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

by Rebecca Levene

Something stirred on the blood-soaked ground between them, and Olufemi realised that whatever rune Yemisi had summoned hadn’t finished its work. The fragments of the Ashane soldiers shook and moved and began to cohere again, reforming themselves into patchwork approximations of the men they’d once been. Five ears dangled from the chin of one rough, globular head. Another had a face made of tongues, while three had no heads at all, only ape-like bodies formed of torn flesh. Rock and fragments of mirror rose from the ground to join the living tissue, glittering shards standing out all over the makeshift bodies.

  Vordanna whimpered and Olufemi took her in her arms, Adolfo’s scaly body pressed between them. They watched as the rebuilt men shambled towards the sound of battle, flesh flaking from them as they walked.

  Eric leaned sideways as his stomach emptied, but Rii swerved unexpectedly to snatch another man in her claws and the vomit splashed to join the blood matting her fur.

  He’d seen men die before. He’d lived in Smiler’s Fair, where death was often a daily occurrence. But he’d never seen men die like this, ripped in two from crotch to shoulder and tossed aside like meat. He’d feared Rii’s fangs but he’d never before seen them do their work on living men, plunging through armour into breasts, spearing them from ear to ear and sucking out what lay inside with a horrible slurp. When she shook her head, droplets of blood sprayed across Eric and his son, and the baby’s pink tongue flicked out to lick them up.

  Rii turned again, cupping air beneath her wings to push herself higher. Eric wondered if she’d tired of slaughter, and then saw that there was no one left to kill. The ground was littered with the ravaged corpses of the Moon Forest folk. But the living had moved away, into Mirror Town itself, where the buildings hid them from Rii’s view.

  ‘Where is my master?’ she cried desperately. ‘How can I save him?’ She threw herself forward, above the city and the roiling fight that filled its streets.

  ‘There!’ Eric called. ‘In that square ahead – the one with all the fallen pillars. You see that banner? It’s the Oak Wheel, the Ashane King’s sign.’

  Rii yipped her battle cry and swooped towards the ground.

  ‘Fuck me,’ Dae Hyo panted, ‘we’re back where we started!’ Blood streaked one side of the warrior’s face and his turban was long gone, his hair loose and wild. But he and Krish were uninjured. There were few around them who could say the same.

  They’d been pushed back to the heart of Mirror Town. The Ashane were herding him and he could do nothing about it. They were all around, and now he saw another group bearing down on him, all mounted and fresh, their weapons gleaming and the Oak Wheel streaming on a banner above them. They’d suffered two charges already and the slaves’ spears had held the horses off, but Krish wasn’t sure they could survive a third. These were his father’s men and his death had been saved for them.

  The Ashane knew that victory was theirs. They pressed forward and the slaves weren’t laughing now. They were falling to the skill and the blades of the metal-armoured men. The horses reared, their hooves lashing. A slave fell, his skull caved in, and a horse followed with a spear in its flank. The madness of battle seemed to consume everyone. The choking scent of mouldy cinnamon filled the air around them, stronger even than the smell of death.

  Krish swung his axe and it found flesh because there was nothing but flesh all around. The wounded Ashane soldier cried out and fell back. They were all falling back, though they outnumbered Krish’s force ten to one. The horses screamed and bucked and he didn’t know how he could be winning, until he saw a group of bowmen kneel to fire upward. He looked up too and understood.

  The creature was vast and ugly. Its wings beat thunderously as it held itself above the Ashane soldiers and used its claws to rake them. Krish saw a man lifted from his saddle with a claw through his stomach. He hung suspended, and then the creature flexed its leg and flung him away to tumble down among his comrades and knock still more from their mounts.

  The Ashane weren’t fighting Krish’s people now. All their attention was on the monster destroying them. ‘Quickly, brother,’ Dae Hyo said, his teeth bared in fury. ‘We can take them now!’

  ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ Dinesh said. The slave had fixed himself to Krish’s side throughout the battle, wielding his spear with clumsy enthusiasm. ‘You can run – you can run now and they won’t see you.’

  ‘I’m not running,’ Krish said, and Dae Hyo’s grin widened, flecks of blood on his white teeth.

  ‘But you’ll die!’ Dinesh said, anguished.

  That might be true, and yet Krish didn’t feel it. Maybe that was what it meant to be a god: that you believed yourself immortal right until the moment a sword sliced through your throat. Or maybe it was the anger, the heat burning in his gut. His father had come to end the life he’d never meant to be started. If Krish couldn’t prevent his own death, he could at least take his father with him.

  Dae Hyo yelled, the battle fever on him, and Krish followed on his heels as he carved a path through the Ashane. Foot soldiers fell screaming until they found themselves facing a cluster of horses with the Oak Wheel banner held above them and the winged monster hovering above that.

  The monster screamed as one of the men raked its leg with his sword. Arrows had found the joins in its armour and still it seemed that it wouldn’t stop, that it would press the attack and finish this. But a moment later it veered up and away, piping a pitiful cry as its black blood fell on the upturned faces of the men who’d driven it off.

  ‘Svarog’s cock!’ Dae Hyo yelled. ‘Come back, you coward!’

  The man at the centre of the group shook his blade in triumph, and in the instant he turned towards Krish, Krish knew him.

  This was his father. Here, now, the prophecy that had driven Krish to this moment could be fulfilled. His father raised his arm, and Krish knew that he meant to order his men to kill Krish, that he didn’t even have the stomach to do it himself. But his men weren’t looking at him. They were looking outward, to where they could see another force approaching.

  At first Krish thought they were soldiers, bloody from the battle. Then they shambled nearer and he realised they were something else: something built of magic from mismatched scraps of flesh. He saw reflections of the Ashane soldiers in the fragments of mirror embedded in their chests and arms. The creatures fell on the Ashane and some of them screamed and more of them turned and fled.

  Only the mounted men seemed to find their courage. Krish heard the call for a charge but the horses were wiser than their riders. When the rune-made creatures stumbled closer the horses reared. The men yelled curses and fought for control and to the right of the group, pushed out by the tide of battle, his father lost control entirely and fell from the saddle to the ground.

  Krish raised his axe and ran forward. A few of the Ashane realised what had happened. They threw themselves in front of their king, but Krish wasn’t alone and his people’s weapons hacked them apart.

  And finally Krish was there, standing above his father. A face a little like his own looked up at him, with eyes a hundred times more tired than his. They widened in fear and Krish felt his rage heat. His father should fear him, for all the months of fear he’d given Krish. For the life he’d given Krish, so different from the one he might have had. He raised his axe high, savouring the moment, and felt something surge out of him, some force or power whose leaving seemed to make him stronger still.

  He cried out his anger and heard the cry echoed from a hundred throats. It was the slaves. All around they raised their weapons in tandem with his own and their faces twisted with his rage. Dinesh snarled beside him, a bestial expression Krish had never seen on his face before. Krish realised it must mirror the expression on his own.

  It was the expression the Chun must have worn, when his rage had driven them to kill the Dae – to slaughter women and children. He remembered that moment now, when he’d stood up to his da for the first time and the joy he’d found in his own anger. He remembered with terrible
clarity the way he’d murdered him, and how he’d felt nothing after.

  ‘Kill him, brother!’ Dae Hyo said, and Krish hesitated.

  Everywhere, the slaves did the same. The shambling creatures stopped, while high above the monster hovered and the Ashane paused, seeing the mortal danger their King lay in.

  Krish should kill him. He’d tried to kill his own newborn son – if any man deserved death, this man did. His father had done a terrible thing. But Krish had done terrible things too.

  ‘Finish it,’ his father croaked.

  All around the battle was poised, waiting to resume. At Krish’s stroke it would, and maybe his people would win and maybe the Ashane would, but it wouldn’t end here. A bitter seed was being planted whose harvest could only be more of the same.

  ‘I don’t want to kill you,’ Krish told his father. It wasn’t true. He hated this man. But if he killed his father again, what would he do next? Dae Hyo was right: he had to do better. He had to be better.

  Slowly, his father scrambled to his feet. He wasn’t a young man; it was clear the movement pained him. ‘It’s one or the other of us. I’ve always known that.’

  Krish looked around him, at the frozen battlefield. Some men stood with swords upraised for blows they hadn’t delivered; others flinched away from wounds they hadn’t yet received. ‘But why can’t it be both? I don’t have to kill you – I’ve already killed my da. The prophecy’s had its blood.’

  His father took a step closer, until they were face to face. They were the same height, though there was more flesh on his father’s bones. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘I want this to be over. I don’t want to take Ashanesland this way. How can I reign in peace if I start with murder?’ Krish looked at the abominations that had turned the tide of battle, their bodies made from the flesh of the dead, the twisted work of the runes he’d woken. ‘I don’t want to be the moon’s heir. Can’t I just be yours?

  His father’s face wasn’t a trusting or a happy one. Maybe his own wasn’t either. But with those words he wasn’t lying. If this war continued, it would make a thousand Dae Hyos, men and women warped by anger and empty of everything but the thirst for revenge. Krish had that same emptiness inside him. He’d filled it with the same anger – and it had brought him here. It would always bring him here.

  He couldn’t be like Dae Hyo, or like his da, or even like his father. He had to be like Uin. Uin had been a better ruler than any of them, giving his people what they wanted and showing them a brighter future. Krish could never admire him, not with what he’d done to Dinesh. But he could imitate him. He could hide his anger behind his smile and do what he needed, not what he felt.

  ‘My heir?’ his father asked.

  ‘Yes. You can teach me to be King after you. We can do things the ordinary way. That’s all I want.’

  ‘My heir,’ his father said again. He looked at his men and then reached out his hand. Its skin was wrinkled and there were liver spots of age on its back, but it looked strong. Krish’s hand was slender in comparison, yet the fingers were the same length. He curled them round his father’s and felt the warmth of the grasp.

  The silence of the battlefield was eerie. They seemed poised on the brink of a precipice. Krish was afraid they might tip over and plummet into depths they couldn’t escape. But then Dinesh dropped his spear and moved to clasp hands with the Ashane soldier nearest him. The man looked startled, his own sword still in his grasp, sticking out at an awkward angle. Another slave followed and then somebody cheered. It was a ragged sound, taken up by only a few voices. The hate hadn’t given way to love or even liking, but the joy of soldiers spared death in battle might be enough.

  His father studied him, clever brown eyes travelling over his face and down his body before climbing back up to meet his again. ‘Before I heard the prophecy, I meant to call you Tanvir, after my father.’

  ‘My name’s Krishanjit. That’s the name my ma gave me.’

  ‘Krishanjit. Do you truly believe we can do this?’

  Krish looked round at the battlefield littered with corpses and the monster hovering above it, ready to strike if he commanded. ‘I think we have to.’

  And if they couldn’t, there was always poison or an assassin’s blade. He’d do better than he had – he’d be wiser. He’d do his darker deeds out of the light of the sun.

  Epilogue

  Sang Ki had found two malbeam, perhaps the same beasts they’d ridden into Mirror Town. There’d been no one to guard them in the chaos of the battle, nor to guard the water and food he’d taken from a half-wrecked mansion. They’d secured the supplies to their saddles and ridden the lizards south until Mirror Town was no more than a distant mirage. The ocean was to their right, a lifeless blue pounding against a shore littered with the bleached bones of unknown beasts.

  ‘Where are we going?’ his companion asked. ‘Where can we go now?’

  He noticed that her accent was less coarse than it had been, more like a shipborn lady’s. It didn’t concern him. ‘We can go wherever you like, Mahvesh,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t return to the Ashane.’

  ‘Nor I to my own people. It seems the north is closed to us, and Mirror Town is a ruin.’

  ‘And what lies south?’

  ‘The exiles, the people of the savannah who don’t welcome strangers in their lands. It’s said they live out their lives on the backs of giant beasts and abhor killing so much they’ll shun a man for stepping on an insect – but these are only travellers’ tales and not to be relied on. I’ve often dreamed of visiting them.’

  ‘I like the sound of people who hate killing.’ She pulled on her reins until the malbeam was walking parallel to the shore, picking its way carefully through the shattered remains of a giant ribcage.

  ‘South then,’ he agreed, and turned his own mount to follow her.

  Alfreda buried Cwen’s body beside Jinn’s. So few hawks were left alive that there was no one to protest the joint grave. Perhaps she should have put Wine and Wingard in the ground with them too, but the land outside Mirror Town was littered with corpses and she didn’t have it in her to search through them all for Cwen’s friends. Cwen might have wanted her to, but Cwen was dead and would never ask anything of her again.

  The sand slid in on top of them so easily, their faces were hidden within moments. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t forget the expression of agony on Jinn’s or of shock on Cwen’s. She’d heard that there was peace now between the two armies. What did it matter, when it had come far too late?

  Her wagon had somehow survived the battle and she harnessed Edred to its front. The autumn rains were past and the brief flowering of the desert had ended. The grass that had sprung so startlingly green from the unpromising sand was withering. To the horizon, the ground was covered in a brittle, browning coat that it would soon shed. She must leave now to have any hope of surviving the desert crossing.

  She hadn’t gone far when the man stepped in front of her. He was Ashane, with a long, hooked nose beneath over-bright eyes. ‘I’m in need of a ride,’ he said, ‘and you’re in possession of a wagon.’

  She thought of ignoring him, even of riding him down, but there was something in those eyes of his she both did and didn’t like. It was something she recognised. She thought she wouldn’t be able to find the words, but for once in her life they came easily to her. What did it matter if they came out wrong? What did anything matter? ‘I prefer to travel alone,’ she told him.

  ‘I can be quiet,’ he said, and climbed on to the seat beside her without asking her leave. He stared at her as they rode in silence across the dying flowers and wilting grass. ‘Or I can talk,’ he added.

  ‘I don’t want to talk.’

  ‘And what do you want?’

  She knew her rage was burning in her face, but he didn’t turn away from it. ‘I want them to die.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Everyone.’

  He smiled and leaned back, turning his face
to the blank blue sky. ‘Then it’s as well that I’ve found you. Together we can make the world bleed.’

  Drut was dying. There was a black hole in her middle where her child had been, and the blood was draining out of it, like poison from an infected wound. There’d been pain at first and she’d wept, but now she didn’t feel very much of anything.

  When she heard the footsteps approaching through the dark of the buried city, she thought it must be Eric returning for her. Then she did feel something: a joy she hated. Eric had bred a monster inside her and chosen it instead of her. When he came for her, she’d reject him. She’d rather die than be with him.

  But it wasn’t Eric; it was the Hunter. Her sister knelt beside her and gently pushed her legs apart. It hurt and she screamed when the Hunter’s fingers probed at the torn flesh through which her monstrous child had entered the world.

  ‘You are haemorrhaging,’ her sister said. ‘You have lost too much blood.’

  She meant that Drut was dying. But no, she wasn’t Drut. The name had been Eric’s and she must abandon it as he’d abandoned her.

  ‘I am sorry,’ the Hunter said. ‘I thought that I could prevent this, but perhaps it can never be stopped. I thought my hawks could nip the bud before it grew this poisonous fruit, but now they all lie dead. My beloved Cwen is gone.’ There were tears on her cheeks, though her voice remained calm.

  ‘Not your fault,’ she whispered. She knew whose fault it was. ‘Eric.’

  ‘Your husband loved his son as you loved him. That is no cause for shame.’

  ‘Monster,’ she gasped, as the Hunter stooped to lift her, cradling her like her own child in her arms.

  The Hunter looked around, at the golden paintings on the rock walls. Now that she stood beside them, it was clear that they were paintings of her. ‘Your son was no more a monster than our husbands were. This place Eric brought you was my husband’s home. The war parted us, but he remembered me and I …’ The Hunter began to walk, her footsteps loud on the stone floor of the undercity. ‘I loved my Guhtur, with his gentle hands and his clever smile. We made three sons together and she would have killed them all.’