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

by Rebecca Levene

  She was surprised when Alfreda put her arm round her and pulled her closer. It was only as she leaned her head against that broad shoulder that she realised she was weeping.

  ‘You’re the wrong tool for this job,’ Alfreda said. ‘There must be some among all these men who were made for it. There’s people who enjoy giving pain. There was a Wanderer once, travelled everywhere in his wagon on his own. Algar … Algar was only a lad then, he wandered off while I was working. I went looking and I found this man … He had Algar’s arm twisted up behind his back. Algar was crying and this man was laughing.’ Her face twisted and Cwen wondered what the smith had done to the man who hurt her brother. ‘There’s people like that everywhere.’

  But it seemed wrong to give this job to anyone who could enjoy it. It felt right that she suffered in carrying it out.

  ‘People are good at the things they enjoy,’ Alfreda said, as if she knew what Cwen was thinking. ‘You hate this task and it will make you bad at it. If the job needs doing, pick someone who’ll do it well.’

  Cwen had always loathed Gest. He wasn’t in her clutch and if he had been, she might have seen to it that he met with a fatal accident. She hated the way he enjoyed killing the moon beasts and the marks she saw on his own mount that didn’t look like they came from battle. She hated the way he looked when she told him what she needed him to do to the prisoners, and she hated even more his sly smile as she told him to set up his tent out of earshot of the rest of the camp.

  She made herself watch as he got it all ready. He shook his head when she offered a chair and ropes and instead he ordered a frame made with costly chains on it and a winch to raise them higher. Alfreda put it together for him without complaint and sharpened all the blades he wanted. She made a furnace for him so he could heat the instruments. Cwen made sure it was all ready, but she walked away as the first prisoner was brought in. She didn’t need to watch; she’d imagine it all well enough.

  Cwen found the boy hawk instead, still pale and silent, and took him back to her tent to rut. She slept with him all night, curled round him and pressed between others of her clutch when they joined her. It helped her forget what she’d done there. She wasn’t sure it helped them forget it, though. She didn’t think even Wingard and Wine saw her in quite the same way now. It was a cost she hadn’t counted when she’d decided to do it, and it pained her.

  For three days, Gest worked his way through the prisoners, Uin ranted at her actions and wheedled when that didn’t work, and Cwen spent the nights with her clutch and the days with Alfreda and Jinn. She was sitting by the smith’s wagon when Gest finally came to her.

  He’d washed before he did, but she saw red beneath his nails. She imagined him using them on the captives, tearing into flesh his instruments had already worked on, and shuddered. ‘I’ve information,’ he said.

  She felt light-headed with relief. If it could not be for nothing, she thought she could bear what had been done. ‘They told you where Krishanjit is?’

  ‘No.’ Gest grinned. She’d never seen him as happy as he’d been since she’d given him this task. ‘Something else. Did you know that Uin’s own daughter was one of them?’

  ‘His daughter?’

  ‘The youngest. I’ve seen her about the camp, pretty as a bluebell. She was one of their leaders, would you believe, and still loyal. He says she’s been sending information back to their people about Uin’s forces. Might explain why he couldn’t seem to win a single fight, eh?’

  The girl was so meek, Cwen found it hard to imagine. She found it hard even to picture her. Short, she thought, with brown hair often kept in a plait and eyes that seemed to be looking beyond you. ‘It’s interesting,’ she said. ‘It’s not helpful.’

  ‘But this girl – Ensee – she was close to Krishanjit. Loved him, maybe. If anyone knows where he is, it’s Uin’s daughter.’

  Cwen went to wait for Gest in the tent he’d set up beyond the edge of the encampment. It crouched in a hollow between two stands of stunted trees. Inside, the wooden frame was stained with blood. The whole place stank of it but the knives and other instruments were sparkling clean. A man was slumped beside the frame, still breathing but not conscious. He must be the one who’d told Gest about Ensee.

  ‘Take him to a healer,’ she told Hilda.

  The Rah man groaned as Hilda lifted him and left a stain of shit and piss on the ground behind him.

  ‘Shall we clear that up?’ Wingard asked.

  ‘No, leave it.’ The whole place was monstrous. That served her purpose: she’d rather use fear than pain. But she’d use pain if she had to – especially now, when she was finally so close.

  Uin looked angry when Gest led him to the tent. It had become a habitual expression over the days in which Cwen had refused to fight his war. The anger shifted into puzzlement when Wine led his two daughters into the tent beside him.

  ‘This is no place for you!’ he snapped at them, and then – seeming to realise it hadn’t been their choice to come – turned to Cwen and asked, ‘What are they doing here?’

  ‘Perhaps you should ask Ensee,’ she said, watching the girl very closely.

  There was something, a flicker of an expression, but she kept her head lowered demurely as she said, ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ Uin said to Cwen. ‘Explain yourself.’

  ‘Oh,’ Gest said, ‘It’s her has some explaining to do.’ There was a dreadful eagerness in his face as he looked at the girl.

  ‘She’s been working against you,’ Cwen told Uin. ‘She’s with those who fought you – she’s sending them messages even now.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd! My daughter? Whoever told you that was a liar.’

  ‘I don’t care if you believe me.’ Cwen clicked her fingers to bring her hawks forward, the round dozen she’d made sure were here for this.

  Uin’s expression changed from anger and disdain to fear. ‘No, you’re making a mistake.’ He looked at Ensee, but she didn’t speak and Cwen saw the moment when he realised it might be true. ‘No, please, don’t hurt her. She’s only a child.’

  Cwen thought of his other child, born of rape and unacknowledged by him. She felt a pleasure that disgusted her as she said, ‘It’s not her I mean to hurt.’

  She gave him this: he didn’t struggle as they tied him to the frame. If it was to be him or his daughter, he was clearly prepared to take his child’s pain for her. But Cwen reminded herself of everything else he’d done and nodded to Gest. ‘Slowly,’ she told him. ‘We can’t have him dying too soon.’

  Uin was silent, but his eldest daughter screamed as the thin-faced hawk brought the pliers to his smallest nail. He screamed too when Gest pulled it out.

  ‘You know what we need,’ Cwen said to Ensee. ‘Where is Krishanjit?’

  The eldest girl was crying with ugly gulping sobs. Ensee’s face was calm, though, and she shook her head.

  ‘Another,’ Cwen said to Gest, looking away from his glad smile.

  Uin screamed again, and wept when the scream was over.

  Cwen made herself look at him, to face what she was doing. She let Gest take two more of his fingernails and a toenail. He was hard to hate when he was like this, so pitiful. She felt herself despising him and tried not to feel that either. He wasn’t to blame for what she’d reduced him to.

  When he looked close to unconsciousness, she turned back to Ensee. At first she mistook her expression, then she realised. Ensee’s thin lips were pressed together and her face was being held so carefully motionless to hide not distress, but pleasure. This girl hated her father. She was glad to see him suffer.

  She turned to Gest to tell him to cut Uin down, and the other daughter finally spoke. ‘Stop it!’ she shouted. ‘Stop hurting him and I’ll tell you. Ensee told me and I’ll tell you.’

  ‘Don’t!’ Ensee tried to grab her sister but the older girl pushed her back, hard enough to send her to the ground.

  ‘She told me – she said he’d deserted them,�
� the older girl said to Cwen. ‘Promise you’ll let my father go if I tell you.’

  ‘I promise,’ Cwen said.

  ‘No!’ Ensee yelled. She scrambled to her feet, lunging for her sister before two hawks grabbed her arms and pulled her back. ‘I’ll hate you if you do!’

  ‘I don’t care,’ her sister said, still sobbing. ‘Krishanjit sailed away from us,’ she told Cwen. ‘He’s gone south, to Mirror Town.’

  30

  The first day Drut didn’t appear, Eric thought she was still in a snit with him. He decided to let it lie and wait for her to come back to him, a policy he’d always found worked in the past. But she didn’t come as another day passed and then another, and when he finally asked one of the other Servants where she’d gone, she only looked at him gravely, shook her head and moved away.

  That set a nasty feeling gnawing at his stomach, but he ignored it. He told himself she was away on some mission of the Servants like the one that had parted them before, and he got on with his explorations below ground and acted like everything was fine. But when the day of his oroboros came that he had to lie with his wives, and afterwards there was still no sign of her, then he had to stop pretending to himself.

  In the end, it was Bolli who told him. Eric was late for dinner, having been wandering Salvation in search of Drut, and when he came the only place was opposite the other lad. They’d barely spoken since Eric had been brought back from his ill-fated attempt to escape, and there was a sulky dislike in Bolli’s face when he looked at Eric now. His guilt at what he’d done to Eric had hardened into resentment at not being forgiven for it.

  Eric kept his head down and concentrated on eating. The meat didn’t taste like the normal reindeer and he wondered if the Hunter had been out killing more bears.

  ‘Enjoying it?’ Bolli asked.

  Eric grunted non-commitally.

  ‘It’s a wonder you’ve any appetite given the news,’ Bolli added snidely.

  Eric realised that most of the other husbands were watching him from the corners of their eyes. He didn’t want to give Bolli the satisfaction but he had to ask, ‘What news?’

  ‘About your wife. You hadn’t heard?’ Bolli had a nasty, self-satisfied grin. ‘She took the long walk into the ice.’

  ‘It’s a very sad thing,’ Abejide said, glaring quellingly at Bolli and changing to a sympathetic look when he turned to Eric, which was somehow much worse than Bolli’s smugness. ‘Your wife was troubled and she took the Servants’ way of ending it.’

  ‘Which wife?’ Eric asked, though he already knew.

  Bolli made a weak effort to look less hateful. ‘The one you got up the duff. And you two seemed so particularly close.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Eric,’ Abejide said, and then something more that he didn’t hear because he was already up from the table and rushing out of the hall.

  He found himself outside without quite remembering how he’d got there. He felt an urgent need to do something, the sense that Drut was in danger right now and if he didn’t act it would all be over. He told himself not to be an idiot, that she could have been missing for hours already or even days, but that just made it worse. Why hadn’t he realised sooner? If he’d asked for her when he’d first noticed her absence, he could have run out and saved her straight away. Instead, he’d let her—

  No, she wasn’t dead. The Servants were strong. He knew it first-hand – she sometimes left bruises when she clasped him in the heat of her passion. And the cold didn’t hurt her the way it did him. She was still alive. Lost maybe, but out there somewhere. He could find her.

  Only, how did you find someone in a thousand miles of snow? He trudged around in it for a while, desperate and unorganised at first and then more orderly, moving out from the pear orchards in a series of zizags so there was no bit of ground he couldn’t see. But he realised very soon that it was pointless. It would take him weeks and weeks to find her this way, and even a Servant wasn’t strong enough to survive that long without food or drink, especially if she was trying to die.

  With that thought, all the will went out of him and he sat down on his arse in the snow. His tears froze on his cheeks before they could fall. He wasn’t quite sure what he was crying for. The death of his baby maybe, and definitely the fact that he’d never now find a way to leave Salvation. But most of all he was crying for Drut.

  Why hadn’t he run after her when they had their row? A lover’s tiff, that’s all he’d thought it was – only he hadn’t really, had he? He’d sensed something deeper in it, some current beneath her words pulling her away from him. And why had she suddenly begun to question him about his home? She’d never seemed to care before.

  My sisters think they treasure their husbands but they do not understand you. He heard the Hunter’s words in his head, loud as if she’d just spoken them. It was her. She’d turned Drut against him, he knew it with sudden certainty, and he turned round and marched back to Salvation.

  The Hunter wasn’t hard to find. She was on the new parade ground the Servants had flattened from the snow to one side of Salvation, drilling them in their swordwork. There was an eerie beauty to it, all those golden forms moving in perfect time with her. But when the Hunter caught sight of Eric, she dropped her sword and waved her sisters away so that she was alone when he came up to her.

  ‘What did you say to Drut?’ he asked, not bothering with any lead-up to it. He knew she’d understand.

  ‘I only told her the truth,’ she replied, proving that she did.

  ‘And what truth would that be?’

  ‘I told her that you were dangerous.’

  ‘Dangerous?’ He laughed harshly. ‘You’re the one what’s a danger to her. She’s taken the long walk into the ice, did she tell you that?’

  He was pleased to see the shock on the Hunter’s face. ‘But she was with child!’

  ‘Yeah – my child! And now they’re both gonna die because of you.’

  She remained still for a long moment, her booted toe resting against her fallen sword and her gaze on the horizon. Standing that way, she looked just like the statue of her they’d had in the village of his birth and he had to fight an urge to bow. But the statue had been of a god. She was just a Servant like any other, and she’d done wrong.

  ‘I do not wish her dead, nor the child inside her,’ she said at last. She reached round to the back of her neck and took off a chain from which hung a small golden whistle. ‘Blow on this and it will summon my wolves. If you have an article of her clothing, something with her scent, present it to them and they will find her for you. But she cannot return to Salvation. My sisters will not accept her now that she has admitted her fall into error by taking the long walk into the ice. Do you have somewhere that you can take her?’

  ‘Yes.’ He didn’t offer any more and she didn’t ask it. Their eyes met as he took the whistle and some kind of understanding passed between them, maybe a sort of truce.

  Everything in him wanted to rush straight out, but he wasn’t such a fool as he had been. He meant to stay out until he found her, and so he dressed in his warmest furs and made himself a pack of food and warmleaf-wrapped water to keep it from freezing. The Servants in the kitchen looked at him oddly, but they didn’t ask what he was about. Questioning wasn’t the Servant way. That was what made Drut different; if only he’d had the guts to answer her questions honestly.

  Outside he made himself walk until Salvation was distant enough that no nosey Servants – or more likely nosey husbands – would guess what he was doing. Then he put the whistle to his lips and blew. It made a noise too high to hear but somehow piercing all the same. The fine hairs on the back of his neck stood up in a way that wasn’t entirely pleasant

  The moment after the whistle wasn’t filled with the howl of wolves as he’d half expected. It was only the not-quite-silence of the snow, with the subtle creak of ice and the murmur of the wind. The wolves, when they came, seemed to form out of the snow, their fur almost the same white and their tongues lol
ling. They sat in front of him in a long neat row, yellow and green and blue eyes unblinking.

  He’d always known wolves were the Hunter’s creatures – that’s why they howled at the moon, who was her enemy. It didn’t stop him shivering as he reached out towards those tooth-filled jaws, holding one of Drut’s dresses between finger and thumb. When one of the wolves lunged forward he dropped it in a hurry, but they all just sniffed it, polite as you please, then turned their backs on him and sped away, fanning out in all directions as if they knew precisely what they were doing.

  And it seemed they did. He’d only just had time to wonder if he ought to go back to Salvation to wait for them when one of the wolves came trotting back to him. It was a bit of a mangy specimen. When it opened its mouth to pant he saw that half of its teeth were rotten.

  ‘Found something then?’ he asked it.

  Of course it didn’t reply, but it nuzzled its nose into his palm and then took the sleeve of his fur coat between its teeth and gently pulled. The message was pretty clear, and when it loped ten paces away and then turned its head round to look at him, he followed after.

  The mangy wolf ranged ahead, sniffing, while one by one the others slunk back out of the snow to join him, so that soon Eric was at the centre of the pack. He was glad of their warmth. They walked for hours while the sun sank towards the horizon it would never cross, and his fears started to eat at him. Drut had gone a long way and been missing a long while. Could she possibly still be alive?

  He slogged on, trudging through the snow as it numbed his fingers and nose even through his furs, and he began to wonder if he was going to die the cold death he’d only narrowly avoided before. He wondered if that was what the Hunter intended. He was so numb, it was hard to care. And then, when only a sliver of sky remained between sun and horizon, he finally saw something other than snow in the distance.

  He began running, a painful exhausted jog. A little further and he realised what the building was: that place of the moon’s he’d found on his wanderings in the city below. It seemed strange that Drut should have come to this one tiny place in all the broad land, but he soon saw her figure sprawled on the lead floor beneath the high, peaked roof.