The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods

by Rebecca Levene

  There was an unhealthy sound in Laali’s breathing, a wet rasping as if something had broken inside her. She was an old bird, and even a young one might have balked at this journey. His mother had told him he was too heavy for her, as he’d been too heavy for most things men were meant to do, but he hadn’t listened. He hadn’t wanted to believe it.

  If he stopped now, they could both rest. An hour, even a full night, it shouldn’t matter. They must surely have overtaken the Brotherband by now. But if they landed, how would they take to the air again? There was no wheel perch here. No, they must go on.

  If they could. The sky seemed limitless and they were in its centre. But gradually he noticed that the trees below were clearer, no longer a green blur but each branch distinct. A wagon rumbled below them and he could make out the form of its driver. Then the broad trefoil leaves themselves were visible. They were dropping fast.

  ‘Laali, Laali,’ he crooned, ‘a little quicker, my girl. Beat those wings a little harder.’

  And though he could barely credit it, she tried. He felt the ingathering of her breath, the groan that went with it, and the tensing all through her body as she pushed the air away in a mighty beat of her wings. There was a waft of carrion stink and he realised that he no longer minded it. The smell was hers.

  The trees retreated and the wagon with them and for a moment his chest felt hollow with joy. But it couldn’t last. She began to drop again, much faster this time. That last effort must have burned out what reserves of strength she had. He stroked her grimy feathers and spoke to her but this time there was no response. They were no more than a hundred paces above the trees. Fifty.

  He clutched his legs round her middle and pulled the reins desperately rightward, towards the nearest track. If she fell in the treetops, it would be the death of both of them.

  She didn’t respond, still falling. Forty feet. Thirty. He sawed on the leather viciously, cutting into her neck. She cried out in pain but at last she moved, veering towards the compacted brown of the road. Ten feet from the treetops, and then they were nearly four hundred feet high again, above the track. And ahead, he saw their destination at last: Aethelgas and Ivarholme. The folks’ twin capitals hung improbably from the branches of the great ice oaks, mansions with brightly tiled roofs and solid, dour longhalls and walkways and shacks, all far above the shadowed ground. They had made it.

  But it was the end of Laali’s strength. Her wings were barely beating. The moist rasp of her chest had become a terrible, wet gurgling and the ground rushed up to meet them, far too fast.

  The impact jarred through his whole body. His spine bent and for a terrible moment it felt as if it might break. There was the cracking sound of bones snapping and two screams: his own and Laali’s. After that, there was blackness. And when he woke it was to pain and the smell of blood.

  Laali’s body was beautifully soft beneath him. He wanted to lie still and never move but he knew that he couldn’t. His legs wouldn’t obey him and he had to use his hands to grab handfuls of her feathers and drag himself off her. He could hear a commotion in the distance, the sound of voices.

  ‘I’m sorry, Laali. I’m sorry,’ he said at the pain he knew he must be causing her. The agony when his knees touched the ground was terrible, and he fell forward onto his stomach, floundered like a landed fish, then finally righted himself.

  He was on the ground by Laali’s head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, but this time he knew she wouldn’t hear him. Her eyes were glazed and empty. Her body had cushioned his and she’d saved his life, but at the cost of her own.

  He stroked his fingers through the grubby grey feathers of her face, pushing them back into order. Then, for the first time since his childhood, he bent his head and wept.

  Cwen lowered her bow and eyed the target. Two in its centre, a hundred paces away, and one in the outer ring. She watched the last arrow tremble as she heard footsteps racing towards her and frowned. Though the aim was good, the power was lacking. Most things a woman could do as well as a man or better, but this was not one of them. The strength needed to penetrate the armour of the greatest moon beasts still eluded her.

  ‘Mistress Cwen,’ the approaching churl said. ‘You’re needed, Mistress Cwen!’

  She turned to face him and he took a step back. She hadn’t made herself popular in the weeks since Bachur’s departure. She’d demanded the mustering of the Jorlith for war and they’d found every excuse to delay. The villagers needed their protection; Janggok raiders were everywhere; moon beasts too, now the Hunt had abandoned their patrols. So many excuses, you might almost take them for cowards.

  ‘What the fuck are you interrupting me for?’ she asked.

  The boy flinched, and she felt bad. He was younger than she’d been when she was taken for a hawk.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked more gently.

  ‘A visitor – a carrion rider from Ashanesland. He’s asking for you.’

  ‘For me?’ It seemed unlikely. She’d never once left the Moon Forest. They said she had Ashane blood in her, but she’d never met an Ashaneman.

  ‘He asked to speak to our leader,’ the boy said. ‘And the thegns thought – they think he means you. He’s talking war.’

  The boy ran ahead, leading the way. Other hawks had seen the conversation and she nodded at Wine and Wingard as they trotted up to walk on either side of her.

  ‘Trouble, I hear?’ Wine said.

  ‘Big trouble, they say,’ Wingard agreed. A savage mauling by a vulture-beaked moon beast had destroyed for ever his resemblance to his twin, but they still seemed to have only one thought between them.

  ‘A carrion rider from Ashanesland,’ Cwen told them. ‘I can’t think he’s come to discuss the weather.’

  ‘What’s war in Ashanesland to us?’ Wine asked as they began to climb the long stair.

  ‘We’ve war enough of our own,’ Wingard agreed.

  But Jinn had told her that the reborn moon was the son of the Ashanesland king. ‘Maybe it’s the same war,’ she said.

  They’d brought the carrion rider to one of the Jorlith healing halls. He lay on a broad bed, surrounded by concentric rings: healers, then thegns, behind them the chief Jorlith spears and loitering on the rim a few of the richest churls.

  Cwen halted when she saw the carrion rider himself. He was huge, bigger than she’d imagined even his mount being. Pale too, not just from sickness but from some mixing in his blood. His blond hair was matted with gore and his back had been propped against a mass of pillows. His narrow, shrewd eyes met hers as she approached.

  ‘You’re their leader?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘I’ll do.’

  His face flushed with sudden anger. It made him look a little healthier. ‘For the love of the gods! I’ve ridden my poor Laali to death to reach you. Can you not at least find the courtesy to grant me an audience with those who need to hear my message?’

  ‘A message of war?’ she asked, and at his nod, ‘Then I’m the woman to speak to, myself and the Jorlith spears. I’m Cwen, the – the leader of the Hunt.’

  The rider – Sang Ki, he named himself – was too injured to leave his bed. He gave Cwen his map instead, and they both grimaced as they studied it.

  The Hunt knew of the night roads, of course. The moon beasts sometimes used the underground routes to evade them. But the monsters seldom came so close to Aethelgas and Ivarholme, surrounded as they were by sunlit fields, and so the Hunt seldom came either. She never would have guessed so many of the deep paths led here.

  With Wine and Wingard beside her, she went to view the largest, which lay hidden in a copse of trees left standing between three cornfields. If the Brotherband were coming – and why would Sang Ki lie? – then there was no time to waste. They could reach Aethelgas in less than a week.

  Brambles caught at her clothes and scored her face. It was slow, sweaty going, but she could see a lightness ahead, a clearing between the trees.

  ‘Sunlight,’ Wingard said. ‘Tha
t’s good. That’ll stop them.’

  ‘These are men,’ Cwen reminded him, ‘not monsters.’ Though from what Sang Ki had told her, the monsters were preferable.

  No deep way she’d seen before had an entrance so broad. Most were merely pits where the ground had fallen in to reveal the secrets hidden in its guts. This place, though, was no accident. There was an arch tall enough for any moon beast to pass through and for five of them to walk side by side. There were carvings on the arch, intricate lines and whorls that she was sure must be letters, but in no language she’d ever seen. Bachur might have been able to read them, but Bachur wasn’t here. There was only Cwen.

  This wouldn’t be an easy place to defend if the Brotherband emerged in force. Sang Ki reckoned they weren’t expecting resistance, so she could set an ambush that might shock them. But retreat would be easy for them: into the inky darkness under the earth. None of Cwen’s fighters would dare follow them there. And if they met resistance here, there were a dozen other exits they could use, scattered all around Aethelgas and Ivarholme. If Cwen split her force to blockade them all, any one group would crumble at a strong blow from the Brotherband.

  It wasn’t good. It was very fucking bad. At least the Jorlith would have to listen to her now; they’d have to muster for war. It wasn’t much consolation.

  When she returned to Aethelgas, she called a guor moot, a battle meeting of all the leaders of the folk. The Rhinanish wanted to hold it on the platform of the Great Moot, the Jorlith in their Hjaldr Longhall. She told them all it would be on the ground.

  ‘The ground!’ a thegn leader protested. She didn’t know which one; she hadn’t bothered to learn their names. ‘But we can’t touch the ground. We’re thegns!’

  As if she might have forgotten. ‘You’ll be fighting on the ground, might as well get used to it now,’ she told him, and used his stunned silence to walk away.

  In the end, the thegns found a way to please themselves, like they always did. They had the churls build a platform for them above a fallow field, so their purity wouldn’t be polluted by the earth their lessers touched every day. Cwen thought of ordering them to tear it down, but restrained herself. She needed these people. She needed them all.

  The thegns had sent four representatives, the richest men among them, as if wealth was a qualification for war-planning. The thirteen spear-leaders of the Jorlith sat in a stiff row, as upright and unbending as their weapons. The hawks outnumbered them all, as she’d intended.

  The carrion rider, Sang-Ki, sat propped on cushions beside her. He looked a little further from death than he had when he arrived, but still sickly pale. ‘Tell them what you told me,’ she said to him, adding, ‘briefly,’ because she’d already learned how he liked to talk.

  ‘The Brotherband are coming here,’ he said, ‘to wipe out the Hunt if they can and slaughter as many of you as possible while they’re about it.’

  He looked at her, and she smiled her thanks. That was just as short and brutal as she’d wanted.

  ‘We have guards on the Salt Road, and the Maeng to get through before they reach it,’ a flame-haired thegn said. ‘I see no reason to panic.’

  ‘They’re using the night roads,’ Sang Ki said. ‘They’re coming straight here.’

  Cwen nodded. ‘My people have scouted them. There’s one entrance bigger than you can bloody believe, and at least a dozen more smaller ones. Don’t know why there’s so many round here.’

  ‘I think I might,’ Sang Ki said. ‘The Moon Forest must once have been a stronghold of the moon god. It explains why so many of his monsters make their home here. I believe that’s why your Hunter brought you here, all those years ago: to act as a bulwark against his beasts and his return.’

  ‘Aye,’ Cwen said, ‘that was her covenant with us. A home in return for our fighting strength. For hundreds of years only us hawks kept the bargain. Now it’s time for everyone else to do the same.’

  ‘But we’re not fighters,’ another thegn protested. ‘We’re merchants.’

  ‘The Brotherband won’t care,’ Sang Ki said. ‘I’ve seen their work. You can’t let them through. Whatever the cost, you have to stop them.’

  ‘But how?’ That was one of the Jorlith, as thin and golden as a stalk of wheat. ‘A dozen entrances, and there’s barely two hundred healthy warriors here. We’ve sent out a summoning for more—’

  ‘Now you’ve sent it,’ Wingard said bitterly.

  ‘We’ve sent it, and we might get another two hundred more in time. There’s less than a thousand of you hawks, and even if the thegns fight …’ He looked around at them, his expression so contemptuous that Cwen smiled. ‘Even if they fight, all they can do is provide more targets. We’ll never keep the Brotherband from emerging. It’s better to prepare Aethelgas and Ivarholme for siege. We bring up food, break the walkways. If they follow, we fight them in the treetops, the Jorlith way. Up here, the advantage is ours. We can hold for weeks and whittle their strength away.’

  ‘If you hide up there,’ Sang Ki said, ‘I don’t believe you’ll have yourself the siege you want. The Brotherband are savages but they aren’t fools. They’ll scatter through the forest and visit their barbarity on all your villages.’

  ‘Will they?’ That was the second thegn again, the one with curly hair so fair it might almost have been Jorlith. ‘What’s your interest in this, Ashaneman? You’ve come a long way to bring a warning to a folk who aren’t your own.’

  ‘If you’d seen the Brotherband’s work for yourselves, you wouldn’t ask that question,’ Sang Ki said quietly.

  ‘Really? I amn’t so sure it’s our poor innocent bairns you’re here to protect. We may be distant, but news flies over the mountains eventually. The moon returned is the son of the king of Ashanesland, isn’t that so?’

  ‘He’s the moon, the source of evil. It doesn’t matter what flesh he was born in,’ Cwen snapped.

  ‘But he is the Ashane prince, all the same.’

  ‘He is,’ Sang Ki admitted.

  ‘Then forgive me, but I can see another reason why you’ve come here to us, and not just from the good nature of your heart. The Ashane king wants his son dead, we’ve all heard the stories. The Brotherband are his son’s men. Do I need to spell out every letter of the sentence?’

  ‘Spell it how you want,’ Cwen said. ‘And think what you want of our carrion rider. The truth won’t be changed by it. The Brotherband are coming here and if we don’t fight them, they’ll kill us. Are you fucking stupid? It’s death or battle. Which will you choose?’

  ‘Battle,’ the Jorlith spear-leaders said fiercely, in a chorus.

  ‘We’ll fight,’ the flame-haired thegn said, making it sound like more of a question than a statement.

  ‘We’ll do what we must,’ the argumentative one added, ambiguously.

  ‘I’ll fight to protect my daughters,’ the youngest said loudly and firmly, glaring at the others.

  ‘Well,’ the last said hesitantly. He’d yet to speak and his pale skin flamed red when everyone turned to look at him. ‘There’s maybe another way. There’s a woman – a Wanderer. Alfreda Sonyasdochter, I think she can help.’

  ‘Enough of that!’ the blond thegn snapped.

  ‘No, listen. There is, Mistress Cwen. There’s a weapon.’

  18

  Krish woke to find Dinesh’s hand on his shoulder, shaking him. ‘It’s time to break your fast,’ he said.

  His eyes were glazed and his expression vacantly happy. Krish knew what he really wanted. He reached inside his shirt, where he kept the pills safe, and handed one to the boy. He had to look away as Dinesh swallowed it; it was horrible to see the boy’s joy at being given the thing that enslaved him. And he truly was a slave again. He’d returned to his father’s house to wait at his table and take his orders, to be nothing more than a possession. He needed orders, now that bliss once again had hold of him. And Krish could hardly blame him for returning here. Was he meant to return to the empty huts where all his fellow slave
s had died? Krish didn’t blame Dinesh; he blamed himself.

  ‘Your meal,’ the boy said again, and Krish realised that he would have to rise and face the morning and Uin’s self-satisfied eyes over the table. Uin had never asked why Dinesh had returned to him, but Krish was sure he knew.

  The others were already seated when he arrived: Ensee, Asook and their mother, with Uin at the head of the table. Olufemi wasn’t there. She’d been around very little since the slaves’ fields had burned. Krish had tried to talk to her, but she’d shrugged him away impatiently.

  Dae Hyo was missing as well, probably drinking already. He’d done little else since they’d arrived in Rah lands.

  It was only as Krish sat down that he saw the table was empty. He felt Uin’s eyes on him, noticing him notice. The other man’s expression was carefully blank. ‘Aren’t we eating this morning?’ Krish asked.

  ‘There’s no food.’ Uin looked back at Krish, refusing to give him more, forcing him to ask. But Ensee spoke before he had to.

  ‘There is food, Father. The cupboards are stocked.’

  Uin glared at her. ‘We must preserve what we have for needier times. Haven’t you heard? The workers in the fields have put down their hoes. They say they won’t farm until they’re given an equal share of the land.’ He paused a calculated moment before adding, ‘They say this is your command, Lord Krish.’

  ‘It’s what they want!’ Ensee said hotly.

  ‘You support the starvation of your family and loss of all their wealth?’ Uin asked.

  ‘We can share the wealth without losing it,’ she said, but it was a mumble, directed at her empty plate.

  ‘My daughter doesn’t understand how money works,’ Uin said to Krish.