The Art of Hunting (16 page)

‘And yet she is a child.’

‘A child poised to become an Unmer queen.’ Briana sighed. ‘You once slew a goddess and brought an army of dragons against Prince Marquetta’s father for the love of Aria.
I beg you, please, consider her daughters now.’

‘I fought Jonas Whiteheart to protect Aria, not the Guild.’

‘The Guild is her legacy, Argusto. Aria built it. She strove to protect it. And you are tempted. I know you are. I can see it in your eyes. Cyr will come after you as soon as he regains
enough power. Help me put an end to it now. Finish what you started. Now, while there’s time to act.’

The dragon lord cradled his long chin in his fingers. ‘I will kill Duke Cyr,’ he said, ‘and the Whiteheart’s son, Paulus, and anyone who tries to prevent me from doing
so.’ He turned and looked deeply into Briana’s eyes. ‘But I will not harm the girl unless she chooses to involve herself in my affairs. Now, I must send a message to the prince
and his uncle announcing my intentions.’

‘
What?
’

‘You said yourself – Ianthe might be spying on this conversation, but we do not know for sure.’

‘She—’

‘Therefore I cannot be certain Cyr and Marquetta are aware that I have marked them for assassination.’

‘But that’s . . .’ She managed to stop herself from finishing her sentence in time. Accusing Conquillas of lunacy would not be prudent. Instead, she added, ‘Why would you
give
them warning?’

He shrugged. ‘I gain no pleasure from bloodshed or murder. It is the challenge that drives me,’ he said. ‘The sport. The greater the challenge, the greater the glory to be
gained in the attempt.’

‘Argusto . . .’

His eyes remained cold and distant. He was deep in thought.

‘You don’t like to make things easy for yourself,’ she said.

‘I have no interest in living a dull life.’

Briana smiled. ‘Sometimes I’m glad we’re friends,’ she said.

Conquillas pursed his lips. ‘We are not friends, Miss Marks.’

Maskelyne remained in his laboratory, working late into the night. Gem lanterns shone in their wall sconces, casting great claws and lattices of shadow between the tables of
Unmer trove scattered about the place. He filled notebooks with his musings while his latest specimens gazed out from their brine tanks. Sailors had pulled two fresh women from Ethugran canals and
a sharkskin child from the Sea of Kings. Both women had drowned recently, and still possessed mental acuity akin to that of the living. They hunched in that bromine gloom and watched him silently
from yellowed eye sockets. The child’s brain had rotted months ago and it merely walked forwards repeatedly, knocking against the glass each time. Maskelyne would normally have removed such a
worthless specimen by now, but he’d kept this one because little Jontney found it so funny.

He turned the salvaged crystal over in his hands and watched the dark and alien ocean churning within its facets. There was a storm raging in there, the gales raising vast waves and smashing
them against the windowless tower on its solitary rock island. What purpose did that tower serve? Was it a fortress? Or even a machine? Who dwelt within? And where exactly was
there
? Brine
came from ichusae, those devious little Unmer phials more commonly known as sea-bottles. Because intact ichusae spewed forth endless torrents of the stuff, it had always seemed reasonable for
Maskelyne to assume that each of these little bottles contained some sort of conduit to another part of the cosmos – or, indeed, to another cosmos entirely.

And now he held in his hands a lens that appeared to offer him a view into that very place. Were the seas there, he wondered, littered with some cousin of the ichusae – artefacts that
sucked in brine rather than expelled the stuff? Or could these sorcerous bottles exist in both places at once? He set the crystal down in a wooden bowl on his desk. It lay there in the semi-dark,
illuminating its immediate surroundings with a dim green glow.

A nearby sound startled him, a sharp metallic
trill
. Maskelyne glanced round and saw that an Unmer device on one of his tables had activated. Now it continued to hum and chatter as
small lights played within its barnacle-crusted box. He had seen similar machines before, and knew it to be a form of pain mutator – related to the nerve manglers used by his jailers in
Ethugra. This one would be able to change pain into other sensations: hunger, or – more dangerously – sexual ecstasy. He returned his attention to the crystal again. Many of his trove
items had been springing to life since he’d brought it into his laboratory.

Clearly, it focused light. Did it, he wondered, focus other energies? He glanced back at the pain mutator, wondering if it had simply come into contact with some sort of energy leakage. A field?
That made immediate sense. His heartbeat quickened. What if the lens didn’t just focus energy, but
sorcery
? Could this simple sphere act as a conduit between the two realms? Was this
the conduit through which all Unmer sorcery flowed?

What was sorcery but the wilful transfiguration of matter and energy? And yet it was clear that some sort of external energy was necessary to effect such alterations. Could the lens provide a
bridge for that imported energy?

What about brine?

Could he, by destroying the crystal, arrest the flow of energy to ichusae?

And thus stop the influx of brine?

He picked it up again and stared into its facets, marvelling at the alien structure within, at the seething waters and starless cloud-torn sky. The glass felt strangely warm. Was it too much to
hope that he was holding the answer to his dilemma here in his hand? Could he bring himself to test his theory by destroying such a treasure?

No.

At least . . . not until he had no alternative.

Maskelyne placed the crystal back in its bowl. He could not take such a risk. He had to know exactly what he was dealing with. He picked up a pen and wrote:

The flow of electrical fluids could be detected by various devices sensitive to their proximity. Copper coils and toruses could transmit electrical fluids through the air, but could also be used
to sense the invisible fields created – even at great distances. And it seemed to him that Unmer sorcery must work in a similar fashion. If this crystal transmitted sorcerous energy, then it
must be possible to
detect
the lines of energy surrounding it. And if he could detect these lines, then he could follow them in order to locate Unmer artefacts. He might yet engineer a way
to discover every last ichusae in the oceans.

He set about testing his theory.

If sorcerous energy produced a field, then artefacts brought together might disturb each other’s fields. Maskelyne slid a gem lantern across his desk and positioned it next to the crystal.
The faintest flickering, perhaps?
He couldn’t be certain. There was little – if any – perceptible disruption to the light produced. He dug out some screwdrivers from his
desk drawer and opened the lantern casing. He knew from experience how to adjust the mechanism to alter the flow of energy into the bulb – energy, he now hoped, passed through the crystal.
Indeed, he had used this knowledge to devastating effect against the Haurstaf palace in Awl.

This time, however, he planned to reduce the flow. He removed four exterior screws and swung back a hinged door in the brass casing, revealing the workings underneath the lantern bulb. Deep in
among the wires, needles and bones he moved aside a flap of human leather and located a series of miniature glass spheres on tiny, movable rods. Each of these contained a drop of amber fluid. Some
of the drops rested in the base of their particular sphere, while others appeared to defy gravity by clinging to the uppermost surfaces. Long ago, he had found that he could adjust the brightness
of the lantern by realigning these spheres.

He did this now, dimming the lantern until it was barely visible. By quenching the lantern’s source of power he hoped it might become more sensitive to the other sources of power radiating
from the crystal.

To his great delight he discovered that moving the lantern around the crystal now caused the light to fluctuate noticeably. It did indeed appear to be reacting to the energies being funnelled
through that sorcerous lens. He imagined those energies to be like invisible rays of sunlight. The stronger the particular ray, the more it affected the lantern’s own field.

At one point in particular, the gem lantern’s brightness leaped considerably.

Whatever could
that
be?

He grabbed his pen and made a note of the position. Two seventy-one degrees. Whatever it was, it must surely be an artefact of extraordinary power to cause such a large disruption in the
lantern’s field. A course of two seventy-one degrees would take him south-west, out past the prison city of Ethugra, and ultimately into the strange green waters of the Mare Verdant.

Maskelyne pulled the bell cord to summon Garstone. Then he rifled through the desk in search of quality drafting paper, rulers, compasses and set squares. By the time his servant had appeared,
Maskelyne had already sketched a rough outline of the housing system he required.

‘Give this to Halfway,’ he said. ‘Tell him to drop everything else, I want all his machinists working on this right now.’

Garstone glanced at the sketch. ‘To this scale?’

‘As it’s drawn. And ready the
Lamp
. We sail as soon as the device is built.’

‘Very good, sir.’

Garstone retreated.

Maskelyne dimmed the laboratory lights and went over to the window.

In the dark the Mare Lux shone like engine oil. To the north and south the island’s headlands stood in ragged silhouette against heavens dusted with stars. Between them he could just
perceive the silvery arc of the Beach of Keys. He could not spot any of the Drowned upon that metal shore, but he knew they would be there. They came in droves at night.

He turned his back on the night and approached the first of his brine tanks. The woman floating within watched him warily. She was in her early thirties, shapely enough, and dressed in a plain
knotted weed robe of Ethugran design – some unfortunate jailer’s wife or daughter. Maskelyne suspected she had been drowned, as many of them undoubtedly were, merely to supply him with
a fresh specimen. But then, people had to make a living somehow.

He pointed to the south-south-west, to the source of the power his makeshift device had detected. ‘What lies there?’ he said. ‘Do you know?’

She stared at him mutely.

‘Is this what your kind want me to find?’

She did not answer.

He had not expected her to. She was merely a vessel into which he might tip his thoughts and thus peer at them. The Drowned who brought the keys to his doorstep were invariably those from whom
the last drop of humanity had long since evaporated: the old Drowned, those from whom the sea had taken everything. They came not as ambassadors of mankind or even of the human dead but as mindless
emissaries of the brine itself.

‘What is it?’ Maskelyne asked again. ‘What lies there? Punishment? Liberation?’

But the Drowned woman did not reply.

Granger woke suddenly with a feeling that something was wrong. He had been dreaming about the Unmer, and Marquetta’s words still reverberated through his thoughts. But
there was something else. He lay there for a moment, listening to the darkness, then opened his eyes. A breeze stirred the gauze curtains covering the windows. The walls were faintly grey from the
starlight reflected off high mountain snow and he could smell the bitter-fresh tang of pine from the surrounding forests. The bed sheets lay crumpled around his legs.

He was struck with an overwhelming sensation that there was someone in the room with him.

He lifted his head and looked around.

Nothing but the curtains blowing in the breeze. No sounds but the distant chuckle of water from a mountain stream.

Granger knew better than to dismiss his instincts. They had saved his life on numerous prior occasions. Quietly, he pulled himself to the edge of the bed and looked underneath it.

Nothing.

He slipped out of bed, feeling the cold stone under his bare feet, and stood there, naked. Pain wrung his joints but he ignored it. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck were standing
on end. His nerves screamed:
There is an intruder in the room.
Only there wasn’t. The room was empty.

The terrace?

From where Granger stood he could see most of the terrace through the translucent curtains. He padded silently across the bedchamber and brushed aside the billowing gauze. The terrace outside
was deserted. A few old pots lay under the balustrade. He could see out across the treetops, the whole valley glimmering faintly silver under a star-dusted sky.

Granger sensed something move behind him. He wheeled round.

Nothing.

But as he stepped back into the room, a wave of dizziness swept over him. He staggered, but managed to stop himself from falling. A sudden sharp pain jabbed his neck, as though something had
bitten him. Granger went to move his arm to slap the offending insect away.

Only he found that he couldn’t. His arm was entirely paralysed.

And then he tried to move his feet.

But they, too, would not budge. Indeed, he found that none of his muscles responded to his will. All of a sudden he was completely unable to move.