The Art of Hunting (6 page)

Her Unmer lenses had changed all that. She could see as well as anybody else. She could see the sunlight piercing the forest canopy overhead, the butterflies flitting between flowers, the warm
moss and lichen-scarred boulders. A fly buzzed past her head and she batted it away. It still felt strange to be directly aware of such things. However, Ianthe’s unique supernormal senses
continued to augment her newly won perceptions of the world, adding a comforting layer of normalcy to what still felt strange and unnerving. When she closed her eyes she could perceive the palace
several miles to the north. For Ianthe, it existed as a great patchwork of light suspended in the darkness, a combination of the perceptions of everyone inhabiting the building.

Weirdness aside, her Unmer lenses had opened up a world of freedom she could never turn her back on. They were, like most such spectacles, psychically linked to a particular sorcerer who had
lived in the past. By turning the tiny wheel on the edge of the frames, she was able to perceive everything the original wearer had witnessed at any given moment during his lifetime. Her mind was
linked, across time, to his, and she could roll back through a lifetime of his perceptions at will. The spectacles allowed her to see through his eyes and him to see through hers. For a normal,
sighted, wearer of the lenses, the ensuing paradoxes resulted in a complete breakdown of the sorcery – what Ethan Maskelyne had called
terminal feedback
. The cosmos would not permit
someone to see their own future.

Ianthe was blind, however. She couldn’t use her own eyes to observe the world. But she could use his. And somewhere amidst these myriad loops of time and sorcery and metaphysics, lenses
that were cheap and commonly regarded as useless gave her the power to see and hear the world she inhabited.

As she marched onwards through sunlit woodland, a pang of misery clenched her heart. She recalled the moment Ethan Maskelyne’s men had thrown her mother, Hana, across a brine-flooded cell
in Granger’s prison, leaving her badly wounded by the toxic water. Ianthe had been leagues away by then, crouched against the bilge of a boat heading for Maskelyne’s fortress on Scythe
Island, but she had been looking through her mother’s eyes.

Ethan Maskelyne – trove expert, metaphysicist, crime lord, psychopath. He had just been another link in the chain of people who’d wished to own Ianthe or use her peculiar talent for
finding treasure. Her life had been a succession of such relationships. Ianthe had earned the money by which she and her mother had survived on Evensraum after the war. They had escaped cholera by
working for a trove scavenger and smuggler. But Emperor Hu’s navy had put a stop to that illegal operation. She’d been passed through Interrogation and then shipped to Ethugra with
thousands of other prisoners of war. God knows what would have become of them if Hana hadn’t identified Granger among the jailers.

She had mixed feelings about having Granger as her father. Even though he had given them refuge, he’d still tried to sell Ianthe to the Haurstaf, which was hardly surprising. That was
before he’d known exactly what she was capable of – before he understood her value to
him
. But by then it was too late. Knowledge of Ianthe’s powers had reached both
Ethan Maskelyne and Haurstaf leader Briana Marks.

And so the course of Ianthe’s life was, as always, channelled by the needs and desires of others. The Haurstaf had taken her from Maskelyne for the same reasons that Maskelyne had stolen
her away from Granger and then subsequently tried to wrench her back from the Haurstaf by bombarding their palace. Ianthe lived her life like a shuttle in a loom. And now Granger had come to take
her away from Awl again. An endless cycle.

Ianthe had had enough. She was tired of doing what other people wanted. Tired of being a victim. Tired of being that shuttle in the loom. When the Haurstaf realized the scale of Ianthe’s
powers, they’d understood how much of a threat she could be to their whole way of life. But rather than trust her as an ally, they chose to kill her. And in their torture cell they’d
dug so deep into Ianthe’s mind that they’d triggered something inside her. By trying to understand her powers they had inadvertently unleashed an even greater power. Ianthe had used it
to devastating effect. Her rage had decimated her captors, giving the Unmer the chance to escape their prisons.

When she thought of Paulus Marquetta, her heart took a fluttering leap. In him she recognized a kindred spirit. He, too, knew what it felt like to be enslaved. He wouldn’t judge her for
what she’d done, she felt sure.

He wouldn’t despise her.

If Ianthe could find forgiveness anywhere, then it would be with the Unmer.

With her prince.

Ianthe halted in a forest clearing where a great profusion of tiny white flowers had sprung from the grass, carpeting the earth in swathes and hummocks so bright they might have been crystals of
salt or ice. She recognized the delicate scent from the Evensraum woodlands of her childhood, but had no name for it. And she stood for a moment, filling her lungs with that natural perfume and
marvelling at the freshness and intensity of the colours.

But then she sensed movement nearby. One of her father’s replicates was close. She hurled herself into its mind and glimpsed its metal-shod boots compressing the soft earth, and suddenly
she was in another part of the forest. Putting her mind inside these sorcerous creations felt odd – quite unlike the sensation of occupying another person. All the senses were there, but
still something was missing. Something indeterminable. Ianthe looked out through the replicate’s eyes and realized that it was getting too close to her physical body for comfort. She vacated
the thing at once.

And ran.

She avoided the replicates easily and soon found herself picking her way along a deep gully in a quieter part of the forest. Granger’s sorcerous copies were off to the west – near
one of the gun emplacements, where numerous tracks made the terrain easier to traverse. But Ianthe had come to know the forest trails well during her time as a Haurstaf student and this short cut
would see her reach the palace before any of her father’s copies. Occasionally she heard the snap of gunfire. Hunters, probably. She sensed deer moving a few hundred yards further up the
slope to her right, and when she closed her eyes and let her mind perceive the forest through its birds and insects, the world became a soft and dreamlike labyrinth of light and sound.

For several hours Ianthe wandered onwards through the forest and finally, as the sun was heading for the mountains, she reached a rocky outcropping overlooking the former Haurstaf palace.

Smoke still rose from the shattered eastern wing of the palace, where Maskelyne’s explosives had reduced the grand carved façades and tall windows to a great clutter of rubble.
Dozens of palace guards and servants were working in teams, clearing away the debris as they hunted for survivors. Several lines of men and women passed stones and buckets of dust and grit down and
emptied them beyond the area of destruction. Ianthe was surprised to see a few Unmer among them.

As she watched, a group of riders approached through the forest. She recognized Prince Marquetta among them. There could be no mistaking his regal bearing and sunburst yellow hair. The prince
dismounted and went over to the nearest line of workers. He spoke with one of the palace guards and then turned and waved his riding companions over.

Ianthe watched with delight as the majority of the riders, along with Prince Marquetta himself, joined the guards and servants moving rubble. Any fears she might have had regarding the reception
she was likely to receive from the Unmer were somewhat allayed.

They were still clearing rubble an hour later when Ianthe strode out of the woods.

The prince and two palace guards were squatting on a great mound of stone and mortar, using a beam to lever up a fallen section of wall when Ianthe approached them. He was covered in dust and
sweat and so preoccupied with his exertions that he merely glanced her way at first. But then he suddenly stopped what he was doing and turned and gaped at her. The palace guards looked up, too,
and reacted at once, dropping the beam in what was almost a panicked scramble to reclaim the bows they had placed nearby. Their hands went to the hilts of their swords.

Ianthe realized she was still wearing Haurstaf robes. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I won’t harm you.’

The guards continued to watch her cautiously. But then Prince Marquetta’s eyes suddenly widened and he said, ‘It
is
you. Ianthe. The girl from my dream.’

She gave a nervous nod.

‘But your father . . .’

‘My father and I have come to a disagreement over my future.’

The young prince climbed down from the rubble and dusted his hands. He approached her, his violet eyes burning with curiosity. ‘I have the chance to thank you, at last,’ he said. And
then he took her hands and grinned and dropped to his knees right there. ‘So thank you, my dear Ianthe. We Unmer owe you a debt of gratitude we can never repay.’

Ianthe felt her face blush. Everyone was looking at her.

‘We Unmer use dreams to speak to our patrons,’ Marquetta said. ‘The entities your kind call
elder gods
. I was in such a dream when we met. You interrupted my
conversation.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t—’

‘Please don’t be,’ Marquetta said. ‘Gods can be tedious. You, most certainly were not. I remember it vividly. And how delightful it is to discover that you are even more
beautiful in the flesh.’

Ianthe felt her cheeks burn with even greater insistence. ‘Thank you, Prince Marquetta.’

‘Call me Paulus,’ he said, and kissed her hand. ‘Now tell me, Ianthe: where is your father? I imagine he’s looking everywhere for you.’

In his present state of physical exhaustion Granger had no option but to allow his power armour to do the work for him. The suit augmented his limbs and made him inhumanly
strong. The razor-thin whorls etched into the metal plates scattered light, endowing the suit with a patina of rainbows. His boots pounded the soft earth, leaving deep depressions in his wake. He
weighed, he supposed, more than three men combined.

And as he ran he let a part of his overworked mind control his eight replicates.

He used them as he would have utilized a small unit of real soldiers. The five furthest away he forced to fan out ahead and to the sides, flanking his position through the forest while
maintaining a defensive perimeter. The others he called closer. He wanted them near: three more blades to bear upon whatever dangers he might run into.

He looked for Ianthe but did not spot her and soon he had reached the place where he had, through one of his replicates, encountered the Unmer prince and his retinue.

Bursts of sunlight lit the forest canopy to the west, the greens and yellows now beginning to shudder at the edges of his vision. He felt that his eyesight might fail him. But down in the defile
wherein the riders had passed it remained rest-fully gloomy. Earth-scented mulch compressed under his heels as he climbed down, his great mass sinking his boots in deep. He ordered his sorcerous
companions out into the forested slopes on either side, and then proceeded along the firmer ground of the trail itself.

He had not gone far when a shot rang out.

A bullet glanced off his armour at the shoulder and pinged into the woods.
No . . . Not
his
shoulder
. It took him a moment to realize that one of the sword replicates had been
hit, and in that instant of confusion came the
crack
of two more shots. He felt the bullets strike the replicate’s chest plate and heard the metal emit an angry buzz and crackle that
sent involuntary spasms through his own muscles. His subconscious reacted, willing the replicate to dive for cover, while he amassed and collated feedback from the others in order to locate the
source of the gunfire.

There.

They were crouched behind boulders on the summit of a rise, a hundred yards or so north of his current position. Haurstaf riflemen: most likely scouts or simply soldiers on hunting detachment.
Each of them possessed a light carbine rifle. Their location offered them a good view of the trail and a good place to ambush travellers, but it was on the forest east of the trail that their
attention was now fixed, the very spot where one of Granger’s replicates now crouched behind a smooth grey boulder. They did not appear to have spotted the others.

Granger sensed his other replicates, now moving to flank the gunmen. Had he ordered them to do so? He could not recall. His thoughts stuttered. And suddenly he found himself standing a dozen
yards further along the path, with no memory of having actually moved. Instantly he felt dizzy. Another ten yards would have brought him into plain view of the ambushers on the slope ahead. In a
moment of terrible confusion it had seemed to him that he was a replicate himself, a slave to one of the others.

Were they using him as a distraction? A target to draw the riflemen’s fire?

He gathered his willpower.

Crack.

Something slammed into his eye and knocked him round. Green and golden sunlight whirled, fractured by branches. As he turned, he glimpsed ferns spattered with blood and brain and fragments of
his own skull. He fell. His face struck warm ground, felt earth between his teeth, the smell of wood and dirt, liquid trickling down his neck. Was that his blood? His mouth was dry – a
crabbing pain moving up the side of his head.

And he was standing at the bottom of the rise again with the blade clenched in his fist and the echo of the shot that had killed him rolling away through the forest. The Unmer sword shuddered
faintly, expelling the fallen replicate to non-existence. And then it trembled again and, with a hideous sensation of dislocation, a fresh copy of himself appeared on the trail before him. The
thing simply materialized out of thin air, its arrival announced by a faint
pop
and an inrush of wind. It looked at Granger with its corpse-flesh eyes before turning towards the riflemen
and loping away up the slope in their direction.