The Art of Hunting (2 page)

It had roughly the shape and the muscular proportions of a pit hound or a bear – a blunt head on massive shoulders – but was far larger than any land beast of this world. It was
hairless, with flesh as pale as dead skin but oddly rippled and covered in countless red bruises or contusions. It walked on four squat legs, turning its head this way and that as though sniffing
out its prey. Its bristling teeth gleamed in the half-light, although it appeared to have no eyes. There came from it an odd sound, a dire chorus of shouts and wailing as of people in great
pain.

Seated in a saddle on the creature’s back was a pale woman with long dark hair that blew behind her like a pennant. She wore some type of faceted silver armour – so brightly polished
that it flashed as she moved. In one hand she held the reins of her beast, in the other she gripped a whip that crackled and fizzed with constantly forking electrical fluids.

‘The Unmer know her as Duna,’ the archer said over the screams and cries that accompanied the approaching beast.

‘Queen of the realm of thorns and at least three other minor dimensions. Daughter of the shape-shifter, Fiorel, whom some people call the Father of Creation and the God of Cauldron and
Forge. Those who fear to utter Duna’s name call her Lady of Clay, for it is said her father moulded her and cast her in the furnace that raged at the birth of time.’ The archer’s
brows lowered. ‘Make no mistake. She is neither furnace born nor a lady. She is an entropath. And the beast on which she rides is no mortal creature. It is the Agaroth, another of her
father’s creations. It is undeniable, unstoppable, eternal and – like its creator – it has the ability to assume any physical form.’

‘Entropath?’

‘The entities you call the elder gods. Fiorel and Duna are entropaths.’

The soldier turned to him. ‘Why is she here?’

‘She has a lust for war,’ the archer said. ‘Perhaps Marquetta’s sorcerers have made a deal with her. I do not know. Whatever her reasons for being here, her father cannot
know she is in this realm. Travelling between their cosmos and ours uses vast amounts of energy and the entropaths cannot afford to waste their dwindling reserves. Fiorel would never have allowed
her to come here just to sate her battle lust.’

‘How do you know all this?’

The archer unwrapped the cloak from his face and rubbed rain from his forehead. He was Unmer: cadaverous with sharp, almost severe features, a long narrow nose and a prominent bony brow. His
skin and hair were as white as salt but his eyes were crimson and intelligent and seemed to burn with a fierce inner light. The soldier recognized him.

‘Conquillas,’ he said. ‘You are Lord Argusto Conquillas.’ Conquillas the betrayer. The dragon lord who had abandoned his own people for the love of Aria, the Haurstaf
queen whose witches had so recently put an end to decades of Unmer rule. Aria of the Ether – the living ghost – a telepath so powerful she could bathe her mind in the thoughts and
dreams of millions. She must have learned of Duna’s coming through espionage.

‘It has long been my ambition to hunt the Agaroth,’ Conquillas admitted. He opened his quiver again. Again, the air around them twisted and became suddenly violent, rushing into the
maw of that black cylinder at the archer’s hip.

By now the air had cleared and the goddess, Duna, and her hellish mount had drawn near enough to the compound that the waiting soldiers could see them more clearly. And when those men perceived
the Agaroth as it truly was and understood what it was composed of, many of them lowered their weapons and wailed in terror.

The great beast now lumbering towards them was composed entirely of the bodies of those it had slain. Its massive limbs were full of mouths and faces and scraps of armour, swords and shields. A
great mess of flesh and metal. And yet those bodies from which it was composed were not dead. Hundreds of slaughtered soldiers gazed out from its knees and its shoulders and gnashed their teeth and
screamed.

‘How do you hunt
that
?’ the soldier exclaimed.

‘With bow and arrow,’ Conquillas said. He notched an arrow and aimed it at the approaching fiend, sighting along the shaft. The tip of this missile was a crackling black dot that
appeared to be sucking in the very air around it.

Void arrows?

The soldier had heard of such sorcerous creations. It was said that only one hundred and eleven had ever been made. One hundred and one of them had been lost forever, fired through the world or
sent into the heavens, never to be seen again. Another was in the palace of Emperor Ji-Kai of the Golden Domain. He had bought it from a pirate lord, giving the man one full tenth of his empire
– an area of land equivalent to a small country. The remaining nine were in Conquillas’s possession.

And one of those was now aiming at the beast on the plain.

Conquillas loosed his arrow and it shot away across the ground with a crackle and a shower of black and white sparks.

It struck the beast in the centre of its head and vanished. Although he couldn’t chart the missile’s progress after that, the soldier imagined it tearing through the creature’s
skull and emerging from the other side. It would keep on that same trajectory forever, plunging through the Alhama Mountains on the distant horizon and then onwards out into the endless void behind
the sky, until it reached the ends of the cosmos and passed beyond.

The beast let out a baleful roar and swung its head towards them, baring its massive teeth. And that alien queen whose name was Duna, daughter of Fiorel, now turned her attention upon the
soldier and his companion. She lashed her whip above her head and a sudden burst of lightning poured down from the thunderclouds and connected with that sorcerous cord.

‘Would it offend you if I flee?’ the soldier said.

‘You are only human,’ Conquillas said.

‘I thought a void arrow could stop anything.’

The archer’s gaze remained locked on Duna and her mount. The Agaroth was a maelstrom of living corpses and metal – a great howling juggernaut that loomed high above the flat earth
and the pockets of withered scrub. Its huge hooves drove deep into the muddy earth as it came lumbering towards them at a frightening pace.

Conquillas loosed another void arrow.

The arrow shot over the palisade wall and struck the oncoming beast again. This time it pierced its chest where, presumably, its heart would be located. But again, the sorcerous missile had no
effect. The ground around them shook as the Agaroth’s speed increased.

The soldier glanced at his companion’s quiver. Strangely, there seemed to be more than nine arrows in there. ‘How many of those do you have?’ he asked.

‘A score or so,’ Conquillas said, pulling yet another free and notching it to his bow string.

‘I didn’t think there were that many left in the world.’

Conquillas sent a third arrow whizzing across the earth towards the goddess and her mount. This struck the beast in the left eye. The Agaroth screamed and huffed and batted the air with one
massive hoof, but it barely slowed. A moment later it came charging at Conquillas with even greater urgency. Now that there was less than three hundred yards between them, the other soldiers
started firing their mortars and cannons. Concussions sounded all around them. Smoke filled the air.

‘I retrieve them,’ Conquillas remarked.

‘The arrows? From beyond the edge of creation?’

Conquillas raised his bow again. ‘Fortunately, time does not exist outside the cosmos,’ he said. ‘The void arrows are always present.’ He loosed the fourth arrow and then
a fifth and sixth in quick succession, but each missile plunged straight through the creature without harming it. He frowned. ‘Nevertheless, getting them back is not straightforward. It can
sometimes take hundreds of years to find them, so I do not like to waste them.’

‘How many do you have left?’

The archer lowered his bow and stared at their oncoming foe. Duna and her mount were now less than two hundred yards away. Most of the other soldiers in the compound abandoned their guns and
fled, despite shouted orders from their commander to remain at their posts. Conquillas ignored the commotion. His full attention remained fixed on the enemy. ‘I suspect the Agaroth lacks a
brain and any critical organs,’ he muttered. ‘It is not living in a sense we recognize. But if it is an abstract creation, then it must be formed by the will of its rider. And there
lies the problem. The only way to destroy such a fiend will engender grave repercussions, I fear. I must have more time to think of a better solution.’

He reached into a pocket in his padded tunic and took out a small silver whistle, which he proceeded to blow into. It made no sound, or at least none that the soldier could hear.

But he heard the shrieks that soon filled the skies above them.

‘Dragons,’ he cried.

The winged serpents must have been waiting in the thunderclouds above them. There were three of them, all monstrous, each wearing horned and spiked helmets and dark metalled armour over their
scaly red hides, war dragons if ever there had been any. Now, at Conquillas’s behest, they tore down through the air, diving towards the oncoming foes at reckless speeds.

‘Dah’le ne kustol,’ Conquillas muttered. ‘Ne kustol.’

‘What was that?’ the soldier said.

‘They must tread with care.’

One of the dragons broke to the west, its vast wings thumping, while the remaining two continued to swoop downwards. These began to loop around each other in helix formation. At the last instant
one banked sharply aside, while the other rushed at the goddess, its great black claws seeking to rip her from the saddle of the monster she rode.

Duna flicked her lash skywards, and there was a flash of white light. As that cord of energy swept up to meet the attacking serpent, it grew to a hundred times its length.

Crackle.

The whip passed straight through the onrushing dragon, slicing it in half from neck to rump. The pieces fell amidst a cloud of blood and smacked into the ground behind the goddess, where they
lay with the great wings still twitching.

The remaining two dragons shrieked as they wheeled around their fallen comrade.

The goddess lashed her whip above her head in triumph. It ripped through the air like lightning. And then she reined her beast around and brought it over to the fallen serpent, whereupon the
Agaroth lowered its head and began to devour the remains.

A chorus of shrieks filled the heavens and both surviving dragons now turned and swept in from the north, flying so low their claws raked the ground.

And the Agaroth began to change.

‘Mercy,’ the soldier said. ‘What’s happening?’

As the entropic beast gorged itself on dragon flesh, it was growing larger with every passing moment. And as it grew it altered its shape. Its head became elongated, developing into a snout full
of black teeth. Ears sprouted from its skull. Hooves became claws. Its rump stretched out, writhing snake-like across the earth, until it took the form of a tail. From its back there unfolded
enormous fans of bone that shuddered and grew sheets of translucent skin.

‘It looks like a dragon,’ the soldier said.

In half a hundred heartbeats the Agaroth had transformed itself into the likeness of a great winged serpent. Now it thrashed its newly formed wings and lifted itself airborne. Gales blew around
it, raising clouds of grit and tearing leafless shrubs from the earth.

Conquillas’s war dragons did not falter, but came straight at the monster, raking its neck savagely with their claws and teeth.

‘Ne kustol!’ Conquillas cried.

But it was already too late. As the war dragons engaged Duna’s mount, a strange and terrible fate befell them. The entropic beast
absorbed
them. One instant the dragons were
involved in savage combat, the next they all but vanished inside the monster. The soldier saw red wings flapping uselessly, a tail thrashed, and then nothing remained in the air but the goddess and
her hellish mount.

The Agaroth grew larger still. And from its shoulders it sprouted two new necks and two new heads and two new maws crammed with glassy black teeth. It turned its baleful eyes back towards the
men in the compound.

‘Shit shit shit,’ the soldier said.

‘Run,’ Conquillas cried.

‘What about you?’

Duna and her mount came surging through the air towards them, and the soldier could see that its forelimbs comprised great swellings of corpse muscle and human bones and blood-black organs still
dripping. Scores of the living dead gaped out at the world from the beast’s chest and shoulders or shuddered and howled and chattered in madness. It came at them, furious, dragging behind it
a storm of dust.

All of the other soldiers were now fleeing, the commander included, but Duna did not even seem to notice them. Her dark and savage eyes were fixed on Conquillas.

Who raised his bow.

‘Daughter of Fiorel!’ he cried. ‘Halt there or die!’

The beast’s wings thundered, and it slowed, halting its dive. Its three necks writhed like snakes, its mouths hissing and snapping at the air. And upon its back Duna looked down and
laughed.

She was pale and achingly beautiful with a soft, tapering face and elegantly arched brows, and yet to look upon her was to feel horror. There was no glimmer of humanity in her eyes: merely raw
and inhuman power. She wore armour fashioned from mirrored silver and sculpted around her small breasts. Her lash crackled constantly and scorched the air around it. Her hair blew out behind her
head like silk funeral pennants, lifted by winds that seemed not to exist in this world. The hand that clutched the Agaroth’s saddle horn was covered in tiny runes that looked red and
painful. The soldier could see scratch marks and old scabs there, as if those imprinted designs caused her endless irritation. On her left hand Duna wore a ring that seemed composed of nothing but
white light.

The shape-shifting beast lowered one of its heads towards Conquillas.

‘I warn you, Duna,’ the Unmer lord said.