The Art of Hunting (42 page)

Siselo was growing bored of shuttered windows and locks. She knocked on yet another door, then listened. ‘Anybody there?’ she called out in a sarcastic voice. She tried the handle
and found it locked and so she kicked the doorstep in frustration. ‘Where is everyone?’

‘Hiding.’

‘From who?’

‘The one of us who looks most Unmer.’

‘I could open any of these doors with a touch of my finger.’

‘That would be illegal and immoral. We talked about this.’

She stamped her foot. ‘What if nobody opens their door? Where are we going to stay?’

‘We’ll find somewhere.’

‘But where?’

‘An inn.’

‘What if there aren’t any inns? What if they don’t take us in an inn?’

‘Shush. Corner.’

She growled.

Knowing that the palace would be Marquetta’s destination, Granger gave it a wide berth. Nevertheless, he stayed alert for any sign of the prince’s men, listening carefully at each
corner before peering around it. He supposed he might have hidden his presence here better, but then it seemed to him that Marquetta had recently become much less of a worry. Now that Granger was
dead, he failed to see what more the young prince could threaten him with. His priority now was keeping Ianthe alive. And that meant finding Conquillas.

‘I know what you’re doing,’ Siselo said.

‘What?’

‘I know why we’re marching round the whole city. You want everyone to see us. You want them all to know we’re here, so that my father hears of it and comes to find
us.’

‘Really?’

‘I’m not stupid.’

He smiled at her. ‘No, I don’t think you are. And you’re almost right. I’m not hiding our presence from the populace.’ He shrugged. ‘Then again, I don’t
suppose I could if I tried.’

‘Yes you could,’ she said. ‘Well, I could. But you’re wasting time trying to find my father that way. It’s quicker if we just go straight to him.’

Granger stopped. ‘You said you didn’t know where he was.’

She pulled a face. ‘Well I didn’t. But I also said I know where he’ll be. We’ve been in Losoto before, you know. There are places we both know, places we
frequent.’

‘
Frequent?
You know where he is?’

‘Yes.’ She nodded, then shook her head. ‘Probably.’

‘Where?’

She pointed at the ground.

Howlish returned to the palace with news that a number of Losotan citizens had organized themselves to the extent that they had appointed a war committee to speak to the
invaders on their behalf. The opinion that the Unmer prince was not here to murder and enslave was beginning to filter through the general population. And, as the middle of the afternoon arrived,
Ianthe found herself standing at the window of her requisitioned chambers, from where she could see Losoto’s newly elected representatives being led through the crowds massed behind the
palace gates.

On Duke Cyr’s advice, the council was held in the throne room. The representatives were shown in by Howlish’s men and presented individually to Paulus, who sat upon the seat of
power. Ianthe lingered nearby.

She found the entire process phenomenally tedious and she suspected that Paulus found it so too. The representatives spoke on behalf of various groups: market traders and shop traders and
importers; fishermen and farming cooperatives; businessmen and bankers and former council officials; innkeepers, hoteliers and brewers. Mostly they sought assurances from the Unmer that their
property would remain in their ownership, that there would be no further appearance of the sorcerous creature that had wreaked havoc on the waterfront and no retaliation against what everyone was
now calling
past imperial crimes
. Paulus conferred with Cyr and nodded and smiled and waved them all on. Since the imperial troops had deserted the city, law and order would be maintained
by a royally appointed militia. Any men with military experience were to present themselves to Athentro. Salaries were suggested and agreed on, along with a temporary cessation of all alcohol and
tobacco and foreign trade taxes in order to boost the city economy and thus better facilitate the transfer of power.

It went on like this for hours. They talked about city defence, the reopening of the port to foreign trade, Losoto’s position in regard to provincial warlords, the forthcoming coronation
and the reopening of the Halls of Anea. This last subject caused the greatest concern among the Losotan representatives, and Paulus and his uncle were hard pressed to allay their fears.

Throughout it all Ianthe tried to appear regal, patient, interested, but eventually she couldn’t take any more of it. She made an excuse about seeing to some palace duties and then left to
go for a walk.

She found Howlish smoking a pipe outside the door.

When he saw her, he grinned. ‘Well, you lasted longer than I thought you would,’ he said. ‘Are they still talking about whale oil reserves or have they moved on to dried
fish?’

‘Actually it’s the tournament now. Paulus—’ She stopped herself. ‘Prince Marquetta seems quite animated.’

The captain observed her for a moment. ‘You’ve seen this great snake in the garden?’

‘Not yet.’

He bowed. ‘Why don’t you let me show you?’

‘Now?’

‘There’s a temple inside,’ Howlish said. ‘Might be a good time to offer the old gods a prayer.’

‘Surely you don’t believe in the old gods?’

He shrugged. ‘I’ll try anything once.’

They left the palace and walked out into the imperial gardens, where ten thousand blooms exuded delicate scents and embellished the verges with a bold but stuttering pronouncement of yellows,
pinks and white. There were stone fountains and statues of nymphs in quartz and loops of miniature hedge as green as the waters of Mare Verdant. Songbirds trilled in golden cages hung from an old
yew.

Two alabaster columns held open the mouth of the great petrified sea snake. Its maw was large enough to allow Ianthe and Howlish to enter walking abreast. Inside it was cool and lit dimly by
hundreds of coloured gem lanterns hanging from the creature’s spine. Their footsteps echoed. A sinuous passageway led further inside the creature.

Ianthe pressed her hand against the inside of the snake. It felt smooth and cool to the touch. ‘Feels like glass,’ she said.

‘It’s varnished,’ Howlish explained. ‘They have to keep applying the coats for years. If you ran down the inside of this thing, licking the walls as you went, you’d
be as high as Jovram by the time you reached the tail. Or dead, anyhow.’ He chuckled and loaded his pipe again. ‘There’s an old tale about a man who was swallowed by one of
these,’ he said, firming the tobacco into the clay bowl. ‘He lived in there for years, making his fire from the boats the serpent swallowed and eating the sailors aboard them. Sometimes
he’d find the sailors alive and he’d have to kill them. And, when he cooked them, you could see the smoke come out of the snake’s nostrils. That’s how people came to think
they breathed fire.’

‘They all died out?’

Howlish lit his pipe with a match. ‘You’ll hear people who claim to have seen them,’ he said. ‘But it’s all grog talk. Nobody’s caught one of these things for
five hundred years.’

They wandered on, deeper into the snake’s body. The path meandered to and fro so that Ianthe could never see more than a few yards ahead. The gem lanterns in here were ancient and cast a
particularly gentle light, their soft colours bleeding together – reds into yellows into greens – as they walked. The space around them became larger at the belly of the serpent only to
grow narrower again as they neared the tail.

The passageway ended abruptly at a pedestal carved out of a strange glossy red stone. It resembled two serpents coiled around each other vertically, a helical arrangement supporting a shallow
bowl. The bowl held a small amount of clear liquid.

‘It’s ashko,’ Howlish said.

‘Ashko?’ She reached her hand towards it.

Howlish grabbed her.‘A very powerful drug,’ he said. ‘While it might be fun, I don’t think your fiancé would approve.’

She could see thin white lines on the back of his fingers, old scars from the Haurstaf lash. It reminded her that this man had once been a privateer. The Guild of psychics had once hired him,
but they hadn’t spared his punishment. In that sense they had something in common.

He stared at her hand a moment before releasing it. ‘Are you looking forward to the games?’ He said this amiably enough, but something in his manner gave the impression that he was
troubled.

‘Of course.’

‘Really?’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that it was your sort of thing.’

‘It isn’t; I mean, the prince is eager to show me.’

Howlish nodded slowly. He bit his lip and then raised a hand to his mouth, in a nervous gesture. ‘How much do you know about the Halls of Anea?’

‘Only what everyone knows.’

‘You know that they lie in a rift?’

This surprised her.

Howlish went on, ‘I used to work for Hu, you see.’ He hesitated, shot a glance at her. ‘The halls have been there for a long, long time – nobody really knows how long,
but thousands of years. The Unmer’s ancestors unearthed them before they abandoned Losoto for Galea. And there’s those who say that it was something in the halls that made them
leave.’ He scratched his chin. ‘When you go up to them, you’ll see for yourself. The entrance is like a door into the hillside – like going into a mine, except finely
carved. More like a temple.

And you think you’re going under the hill, it feels that way, but the truth is, you’re not even on this world any more.’

‘This rift is under a hill?’

He shook his head. ‘No, it doesn’t work like that. The door to the rift – the halls – that’s buried in the hillside. But the halls themselves . . .’ He
shrugged. ‘They might be anywhere. Outside this universe, maybe. I don’t know. But I do know that they are far larger than most people think they are. That’s why Hu couldn’t
flood them. There isn’t enough brine on this planet to do that.’

‘How large is it? Has it been mapped?’

The corners of Howlish’s lips twitched. ‘Mapped? Oh, we found maps of the parts that have been explored. There are rooms in there . . . rooms Duke Cyr won’t show you, rooms
full of ancient maps.’ He leaned closer. ‘Maps of great halls and corridors, stairs, tunnels, lakes and pits and canals – all carved, mind you. Every inch of it expertly chiselled
from the stone on a scale that you wouldn’t believe. You could sail a galleon through some of the larger doors. And those parts of the Halls of Anea that
have
been explored extend
much further than Anea itself – maybe further than it’s even possible to travel on this world. Some people think it goes on forever. Endless halls and endless darkness.’

Ianthe frowned.

‘Exactly,’ Howlish said. ‘That’s the question that begs an answer.’

‘What question?’

‘Who made it?’ he said. ‘And why?’

‘That’s two questions. Well, who did make it?’

‘Giants . . . I don’t know. But I know why Hu sealed it up.’

She waited.

‘People used to see and hear strange things all the time in there,’ he said. ‘Ghosts. Queer lights. Combatants went missing outside the arenas. Divisions sent to look for them
went missing. And then armies sent to find those divisions went missing. There are tales of terrible things lurking in the further reaches of the halls.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Old gods, maybe.’

‘Oh come on, Captain, you know—’

‘I saw something,’ Howlish cut in. ‘Before Hu buried the entrance, I was in there. The emperor used to send criminals in with ichusae. I was . . . helping. It was only a
glimpse, but . . .’ His eyes looked inward as he remembered, then he shook his head. ‘I saw a giant figure in the darkness,’ he said wearily. ‘It looked at me for an instant
and then it slipped away into the shadows. I’ve never felt such a chill. Never felt like I’ve been in the presence of such
evil
.’

‘What was it?’

He didn’t reply at once. He was silent for a moment longer and then he said, ‘I’m telling you all this because . . . maybe you’ll be in a position to do something about
it. The Unmer might seem to be in control of all this sorcery, all this power, but really they’re like children who’ve been given the key to an armoury. Your prince is much older than
either of us, but he’s not infallible, Ianthe. He’s just a man like any other. And there are things in the Halls of Anea that should never be disturbed.’

Granger looked up one last time through the circle of light immediately above his head, then dragged the round iron cover across it. It settled into place with a
bang
,
plunging the sewer shaft into darkness.

Siselo’s voice came from below. ‘You could have waited till I got the lamp out!’

Granger grumbled something non-committal under his breath. He climbed down ten feet of metal rungs in utter darkness until his boots touched solid stone. At that moment, Siselo found her gem
lantern and opened the shutter and light flooded into the narrow space.

They were in a brick sewage tunnel running roughly north– south. A runnel of brown, stinking water rushed along a channel a foot below their ankles, but the ledge on either side allowed
them to follow its course without getting wet. Granger could hear the sewage gurgling somewhere to the south, where he guessed it must either drop through a shaft, or pass into a basin. However,
their light revealed nothing but curved brick walls receding into utter black. The smell made his eyes water.

‘This way.’ Siselo raised the lantern and scampered away, heading south.

Granger sighed and followed.

They wandered along that ghastly passageway for several hundred yards, and then turned to the right, into an identical conduit. This took them another fifty yards or so, after which they turned
left into a narrower, orthogonal tunnel that was barely larger than Granger’s shoulders. This section of the sewer system looked older. Dozens of other channels branched off from the main
conduit, but they maintained a straight course, all the while following the foul watercourse. After what must have been half a mile, Siselo stopped and examined a section of the brick wall near the
floor. Then she lifted the lantern again and proceeded onwards.