The Art of Hunting (21 page)

He heard a gunshot.

There was a commotion at the bow of the ship. One of his crewmen had just shot his comrade and was now backing away, his rifle still trained on the body. Maskelyne could see blood pooling around
the fallen man.

‘Was he got?’ the helmsman said.

Mellor came up beside them. ‘Men lose their nerve when there’s a samal around. There’s no—’

Another shot rang out.

‘Mellor, with me!’ Maskelyne ran to the wheelhouse door.

He slid down the ladder to the midships deck with Mellor following close behind, just as four more of his men arrived from aft. The sailor who had fired the shots was reloading his rifle. His
target was lying on his back ten paces further along the deck, his whaleskins soaked in blood. He had two puncture wounds in him, one through the chest and one above his left eye. That eye had
filled with blood. The skull behind had burst outwards, leaving a gap into which a man could shove a fist. And yet he was still moving. As Maskelyne watched, the fallen sailor lifted his head and
tried to rise from the bloody pool in which he lay. The flesh around his ribs and at his thighs had already begun to swell. From his lips there came a low, mournful wail.

Maskelyne’s gaze searched the gore-drenched deck behind the unfortunate man. After a moment he spotted a mass of slender white tendrils writhing within the spilled blood. They resembled
fungal mycelium, it seemed to him. He watched them slide over each other with morbid fascination. They had connected with the back of the wounded man’s knees and again at his lower spine.
Maskelyne’s gaze traced them out through the wash-gaps in the bulwarks to where they disappeared into the darkly rushing sea. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to compare these
filaments to fishing lines? They had, after all, just snagged the creature’s prey.

He raised his own rifle. ‘Aim for the head,’ he said. ‘Try to remove as much brain matter as possible.’ Then he turned to those standing closest to the deck rail.
‘And keep an eye out for more, will you?’

They fired upon the crewman until they had reduced his head to a rag-like clod. And yet after each volley the stricken man rose again and came lumbering towards them with his arms outstretched.
His wailing was unbearable to hear until one of the sailors shot out his larynx and most of his throat. The distension in his belly and thighs continued and then moved to his shoulders so that in
the space of several minutes he looked like some gruesome hunchback. His clothes ripped, revealing skin inflated and stretched to translucency. Bubbles of blood formed amid the mulch of flesh at
his neck and now they could hear the whine of gases escaping from this area. Finally Maskelyne raised his hand to stop his men from firing any further rounds.

‘Over the side with him,’ he said.

The men drove boat hooks into their transforming comrade and, with a chorus of yells and one almighty heave, pitched him over the side.

Maskelyne watched the sea in silence for a long moment. ‘Now return to your watches,’ he said at last. ‘And remain vigilant. Samal are notoriously persistent.’

He returned to his cabin and lay on his bunk, listening to the ever-present creaking of wood and the steady thrum and thump of the
Lamp
’s engines. He could not sleep. Something
was troubling him, but he could not say what it was. Something all around him, an ambience of unease. He closed his eyes and let his mind go blank, filling it instead with the sound of the
ship’s engines.

His eyes snapped open, and he grabbed the com funnel.

‘Mellor.’

The first officer’s reply came at once. ‘Captain?’

‘The engines are labouring.’

‘Sir?’

‘I’ve spent long enough aboard this tub to know how she sounds. And we’re not carrying enough cargo to account for the noise she’s making.’

‘The samal?’

‘It’s attached itself to us somehow, Mellor. I want our sides examined for tendrils – and a full head count. Now.’

‘Right away, sir.’

Mellor came back on the com several minutes later. The head count was underway, but they had spotted samal tendrils low on the port side, amidships.

‘The animal pens,’ Maskelyne said. ‘I’ll meet you there.’

‘Aye, sir.’

He caught up with Mellor and four other crewmen in the bathysphere hold and together they hurried towards the midships deck well. Every man carried a rifle. The great metal bell of the
submersible loomed over them, and in the gloom all around stood shelves of machine parts and dredging hooks and nets, spades, harpoons and chains – all coated with whale oil lubricant and
glistening black. To Maskelyne this chamber smelled like a cavern at the heart of the earth and the oceans – awash with that fragrance of brine and rock oil and treasure. Their boots clanged
on welded iron deck plates and their gem lanterns threw grotesque shadows across the bulkheads.

The cabins and living areas occupied the stern section of the
Lamp
underneath the wheelhouse, while the salvage hold took up most of the bow space before the dredger’s crane. The
food stores and livestock cages were located amidships, in those low cramped decks immediately below the equipment level. All the portholes and storm shutters should have been sealed, as they were
every night, although the men sometimes left volver vents open to allow the livestock some fresh air. Such an opening seemed the most likely point of ingress.

His unease deepened as the party advanced along the companionway towards the first of the animal holds, for they could hear a frightful commotion coming from ahead. The goats and pigs were
greatly distressed.

Mellor cast a grim look in his direction. Maskelyne checked his rifle, upheld his lantern and then nodded to the men at the front. They took a breath and then opened the door of the hold.

A terrible shrieking noise assailed them. Something huge and fleshy bulled through the group, scattering men to either side. Maskelyne raised his rifle and almost fired, before he recognized the
corpulent shape. A pig. The frantic animal scrambled up the companionway away from them, screaming hellishly, its hooves clattering across the iron.

‘Hell o’brine.’

The curse had come from one of the two men in the lead. He was standing by the open hatchway, gazing into the hold. He made no effort to raise his gun, but wore on his face an expression of
horror.

Maskelyne and the others joined them.

As he raised his lantern through the hatchway, his immediate reaction was one of confusion. The walls and ceiling appeared to be lined with some organic substance – a dense mat of fungus
or the root system of an enormous plant. He glimpsed walls of dark fleshy swellings, all folded and creased and interspersed with white nodules and tendrils and tufts of brown scrub.
An
excavation
– it reminded him of an archaeological dig he had attended on a rain-drenched hillside near Losoto: sodden clay, bones protruding from the root ball of a tree. Moments later
he realized just how much of the available space this substance occupied. Except for a scant few yards in front of the party, the entire hold was full of it. It must have been sixty paces deep, by
forty wide. And the smell . . .

One of the men retched. Others covered their noses. The stench was of putrescent brine or rotten shellfish mixed with something earthier, like animal blood or flesh – the musk of a
menagerie.

Mellor coughed. ‘What was it?’

‘Goat or pig,’ another man replied. ‘No way to tell.’

‘There may be more than one animal in there,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Our guns are useless here. It’s grown too large already.’

The wall of tissue continued to unfurl and distend before them. In that mass of meat and gas-filled blisters Maskelyne could see veins and hair and even something that might have been a curl of
horn. He guessed the thing was mostly goat. A yard below the ceiling he could perceive an eye – vastly bloated, perhaps eighteen inches across, but undeniably caprine. He shuddered and took a
step back, clenching his nose. ‘Seal it off,’ he said.

They closed the hatch and Maskelyne posted two guards.

He met with Mellor and the other officers in the officers’ mess. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Our stowaway appears to be quite firmly entrenched. Do we have any ideas on how we
shift it?’

Jones’s oil-stained fingers drummed the table. ‘Looks like it got in through a volver vent,’ he said. ‘We might want to think about keeping those closed in
future.’

‘We’ll see,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Our first task must be to sever the connection between the unfortunate animal below decks and the parasite we are now dragging through the
sea. But that still leaves us with the problem of how to dispose of the . . . eh . . . matter in the hold.’

A murmur swept through the assembled men.

‘Maybe it’s edible,’ Jones said.

Maskelyne gave him a thin smile.

They all fell to silence.

‘We could burn it out,’ Mellor suggested.

Maskelyne shook his head. ‘I’m concerned by the quantity of gases trapped within the host animal’s flesh. There’s a risk of explosion. Even if we could contain it . .
.’ He shrugged. ‘Such a fire might taint the air in unforeseeable ways.’

‘Then it’s down to hatchet work,’ Mellor said. ‘We go in, in teams, and cut it out.’

Most of the men nodded.

‘I feared it would come to this,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Triple rum rations for any man who volunteers for the job.’

The men used a whaler’s headspade to cut the samal tendrils from the side of the ship. They were almost translucent and as fine as gossamer. They checked the other volver vents but found
nothing. As soon as the
Lamp
was freed, Maskelyne noted a distinct change in the tone of her engines – testament to the prodigious weight of the parasite they had been pulling behind
them. Now with the creature gone, they could begin the process of removing its host from the livestock hold. Maskelyne met briefly with the first of the cutting teams, offering instruction and
advice, and then retired to his cabin. It was almost dawn and he had been awake for too many hours.

But when he slept he dreamed of monsters. He woke several hours later, clutching his chest in desperate panic. He was drenched in sweat, breathing erratically. His heartbeat felt irregular and
laboured.

He took a long draught of water and lay back in his bunk, panting, willing his heart to slow. The men could not see him like this. After all, the seas were no place for cowards.

CHAPTER 5

Conquillas’s dragon flew over a great blood-glass ocean and Ianthe – hiding in its mind – flew with it. The wind tore at its eyes and muzzle and filled its
vast wings. And the merest tease of its shoulder muscles brought it swooping down at reckless speeds to smash froth from the tips of the poisoned waves or snatch at the brine with powerful claws.
Water flashed in the sunlight. Sea spray chilled its armoured face, its nostrils. And then it would rise again, the cold metal-scented air buffeting its neck and keening in its ears.

The beast’s vision was keener than that of human or Unmerkind and it allowed Ianthe a view far across the Sea of Kings to the dark and fiercely ragged island rising above the horizon like
a claw reaching from a pool of blood. Other serpents were hunting there, their lithe cross-shaped bodies soaring or else folding closed and plunging dagger-like into the waters.

‘Peregrello Sentevadro was once a mountain,’ the dragon said. ‘Now the less poetic of your kind call it the Dragon Isle.’ The beast made a growling laugh in its throat.
‘Are you in there, little girl? There are occasions when it seems to me that I can feel you hiding behind my eyes.’

Ianthe knew the dragon could not detect her presence. It merely assumed – correctly as it happened – that she was currently a stowaway, lurking in the periphery of its mind as it
neared its homeland.

‘Of course, all of this was once the Sentevadro Lowlands,’ the dragon went on. ‘Part of old Anea. There are many valleys below the waves here, many cities and manmade caves.
The ruins of the old Marolian capital cut into a cliff, and more wonders besides. The wreckage of old bone ships and tea merchants’ ships and a fort carved out of a single blue crystal. But
no Drowned.’ It looked down at the ocean rushing past beneath its claws – wave crests flashing like rubies. ‘Not for many years now.’

The dragon flew with the wind for a moment longer, and then it said, ‘If you can truly see through my eyes, then watch now.’ With that it flexed its shoulders and drew back its wings
and dived.

The sea rushed upwards.

And the dragon smashed through the glinting waves and down into freezing depths. Bubbles of air boiled around its snout and claws. Ianthe heard the thump and clang of the pressure difference in
the beast’s ears. The brine around them was pink, pierced by rippling shafts of light that played across the seabed like floral auroras. Less than ten fathoms separated the silt-smothered
ground from the air above. She could see scalloped outcrops of rock and boulders furred by sediment. And here and there stood the skeletons of long-dead trees. It had been pastoral land once, for
the outlines of fields could still be determined by dry stone walls now bulked and mortared by crimson mud.

The dragon swam on, past a low building from which the roof had been torn.

And then suddenly from the gloom emerged the masts and yards and shrouds of ships – a great many of them. These were mainly Unmer vessels, with a few Evensraum trawlers and dredgers and
even a couple of smaller Losotan yachts. Ianthe looked on in awe. The larger ships were old, so terribly old, and clad with the bones and scales of creatures she did not recognize. Not dragon
– too large to belong to dragons. Cannons still rested upon the silt-soft decks, and schools of silver fish darted between woollen rigging, scattering when Ianthe’s dragon drew near.
The serpent swam low over the remains of two warships whose masts had fallen into each other’s and around whose open hulls there lay a scattering of crates and cables and rusted cannons. And
she saw that some of the crates had been smashed open and disgorged scores of tiny human skulls upon the seabed.