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

by Rebecca Levene

  ‘Perhaps not, but Cwen has told me her own force is much expanded. No doubt we’ll see for ourselves when we rendezvous. The bird will lead me to her encampment.’

  The owl seemed to take that as permission. It fluttered from his arm and to a tree ahead, alighting in its branches and turning to see that they were following.

  ‘Remarkable,’ he said.

  The little bird led them on what turned out to be quite a short journey. Sang Ki supposed it wasn’t surprising. Both his force and hers had been following after different contingents of the Brotherband and as the warriors had converged, so had they.

  Cwen was waiting for him at the edge of the camp, peering into the scrub with an impatient frown on her face. The instant she saw his horse she waved him on and then walked away, towards the far side of the huge camp.

  ‘She has no manners,’ his mother said, and it was hard to argue, but he liked Cwen nonetheless. Perhaps he liked her precisely because of how much she irritated his mother.

  ‘You can get yourself settled here,’ he said. ‘I’ll pass along anything she says that’s worth knowing.’

  His mother harrumphed, but after a last glare at Cwen’s retreating form she moved to do as he’d said. She’d been such a powerful force throughout his life; but she wasn’t a young woman any more and a full day in the saddle tired her.

  He was exhausted himself and his back was agony, but he knew that whatever Cwen wished to show him, it would be important. ‘Dismount then,’ she said when he drew near and looked away as he did it. She seemed to find the inelegant proced-ure as distasteful as he found it humiliating.

  ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What have you found to dazzle me with?’

  ‘The Brotherband.’ She gestured at the ground.

  It was a trail even he could have followed. In the forest the warriors had made some effort to disguise their movements but that no longer seemed to trouble them. Or perhaps they knew that such a large force couldn’t be disguised. Despite his blithe words to his mother, the sight of so broad a swathe trodden through the underbrush alarmed him.

  ‘Looks like there’s more of them than lice in a whore’s pubes,’ Cwen said, in her charming way.

  ‘Thousands, I’d guess, though I’m no judge.’

  ‘Thousands, you’re right. I’ve sent scouts. They’ve spotted them, less than a day’s march ahead. We’ve caught them up.’

  ‘That’s welcome news,’ Sang Ki said, and tried to mean it.

  ‘There’s better, for us anyway. The Brotherband are on the hunt for larger prey than they found in the forest. There’s another army here, or the remnants of one. Our scouts saw the Brotherband scouting it.’

  ‘And they weren’t seen?’

  ‘It’s not like they don’t know we’re after them. But they seem a mite more interested in this other gang – they’re tribesmen as well, but who knows what tribe?’

  ‘They didn’t come from the forest?’

  ‘Not unless they’re Janggok raiders, and they aren’t.’

  ‘Then how did the Brotherband know their location?’

  ‘I told you. They’ve been scouting.’

  ‘But they’ve been heading in this direction for weeks. That’s far longer than they could have known this other force was here.’

  She shrugged. ‘Listen to what I’m trying to tell you, Ashane. There’s going to be a battle – tomorrow or the day after. The Brotherband will attack them, and we’ll attack the Brotherband. I didn’t think we’d get another chance to catch them with their cocks hanging out, but this looks like it.’

  ‘And you think our force and whoever these others are can truly defeat so many?’ He looked again at the trail, a swathe of crushed brown grass and bent thistles leading towards the horizon.

  ‘Well, as to that.’ She strode a few paces to her left where a linen-wrapped lump sat on the ground, and pulled the cloth away with a showman’s flourish. Beneath, golden metal gleamed.

  ‘The fire javelin!’ he said. ‘She finished it.’

  ‘This and one other. That’s all we had the metal for. But these can fire more than once and they’ll throw those killing balls a good distance. Even better, the Brotherband have faced this once before. The memory of that will be as big a weapon as the weapons themselves.’

  It was true. The sound alone had scared him, and he’d been a good distance away. The sight of the slaughter and the dismembered bodies afterwards had been impossible to forget. Still, he looked at the Brotherband’s trail, so very wide, and he thought of what his mother had said. Whatever Cwen claimed, he couldn’t believe that the coming battle would be easy. He wasn’t even confident it could be won.

  25

  Krish didn’t know where he was, but he knew that he didn’t belong there. The grass was too brown, the trees too many and too stunted, the air too hot. He came from a cooler place, but this was where he’d been drawn. It was his rage that had drawn him on.

  He used to do his fighting on horseback, but they’d left their horses behind when they entered the deep ways. He remembered for a moment the terror of that endless darkness. He’d seen the worm men, their unnatural eyes watching from between cracks in the rocks. The eyes had their own light, a silver glow that was the only illumination below.

  There were no worm men here, beneath the open sky. But that man was here, that man and all the men with him that he hated so much. He couldn’t remember what the man had done to him, but he knew that he needed to die. Those murderers from the Moon Forest were closing in too, but that didn’t matter. They weren’t important now. Revenge was.

  He lay in the long grass, hidden. The enemy encampment was large, yet ill-defended. These people were armed, but they weren’t fighters, not like him and his brothers. There’d be a slaughter tomorrow and a reckoning. The mark of the moon burned on his chest, a good pain.

  He rolled over so that he could place his hand on it, over his heart. But the clouded sky above was now clear, the sun too bright. The light stabbed into his eyes – and he woke in another place entirely. For a moment the dream clung to him, tangling him in memories he wasn’t sure were real. A moment more and he knew himself and this place: Mirror Town. The marble walls, the open arch in place of a door, the slave stationed outside it: all these had grown familiar to him over his months here.

  Krish had been provided with local dress when he arrived, though Dae Hyo said he ought to keep his Dae clothes. The warrior had done so and sweated through the crippling heat, but Krish could only endure one day of it before he tore them off and slipped into the loose, long-sleeved cotton robes that all the mages wore. He chose one from his wardrobe now, plain white without the complex embroidery Olufemi had told him marked each mage’s place in their family and each family’s place in the city. Krish had no family here. He was no one and they’d dressed him like a slave.

  His room was in one wing of the mansion Olufemi said had been her family’s since the city was founded. Its heart was made out of a smooth rock veined with red and blue and sometimes green. Krish had seen the rock before, in some of the ruins he and Dae Hyo had passed as they travelled the plains. He couldn’t imagine how they’d been brought all the way here.

  He passed the first mirror as he walked the long corridor that led from his room to one of the main courtyards of the house. It was lined with carvings and paintings and complex objects whose use he didn’t know. It was the same everywhere he went. Olufemi’s home was huge and sprawling, and Krish still hadn’t seen a tenth of it. He hadn’t been invited to.

  Olufemi had told him that the mansion had been deliberately built to confuse. Few of the rooms were simple squares, like those of the Rah, or circles like the tent he’d lived in his whole life. Most were built on more than one level, so you entered on one and left on another. Corridors sloped and twined above and below each other. You’d enter at ground level and find yourself looking out of a window high above the city and never be quite sure how you got there. Olufemi’s family were map-makers, and they�
�d found it amusing to design their home to elude their own craft.

  When she was a child, she’d told him back when she still seemed to have time to speak to him, they used to tell stories of visitors who’d wandered off and never returned. One of her cousins swore she’d found the skeleton of an unlucky traveller in a distant room. Krish suspected it wasn’t true, but he stuck to the few routes he’d memorised whenever he walked through the place. His reflection followed him everywhere he went, multiplied in every mirror so that he seemed constantly accompanied by a crowd of sombre-faced young Ashane men.

  When he stepped outside, the sun hit him like a blow. He thought he’d been hot in Rah lands, but he hadn’t understood what true heat was. That had been damp and cloying, like a sticky embrace. This was all the sun’s work. It shone brighter than he’d known it could in a clear blue sky and seemed to suck the moisture and the energy straight out of him.

  The Etze Mansion lay on the seaward edge of Mirror Town. The ocean was a stark blue too, and as reflective as a mirror itself. When Krish looked at it from the high wall that bordered the city, he found it hard to remember the storm-racked journey that had brought them there. Everything in this place seemed still, leached of the ability to move by the searing heat. The slaves crept along the broad streets and the mages drifted through them and no one seemed in a hurry to be anywhere.

  Krish didn’t know where he was going, but his feet led him inward, towards the heart of the city with its scores of sprawling, stone-built complexes in as many different styles. It was a hard place to walk, with the mirrors on every roof and street corner. The sunlight reflected in them stabbed at him whichever way he looked and his own reflection haunted him.

  The slaves were everywhere, outnumbering their masters a hundred to one, working while the mages played. They reminded him a little of the residents of Smiler’s Fair, a mix of people from all over the world. But Smiler’s Fair had been filled with people living lives at full speed – lives they’d chosen, however rough. Here the mages had no need to rush and slaves had no energy for rushing and no choice, only the bliss that left them blank-eyed and compliant. The loudest sound was the shouts of the mirror masters, a cacophony that lasted all day. ‘Turn one, turn, turn two, turn!’

  It was odd being so easily able to understand what they said. Learning the tribes’ language from Dae Hyo had been hard. For every two words that stuck in his memory, four more slipped out of it. But the warrior hadn’t let up and Krish had got better. He hadn’t even tried to learn the mages’ tongue, but as if his earlier studies had worn a smooth groove downward in his mind, the knowledge slid in regardless.

  ‘Turn east!’ the mirror master nearest to him croaked, as a stooped woman by the mirror on the roof above cried, ‘Turn west!’ The piercing sunlight streamed between them and swept through the building opposite.

  Krish realised that he’d reached his destination, though he hadn’t known he intended to come here. The streets of Mirror Town were paved in a score of different ways: cobbles, glass, stone, wood. Here, though, there was only dusty yellow earth. It blew up in clouds around his feet as he walked towards the centre of the square.

  There were fewer slaves here and more mages. Some had brought small, folding wooden tables and sat hunched over complex circular boards, the game called Night and Day that the mages seemed to take more seriously than anything. Others stood in rings around the eleven huge pillars that lay scattered around the square. Only five of them were currently occupied, and four of those occupants were the focus of the mages’ attention.

  It was impossible to speak to the men and women standing on the pillars. The lowest was almost a hundred paces in the air. But the mages came to watch, every day. Krish didn’t know why. To draw inspiration from them, or to mock? He’d learned that standing on those pillars was a thing mages did when they needed to think deeply. They let themselves be taken to the narrow tops and they stayed there under the blazing sun, and slept there in the surprising chill of night. And they had visions, if they did it long enough, visions that had inspired some of Mirror Town’s greatest inventions.

  The pillar nearest him held a young man, swaying on his feet. On the ground below, four slaves worked the winches of a complex wooden platform. Its zigzag supports slowly straightened until it was teetering at the same height as the pillar. They’d put a flagon of water and a bowl of fruit and meat on it, but the young man ignored them. With his face turned to the sun, his eyes must be closed. Apparently, he’d been up there nearly a year. The same buckets that took up his food and water brought his waste products down. He’d said he wouldn’t come down himself until he understood why sugar was sweet. ‘The Bakari family,’ Krish heard one of the watching mages say. ‘They’re all crazy.’

  The tallest pillar, in the centre of the square, was made of a glass so clear there were angles from which you could barely see it. It was empty. He’d been told it was always left empty, in honour of its last resident. Ayo Abiola had climbed up there when she was seventeen and stayed until she was seventy-three. No one knew what she’d told her family when she came back down, but they’d been the richest of the great houses of Mirror Town ever since.

  The pillar he wanted was in the far corner of the square and unattended. The mages weren’t interested in the man who sat on its broad platform, sheltering underneath a white cotton tent. Krish grabbed a passing slave and said, ‘I need to get up there,’ and the woman drifted off to make it happen. It sent a twinge of guilt through him every time he commanded one of the slaves, but a little less each time. Nothing happened in Mirror Town if a slave didn’t do it.

  A few moments later, a platform was wheeled up. It was broader than the one they’d used to feed the other mage but not conspicuously more steady. ‘I’ll need food and water for him too,’ Krish said. When they brought it, he had no more excuses not to step on to the rickety thing.

  It creaked as the slaves below worked the winches. He sat and tried to brace himself against the rocking motion until he was at the same height as the top of the pillar. It was one of the broadest, nearly fifteen paces square. He unloaded the water and the food and lastly himself, and then waved at the slaves below to winch it down. It left him trapped but he wasn’t afraid. Here he was the one with all the power. He was also the one with the knife, and Dae Hyo had spent months making sure he knew how to use it.

  Marvan appeared to be asleep. He was lying on his back beneath the linen tent, his eyes closed. Despite the shade, the skin of his face and hands had darkened in the sun to almost the same colour as the mages’. Krish didn’t know why he’d come here. He wasn’t sure why Marvan was still alive. Once they’d arrived in Mirror Town they could have killed Marvan. He deserved it. But killing was hard when the blood was cold, unless you were Marvan.

  ‘A visit,’ Marvan said, his eyes still closed. ‘You honour me.’

  It was mocking. Nearly everything he said was mocking.

  ‘Maybe I just like the view,’ Krish replied and Marvan smiled and rolled up to sit beside him.

  Below, the ten thousand mirrors glittered like jewels. ‘Turn, turn, turn.’ He could hear it faintly even up here as they moved the mirrors in the complex, pre-planned motions that kept their city safe.The sunlight blazed down and was passed between, each movement carefully calculated so that it swept through every window of every house and down every corridor into every corner.

  Mirror Town seemed both more orderly and more chaotic from this height. The original seven great mansions of the seven great families spread in a ring around the fragile glass tower at the city’s centre. They were curiously bulbous structures that looked more grown than built. But each had been added to and then added to again over the years, no addition the same, none made to be in harmony with each other. In fact, it looked like the exact reverse: that each great house was competing to outdo its neighbours, to build the tallest tower, or the broadest or the most ornamented.

  The lesser houses squatted in the shadows of that vast,
futile endeavour. And through it all the slaves crawled, doing anything that needed to be done so that the mages could devote all effort to their petty, meaningless competitions with each other.

  ‘Behold the great city of Nkankan-lati-Ohunkohun,’ Marvan said. ‘I believe that’s what they call it – it roughly translates as Something from Nothing. It’s claimed that there was nothing but sand here when the mages came and there was a city surrounded by lush fields when they’d finished their magic. Perhaps it’s true. They’re a clever bunch, though I could wish they were more hospitable.’

  The mages kept no prisoners that Krish could see and Olufemi’s family had refused to lock Marvan in their house. Krish refused to let him go free, and so here he was.

  ‘What can I do for you today?’ Marvan asked after a moment’s silence.

  Krish shrugged, still looking out over the sprawl of the city, the straight blue line of the sea to the west and the greenery ringing its landward sides.

  ‘You know I can be more use to you down below,’ Marvan said. ‘If you don’t think the Ashane will come for you eventually, even here, you’re a fool.’

  ‘King Nayan won’t come here. People are afraid of the mages. And it’s a long way from Ashanesland. I’ve seen the maps.’

  ‘And then,’ Marvan continued, as if Krish hadn’t spoken, ‘there are all those new friends you made among the Rah. But I know your enemies. I can help you understand them, which is the first step towards defeating them.’

  ‘I’ll never trust you.’

  ‘You can trust my self-interest. As Mirror Town is your last refuge, you’re mine.’

  ‘You’re staying up here,’ Krish insisted. ‘You’re lucky to be alive.’

  ‘As are you. It seemed unlikely you’d make it out of Rah territory once you had Uin for an enemy. Why did you turn him against you? I understand he welcomed you as his god when you first came. That’s quite an impressive reversal of feelings.’