cracked and bleeding skin. He didn’t know why she wanted to be a part of this interrogation, but the physician’s expression suggested it wouldn’t be wise to ask.

  The warrior was propped up in his bed. His bandaged stomach seeped red but his smiling face showed no pain. His eyes were wide and his pupils black pits. They tracked Sang Ki as he approached.

  ‘Is he ready?’ Sang Ki asked.

  The warrior gurgled low in his throat like a baby laughing. ‘Ready!’ he said, as if he found the word ridiculous.

  Sang Ki frowned. ‘Clearly he’ll speak, but is he rational?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with his mind,’ Min Soo said snappishly. ‘Haengbog doesn’t affect what’s thought, only the feelings that go with it. It’s close in effect to bliss, though less evil.’

  ‘I’ve never been so happy,’ the warrior said, grinning up at the physician. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And will you answer my questions?’ Sang Ki asked.

  ‘Will it make you happy?’

  ‘It will.’ He forced a smile of his own.

  ‘Then ask.’

  Nethmi was looking between them as they spoke, her mutilated face impossible to read. ‘What’s he saying?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah, you don’t speak the language of the tribes,’ Sang Ki said in Ashane. ‘Curious for one raised in Smiler’s Fair.’

  ‘Ashane’s the language of the fair. It was all I ever needed.’

  ‘Ask your questions, shiplord,’ Min Soo interrupted. ‘The drug’s effects won’t last for ever.’

  ‘It’s so long since I was happy,’ the warrior said. ‘I remember the Spring festival when I was four … My father carried me on his shoulders to the top of Horse Skull Hill. I saw the Four Together. I saw all of them there below me. So many people, so many colours. And I was part of them. That moment, I felt … But never again. Never again. Then my father joined the ancestors and my mother married another. My brothers died of the carrion fever, and I was … I was just one. Just one, until the Brotherband came …’

  ‘Why did you join the Brotherband?’ Sang Ki asked, ignoring the physician’s scowl. The opportunity to ask such a question might never arise again, and historians would want to know what had drawn so many to that savagery. Sang Ki knew how a segment of the Chun had seized control of the tribe and renamed themselves the Brotherband, and everyone knew what the Brotherband had done to the Dae, to the women and their children. But what had become of them after they’d retreated into the Rune Waste, why they’d emerged to raid the other tribes and draw recruits from among their worst young men … That was a story yet to be told.

  ‘They came to our hearth last winter,’ the warrior said. ‘We thought we were ready for them, but they were so many. They were fine fighters. So strong. They killed the first men who opposed them. Not me … Not me … I’d eaten meat too old. I was behind my tent shitting when they came. Shitting my guts out and I felt like I’d die.’ He giggled.

  ‘I heard the screams and the metal. Blood and death. When I came out from behind my tent it was over. My cousins were dead, and three of them had Cho Hee on the ground. She was always the prettiest. I courted her with berries and bull blood but she wouldn’t have me. Cho Hee on the ground and one of them saw me watching. He said, “Do you want this, brother?” I did. I did. Of course I did.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear this,’ Min Soo growled.

  Sang Ki wasn’t sure he did either. ‘You raped your own clanswoman?’

  ‘They said the moon was rising. They said it was time for men to rise up and take what was theirs. They pulled off her dress. I saw her breasts and—’

  ‘Stop!’ Sang Ki snapped. ‘Enough.’

  ‘Is your curiosity satisfied, shiplord?’ Min Soo asked, winding his purple hair round his fingers. ‘May we get to our purpose now?’

  ‘So you joined the Brotherband,’ Sang Ki said to their captive, ‘and the Brotherband serve the moon god.’

  ‘The moon has risen,’ the warrior said. ‘Our time has come.’

  Sang Ki nodded. ‘Indeed, the moon’s avatar is in the land. Would you know precisely where?’

  The exaggerated sadness on the warrior’s face was as extreme as his happiness had been before. ‘No, he’s lost. Lost and can’t be found! Chung Cheol thought he’d be in the fair, but there wasn’t a hair of him.’

  ‘And yet you attack us still.’

  ‘Don’t leave an enemy to stab you in the back. Every man knows that!’

  ‘In your back?’ Sang Ki asked. He looked at the warrior, slouched in his bed, smiling as his lifeblood leaked out of him. ‘If we’re to your rear, then what lies before you? Where is the Brotherband heading next?’

  ‘The Hunter has left the Moon Forest,’ Sang Ki told his mother. ‘She’s brought the Hunt from the shadow of the trees for the first time since she emerged to take revenge on the Eagle Band of the Dogko for slaughtering a party of her Wanderers.’

  ‘And?’ His mother had been sleeping, a crease of red on her face and her eyes moody with broken rest. She liked to have eight hours of sleep each night, precisely. She liked everything to be precise, the day cut into clean, even segments and everything within them orderly.

  ‘She’s come for the moon god, there can’t be any doubt of it,’ Sang Ki said. ‘Or at least the Brotherband don’t doubt it. The Hunter is called the Sun’s Right Hand for a reason, and they believe she’s their master’s enemy. She’ll gather the folk against him and bring an army of Jorlith from the forest to destroy him.’

  His mother rubbed her creased cheek, her eyes narrowed in sudden interest. ‘So the Brotherband will go to fight them first?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Good, then. Min Soo says Nethmi is well enough to travel. With the Brotherband gone, it’s safe to return to the mountains.’

  ‘Return? Oh, no. With the lost prince still loose on the plains and we with nothing to show for our troubles? That’s not at all what I’m thinking.’

  ‘You’ve no idea where the lost prince is.’

  ‘I know where his army is.’

  ‘There are thousands in the Brotherband. Tens of thousands! You’re not fool enough to fight them. You’re a child – not fit to make such a decision.’

  He was stung despite himself. ‘I learn the tribe’s secrets on my twenty-eighth birthday – less than half a year’s time. If you chose to you could tell me them now and the Seonu would take my orders without question.’

  Her face told him what she thought of that suggestion. She’d always preferred making rules to breaking them.

  ‘No? Well, it’s no matter. Only your people would say I’m not yet a man – and it’s the Ashane whose good opinion I’ve been courting. Whose good opinion you told me to court. My armsmen don’t think me too young to lead them.’

  She looked angry, as she always did when he crossed her. A soft part of him cringed at it. ‘Your armsmen are wrong. You must return to the tribe.’

  ‘Must I? The Brotherband mean to take the Hunter’s forces by stealth. If they succeed there’ll be no one west of the mountain who can oppose them. King Nayan’s son will face King Nayan with half the world under his command, and how well do you think that news will be received in Ashanesland, when it’s learned that I might have prevented it?’

  ‘You can’t prevent it. Sang Ki, please …’ She grasped his plump forearm, the physical contact between them so rare he stared at her hand in bemusement until she took it away.

  ‘I can,’ he said. ‘The Brotherband are being clever. They
think they know a secret way to come to the Moon Forest and avoid detection, but their cleverness will defeat them. I will follow them, and I will destroy them and there’ll be no more questions then about my fitness as an heir. Or as a man.’

  11

  The rain bath was high in the treetop, where the trunk was narrow enough to sway in the wind and the water slopped from side to side. Algar laughed as he dunked his head and then shook it to scatter droplets all over Alfreda and the three thegns and four other Wanderers in the bath beside her.

  Aethelgas lay far below, a jumble of buildings clinging to the branches of the tallest ice oaks in the forest. Each dwelling was competing to outdo its neighbours, some with obscenely wasteful facings of metal, others with delicate ceramic tiles all the way from the Eternal Empire. One, quite close below, had covered its flat roof in statues of all the gods of the plains. The blasphemy was startling but Alfreda suspected it was the expense that would rile its neighbours more. She recognised the work of Dae Ji Won, a hundred years dead and the finest woodworker the tribes had ever produced.

  There were other buildings lower still, the shacks of the poor come to live off the largess of the chief thegns of the Moon Forest. But they were hidden in the shadow of the great mansions.

  Ivarholme, suspended in the trees to her left, was a far more sober affair. Its longhalls looked no different from those of any far-flung village. Only its gardens lent it colour, spring-filled with the bloodbells and bluebells from which the Jorlith healers made their beer. Of the folks’ twin capitals, she’d always preferred Ivarholme and its warriors, who appreciated her wares and were too polite to stare at her over-muscled body. But Aethelgas was where Algar thrived and where he was sure their brass fire javelin would find its market.

  Because the Hunt was coming to Aethelgas. It hardly seemed possible. In all the centuries since the very first Folk Moot, when the people had sworn themselves to the Hunter, she’d never again showed her face to any but her own hawks.

  Algar looked at Alfreda and winked as he rubbed the rainwater over his face. A Wanderer could be made pure enough to mix with thegns by the ritual bath, but what would make him fit to meet the Hunter? And he meant to meet her. He meant to show her the brass fire javelin.

  The bath swayed even more fiercely as someone climbed the ladder that led to it. Alfreda could hear his breath all the way up, and when his face popped above the rim, it was red and sweating.

  ‘She’s coming!’ the newcomer gasped. ‘The Hunt will be here by sunset!’

  Algar stood so quickly he threatened to overbalance the platform. ‘Come on, Freda. We’d best get ready.’

  Ready to show the Hunter the weapon Algar had once boasted would put her out of work. Alfreda shivered.

  Whenever they came to Aethelgas, they stayed in the Grey House, a mansion that had been in Eadric Godricson’s family for a dozen generations. Despite his wealth, Eadric kept a meagre house, but Algar had made him an ally in his work on the fire javelin and discovered other entertainment in the three unmarried daughters who still lived in the family home. Algar’s favourite had always been the curly-haired eldest, and it was she who answered the door when they knocked – answered it with a babe in her arms not more than a few months old.

  Her brother’s expression was almost funny. He wasn’t one to think much about consequences, and here was a little pink wailing one, squirming in its mother’s arms. It had been almost exactly a year since they’d last lodged in Eadric’s house and Algar had found a welcome with his daughter.

  And then Eadric himself strode down the corridor towards them and suddenly it wasn’t funny at all. His rust-coloured eyes blazed beneath curled hair almost as pale as a Jorlith’s.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’ve come to offer for my daughter’s hand, and only twelve months too late.’

  ‘I …’ Algar said, and then didn’t say anything else.

  ‘No?’ Eadric sneered. ‘You haven’t even that much honour?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have me,’ Algar muttered.

  ‘You’re right – no decent family would. Now get out.’

  The door slammed, leaving a reverberating silence behind. Algar stood staring at it for a long moment, then turned to Alfreda. He looked lost. ‘But I don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a problem, is what it is.’ Alfreda pulled on his arm to draw him away. There were eyes at surrounding windows, drawn by Eadric’s heated words, and she didn’t want to share their business with the world. It was probably best to get out of Aethelgas altogether. There was certainly no question of lodging with Eadric now, and who knew how many others he’d shared ill-word of them with?

  The sky path between Aethelgas and Ivarholme was the broadest in the forest. Unlike Aethelgas, the Jorlith capital was a home for the wounded and the crippled. They’d paid in blood for the safety of the folk, and the Rhinannish – thegn and churl both – settled the debt with fruit and meat. She and Algar weaved between the wagons being pulled across the broad wooden planks of the sky path, one piled high with potatoes, another bloody with sheep carcasses. On a different occasion, Algar would have snagged an apple from the third, but her brother seemed in a daze. Alfreda kept hold of his arm and led him safely through.

  The noise of the traffic cut out abruptly as they reached the far end of the half-mile span between the twin capitals. No noise was allowed in Ivarholme, nothing to disturb the tranquillity of the sick. The churls stepped sweating out of the traces of their wagons and carried the goods the rest of the way by hand. Even their voices quietened to whispers no louder than the shushing of the wind through the leaves above.

  The scent of the flowers hit her as they climbed the wooden ladder to the strangers’ longhall. The bluebells smelled sweet and the bloodbells spicy. The combination was curiously soothing, like a half-forgotten memory of childhood.

  Algar didn’t look soothed, though. He was whistling through his teeth, a nervous habit he’d had since he was seven. Alfreda ruffled his hair, which made his lips twitch into a brief smile, and led him inside the longhall. At least here there was some noise. The men and women seated at the wooden tables laughed and talked and drank and no one watched them enter.

  Algar winked when he caught a pretty waitress’s eye. Alfreda sighed as he held up two fingers for beers. Some instincts couldn’t be suppressed, even by such recent evidence of what they led to.

  When he looked back at her, his roguish smile had returned. ‘Go on, Freda, say it.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘All those disapproving things balancing on the edge of your tongue. You won’t enjoy your beer until you drop them out.’

  ‘What’s the point? It’s done now.’

  ‘Done and cooked and out of the oven. I was careful, you know. I didn’t finish inside her.’

  ‘I don’t need the details!’

  ‘All I’m saying is there shouldn’t have been any bairn. Maybe it isn’t mine.’

  ‘Was anyone else courting her?’

  He took a swig of his beer and licked the white froth from his lips. ‘I never knew of her lying with another – but then she was obliging enough to have some fun with me, so she clearly wasn’t averse to the idea.’

  ‘She was a well-behaved lass before you got to her. I doubt she let anyone else take the liberties you did. You’ve got a special talent for seduction.’

  ‘Others might mean that as a compliment.’

  ‘Aye, but others don’t have to deal with the results. We can’t stay here, not now. Eadric has too loud a voice in the Great Moot. Who knows what he’s been saying against us?’

  Her brother looked genuinely bewildered. ‘You can’t mean that, Freda! Not show off our fire javelin? But this is the market for it, and with the Hunter coming – this is the moment, I feel it.’

  ‘No, this isn’t the time. We’ll return when Eadric’s found a man poor enough to raise another’s bastard for the dowry and respectable enough to cleanse his daughte
r’s reputation. We can make our living the way we always have. We’ve never gone hungry, have we? Everyone knows we’re the best smiths in the forest. We’ll come back when the Hunt’s gone and you aren’t in danger of offending our god. Or worse yet, flirting with her!’

  He grinned at that and shrugged and she knew that she’d have her way. Algar had learned how she was: water on most things he cared about; iron when she was sure of herself.

  She grabbed Algar’s hand and pulled him from the table. Their wagon was beneath Aethelgas and the walk back to the sky path seemed to take far too long, now she knew escape lay at the end of it. Algar didn’t seem to care. He looked around at the austere longhalls, the neat gardens and the cripples walking them, always endlessly curious, and smiled at the fair-haired Jorlith girls, as if there was no lesson at all to be learned from what had happened.

  The way down from Aethelgas to the dirt below was a spiral stair suspended between three ice oaks by ropes thicker than her wrists. The treads were as deep and long as a man, and each was intricately carved, no two the same. There were pictures of villages from the long-lost Rhinanish homeland, and the three-masted boats on which the Jorlith had helped them to flee it. The stair was almost as old as the cities themselves and no one remembered who had made it or how.

  She trod a horned owl, a dancing couple, a baker and a seascape beneath her feet without pausing to admire them. Algar’s hand was still in hers and when they rounded the next curve in the stairs, it gripped her fingers convulsively.

  Eadric was there with a cluster of churls, the burliest of his clients. Alfreda wished fiercely and futilely that she had her hammer with her. She noted that even the largest of the churls was shorter than her, and she clenched her fists and prepared to make the best fight of it she could, pushing Algar behind her.

  And Eadric laughed and slapped her on the shoulder before flinging his arm around Algar’s. ‘Gave you a fright, did I? I suppose you don’t expect to see a thegn so low on the stair, but I had to make sure my men found the right wagon. Couldn’t have them ransacking some stranger’s home, could I? But they did find it for me – and it’s just as impressive as I’d hoped.’