The Art of Hunting (38 page)

The door opened and Paulus stood there, wearing a red silk gown. Looking vaguely annoyed, he stepped out and partially closed the door behind him. ‘Ianthe?’

‘What is brine?’

‘What?’

‘Brine!’ she said. ‘Where does it come from?’

‘It’s poison. Ianthe, what’s going on?’

She hesitated. If she told him the truth, she would have to admit spying on Duke Cyr. ‘I had a dream,’ she said. ‘It scared me. Can I come in?’

He frowned. ‘This isn’t a good time, Ianthe.’

‘I won’t—’ She stopped, suddenly aware that someone was in the room with him. She could sense their presence hovering behind the door. She felt it at the periphery of her
consciousness, yet held back from reaching out with her mind to investigate. She stiffened against him, and drew back. ‘Who’s there with you?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘In your cabin. Who’s that in your cabin?’

He glanced away. ‘It’s just Nera.’

‘Nera?’ A knot tightened in Ianthe’s gut.

‘I told you it wasn’t a good time,’ Paulus said. ‘The imperial armada is currently two leagues south-east of us. Nera is communicating with it.’

The pressure in Ianthe’s stomach didn’t lessen. ‘Communicating?’

‘One of the emperor’s psychics has turned,’ he said. ‘She’s agreed to help us in exchange for her own life. She doesn’t want to face you, Ianthe.’ He
closed the door behind him and then took her hands in his. ‘But there’s another Guild witch with the fleet and that one has already sensed Nera and given our position to her captain. We
don’t yet know if she’s betrayed her colleague, but we expect the Imperial Navy to engage at first light. I must be ready and so must you, Ianthe.’ He squeezed her hands lightly.
‘Go and get some sleep.’

Ianthe’s gaze shifted from Paulus’s earnest face to his closed cabin door. She could easily have slipped behind Nera’s eyes, or even crushed the girl’s mind with a
thought, but that path could only lead to despair. She trusted Paulus implicitly, didn’t she? Then what was this knot that kept twisting inside her?

‘Perhaps I should stay up with you?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I need you well rested and alert for tomorrow.’ He leaned down and kissed her cheek. His perfume lingered on her skin.

His
perfume?

‘Goodnight, Ianthe,’ he said.

Ianthe glanced at his cabin door again. What she wanted to say was,
Do you love me?
But she was afraid she’d see a lie in his eyes. Instead she said, ‘Goodnight.’

Sleep was a long time coming for her. Her mind kept replaying the events of the evening: Nera’s presence in Paulus’s cabin and the sight of that alien sea in Cyr’s mirror. He
had been
conversing
with it. He had been talking about the tournament, she felt sure.

These thoughts spun around in her mind for hours. She began to feel as if she’d never fall asleep.

And then she awoke suddenly, her eyes blinking at the orange glare filtering through the opaque cabin wall. The sun was already climbing above the horizon. Ianthe felt exhausted. A bell was
ringing above decks.

She filled a metal basin and splashed water on her face, trying to dispel the fog of sleep. If only it were as easy to dispel the knot of anguish in her stomach.

There was an urgent knocking at the cabin door.

She opened it to find Paulus standing there, dressed in his finest velvets and leathers. A pale grey sealskin cloak enveloped his shoulders, parting at his waist to reveal the jewel-crusted
pommel of an exquisite rapier. On his head he wore a set of brass navigator’s goggles, held securely by a leather strap with tiny end-springs. His face was pale and drawn, and yet he exuded a
sort of nervous energy. ‘They’re moving to attack,’ he said.

‘I’ve just woken,’ she protested.

‘Dress quickly and meet me above deck.’ He turned to leave.

‘Paulus?’

He stopped and looked back at her.

‘Do you love me?’

He looked startled, and Ianthe couldn’t help but sense a vague air of annoyance in his reply. ‘Of course I do,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ll see you in five
minutes.’ Then he hurried away.

Ianthe watched him go. His attitude left her with an empty feeling in her heart. He was taking her help for granted. At that moment she wished that she had no preternatural vision and no power
over the Haurstaf. She wanted to be normal. But she was also terrified of what that would mean. All this time she had been unwilling to admit to herself the real reason Paulus was marrying her. She
had forbidden herself from asking the question because she was afraid to know the answer. She was so used to viewing the world through other people’s eyes that she had clung to a comforting
perception
of her relationship with Paulus, rather than look at the naked truth. She had created her own fiction.

But it wasn’t enough.

She still felt hollow as she dressed in loose comfortable clothing, choosing the least ostentatious of the garments with which she had been supplied: a light grey spider-silk blouse and dark
grey woollen breeches. She draped a patterned scarf around her neck and then grabbed her hooded sealskin cape on her way out.

The eastern sky was starfish pink and the low sunlight turned the
St Augustine
’s deck candle-flame orange. Ianthe spotted her fiancé standing by the starboard gunwale with
Duke Cyr, Captain Howlish and Nera. The Haurstaf psychic cast a nervous glance in Ianthe’s direction, then folded her arms and looked away. Even now Ianthe felt a stab of jealousy. In this
light, the girl’s hair shone as brightly as gold, and a touch of pink coloured her pale cheeks. All three of the men were looking out towards the north-east. As Ianthe joined them, her breath
caught in her throat. The sight before her cut through her dark mood.

Ships covered the ocean to the north. At least a hundred of them: destroyers, frigates, galleons and men-o’-war, their hulls clad in copper or brass or blue, black, brown, green and red
dragon scales in solid swathes or motleys gleaming like boiled candy. Innumerable painted sails rose above the dark waters, their stylized designs depicting ancient gods or weapons or beasts of
legend or one of scores of noble crests. Metal-bound bows smashed waves to spume. Purple and gold imperial pennants fluttered from countless masts. From everywhere came the glint of armour and
brass cannon.

‘So many,’ Ianthe said.

Paulus glanced round at her. ‘Do you sense the Haurstaf witches? Nera says they’re keeping them out to the rear of the armada. Two vessels, both frigates: the
Warhorse
and
the
Castle Sky
.’

‘Those ships probably won’t engage,’ Howlish said. ‘They won’t risk losing psychics.’

Ianthe glanced at Nera, but the other girl wouldn’t meet her eye. ‘I’ll look for them,’ she said.

Ianthe cast her consciousness out and saw the armada as a bright patchwork of decks and sails and pools of ocean all hung in nebulous darkness. These were the collected perceptions of thousands
of sailors and she raced through their minds, skipping from one to another like a vengeful spirit hunting for a body to possess.

But she could not find either psychic.

‘They’ve kept them away from the crew,’ she said.‘If nobody out there can see them, then I can’t. I don’t know which ships are which, I have to look for
someone who’s alone, and . . .’ And just as she said it, she found someone who was apart from all the others. A solitary figure in a small cabin situated near the stern of one of the
frigates. ‘I’ve found one,’ she said. ‘I think . . . it has to be.’

‘Find the other,’ Paulus said.

Ianthe sent her mind out again and a few minutes later she located a second person, similarly hidden from the sight of the crew. This passenger was located in a midships cabin of another
frigate. Short of glimpsing them looking into a mirror, Ianthe had no way of knowing for sure if these two minds belonged to the Haurstaf witches she sought, but it seemed likely enough, as every
other crewmember was in plain sight of another. She hurled her mind above decks, flitting through the ship’s crew. Was this the frigate she sought?

She couldn’t be sure.

Her assumption had to be good enough. Now that she had the position of the two witches, she could shuttle back and forth between their minds, ready to crush any psychic attack they might unleash
against the Unmer.

‘Are we set?’ Paulus said.

‘I still don’t know which one of them is on our side, I don’t know who to—’

‘But you know
where
they are?’

She nodded. ‘I think so.’

‘Then kill them both if you have to.’

She was about to protest, but then stopped herself. It was best not to question Paulus in public. If it came to it, she would find a way to tell which one of her targets was the enemy.
She’d have to.

The prince turned to his uncle and gave him a grim nod.

Duke Cyr held up the third of his patron’s sorcerous bottles. The glass glinted in the sun, and the tiny maggot within floated in clear liquid. ‘Once this begins,’ he said.
‘There’s no going back.’ He glanced at Howlish. ‘You know what you have to do?’

The captain nodded.

‘In that case, gentlemen,’ Cyr said, ‘let us proceed.’ He removed the stopper and flung the bottle into the sea.

Nothing happened for a few moments, and then a sudden cataclysm of light erupted in the watery depths ahead of them. For a heartbeat the whole ocean was awash with flickering amber luminance.
Ianthe’s teeth thrummed. She thought she heard a high-pitched tone at the very limits of her perception, although she couldn’t be certain. Bolts of energy tore through the brine,
fathoms down, turning from yellow to angry red. In those few moments it seemed to her that a great swathe of the ocean before her had turned to fire.

The sea became dark once more, and yet the event elicited a response from the imperial armada as ships immediately began to manoeuvre around the affected area, clearly anticipating some Unmer
trick.

Paulus looked at his uncle.

‘It’s coming,’ Cyr said. Suddenly he pointed ahead of them to where a vast cloud of mist or steam had begun to rise from the surface of the waters. ‘There! You see the
shift in entropy?’

‘Then it is Vadra?’

The older man nodded. ‘As we thought.’

Ianthe seized Paulus’s arm. ‘The worm?’

‘The Uriun,’ he said. ‘The Worm of Vadra.’

The sea ahead of them began to bubble furiously. And then an acre of surface swelled upwards suddenly, rising ten or more feet before collapsing back downwards and forming a great circular
wave.

Ianthe clung to Paulus. ‘It’s vast.’

He grinned. ‘This is but a tiny piece of it.’

Howlish let out a growl. ‘Two degrees to port,’ he cried, signalling frantically to the helmsman to bring the ship’s bow more precisely into line with the oncoming water.

But there simply wasn’t time. The
St Augustine
’s bow pitched sharply upwards as the wave passed under her hull, and then she plunged down again. To port, the
Ilena
Grey
’s mast tilted as she also rode the wave, her hull rocking sharply before settling.

The expanding circle of seawater passed beneath the armada without upturning any of Hu’s ships. They were still beyond cannon range, turning now to flank the two Unmer ships.

‘I would have expected a psychic attack by now,’ Duke Cyr remarked.

Paulus shrugged. ‘You think the other witch has turned?’

‘I wouldn’t count on it.’

From under the sea there came a series of flickering lights, as silent as a distant lightning storm. Ianthe could see a massive shadow down there, a mountainous ill-defined shape rising up
towards the surface. It was pulsing with strange jellyfish luminescence, silent explosions of blue, green and red that spread across a great expanse of the sea. The sheer size of the thing
afflicted her with awe. It seemed larger than the whole of the imperial armada.

And then suddenly it broke the surface.

A great mass of writhing coils appeared on the face of the waters. The creature was worm-like, but throbbing with colours that streamed across its darkly gelatinous skin. As it uncoiled, Ianthe
first thought that she was looking at a great number of serpents, but then she realized that it was merely one creature with many heads and tendrils. They rose now above the sea, bursting up
through the waves, dripping brine: hundreds of fat eyeless stalks, each with a vertical slit for a mouth, and each mouth glistening with tiny red teeth; and still hundreds more tentacles, slender
and rippling with bright colours.

But then Ianthe noticed something odd about the creature. Its many heads and tendrils were, to different extents, translucent. While some appeared ghostlike, ethereal, others were more solid. As
she watched it untangle itself and extend its reach across the steaming seas, it seemed to her that these lashing appendages left gaseous trails behind them, or else faded out entirely, only to
reappear again, giving the overall impression of a mirage.

‘Why does it seem to blur and vanish in places?’ she asked Paulus.

‘The worm’s body loops through time as well as space,’ he replied. ‘The necks and tentacles . . . the . . . ah, you see there, the light shining through that cluster of
heads? It is merely the same head revisiting the present moment many times over.’ He smiled. ‘It is one of several . . . unusual defences the worm employs. Such powers make it almost
impossible to kill.’

She shivered.

He placed his hand on her shoulder. ‘We have nothing to fear from it,’ he said. ‘But we must be ready for reprisals.’

She nodded.

Several ships of the armada had turned to bring their cannons to bear on the Uriun, and Ianthe now saw a series of bright flashes from their scale- and metal-clad hulls. A moment later the air
shook with multiple concussions.
Crack, crack, crack.
The Uriun shuddered and writhed amidst the drifting smoke, and yet the attack did not appear to harm it in any way.

Its tentacles had by now reached the first of the emperor’s ships – a galleon armoured in bright copper. The ghostly appendages wrapped around masts and yards, ripping through
sailcloth and snapping rope. A larger tentacle coiled around the hull. Crewmen ran, screaming, to the quarterdeck. Rifles flashed. And then the creature pulled hard.