The Art of Hunting (34 page)

Night was fully upon them now and the surrounding halls and temples of Doma revealed themselves as hulking slabs of darkness briefly silhouetted against the intermittent lightning – or
else as grey and crumbling façades burned into the retina. The sea hissed and the winds moaned through empty doors and windows, turning the buildings into so many monstrous throats.

Ianthe took a gem lantern, wiped her lenses clear of brine spray and clambered up some rocks near where they’d made their camp. She soon found a doorway in one wall of the derelict hall
and ventured inside. The structure held four nests – crude curved embankments of mortared stone and whalebones set against the lower walls. The air was rank with the dense musk and blood
odour of the dragons. But Duke Cyr’s entropic wraiths had left nothing alive. Ianthe wandered among the scorched remains of old and young dragons, blues, greens. She had no idea how many of
them had been killed in here, but it seemed to be far more than the number of dwellings would suggest. Evidently other adults had come to the aid of their neighbours’ young.

She climbed up the edge of the nearest nest and peered down into it. All three of the eggs had been smashed open revealing the dog-sized pink foetuses within.

It was the same story, she discovered, for the other nests.

She sensed someone watching her and turned to see Paulus standing in the dark a short distance away.

‘They destroyed the eggs, too,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘You feel pity for them?’ he asked. ‘The young?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Of course.’

Lightning coursed across the skies, illuminating the vast hall and the broken bloody corpses within. A moment later, the ruined walls resounded with thunder.

‘Still no sign of your father?’ he said.

The question took her unawares and she hesitated a moment before finally answering. ‘There are a lot of people in the world.’

He gave a slight shrug. ‘I would understand if you didn’t want him found.’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s just . . .’

He waited.

‘There are so many people,’ she went on. ‘More than I could ever hope to visit. And sometimes it’s hard to reconcile the visions that I see with the real world.
Particularly if there are no landmarks to go by. It’s the same with the
Ilena Grey
, harder even . . .’

‘It’s a big ocean,’ he conceded. ‘And she might not even sail upon it.’

‘You think she could have sunk?’

He shrugged. ‘More likely we simply haven’t found her yet.’

‘But what if we don’t find her? Or we can’t contact them? How will we escape?’

‘We have another ship, Ianthe.’

She gave him a puzzled look. ‘What ship?’

‘Our wedding present. Cyr is preparing to uncork it now.’

‘The bottle?’ she said. ‘You mean the ship in the bottle?’ As outrageous as it seemed, she forced herself to consider it. If a great flock of wraiths had come from the
first bottle, could a usable ship come from the second?

Paulus approached her, stepping carefully over the blasted ground. ‘The bottles are not unlike ichusae,’ he said. ‘They act as doors between one place and another. Each of
these four bottles accesses a different artificial universe created by Fiorel. They are far smaller and more fragile than our own cosmos. Opening the bottle unleashes whatever is stored
there.’

‘Fiorel made those wraiths?’

‘And the ship, and whatever lies in the other bottles.’

‘But how did he know we’d need these things?’

Paulus shrugged. ‘The gods are ancient and wise. Fiorel knew that we would pass Doma on the way to the Anean peninsula. Perhaps he anticipated my reaction and the subsequent
battle.’

Ianthe thought about this. She couldn’t see how anyone could have predicted Paulus’s violent outburst that had led to their present dilemma. No one but Paulus himself.

‘When the battle raged,’ he said, ‘were you ever inside me?’

She didn’t answer at once. It had all happened so quickly. And in the chaos she had leaped from mind to mind. Had she been inside her lover at any point? ‘No,’ she said,
honestly. ‘I made you a promise.’

‘What does it feel like?’

‘Like this,’ she said. ‘Like life. Except you’re carried. You are there . . . but without control. A passenger.’

He leaned forward and whispered in her ear. ‘Do it now. Move inside me.’

‘I swore to you I wouldn’t.’

He placed a hand upon her cheek. ‘I want you to,’ he said. ‘Just this once. I want to see if I can feel you inside me.’

Ianthe shivered. She could feel his breath upon her neck. And then he pulled back and gazed into her eyes.

She slid her mind inside his own.

And saw herself exactly as he did – a dark-eyed girl, at once sad and fearful and breathless. ‘You are there now?’ he said. ‘Inside me?’

She watched herself nod slowly.

‘You see what I see?’

Another nod.

‘And feel what I feel?’

He smiled and then leaned forward and kissed her deeply. And then he eased her back against the wall and slid his hands down her body. He lifted her dress. She felt his fingertips between her
thighs, each delicious sensation coming to her through a wonderful union of both his senses and her own. He pressed hard against her. She clung to him desperately and shuddered as he pushed inside
her.

‘How does it feel?’ he said.

Her breaths were fast and hard against his neck. She inhaled the scent of him.

He whispered in her ear, ‘How does it feel to fuck someone who could kill you in an instant?’

Ianthe smiled. She drew her hands more tightly around him and pulled him deeper inside her.

Ianthe and Paulus returned to the camp to find that Howlish’s men had erected a crude sailcloth shelter to protect them from the worst of wind and rain. The
prince’s uncle, Duke Cyr, had not availed himself of this shelter. He was standing on the edge of the rock promontory, gazing out at the brooding storm-lit sea.

He turned at their approach, and it seemed to Ianthe that he gave the young prince a questioning glance. And yet perhaps she imagined it. A degree of paranoia accompanied her racing heart. A
part of her could not help but wonder how anyone gazing upon her flushed and breathless face could
not
instinctively know what had transpired. She had undergone a change so profound that
its effect must yet radiate from her.

‘Success, Uncle?’ Paulus said, in an oddly flat tone that made his words sound – to Ianthe’s presently overly sensitive mind – more like a statement than a
question.

‘I was awaiting your return. If it pleases you, I will open the rift now.’

‘Do it. I am growing tired of this rock.’

The duke nodded. From his pocket he brought out the second bottle and held it up before them. It was hardly bigger than his thumb. Inside it, Ianthe could see the tiny ship floating upon a
finger’s width of brine.

The duke carried the little bottle down to the edge of the sea, where he asked Paulus to raise his gem lantern. By its light he pulled the stopper free from the bottle and peered intently at the
contents. He said, ‘As I thought.’

‘Reflected light?’ Paulus said.

‘Indeed. Thankfully there’s no need to venture closer.’With that he merely set the bottle down on a rock and waved Paulus and Ianthe away.

They clambered back up the rocks to the camp.

‘The ship was never in the bottle,’ Cyr said. ‘Merely the light it reflected.’ His gaze scanned the dark waters and then he stopped. ‘There,’ he said,
pointing. ‘There! There it is. Yet again, Fiorel has anticipated our plight and come to our aid.’

At first Ianthe saw nothing. But then another flicker of lightning tore across the night, and by that illumination she caught a momentary glimpse of
something
. A mass of faint white
lines hanging over the sea? Weblike, but chaotic – without discernible shape. And then full darkness returned to swallow the vision.

But, no . . .

Some trace of it still remained. The lines, she now perceived, were becoming brighter with each passing moment. And yet more of them appeared, gossamer-like, forming in the air a hundred yards
from where Ianthe stood. Like a phantasmal drawing, something was taking shape out on that black ocean. And, as she watched, it became recognizable.
A pale and ghostly sailing ship, wreathed in
ethereal fire
. Her four masts and square-rigged sails identified her as a barque, albeit of an unusual and seemingly archaic design. She was much larger than the Haurstaf man-o’-war they
had so recently been forced to abandon – heavier, bulkier and yet infinitely more insubstantial. Her decks and masts were not constructed from timber and iron, but from the ghosts of those
materials. Her hull seemed formed from lightning and liquid fire. Her masts and shrouds were opaque, mist-like. There were moments when Ianthe thought she could see clear through the whole
ship.

Upon her decks there stood strange cannon-like devices, each formed of the same pale energy and fronted with a series of sparkling discs.

And how she burned!

Streams of pale fire coursed across the barque’s timbers and played in her rigging and shrouds. Every nail and knot and dowel crackled with the same mysterious ethereal energy. And yet
down below the waterline, where the keel met the brine of the Mare Lux, the white flames became fierce and angry – a mass of bonfire golds and reds that gave Ianthe the uneasy impression of a
funeral barge recently set alight.

‘Fiorel has a morbid sense of humour,’ Duke Cyr remarked.

Ianthe frowned. ‘How so?’

The old man pointed. ‘See the name etched on her bow?’

It read:
St Augustine
.

In response to Ianthe’s puzzled frown Paulus said, ‘Cyr’s patron has conjured us a ghost ship. The
St Augustine
has a dark past. She was once a plague ship. King Uten
the First requisitioned her to carry plague victims from Galea to an isolated colony on the Herlon coast.’

‘Over a thousand years ago now,’ Cyr added. ‘Before the seas began to rise.’

‘But there never was a colony,’ Paulus said. ‘It was merely a ruse. A frigate of the king’s navy escorted her for three days out into the open sea. On the fourth day they
opened fire on her. The
St Augustine
sank, taking all eight hundred souls onboard with her to the seabed.’

‘That’s awful,’ Ianthe said.

‘But it wasn’t the end,’ Paulus went on. ‘If the stories are to be believed, then the
St Augustine
has been seen many times since then. Her appearance was always
said to foretell disaster for any who spotted her.’ He leaned closer and lowered his voice. ‘Fiorel has given careful thought to this name. Enemies of ours who look upon this ship will
see her as a harbinger of doom.’

She nodded. ‘Why does the ship glow?’

‘It is wrought from light,’ Paulus said.

Ianthe looked back at the ship. It burned with ghostly fire, lighting up the seas all around. Indeed, its very fabric seemed to surge between solid and ethereal, fading in and out of existence
before her eyes. She could see the waves crashing against its fiery hull, but occasionally she’d catch glimpses of the sea
through
that same hull. It remained, to her eyes, a phantom
vessel.

All except in one place.

There was a cubic object within the ghostly timbers – a box or perhaps a room – that appeared consistently solid. While the vessel around it phased back and forth between the
corporeal and the ethereal, this one component remained a solid white block. At no point could she see through it.

Captain Howlish and his men had seen the apparition too and now gathered on the promontory around Ianthe, Paulus and Duke Cyr. Howlish said, ‘I’ve seen Valcinder magicians pull
whistles from the air, but never a ship.’

Cyr grunted. ‘Whistles we don’t need.’

‘Well, I applaud you, sir,’ Howlish added. ‘And your good sense. That barque, I see, is well anchored.’ He hesitated. ‘Assuming it is more substantial than it
looks, we’ll pull the gear across at first light.’

Cyr wandered over to one of the crates that they’d rescued from the
Irillian Herald
. He grabbed one of the heavy metal rings he called an amplifier and then rummaged around until
he found a gem lantern and what appeared to be a small stone sphere on a chain. He slid the ring over his hand and wore it like a huge bracelet. And then he attached the chain to a hook in the
lantern’s peaked cap. When he released the stone, it floated upwards, pulling at the lantern as though it meant to carry it skywards. Cyr opened one of the gem lantern’s metal
shutters.

The crewmen gasped and shielded their eyes or else turned away from the fearsome glare emitted by that lantern. Its wide beam shone far across the waters. Then Cyr opened the other two shutters
and released the lantern. It floated upwards, blazing like a small sun.

Ianthe marvelled at the sudden change in her surroundings. The sky above remained black and dense with thunder-heads, but here the sea now shimmered like the brightest jade, and the halls of
Carhen Doma basked in strange daylight.

Cyr turned to Howlish. ‘First light,’ he said.

The gem lantern remained hovering in the air, several hundred feet above them, for several hours – which was more than enough time, as it turned out, to ferry people and supplies out to
the
St Augustine
. Howlish’s men regarded the barque with unease, cautious of the spectral inferno that rippled across her bulwarks and yards and even plucked at their own boots as
they carried cargo across the decks.

Ianthe stood on the deck with the prince and his uncle, while Howlish’s men worked around them. The translucent timbers beneath their feet emitted an eerie glow, and yet they supported
their weight as effectively as any plain wooden board. Howlish had sent men to explore below decks. Now he turned to the prince and said, ‘We could plunder the
Herald
for more
supplies, if you like, but it’s a risky business in these seas and we’ve more than enough food and water now to reach Losoto.’

Paulus’s eyes were inscrutable, but Ianthe had the feeling he was weighing something up. ‘No, you are quite correct,’ he said. ‘Let’s not linger here a moment
longer.’