The Art of Hunting (7 page)

Again, Granger could not recall having ordered it to do so.

Stop.
His mind groped for the other replicates.
Stay where you are.

Suddenly he was running again.

Why?

He stopped, unsure.

When he heard screaming, Granger finally understood that he had lost control. He sat down on the ground and began to laugh. Images flashed through his mind: of wide white eyes and teeth and
flesh cleaved open. The steel barrels of carbine rifles bent double by powerful gauntlets. He was no longer in a woodland of sun and leaves but in a forest of green glass, a mass of shards that
split his vision into innumerable planes. Rifts of shadow clashed with light as white as pain. And somewhere in that frenzy of broken images he witnessed the brutal murder of the Haurstaf riflemen
on the rise.

Drop the sword.

He wanted to drop the sword, but he could not.

Drop the sword.

Some part of him begged his hand to release his grip on the weapon. But yet another part was using the blade up there on the summit of the slope – in three hands, in four hands, in six of
his hands. And that part of his mind refused. He growled with impotent rage, powerless to do anything but watch as his replicates hacked and hacked at the unfortunate men and his splintered vision
turned from green to red.

They gave Ianthe a suite of chambers overlooking the meditation garden in the westernmost courtyard. This accommodation had previously belonged to a high-ranking Haurstaf
official, and Ianthe wondered if the prince had chosen this suite merely because the official was as close to Ianthe’s size as the servants could find. Everything in the wardrobes fitted her
like a glove.

On the morning after her arrival here she paced back and forth before the mirror on the gilt and onyx wardrobe and tried on the clothes of a woman she had probably murdered. In addition to the
white Haurstaf robes were scores of other garments: gowns in gold and silver and alabaster colours and spider-silk blouses and quilted hunting outfits and shoes by the dozen woven with fine
precious metals. A dragon-bone chest in the corner of the room held enough jewellery to buy a house.

However, as beautiful as they were, none of clothes felt right. She would try something on, and stare at herself and then inevitably feel guilty and miserable. How could she delight in wages of
her sins? She stood in the bedroom and gazed around at the myriad piles of sumptuous fabric. And then she piled it all unceremoniously back into the wardrobe and went through to the bathroom.
There, she removed her own threadbare and mud-stained robe, washed it in the bath using hand soap and hung it up to dry.

The servants brought her bowls of fruit for breakfast and she dined at an elaborately sculpted glass table beside the window. The light pouring through the window made the table sparkle like a
frost-crusted bush.

Ianthe was so nervous about breaking the blasted thing that she became tense and clumsy. It was probably inevitable that she should knock her mug over, spilling coffee that dripped down through
the transparent intricacies. In her panic to mop it up, she knocked over a vase, which chipped the table surface and then rolled off and hit the floor and shattered.

She stopped, breathing hard, and stared at the destruction she’d caused and almost wept.

When the servant girl came to collect the breakfast plates an hour later she found Ianthe sitting on the floor in her damp and wrinkled robes, scrubbing at the glass table with a napkin.

‘Please, ma’am,’ the girl said. ‘Let me.’

Ianthe stopped what she was doing, and said, ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean . . . I . . .’

‘The prince has asked for you,’ the girl said.

Ianthe stared at her.

‘He’s waiting for you in the garden below the window.’

‘He’s there
now
?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Please don’t call me that. My name is Ianthe.’

‘Yes, Miss Ianthe.’

‘You say he’s waiting there now?’

‘Yes, Miss Ianthe.’

‘Can you take me there?’

‘Yes, miss. Now?’

‘Please.’

The servant studied her a moment. ‘Would you like to change first, miss?’

Ianthe looked down at her miserable robes, then glanced at the wardrobe again.

She found Paulus sitting waiting for her on a bench beneath a whitewashed wall against which the Haurstaf gardeners had trained fans of pears and almonds. He was reading a small leather book in
Unmer, but looked up when she approached.

‘Ianthe,’ he said, rising and taking her hand. ‘How wonderful you look.’ His gaze wandered approvingly over her pale silk skirt and a cream quilted jacket with its gold
filigree. ‘I see that everything was the correct size?’

‘Thank you, Your—’

‘Call me Paulus,’ he said. ‘I insist.’

He led her along the crushed-shell path and under a vine-smothered arbour dripping with plump grapes. Fruit, he explained, that was ripening earlier in the season, thanks to sorcerous heat
blades driven into the soil. Yet another aspect of Unmer culture borrowed by Haurstaf.

And so they walked among the lavender and sage and inhaled the scent of wallflowers and Paulus talked eagerly of the future Ianthe had given his people. The air seemed ripe with possibilities.
His uncle Cyr had, he explained, come to a provisional agreement with the Haurstaf military. Some four thousand soldiers in bases around the palace now had new paymasters – a transition that
had been remarkably uneventful. There were enough riches in the palace to keep an army that size paid for decades to come, with enough left over to build a fleet of ships should the Haurstaf navy
prove less cooperative.

‘However,’ Paulus explained. ‘Our priority is our people in Losoto.’

Thousands of Unmer remained imprisoned in the ghettos there, under the guard of a unit of Haurstaf psychics – an arrangement which was paid for by Emperor Hu himself at Guild insistence.
Presumably Hu had heard of the Haurstaf’s demise in Awl, but as yet there had been no response from him.

There had been survivors among the Haurstaf in Awl, but almost all of them had fled to join their sisters in Port Awl and arrange passage away from the island altogether. Paulus had sent word to
these estranged psychics, offering a truce. Since none of the Haurstaf knew what had really been behind the slaughter at the palace, they had naturally assumed that Maskelyne’s bombardment
had been a decoy to allow the Unmer to launch their own attack using some as yet unidentified sorcery. This worked to the Unmer’s advantage. The Haurstaf now feared them enough that they
accepted Paulus’s terms and were unlikely to retaliate.

They left the garden by a small wicket gate and stepped out into the forest. Ianthe knew the woods around the palace well. On any given day you could be sure to find students wandering the worn
pathways or sitting studying in quiet glades. Now it seemed woefully quiet. Ianthe let her consciousness reach out, out of habit, and search for anyone around her. In the back of her mind she
sensed the birds and insects, the skittish deer. She could see and hear the work of palace guards and manservants still clearing the wrecked palace wing, and further away a unit of soldiers
marching along a trail further down the hill.

But then she sensed something horribly familiar. A group of people with unnaturally sharp perceptions – and yet edgy, corrupted, tainted by sorcery. She had missed them initially because
they were moving around the shattered wing where so many other people worked. She had overlooked them in a crowd of perceptions. But now those workers had stopped clearing rubble and were staring
at the newcomers. Eight men. They were close enough to make her stop suddenly and clench Paulus’s arm.

‘What is it?’ he said.

Ianthe looked along the palace façade to the corner. She knew what was coming and almost stamped her foot with frustration. It wasn’t fair. Why should her perfect moment be
spoiled?

‘Can we go,’ she said.

‘Why? What is it?’

But then it was too late. Granger’s replicates came into view around the corner. Their identical faces each bore scorch marks caused by immersion in brine. Their eyes were hot and red and
utterly devoid of human emotion. They wore bulky power armour that whirred faintly and altered hue in the patchy forest light, as nacreous swirls danced across sorcerous alloys.

The lead replicate was holding the body of a man before him, supporting him as easily as if he weighed nothing. And suddenly Ianthe’s breath caught in her throat. She’d seen the
replicates from afar, but she had overlooked the figure they carried. She’d overlooked it because the man was dead. He didn’t have perceptions she could hijack, nor even a consciousness
she could inhabit.

But of course Ianthe recognized him at once. His face was well known to her. A face that would have been identical to the seven other replicates, were it not for the bullet hole in his eye.

Paulus beckoned the replicates inside, and they followed without a word. He got them to lay Granger’s body on a large table in one of the schoolrooms and then he sent a
servant to fetch his uncle.

Ianthe stood beside her father’s dead body while his eight ghoulish likenesses looked on. They unnerved her. Just looking at them filled her with nausea and revulsion. She resented them
being here, sharing this moment. Her hand hovered over her father’s breastplate – the scorched and battle-scarred metal, with its weird rainbow patina – but she couldn’t
bring herself to touch it.

She felt hollow, as if some great part of her future had been wrenched out of her. And, as she looked at his shattered face, anguish came to fill the emptiness. Suddenly her tears welled and
flowed freely down her cheeks. She hid her face in her hands and sobbed.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Paulus said.

She sensed his hand on her shoulder. She turned into him and sobbed against his chest, trembling, her breaths now coming in great uncontrollable heaves.

‘I hated him so much,’ she managed to say.

He held her closer. ‘That emotion is often a companion of love.’

She let out a soft wail. She had started to shake and so she let him hold her for a long time, feeling the warmth of his chest against her cheek.

‘Your Highness.’

Ianthe recognized Duke Cyr’s voice. She sniffed and looked up to see him striding over to the table, his brow creased with concern. He glanced at the sword replicates standing mutely
around the table and then back at her father’s body.

He stooped over Granger and examined the wound in his head. And then he reached down and pressed his hand against the side of Granger’s neck. After a moment he gave a soft grunt of
approval. ‘Dry your eyes, my dear,’ he said. ‘Your father is alive.’

Ianthe gaped at him for a moment. ‘But the wound . . .?’

‘Is as fatal as I’ve seen,’ Cyr replied. ‘The eye and most of his brain are gone. Nevertheless, he is alive.’

That night Ianthe lay in bed and tried to unravel her thoughts. They had moved her father to an empty chamber and laid him upon the bed. She thought of him lying there with
that gaping hole in his face, his brains exposed.

And still alive.

It was the armour, Cyr had said. The armour was keeping him alive, regenerating him, forming new tissue to replace the stuff that had been damaged. Growing him a new eye.

A new brain.

She shuddered.

Did her father dream, she wondered. Was he aware of his surroundings, his condition?

And how had he ended up here? How had the replicating sword been able to create the replicates who had brought her father here when he had been unconscious? She recalled that they were, in this
instance, not exact copies of him. None of them had displayed the same mortal wound.

She didn’t understand any of it.

Moonlight glimmered beyond the gauze drapes. She could smell the jasmine growing in the garden below her window. Normally she would have found it soothing, but sleep eluded her tonight. It must
already be three or four bells past midnight. She found herself on edge, listening out for something.

But what?

And then she realized what it was. She was listening for the approach of her father’s replicates. Sword phantoms, Paulus called them. They were empty, mere sorcerous husks, but they still
terrified her. She imagined them standing out there in the dark of the garden, their ghoulish faces staring up at her window, and the thought made her shiver.

Ianthe wrapped the bedclothes more tightly around her. Of course they weren’t out there. Why would they be? Her father’s brain was in pieces. He could neither summon them nor control
them. They were here at the will of the blade itself.

She wondered where they were right now. Had Cyr sent them away? Had they merely evaporated back to non-existence now that they had accomplished their task and brought Granger here?

Ianthe listened to the silence.

They weren’t outside. It was foolish of her to think so.

Perhaps she should just check, to put her mind at rest.

Ianthe shook her head and buried herself further under the bedclothes. She was being ridiculous. There were no ghouls out there in the dark. She was alone and it was four bells after midnight
and she ought to get to sleep. Paulus had promised to take her riding tomorrow, if she felt up to it.

She wasn’t going to feel up to it, if she didn’t get some sleep.

Ianthe growled and sat up in bed. She stared at the window. The moonlit curtains glowed faintly. Nothing moved. There were no sounds. Not so much as a breeze to disturb the utter stillness.

Ianthe got out of bed and padded over to the window. She reached for the drapes, but then hesitated. Fear prickled the back of her neck. The stone floor felt icy beneath her toes. She could feel
her heart racing.

Really. She was just being ridiculous.

Ianthe pulled back the curtain.

She saw them at once, standing in the garden below her window. Eight dark figures, their brine-scarred faces upturned, their eyes mere pits of shadow. They were all looking up at her.