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

by Rebecca Levene

  And maybe the worm man did understand that. It nodded once, sharply, and every single one of them turned away. Their footsteps pattered against the cobbles and then they were all gone.

  The instant the last footstep faded, he picked up his light and fled.

  He woke, an uncountable amount of time later, sweaty and disoriented. He didn’t remember going to bed. He didn’t remember much after he’d fled the worm men. He must have found his way back to Salvation somehow. He was in his own room in his own bed, with his own furs tangled around him. His dreams had been filled with grey faces and black eyes, but they hadn’t been nightmares. In his dreams he’d held his newborn son, and those black and silver eyes had looked up at him so trustingly.

  Some of the whores of Smiler’s Fair, the ones whose lack of care landed them in the family way, had spoken about loving their child even before it was born, when it was nothing but a swelling of their stomach. Eric had thought it was daft then, but he didn’t now. The promise he’d made to the worm men to save his child wasn’t just air. He wouldn’t let his son die.

  He went to his basin to splash water on his face and finally noticed the distant racket that had been going on since he woke, a sound unlike any he’d heard in Salvation before. It was women’s voices. It must be the Servants, though it wasn’t much like them. He was pretty sure getting all agitated like that went against the Perfect Law.

  He wandered the halls a while, finding them empty, before he realised the noise was coming from outside. Could it be an attack, the moon’s forces against the sun’s? But it didn’t seem likely they could have come all the way here to strike in secret.

  It might be safer just to stay in his room, all the same. He stopped in the middle of a wide white hall, considering it, but found that he couldn’t. He’d always hated games of hide-and-seek when he was a boy. Cowering in a hole waiting to be caught was worse than just facing it. It wasn’t bravery, just a different form of cowardice.

  As he approached the arched entranceway of Salvation, he could see a blurry golden crowd through the ice and another form, big and black, that could only be Rii. Outside he found that the Servants were all ringed around her, anger in every stiff line of their bodies. And that’s what the shouting had been: they were shouting at Rii.

  Or – no. As he pushed his way forward he could see more clearly. They were shouting at the person riding on Rii’s back. It was another Servant, with the same golden skin and hair and ears that weren’t quite right. She was the spit of the Hunter, the Lion of the Forest. Her hair was a tightly curled bush standing up from her head, her nose broad and her lips full. She would have been beautiful, if it hadn’t been for the four long scars running the length of her face.

  And she was just as angry as the Servants. Their faces were twisted with the emotion, but it didn’t sit comfortably there. They weren’t used to feeling strong things. This newcomer was, he could tell it immediately. Her face looked deeper than all the others, in a way he couldn’t quite explain, and there seemed to be a golden light glowing from it, a little like the light that came from the ivory images of Mizhara herself. He thought, suddenly, that despite her unageing face she showed all the years she’d lived in it.

  ‘Sisters,’ she said, more calm than everyone around her. ‘Let me dismount. You must listen.’

  ‘They do not heed thee,’ Rii said.

  ‘Anathema!’ one of the Servants hissed. ‘Don’t bring your blasphemy to Salvation.’

  ‘Take the long walk into the snow, as you should have done centuries ago,’ another said. She spoke gently, as if she meant it as advice, but there was venom beneath the seeming concern.

  ‘You have nothing to say to us,’ a third told the newcomer.

  At that, her patience seemed to snap. ‘I have this to tell to you,’ she said, suddenly fierce. ‘And you will listen, sisters. You will listen and you will act, because the moon has risen, and the great war is come again.’

  It was amazing how so big and noisy a crowd could go silent so quickly.

  ‘You lie,’ one of the others said eventually, but she didn’t sound as if she meant it.

  ‘The moon has returned,’ the newcomer said. She swung her leg over Rii’s hairy flank and slid down to the ground into a space that had finally been made for her. ‘We must fight him. It is our duty to Mizhara; on that at least, I think we can agree.’

  She strode towards Salvation as if the place was her home and the other Servants her guests. There was still muttering from among them, but they followed after obediently enough. Eric watched them all troop through the arched entrance and down the straight cold corridors, watching until enough icy walls lay between them that they were all hidden from view. Then he turned to Rii.

  ‘So that’s where you’ve been,’ he said.

  She shifted in the snow to face him, leaving a smear of grease on the pure white. ‘I was summoned, morsel, and had no choice but to depart.’

  ‘Well you’re back now, that’s what matters. And we got trouble. The babe’s coming in only three months. Why didn’t you tell me that?’

  She lifted the upper joints of her wings until they touched her large, cupped ears, shrugging in her own way. ‘I am not thy teacher.’

  ‘But listen, Rii, I talked to Drut yesterday about what if –’ he lowered his voice to a whisper ‘– what if it’s a boy.’

  ‘That was foolish, morsel.’

  ‘We only got three months. I had to raise it sooner or later. Anyway, I didn’t precisely get the response I wanted. I don’t reckon there’s any way she’s gonna help us steal the kid. We’ll have to pinch it somehow, and then it’s you and me on our lonesome.’

  ‘Then the news is doubly bad,’ she said. ‘It is an ill wind that blew me here, with that one on my back. She brings the tidings we hoped to keep from the sun’s cursed Servants, that my master has returned. And it is worse than that, also. Long ago, in the last days of the great war, I was a leader among my master’s forces. And that one found me, and caught me, and placed her rune upon my flesh and commanded me through its power. I owe my captivity to Bachur, whom thy people named the Hunter and worship as a god.’

  ‘That’s the Hunter? But she can’t be. She can’t be only a Servant!’

  ‘The eldest and most powerful of them, but a Servant still, though she hid that truth from thy people for the centuries of their service to her. She alone among her kind continued to battle my master’s forces after the war was won.’

  ‘And now she’s back here. And she’s the one what caught you?’

  ‘And holds me still, morsel. I must obey her. While she remains in Salvation, I cannot aid thee. Thy son is doomed, unless thou alone canst aid him.’

  20

  It was strange how grief changed the colour of the world. The trees Alfreda could see through the windows of her cell seemed grey and the sky that met them at the horizon just a darker shade of it. Even the sun burned with a pale light. The hours passed, empty and unendurably slow. She hadn’t realised how many hours there were in a day, and every one was filled with thoughts of Algar. They hadn’t allowed her out to see his burial, but she could picture it anyway, and his beautiful face decaying beneath its shroud.

  Hunger gnawed at her, but she ignored it. When they pushed food through a flap in the cell door she let it rot on the plate. One corner of her room was a pile of mouldy bread and congealed gruel and the flies that came through the bars on her window to feed on it. Sometimes there was noise outside, voices she chose not to hear and yells of alarm she didn’t care about.

  Her mind kept presenting images to her, pictures of her brother’s face. Sometimes it was his expression as he died, sometimes the look in his eyes as he laughed at one of his own jokes. They were equally painful. Other times she heard his voice as he talked about the advanced fire javelin, how it could save the folk from the monsters. The only bright thing in the world was the fury in her head, but she couldn’t find a way to express it.

  She had to stop herse
lf from thinking about Eadric. The rage was too much; it felt like a hole in her chest that might suck her in entirely, until there was nothing left. She thought about the fire javelin instead. The path from Algar’s first dream of it to his body blown to pieces seemed entirely straight seen from this direction. The fire javelin had killed him as surely as Eadric had.

  She was studying the wall of her cell dully, wondering if she had the strength to break it, to find Eadric and make him pay, when she realised that someone was watching her through the slot in the door. She could see nothing of the face, only the very pale blue eyes and a hint of lines around them. She watched the eyes watching her, but whoever it was left without entering her cell and she was surprised to feel an ache of disappointment. After the days trapped inside her silence, she found herself longing for conversation.

  An hour or so later, the eyes returned, but this time when they left off their watching Alfreda heard the scratch of a key in the door’s lock. She clutched the spoon they’d left her convulsively, and then dropped it. She’d thought she wanted company but now the prospect of it horrified her and she retreated to the furthest corner of the small room.

  It was a woman. Her skin was almost as dark as an Ashane’s, her hair fire-red and her face filled with a liveliness that instantly made Alfreda feel her own grief more. ‘I’m Cwen,’ she said. ‘Leader of the Hunter’s hawks.’

  Alfreda could see the birthmark on her cheek, a darker blot against the brown. The Hunt had been coming to Aethelgas, she remembered that now. Algar had wanted to meet the Hunter and Alfreda had joked that he meant to flirt with her. She could picture his smile when she said it, the crooked curve of his lips.

  ‘You’re Alfreda Sonyasdochter,’ Cwen said, when Alfreda didn’t supply the name herself. ‘Have you heard what’s happened outside your cell? There’s to be war. The Brotherband are coming to the Moon Forest and we’re near defenceless against them. Barely more than a thousand spears and hawks against their thousands.’

  The Brotherband were butchers, everyone whose wagons had crossed the plains knew that. If they were coming to Aethelgas there would be blood spilled. All those people who’d stood and watched as Algar died. Eadric, his throat slit by a Brotherband blade, his daughters despoiled by far, far worse than Algar. Alfreda smiled.

  Cwen frowned at the smile. ‘You’re pleased that war is coming here? Is what they say about you true, then? You’re a killer like your brother was?’

  Alfreda turned away to face the wall. The other woman’s presence had already exhausted her. She felt, for the first time, the hollowness of her stomach. Her head was pounding. She thought the pain might have been with her for a while, but she only now noticed it.

  Cwen’s step sounded on the wooden boards, moving nearer. There was a waft of air against her and she thought the hawk might have reached out her hand, but there was no contact. The hawks were polluted by their contact with the moon monsters, yet it was Alfreda who felt untouchable. There was a wall around her, higher than an ice oak and stronger than steel.

  ‘You have a weapon,’ Cwen said from close behind. Her voice was less friendly now. ‘It’s the reason you’re in here. They tell me the one you used is broken, but we need you to make more.’

  More fire javelins. Alfreda laughed at that, a soundless exhalation of air.

  ‘You think that’s funny? The Brotherband won’t spare you. Do you know what they like to do? If you’re lucky they’ll kill you before they fuck you. They might cut off a few pieces of you first. Or maybe you’ll get really lucky and they’ll have their fill of raping before they reach you. They like fire too. Have you ever seen a woman burned to death? I have – some of the monsters of the forest breathe fire. The pain is like a knife through a foreskin, I’m told. And you’re a very long time dying.’

  But fire just made her think of Algar. There had been flames in the explosion that killed him. It horrified her to think of his face ruined. The image of it overlaid her memories of him, so that she saw him as a boy with red and bubbling blisters on his cheeks, as a young man with his mouth burned down to the brittle white of his teeth.

  ‘Shit,’ Cwen said. ‘You’re not talkative, are you? Think about what I’ve said then. If you don’t care about our lives, think about your freedom. You can have it in exchange for more of those weapons.’ Then she was gone and Alfreda could slip back into her silence.

  She didn’t think about her freedom. Why should she care? She found it impossible to think much beyond the next hour. Considering her future made her painfully aware of Algar’s absence from it. She did think about the fire javelin. She couldn’t help herself. If an attack was coming soon, there wouldn’t be much time to make new ones. Cwen didn’t understand that. The hawk probably imagined a row of blacksmiths at a row of forges turning out dozens of the thing. Maybe Algar could have thought of a way to make that possible. But Algar was dead and Alfreda wouldn’t make a weapon to defend his killers.

  She thought she might be left in peace after that. She’d done nothing to let Cwen think she’d relent. But a few hours later there was another set of eyes at the slit in her cell door, green this time.

  These ones didn’t watch her for long. A moment’s fixed stare, a blink, and then the key was sounding in the lock again. Alfreda didn’t retreat this time. She clenched her fists, wondering if she might hit Cwen. Not her probably, but any Rhinanish man who dared to come through.

  But it wasn’t a man. It was a boy. His skin was almost as pale as hers, his cheekbones sharply slanted. His was a face from the far south, from the savannah where even Smiler’s Fair didn’t venture, and he had the narrow eyes of the tribes.

  He was holding two bowls of stew in his hands. They’d provided her with no table, so he set them on the floor. As he did, she saw his eyes caught by the piles of mouldering bread and meat. ‘They told me you weren’t eating,’ he said. ‘I can see they weren’t joking.’

  The smell brought water to her mouth but her stomach was too knotted to eat.

  He shrugged and picked up one of the bowls. ‘Well I’m hungry anyhow. Hope you don’t mind if I start without you.’ He smiled at her, briefly turning his long, solemn face into something brighter and younger, then sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her.

  She watched him eat, looming above him. He did seem to be hungry. He was too thin for a boy his age, not quite yet flowered into manhood. She remembered when Algar had been that age and it had been a daily fight to get food inside him. Cooking is a waste of a good day, he’d told her, and so she’d cooked for him and sat and watched him as he ate, just as she was doing with the boy now.

  ‘I’m Jinn,’ he said between mouthfuls. ‘Don’t worry, I know your name. Alfreda, ain’t it? It’s a pretty name. And I know you don’t much care to talk. I been asking around. The folk here think you’re simple, but I don’t see how that can be. You’re a blacksmith, ain’t you? That ain’t a stupid person’s job. But if you don’t like flapping your mouth the way I do – Mamma says I talk enough for ten – I’ll just leave this here.’ He pulled out a sheaf of parchments from beneath his jacket and quill and ink to go with them and set them down in front of her. ‘A person ought to be able to have their say.’

  She didn’t touch the parchment, but she sat down beside it, bringing her eyes nearer to his level. Her stomach grumbled and she was surprised to find herself reaching for the stew.

  ‘It’s good,’ he said. ‘Those Jorlith know how to cook. I heard what happened to you,’ he added, as if it was just a continuation of the same thought. ‘They said your brother killed a man while he was pretending to demonstrate some new weapon, botched it up and got himself killed in the process. They say he made you go along with it, because you ain’t quite right in the head.’

  The clay bowl cracked in her suddenly clenched hands and the stew dribbled warm and sticky through her fingers.

  ‘See,’ the boy said. ‘That right there is why I ain’t so sure what they say is the truth. They said your brother �
�� Algar, wasn’t it? – they said he was a head shorter than you and built light, not like you. Now I’ve seen you with my own eyes, I don’t reckon there’s a man in the whole Moon Forest could make you do something you didn’t want. And as for killing someone with an exploding weapon in full view of all the folk … They said your brother was cunning, but that don’t sound like a cunning man’s plan.’

  Alfreda felt the flowering of something she couldn’t identify. Was it rage or gratitude? She skittered backwards along the floor, away from the boy, but he just smiled and chewed another mouthful of stew.

  His almond eyes were very green, bright and far too clever as he looked at her and waited to see if she’d reply. There were so many things she wanted to say, they crowded her throat and blocked it so that none of them came out.

  ‘Well,’ the boy said, ‘shame for you not to eat anything. You’re nothing but skin and bones. Very big bones. I’ll just set the rest of my meal down here and leave you in peace.’

  She sat, motionless, and watched him rise and lock the door behind him. The smell of the stew permeated the cell, masking the fouler odours of rotten food and her own waste in the corner bucket.

  She was hungry. She pulled the stew bowl towards her and scraped it clean. Afterwards, her stomach felt swollen, full after too long empty.

  She looked at the parchment, blankly yellow and right beside her left leg. Jinn hadn’t believed Algar was a killer, but he hadn’t known the full story. And Jinn had been sent by Cwen, that was clear. The truth felt like a physical thing inside her: a weight and a sickness like sour meat, impossible to digest. She wanted it out of her. She wanted others to know it.

  Her hand shook as she wrote, but the words came easily when she didn’t have to speak them. She wrote until it was all out, and then she banged on her cell door until someone came to take it.

  Cwen frowned at the parchment. It wasn’t what she’d hoped: it wasn’t information about how to build the weapon it had become increasingly clear they’d need, but it was something.