The Art of Hunting (20 page)

Ten feet behind the guard, on the other side of the grille, stood a dark and wild-eyed figure. He recognized it as one of the sword replicates. It wore his power armour and carried his phasing
shield and in its fist it clenched the Unmer blade.

A blade it now raised, as it rushed towards the guard.

‘Wait,’ Granger cried. ‘No!’

The guard looked up at Granger with surprise.

But the replicate coming up behind him ignored Granger’s pleas. The seated guard half-turned, in time to see the hellish eyes and brine-scarred face and teeth. The upraised blade. The
replicate thrust the sword downwards savagely, puncturing through the skin under the guard’s clavicle and burying the steel tip deep into his heart. He twisted it once.

A short gasp escaped from the guard’s throat.

And then he collapsed to the floor, dead.

Granger stood there, his heart thumping, his breaths coming hard and fast as he watched the guard’s blood spill out across the floor. He looked at the replicate and the replicate returned
his gaze. There was nothing in those eyes but a savage emptiness.

And then the replicate stooped and ran its fingers through the dead man’s blood and brought it to its lips and supped. It rose again and stepped forward and placed the sword into the well
below the grille. He released the handle.

And vanished.

Granger felt a sudden sensation of dizziness and nausea. The light itself seemed to shift, fracturing subtly, as though the air immediately around him had momentarily possessed a different
quality.

He looked at the sword with dread. It had wanted Granger to free it. It had been waiting for him to come. But had it summoned him here? Would it still serve his will? Would the replicates obey
him? Or would they obey the sword? Was he, Thomas Granger, to blame for this innocent man’s death?

Granger reached for the sword, but then stopped himself. The weapon wanted him to pick it up, he could feel it in his heart, but Granger resisted. His hand trembled, inches from the blade.

‘On my terms,’ he said. ‘You hear me.’

He wanted to pick it up. Every part of him yearned to reclaim the blade. Granger hissed through his teeth.

‘On my terms!’ he cried.

He snatched up the sword and then used it to break the armoury lock. He stepped over the spreading pool of blood and went to look for his armour and his shield, dimly aware of the eight ghoulish
figures who had appeared in the shadows around him.

Maskelyne’s chief engineer and metallurgist, Milford ‘Halfway’ Jones, had a gift for fixing broken Unmer artefacts and adapting others to create new devices:
most notably the miniature trumpet horn strapped to the left side of his own head that allowed him, after a certain amount of tweaking, to hear – or so he claimed – conversations in an
as yet unidentified Losotan-speaking household somewhere in the world, and the monocle he wore perpetually over his left eye that enabled him (again, if his claims were to be believed) to determine
at all times the location of his wife. Maskelyne had no doubt that these were merely fables intended to boost his reputation across the Sea of Lights, and yet he could not help but admire the
man’s ability as an engineer. By dawn the new device was ready and fitted into the wheelhouse of Maskelyne’s deep-water dredger, the
Lamp
. He kept the ship in a constant state
of readiness, but he’d had her crew working overnight on the numerous last-minute details required for any lengthy voyage. Now he stood in the wheelhouse and examined Jones’s
handiwork.

The crystal had been mounted in a spherical wire cage set atop a gyroscope. Around the cage, the adapted gem lantern could swing on a pivoting arm, which could be tightened or locked into place
during high seas. By revolving the lantern around the crystal to the spot where it was brightest, Maskelyne’s navigator would be able to follow the line of greatest energetic radiance and
thus discover whatever artefact was presently drawing on that energy.

Whatever it was, Maskelyne suspected it would be in a locked case or cabinet.

It could only be the object for which the Drowned continued to bring him keys. They had, in their mindless way, sensed something extremely powerful lying on the seabed. And they knew Maskelyne
to be a man who dredged up such objects by their thousands. He wondered if they even knew what the object was. Did they intend Maskelyne to have it for some unknown, and possibly unknowable,
purpose? Or did they simply want it removed from their domain?

That last thought gave him pause.

So it was with a chill in his heart that he waved goodbye to Jontney and Lucille and boarded the
Lamp.
The crew were busy loading the last fresh fruit and animals, and he found himself
skipping sideways to avoid a largess of maniacally bleating goats.

They steamed out from Scythe Island on a calm morning with the sea like a polished bronze plate reflecting a red sun and the scent of northern snows still sharp in the air. A sunny day still
trying to shrug off its winter coat. Even the heavens seemed to shine like lacquered metal, purple ranging to gradients of orange in the east. The gentle booming of the ship’s engines failed
to lift his spirits as it usually did. And his mood was pervasive, for he noticed several of his crew standing quietly to aft, where they could watch that lonely rock diminish.

His first officer, Mellor, came down from the bridge. ‘One sixty-eight steady, Captain.’

Maskelyne nodded.

‘Are we to expect a traverse?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Mellor. The artefact might lie ten leagues from here, or a thousand.’

Mellor gazed out to sea. ‘The weather can be unpredictable around the southern fluxes, particularly at this time of year. You know Tom Gascale?’

‘Lost his eye during a storm down there.’ Maskelyne grinned. ‘You see? I do sometimes listen to their tales. The knowledge that my men have experience of the area gives me
great confidence.’ He studied the small, thin-faced officer. ‘Your father drowned in the confluxes, did he not?’

‘He went there looking for grandfather’s ship. Never found a trace of it.’

‘And your grandfather?’ Maskelyne enquired. ‘He didn’t, by any chance, go looking for a long-lost great-grandfather?’

Mellor’s lips twitched in what was not quite a smile. ‘No, sir.’

‘Then there’s no curse to speak of.’

‘I believe it takes three deaths, father to son, before a sequence of misfortunes is considered to be a curse.’

‘Thank the heavens for that.’

‘You ever wonder why so many ships sink there?’

Maskelyne had given it some thought before. The conjunction of two seas led to a mixing of brines, which was essentially just a mixing of different poisons. And when the sun warmed these
night-cooled confluence waters, the mists could be strange indeed. He suspected there could be a psychoactive element to the resultant chemical fumes. It was either that, or one was forced to
believe the fantastical sailors’ tales: of sea monsters and blood-mottled sharks and jellyfish with gas bladders as large as city blocks, acting as host to all manner of other creatures; of
Drowned mariners sailing undersea ships; of musical growths of crystal and dark tentacled things that supped on the brains of sleeping crewmen and replaced them with a sentient broth intent on
breeding mischief. ‘If fate brings us to the southern arm of the Mare Regis, then so be it,’ he said. ‘We will brave the confluxes and hope to pass without incident. We’ve
been in worse places, Mr Mellor.’

‘I suppose we have, sir.’

The crystal led them almost due south for three days and three nights. By all accounts it should have been getting warmer as they covered those leagues, but the sea continued to shudder under a
slab of cold air from the north. On the second day a wind from the north-west picked up and blew against the
Lamp
’s hull, aiding her engines in the push south. And so they made good
progress. The waters of the Mare Lux flashed and foamed, and copper-coloured spume blew against the wheel-house windows behind which Maskelyne stood and watched his crew at work in their whaleskins
and goggles.

On the fourth day they passed the Clutching Rocks, a cluster of wind-blown pillars against which the waves exploded into droplets like a million shards of amber glass. Here the boom and fizzle
of the brine reminded him of cannon fire. Two generations ago this had been a temple atop a hill upon an island on which Verluya vines had grown. Now it was all drowned. There were sailors who
swore the priests still prayed within those watery halls and still plucked rank malodorous weeds from the silt, with which they made a potion that was no longer wine but an elixir to turn a living,
breathing, man each night into a phantasm. Other buildings yet lay beneath the surface here, village houses and cottages and hovels where a community of the Drowned existed to this day.

They left the flooded island behind and an hour later in their wake they spotted a dragon hunting the sea around the rocks. It must have been there all along, Maskelyne supposed, watching from
the deep as the dark mass of their hull passed overhead. Dragons could stay submerged for hours, but lacked speed and mobility in water, preferring to swoop down on prey from the sky above, as many
sea birds had once done.

The men watched in silence.

That night the stars closest to the southern horizon glimmered with unusual colours: very frail pinks and topaz and ultramarine. An illusion caused by vapours, Mellor said, yet not vapours born
of brine. They were watching, he said, the deaths of a hundred million jellyfish. Where the seas met and mixed, countless numbers of these simple creatures found themselves trapped in a poisonous
mixture of different brines. And so they died, and the gases released by their decomposition coloured the stars.

Mellor watched with a grim expression. ‘We must be careful not to stray into such fields,’ he said. ‘Issue the men with gas filters for their masks.’

Maskelyne knew the dangers well. ‘Men have fished such corrupted waters before,’ he remarked. ‘The slicks attract rare predators. I remember a ship in Raine . . . another in
Losoto.’

‘Carnival ships,’ Mellor said.

‘That’s right.’ Maskelyne recalled the bright designs, the scorched and painted hulls, and the wild-eyed and savage men who sailed them. ‘Have we any men who crewed such
ships?’

‘I wouldn’t hire ’em.’

Maskelyne raised his eyebrows.

Mellor simply smiled and tapped a finger against his forehead.

After consulting with Hayn the navigator about alterations to their course, Maskelyne retired to his cabin, poured himself a whisky and tried to relax. The crystal continued to lead them
unerringly south. He had hoped to see a change in the brightness of the mounted gem lantern, perhaps indicating that they were nearing their target, but he could not determine any noticeable
increase in its illumination. Either the ray of energy they followed was not prone to variance or the artefact was very distant.

He had been in his cabin for less than fifteen minutes when he heard a bellowing sound from outside so loud and deep that the spirit in his glass shuddered. It had to be a whale. The
Lamp
’s engines slowed at once. Maskelyne took his drink to the wheelhouse. It was a calm night and everyone but the helmsman had gathered on the deck outside. They were clustered
around the starboard rail, lanterns raised, as the dredger edged forward at less than quarter speed. Maskelyne grabbed a whaleskin cloak, opened the wheelhouse door and climbed down to join his
men.

The whale must have surfaced close to starboard as Maskelyne reached the edge of the ship for he heard it blow. It was near enough that he could hear the spray spattering against the surface of
the ocean, but he couldn’t yet see it out in that glimmering darkness. It bellowed again, a sound so vast it might have been the cry of a god, and now Maskelyne recognized it as a cry of fear
and pain. The whale was in some sort of trouble.

‘There!’

One of the men was pointing out at the dark ocean.

At first Maskelyne could see nothing. But then he spotted a great long shadow drifting some two hundred yards distant, like the hull of a capsized ship. There appeared to be something snarled
around it, a mass of pale rope or weed.

Maskelyne suddenly understood what he was seeing. He located Mellor in the throng and seized his shoulder. ‘Have the helmsman steer us away,’ he said. ‘Engines full
ahead.’

Mellor gave him a brief quizzical look, before comprehension lit his face. He muttered a curse under his breath. ‘Full speed?’

‘The time for stealth has passed. It must have heard us by now.’

‘Aye, Captain.’ He turned and ran back towards the wheel-house.

Just as Maskelyne was about to address his crew, one of them spoke urgently. ‘Samal.’

A few of the crewmen scrambled to get a better look. Silence fell.

Finally, one of his men said, ‘That’s not a whale.’

He was right, of course. The large shape drifting past their starboard side had the wrong outline to be a whale. It was too bulbous and uneven. Among the mass of flesh Maskelyne thought he
spotted a limb, huge and distended, ending in a lump that might once have been a hand. Huge gas-filled sacs swelled from the skin. The sound he had assumed to be the bellow of a whale had come from
vocal cords that had once been human. He said, ‘We’re moving away quickly. Mellor will distribute firearms. I want all watch stations manned immediately. Remain in pairs and watch your
colleagues closely.’

Once Mellor had handed out the rifles, the men dispersed quickly, without a word, moving in pairs to each watch station. Each of them wore a grim expression. Sailors had been encountering erokin
samal in the seas since the Unmer unleashed their poisonous brine on the world. Many thought they had once been a benign species, a form of deepwater worm or polyp mutated by the toxins. They were
notoriously sensitive. It was unlikely that they had escaped the creature’s attention.

Maskelyne returned to the wheelhouse. At length he found himself pacing behind the helmsman, repeatedly checking their speed and their engine oil pressure. Every few seconds his gaze returned to
the window. Samal were parasitic. This one had most likely trapped one of the Drowned, and then slowly altered its host’s pathology to suit its own needs. The inflated body was used as a
flotation aid and a crude sail, allowing the parasite to drift with the wind. The organs within the host would have been adapted to process brine and toxic marine invertebrates into food. Large
samal would often ensnare several hosts, forming whole islands of biological matter. By altering blood-flow, the creature would then create pockets of decay among the living tissue, thus allowing
wind-blown seeds to take root. Vegetation grew vigorously in such a rich medium. Such islands often resembled natural landmasses, but with the parasite’s slender tentacles waiting amidst the
greenery to snatch unwary birds, or men. Samal could keep their hosts alive for many hundreds of years.