The Art of Hunting (10 page)

She blushed. ‘I suppose I could let you read some.’

Paulus held both of her plump little hands in his. ‘You know I’d love to,’ he said, grinning. ‘But I’m not going to. Affairs of state and all that.’ He
dropped her hands.

She nodded vigorously and then in an almost conspiratorial tone said, ‘I completely understand.’ Her gaze then fixed on Cyr and she opened her mouth to speak.

‘My dear,’ he said, raising a hand to stop her. ‘Don’t make me choose between honesty and love.’

‘But what’s been going on?’ Paulus said. ‘I’m told you require assistance.’

‘Well, yes. No,’ she said. ‘Yes and no.’ She clenched her fists in frustration and sucked in a deep breath. ‘The noises they’ve been making . . . And the
smell, oh my dear.’

‘But then you must leave,’ Paulus said. ‘The palace staff can see to their needs.’

‘Oh, I don’t trust the staff,’ she said, leaning closer. ‘Some of these patients were my friends.’

‘I see you’ve gagged them,’ Ianthe said.

Anaisy turned her wet eyes on Ianthe and gave her a bladelike smile. Then she turned back to the prince. ‘How am I to cope?The gags aren’t particularly effective. I’ve asked
for drugs, but there isn’t anything suitable.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and it seems to me that the best thing would be to put them on a
boat and send them somewhere.’

‘A boat?’ Paulus said. ‘Where would you send it?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’Anaisy said.‘It hardly matters, I suppose. Somewhere nice, where they can . . . you know.’

‘Frolic and drool,’ Paulus said.

‘Precisely. The important thing is that they don’t return. Better that than have them killed, don’t you think?’

Cyr guffawed. ‘You want to exile our kin?’

She shot him a murderous look. ‘Absolutely not. How dare you even suggest that?’

‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to exile them. You merely wish to send them away, never to return.’

‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘What choice do we have? Killing them wouldn’t be acceptable at all.’

‘We’re in agreement there,’ Cyr said.

‘After all,’ she added, ‘what would people say if they knew what we’d done?’

‘I’ll wager the words would not be kind.’

Anaisy nodded. ‘So, do you think you could arrange it?’

‘Consider it done,’ Paulus said.

She beamed at him again. ‘Oh, Paulus, you’ll make such a fine king.’ And then she turned to Ianthe. ‘And you . . . my dear . . .’ She grabbed Ianthe’s hands
and smiled. ‘You must not fret. We can always do something about your presentation.’

Ianthe frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

Cyr intervened, steering Ianthe away from the woman. ‘The dear girl must prepare for the ball,’ he said. ‘As young and beautiful as she is, we must have her looking less
seductive and more regal. This is, after all, a formal affair.’

‘Of course.’The duchess spoke through a smile that seemed cemented into her jaw, but then the smile faded and she was abruptly thoughtful again. ‘What if it was an old
ship?’ she said.

Paulus raised his eyebrows.

‘Well then we couldn’t be blamed if it sank,’ she said. ‘Could we?’

‘Ethan?’

When Lucille shook his shoulder, Maskelyne realized that the light in his laboratory had changed to a deep umber. He looked up from his desk to find her eyes pinched with worry.

‘You’ve been staring into that thing for hours,’ she said.

Hours?
He glanced at the large crystal sphere in his hands as if seeing it for the first time. Had he been daydreaming? The crystal shone weirdly, reflecting light that didn’t
appear to emanate from his environment. Through its facets he sometimes glimpsed dark waves and sometimes a tower standing on an outcrop of rock in an endless sea. ‘This thing,’ he
said, ‘is quite possibly the most important object that has ever existed.’

He had found it in the chariot that one of Granger’s replicates had crashed into the mountainside at Awl – a crash that had destroyed the gun Maskelyne was using to turn great chunks
of Haurstaf palace into great mounds of powdered Haurstaf palace. A crash that had nearly killed Ethan Maskelyne himself.

But his wife only raised her eyebrows in a manner that bordered on pity.

‘I mean it, Lucille,’ he insisted. ‘This artefact is no mere ichusae or chariot. It is, as far as I can tell, a lens – refracting light, but not from this world.’
He held up the magnificent object so that it gleamed wickedly in the evening sun, cycling through a kaleidoscope of otherworldly hues. ‘Look at it. See these waves, the colours. The view . .
. it’s from several hundred yards above the surface . . . an island, perhaps. The ocean you perceive through these facets is not on this planet.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ she said. ‘One ocean looks much like another.’

‘And one sky does
not
look much like another,’ he retorted. ‘I have watched the night stars, Lucille, such as they are. This world – if indeed it still exists
– belongs to a far less crowded part of the cosmos than our own, or even another cosmos altogether.’

She looked at the crystal anew. ‘Another cosmos?’

‘Many scholars believe that the Unmer are in contact with intelligences beyond our world, perhaps even beyond our own universe,’ he said. ‘There are too many tales of godlike
beings to dismiss readily. Argusto Conquillas is said to have murdered a goddess during the dragon wars. You know the story?’

‘The shape-shifter’s daughter,’ Lucille replied. ‘Oh Ethan, you don’t believe that, do you?’

‘Why not?’ He held up the crystal. ‘Is this not evidence enough of otherworldly life?’ He spoke with passion, but not complete conviction. Admittedly, there was no real
proof of this. Conquillas collected legends like the Baruch tribesmen collected their enemies’ daughters. However, the artefact here in his hand
was
something tangible. ‘This
lens might well be a method of communication,’ he ventured. ‘If it is, then it represents nothing less than the key to the survival of our own race.’

A trace of fear came into Lucille’s eyes.

Maskelyne grumbled and shook his head. ‘Look . . . come.’ He leaped from his desk and bounded to the window, which had been thrown wide to admit the breeze. His light summer jacket
and cotton trousers flapped in the metal-scented wind from the sea. The gauze curtains wafted like smoke around him. Between the horns of Scythe Island the evening sun scattered its rays across the
dark brooding waters of the Mare Lux, forming countless gold and honey sparkles. Under his fortress and directly beneath this very window there lay a silver crescent of beach bisected by a long
stone quay. ‘You see the high-tide mark?’ he asked her. ‘Where it runs along the quay?’

She joined him. ‘I see where the stone is stained.’

‘It’s up to fourteen yards,’ Maskelyne said. On either side of the quay, gentle bronze-coloured waves broke across the metalled shore, leaving tails of yellow froth. ‘A
yard in the last eight years alone. Regardless of how many ichusae I pull from the depths, the seas continue to rise faster than ever. The rate is accelerating.’ Something among the breaking
surf caught his eye. ‘Look at that!’ he cried with evident delight. ‘There’s a twitch of fate for you. The Drowned conspire to strengthen my point.’ He pointed
furiously, jabbing his hand at the beach below. ‘Their mad compulsions have been increasingly fervent of late.’

From out of the waves there crawled a figure – a scrawny woman with rough grey skin and hair like spilled green paint. She was naked above the waist, but wore a wrap of some tattered red
material about her hips. She clawed her way up onto the beach, moving slowly and painfully. Three yards above the shoreline, she reached out her hand and deposited something on the metal shingle.
And then she turned slowly and began to make her way back to the poisoned water.

‘In broad daylight,’ Maskelyne said. ‘In broad daylight!’

Lucille had covered her mouth with her hand. ‘The poor thing. Why do they do it? Why endure such agony to leave all those keys?’

Ethan Maskelyne watched the woman drag herself back into the sea. ‘I suspect the answer to that has become more important than ever,’ he said quietly. ‘The Drowned sense that
something is coming. They sense it instinctively, even if they don’t know what it is. I would—’

He stopped talking as something out in the great shimmering sea caught his attention. Out to the north-west he spied a flash of white canvas: a square mainsail and then a spinnaker.

‘We have company,’ he said.

‘Emperor Hu?’

‘I think not,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘I must assume that this is Briana Marks come to beg my assistance.’

‘Assistance with what?’

Ethan Maskelyne smiled. ‘A small matter of genocide.’

Granger must have slept for hours because the lozenges of light that had been on the wall had now slid far across the marble floor.

Sudden panic overcame him. He wrestled the bedclothes away and then lay there panting, his brow clammy with an unexpected and surprising fear. What was he afraid of? He knew who he was. Thomas
Granger of Anea. Son of Helen and John Granger. Brother of John junior. The man who had led Imperial Infiltration Unit Seven, the Gravediggers, for all those years. He remembered Evensraum, the
farm in Weaverbrook where he’d met Ianthe’s mother, Hana. The same place where he buried John and three thousand others. He thought about the men in his unit who’d survived the
bombing: Creedy, Banks and the Tummel brothers. He recalled his own trial in Ethugra. How could he be a sorcerous copy of another man and yet remember all of these things? He had lived through
those events. His limbs were tired beyond belief and it was all he could do to support himself on one elbow. But he was alive. Real.

A rich and cloying floral scent assaulted his nostrils. He grabbed a fistful of his shirt and sniffed. Then he smelled his arm. Evidently someone had bathed him while he’d been asleep, and
then slathered his skin with perfume.

They had removed his armour.

Was that why he felt so exhausted?

His thoughts groped through a fug that felt like a whisky hangover. Who the hell had been in here? And how had they managed to do this without waking him?

Nothing at all came back to him. His mind remained blank.

A series of clicking noises grabbed his attention, and he looked over to see the silver sphere Duke Cyr had released floating near the windows, some eight feet from the floor. It gave out a few
more clicks – the sounds eerily reminiscent of language – then bobbed up and down in the air. Had it stirred because Granger had woken up? It occurred to him that the device might allow
the Unmer to observe him remotely.

Before he could contemplate this any further, the door opened and a young servant girl came in. From the look of her, he took her to be one of the Port Awl locals who had previously been under
Haurstaf employ. She was carrying a pile of neatly folded – and rather extravagant – clothes. She blinked with surprise at seeing him awake, then quickly lowered her head and scurried
across the room, depositing the clothes on a chair beside the dresser.

Granger frowned at her. ‘Did you . . .?’ he began.

‘Sir?’

‘Who bathed me?’

‘Your servants, sir.’

‘What servants?’

She looked at him blankly for a moment. ‘Four of us, sir.

Are you ready to be dressed? Shall I activate the somnambulum again?’

‘The what?’

She turned to the floating silver sphere and beckoned to it. The little device moved immediately, whistling through the air, and stopped a few inches away from her face. She opened her mouth as
if to speak to it . . .

Granger awoke – again, with no memory of having fallen asleep. Changes in the angle of sunlight suggested that an hour or so had passed. The servant girl was no longer in the room, but now
he found himself lying flat on the bed, fully dressed. He was wearing a padded plum-coloured tunic over a pink silk blouse and pantaloons patterned with green and yellow diamonds. He raised his
head and gazed down at this riot of coloured cloth – every bit as fetid and febrile as the perfume they’d forced upon him. The material shimmered with arabesques of silver and gold
thread. And upon the finger of his left hand there now rested a silver-mounted ruby the size of a bullfrog’s liver.

A chattering sound came from the corner of the room. There. Granger spotted the little silver sphere – the
somnambulum
, she’d called it – hovering a foot below the
ceiling. It sounded like it was mocking him.

Or was it summoning someone? This premise seemed suddenly more likely, for no sooner had the device stopped, than the door opened again and the servant girl reappeared. She cowed her eyes from
Granger and then hurried over to the sphere.

‘Wait,’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ she replied. ‘It isn’t supposed to wake you. I don’t know what’s got into it.’

‘What? Wait! Stop, get away from that.’

She halted. ‘Sir?’

‘What is that thing? Why do I keep falling asleep?’

She looked at him dumbly.

‘The somnambulum,’ Granger said. ‘What does it do?’

‘It removes the necessity to suffer the touch of one’s servants’ hands upon one’s person.’ When it became clear to her that she’d baffled him, she added,
‘Allowing the lady or gentleman to complete their toilet without being forced to endure the discomfort of physical contact.’

‘I want it out of here.’

‘Sir?’

‘Get rid of it.’

Her brow crinkled with confusion. ‘You wish to be
conscious
when you are bathed and dressed?’

Granger growled. ‘I don’t
wish
to be bathed and dressed at all. I can manage on my own.’

She frowned again.

‘Where is my daughter?’ he demanded.

‘The Lady Cooper?’

‘Ianthe!’

Granger’s anger quickly turned to chagrin.
Cooper
was a name he knew. It had been Hana’s surname, and so of course it now belonged to Ianthe. And he hated it because it
exposed his own inadequacies. It marked her as part of a family he didn’t know and hadn’t cared to find out about – family he had no real connections to. Who were Ianthe’s
Evensraum grandparents? Her uncles, aunts and cousins? Were they still alive? Ianthe’s given surname represented a heritage about which he knew nothing. The name Cooper implied her family had
been barrel-makers in the past. As decent and as skilled a profession as any. And yet how ridiculous the name sounded here among all these gilded halls and servants. Lady Barrel-Maker.