Art of Hunting

by Alan Campbell

  The two swords met with a noise like a boom of thunder.

  ‘My mind,’ he hissed through his teeth. ‘Mine!’

  He released the sword.

  As it fell from his hand and clattered to the deck at his feet, all eight of his copies vanished. The boat swayed suddenly and then settled, moved by the abrupt difference in weight.

  Granger’s sword arm felt as if it was on fire. Intense pain crept into his skull from the top of his spine. His chest was tight, suddenly constricted, and his thoughts reeled in a fog of pain and confusion. He could no longer count on being able to control his replicates. They were starting to exert control over him.

  He stared at the sword lying in a pool of blood between the two mercenaries’ corpses. ‘Why me?’ he yelled at it. ‘Why don’t you choose someone else?’

  The blade lay there, as innocent-looking as any ordinary weapon.

  But Granger could never use the damned thing again. It was too dangerous, already too entrenched in his mind. He could no longer trust his replicates. He let out a deep and ragged breath and wiped sweat-lank hair from his brow. Without his armour to support him, he might have collapsed.

  He found a torn oilcloth tarpaulin in a bilge compartment and used it to pick up the sword by the back of its blade, being careful not to touch the hilt. He carried it to the side of the boat and held it over the brine.

  All he had to do was open his fingers and let it go.

  His hands trembled, but he could not release his grip.

  He focused, fighting the sword with every last scrap of his will. Just open my fingers. Open, damn it, open!

  Finally he gasped and staggered back. As soon as he was clear of the side, the sword slipped from his grip and clattered to the floor of the boat. It lay there, covered in blood, mute, mocking him.

  ‘You won’t win,’ he said. ‘You hear?’

  Even to his own ears his words lacked conviction.

  But he gathered what was left of his resolve and, driven by a kind of numb desperation, set about preparing to leave. After he had heaved the mercenaries’ bodies over the side, he drew up buckets of brine and spent the next ten minutes washing the deck down. Then he wrapped the sword in a scrap of cloth and stowed it in his kitbag. When he had removed all trace of violence, he ducked into the wheelhouse to inspect the controls.

  At first glance the boat seemed old and poorly maintained. Panels had been removed from underneath the wheel console, exposing a tangle of badly worn hydraulic tubes wrapped in tape. The engine crank handle felt loose and gritty when he turned it, but the engine itself kicked into life on the second attempt and sounded surprisingly smooth. The smoke streaming from the pipes behind the wheelhouse ran grey for a few moments, then turned colourless. There was very little vibration from the props, suggesting good alignment, and perhaps even new bearings. He turned the vessel slowly, listening for any potential problems, but she thrummed as if she was eager to be pushed hard. She would do fine, he decided, provided he could purchase enough fuel for the three-day trip to Doma. The gauge indicated an eighth of a tank, which would only see him fifty leagues or so. And that wasn’t enough. He set out to find the sea gypsy village Fuller had talked about.

  As the light faded, he pointed the boat’s bow at the centre of the bay and pushed the throttle lever forwards. She leaped away eagerly in response, churning the brine to green froth in her wake.

  Maskelyne woke with a start. He was in his cabin and it was late morning. His pillow and sheets were drenched in sweat.

  He sat up and clamped a hand against his wet brow and shuddered. His fingers trembled as he poured himself a drink of water from the decanter on the bunkside table. His body felt weak, as if his dreams had taken a very real and physical toll on him.

  What had he been dreaming of?

  A man without a face.

  He could not now recall. And yet some trace of his nightmare still remained. An unshakeable feeling that something bad was going to happen.

  To whom? To me?

  He got out of bed and used the head and then washed quickly before going above deck.

  The sun shone down from a cloudless blue sky and the sea lay flat around them. The Lamp’s engines sounded healthy again and twin tails of black smoke from her funnels left a gauzy stain far across the north. It looked as if they had made good progress overnight. Maskelyne found Mellor in the bow with Hayn the navigator. The pair were bent over charts spread across a hatch housing. They appeared to be in disagreement, for Hayn was shaking his head and indicating insistently towards the south-west.

  ‘Problems?’ Maskelyne asked.

  Mellor looked up. ‘The crystal is leading us towards the Gehnal conflux. Hayn wants to go around it.’

  ‘But you disagree?’

  ‘What if Gehnal itself is our destination?’

  Maskelyne thought about this. ‘Do you have any reason to believe that to be the case?’

  The first officer shrugged. ‘If I were going to hide something where nobody would find it . . .’

  Maskelyne nodded. ‘You’d put it where nobody dared to go.’

  ‘It’s just a hunch, but . . .’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with you, Mr Mellor.’

  ‘Captain,’ Hayn said. ‘I propose we head a point west or south-west to confirm the destination. If the device still points to Gehnal, then we’ll know for sure. Otherwise, it gives us the opportunity to skirt that conflux.’

  Maskelyne shook his head. ‘That would cost us a day or more,’ he said. ‘I’m with Mellor on this. Have the helmsman keep us on our current course.’

  The young man gave a quick salute. ‘Very good, sir.’

  They steamed due south for the rest of the day in glorious sunshine. The dark brown Mare Lux brine surged past the hull. Every so often Maskelyne spotted jellyfish pulsing near its surface and once a shoal of bright flying fish shattered free of the waves to skim away from some unseen foe. He knew there were giants in the deep out here, whales and sharks and the great squid, but he glimpsed no such monsters today. Maskelyne remained above deck until the heat in his forehead and the backs of his hands told him he’d suffered too much sun, whereupon he retired to his cabin to write his journal.

  A knocking on the door roused him shortly before dusk. He had fallen asleep with his head resting on the pages of his journal. If any dreams had haunted his sleep, he had no recollection of them. He opened the cabin door to find one of the deckhands with his fist raised to knock again. The young man looked agitated.

  ‘First Officer Mellor is asking for you, Captain,’ he said. ‘There’s something unusual on the horizon.’

  ‘Unusual in what way?’

  The deckhand fidgeted. ‘You’d best see for yourself, sir. Half the men think it’s a mirage.’

  Maskelyne followed him above decks. The sun was slinking towards the horizon and illuminated high clouds in nacreous and quicksilver hues so that the whole sky seemed ablaze with strange cosmic gases. He found most of the crew gathered at the Lamp’s bow, staring south. He pushed through to see what had so thoroughly ensnared their attention.

  It appeared to be a floating city: a great profusion of crystal palaces and temples resting on the southern horizon. The long evening light shone through these structures and caused them to shine like vast, glorious lanterns. To Maskelyne the effect did indeed seem mirage-like, febrile. But also unsettling.

  Something about this struck a chord. Had he dreamed of this place?

  He could not remember.

  With great shame Maskelyne realized that a part of him wanted to turn the Lamp away right now, and flee whatever horrors awaited him in those bright palaces. But his rational mind interceded. He refused to fear the unknown. Indeed, as a scientist, his job was to seek it out, explore it, shine his light into its darkest corners. For it was the need to understand what lurked in those dark corners that drove him. And it drove him now.

  As the Lamp drew nearer to this floating conflagration, he realized that he w
asn’t looking at a city at all. Those bright translucent domes were not made of glass. They were organic, gas-filled membranes.

  ‘Mr Mellor,’ he said. ‘How long would you say it takes a samal to grow its victim into an island that large?’

  Mellor frowned at him for a moment before realization struck. He turned quickly back to the island, his eyes widening with horror. The rest of the assembled men cursed, gasped or groaned. Finally Mellor shook his head. ‘That’s the largest I’ve ever seen,’ he said. ‘It must be hundreds of years old, thousands even.’

  ‘And the crystal points directly at it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Maskelyne couldn’t take his eyes off it. ‘An island that large, here in the Gehnal conflux, would have been noticed by shipping long before now.’

  Mellor nodded.

  ‘But then samal do drift, I suppose,’ he added. He left the rest of his thoughts unspoken to avoid unsettling the men. Nothing of that size had ever been recorded in the Sea of Lights or its confluxes, and it concerned him that this one should appear now, barely ten days’ sail from Scythe Island. He feared that if they charted its progress they would discover that it had been moving towards his home. ‘Stop the engines,’ he said. ‘I want my ship to maintain this distance, as minimum, at all times.’

  ‘You mean to observe it?’

  ‘I mean to land on it,’ Maskelyne said. ‘I’ll take one of the tenders in tomorrow morning, but we’ll keep the Lamp well clear. How many diving suits do we have?’

  ‘Three, sir,’ Mellor replied.

  ‘Then I require two volunteers to accompany me onto the island at first light tomorrow.’

  A few of the crew exchanged fearful glances among themselves, but not a man of them protested or complained. Indeed several approached Mellor to volunteer their services then and there.

  Maskelyne ordered his men to keep constant watch throughout the night and to maintain a distance of one league. At all costs. The samal in the water below would be vast, and there was no telling how far its tentacles could reach or in which direction the ocean currents might carry it. They made preparations for the expedition tomorrow, checking the seals on all three diving suits. When that was done, the metaphysicist sat on a deckchair upon the wheelhouse roof and in the last of the fading light gazed across at that vast and gaseous mass. It covered three or four acres and supported mature trees among the swathes of distended flesh and mutated veins. The great inflated membranes he had first assumed to be temples had once been skin or other organic surfaces, now regrown to suit the needs of the parasite in the depths below. He fancied he saw movement in the undergrowth, but that could only have been his imagination, for the samal would consume any unprotected traveller that set foot upon its domain.

  He had to hope the suits would be enough.

  ‘What do you think it was?’

  Maskelyne looked over to see Mellor clinging to the wheel-house ladder.

  ‘The host?’ Maskelyne replied. ‘I think it was human. Or possibly Unmer.’

  The other man nodded. ‘The men share your belief. Some of them claim they’ve seen a face there.’

  They watched the island in silence for a while.

  ‘If it’s any consolation,’ Maskelyne said, ‘I doubt the brain still functions as it once did. Who can say if such a mutation has the capacity to know pain or despair? Perhaps the parasite offers satisfaction in exchange for aid. Pleasure, even. We might also posit that the human mind can come to accept even the most grievous change. Dragons thrive in their own addictions and madness. Are we not all creatures of the same cosmos? Is it not arrogant to perceive degeneration as a cruelty?’

  ‘Not when it’s imposed.’

  Maskelyne shook his head. ‘It’s always imposed. Why is it that life is so abhorred by the universe? Why must our existence be an endless battle against entropy? There’s nature, clawing at our heels, undoing life’s tapestries as fast as we can weave them.’ He stood up and threw his arms wide and cried out. ‘The will of the universe is the will of the void and the void has but one single intention. To reach equilibrium like any other wave.’ Slowly he sat back down again. ‘Time continues to slow and space continues to stretch and thin and homogenize. And we cannot appeal to vacuum. That would be too . . .’ He caught himself, smiled. ‘Too unfair. The truth is that life itself is unnatural.’ He raised his chin, indicating the island.

  ‘There is a creature debased in your eyes. But would it not be true to say that the parasite has brought it closer to the natural state?’

  Mellor shrugged. ‘Your perception of nature is different to mine,’ he said. ‘Still, I hope that come tomorrow you’ll tread just as carefully as the less . . . uh . . . philosophical volunteers.’

  Maskelyne grinned. ‘Oh, it’s all just semantics, anyway. What we refer to as nature is at odds with the fundamental nature of the universe. Now tell me, Mellor, which of the men volunteered to accompany their captain into the monster’s maw.’

  ‘All but one.’

  Maskelyne raised his eyebrows. ‘Who was the one?’

  ‘New lad.’ Mellor grinned. ‘Should I do the usual?’

  ‘Well, of course,’ Maskelyne said.‘One must learn to conquer one’s fears, after all.’

  ‘Very good, Captain.’

  No dreams came that night to disturb Maskelyne’s sleep. He woke before dawn and joined several of his crew on the bathysphere deck. With Mellor was Spenratter the dive engineer and the coward who had failed to volunteer – a twenty-year-old Evensraumer named Charles Pendragon. Now that this young man understood the outcome of his decision, he would undoubtedly be more inclined to put his name forward for future expeditions. It was through small steps like these that Maskelyne had long forged and tempered collections of men into crews.

  A fragile pink light glimmered in the east and a profusion of stars yet dusted the sky above the ship’s twin iron funnels. It seemed to Maskelyne that the ocean around them simmered with the same dark energy of the cosmos – tremulous and pregnant with elemental wrath. It was a medium of both degeneration and creation, of cold indifference to those it altered.

  Maskelyne had chosen Spenratter to accompany him lest they had any issues with the suits while away from the Lamp. He saw no danger on the island other than the danger posed by crawling samal filaments. A well-maintained dive suit ought to keep those out. Pendragon said nothing as Mellor and the others helped him into his suit, but the terror in his eyes was clear for all to see. His hands trembled when they handed him a dragon lance. He almost dropped the weapon. His finger would be jumpy on its trigger, liable to spray flame wildly at the first hint of trouble. Maskelyne’s diving suit was brine-proof, but it wasn’t particularly fireproof. He thought for a moment, then said, ‘That suit’s a poor fit. Don’t you think, Mr Mellor?’

  Mellor frowned, but clearly knew better than to question his captain’s comment. ‘It is, sir.’

  ‘Slack around the knees, there,’ Maskelyne added, pointing.

  The first officer nodded. ‘Droops like my old nan’s tit, sir.’

  ‘Get him out of it,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Find me someone more suitable.’

  Pendragon’s eyes snapped to Maskelyne. And suddenly all trace of fear had vanished from him, to be replaced by sudden and righteous defiance. ‘Please, sir,’ he said. ‘The suit fits just fine.’

  ‘The gloves are too large for your hands,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘You’ll struggle to pull that weapon’s trigger.’

  ‘It’s not a problem, sir.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  Maskelyne studied the young man for a long moment. ‘You know what we face over there?’

  Pendragon nodded. There was, Maskelyne noted, no longer even a hint of nervousness about the boy. He held his dragon lance with the relaxed grip of a veteran.

  ‘Why the change of heart, son?’

  ‘No change of heart, sir. I wanted to go, and it’s well known you choose new sailors who refuse to volunte
er.’

  ‘You’re not scared?’

  ‘I’ve faced worse.’

  Maskelyne laughed. ‘Worse than the mother of all samal?’

  ‘My old man, sir, was a hell of a brute.’

  Maskelyne’s smile faded. He gripped the young man’s shoulder. ‘Mark my words, son. You have a long and prosperous future in my employ.’

  ‘Provided I survive today.’

  ‘You’ll survive today.’

  When all three men were suited up, they clambered down into the Lamp’s steel-hulled dory. He used this thirty-foot flat-hulled vessel primarily as a tender, but also in those rare occasions when the shallows gave up trove. She still bore the Valcinder shipyard’s mark on her side, VM22, although the crew called her Tutu. Mellor passed him down the crystal locator device, which he set on his lap. A cursory glance confirmed that their destination was indeed the heart of the parasite’s island.

  Spenratter started the engines and soon the small boat was skimming across the tea-dark water towards the floating island. As they drew nearer, they began to smell the rich musky odour of the thing. The suits were merely for protection from the samal’s gossamer tentacles; they lacked the means to pump air into them so far from the Lamp, and so simply breathed through the disconnected hose valves at the top of each helmet – an opening through which they were most vulnerable to ingress.

  Nevertheless, the stench was so foul Maskelyne wished he’d possessed the foresight to have filters fitted. Young Pendragon sat in the stern, pale faced and gripping the gunwale with both hands, while Spenratter’s stocky figure stood over him at the wheel.

  ‘You’ll get used to the feel of it soon enough,’ Maskelyne said, his voice muffled by the heavy glass-and-brass sphere around his head. ‘But if you want to vomit, do it now. There won’t be an opportunity to open your helmet after we land.’

  ‘I’m fine, sir.’

  ‘Spenratter?’

  ‘Actually quite enjoying the smell,’ he said. ‘Reminds me of the wife’s cooking.’