When he heard the growl and snapped his head round, it almost seemed like a section of the painting had come to life. But then he smelled the beast’s rank breath and heard its growl and knew that it was real.
It was a bear, but bigger than he knew any bear could be, even the great brown bears of the Moon Forest. This one was white, a grubby yellow-white that would have disappeared against the background of snow that was probably its natural home. But here it was, inside this building. Its claws skittered against the metal floor as it paced towards him, and then reared up on its hind legs to roar. It was taller than him. It was taller than any man and that roar had given him much too close a look at its teeth.
He hadn’t been afraid at first. It was all too sudden and a little too much like a dream. That roar did it though. His guts clenched and he wanted nothing more than to turn and run, but he couldn’t show it his fear. Beasts knew what to do with prey that feared them. He backed away instead, his legs trembling so hard they threatened to tip him on his arse.
The bear’s beady black eyes watched him as its front legs settled back down on the ground. It left its mouth hanging half open, ready to bite, as it swung its great hairy body across the ground towards him. Maybe he should run. It didn’t look like it could move too fast. He drew a breath, trying to coil up his courage for it.
Then the bear swung closer, he backed away on instinct – and skidded and fell on to the smooth metal floor. The animal roared again, opening its huge arms wide, its black-clawed paws readying a crushing embrace. He tried to crawl away, but his mittened hands could find no purchase on the floor. The bear was right above him, jaws open, teeth bared – and a blot of blood on its throat where an arrow tip poked out of it.
He only moved when the bear started to topple and he realised it was going to fall right on top of him. He crawled just far enough away that only the bear’s blood hit him, and sat panting beside the big corpse.
When the archer entered the building, he wasn’t entirely surprised to see golden skin. It was only as she came closer to the massive body that he knew precisely which of the Servants it was. The Hunter’s face was unmistakable.
‘Thank you,’ he said hoarsely.
She rested her hand on the dead bear’s head, her skin a purer, glowing gold against the yellowish white fur. ‘This is a dangerous land for those who do not know it.’
He laughed a little wildly. ‘You’re telling me!’
‘Come then, I need your assistance.’
‘Don’t look to me like you need anyone’s help.’
She drew out a hook-bladed knife from her belt and handed it to him. ‘Some tasks are easier alone. Butchery is not one of them.’
‘Butchery?’
‘There is meat here in a land that is short of it. We shall not waste it.’
He watched, astonished, as she took hold of the bear by one outstretched paw and dragged it over the metal as if it weighed less than a cat. The body left a smear of blood behind it, dark on the floor and then a startling bright red when she reached the snow outside. She carried on for another fifty paces until she seemed satisfied and finally let the corpse drop. After that she drew her own knife, and he guessed it was time to work.
It was a hideously messy business, skinning and gutting and carving up that huge bear. It did give him a little satisfaction, though, to be doing to it what it had meant to do to him. Or so he told himself while he was elbow-deep in its intestines.
The Hunter made a very neat job of it. Stood to reason, he supposed. She wasn’t a talkative sort, though, and after a while he felt obliged to fill the silence. ‘I used to pray to you, you know,’ he said.
She didn’t respond but he thought that she tensed.
‘All us Moon Forest folk did. But now your sisters, these other Servants, they say you ain’t no god. You ain’t nothing but another one of them. Is that true?’
‘I am no god,’ she confirmed, gutting knife in one hand and the bear’s huge, purple heart in the other. She threw the heart on to the pile of jointed meat and got back to work with the knife.
‘But you told us you was. Ain’t that a touch dishonest?’
That got her attention. She had the liver in her hand now. ‘Attend me well, mortal,’ she said and he thought for sure he was going to get some kind of stern answer, a warning not to be so cheeky. But all she said was, ‘The flesh of the snow bears is good to eat, all but one part of it. The liver is poison, tucked inside the good meat though it is. You must cut all of it out before you feast, or suffer the consequences.’
He wasn’t born yesterday. There was a message in that for him, though he wasn’t quite sure what it was.
She let him brood on it in silence for a while, starting a fire from kindling she drew from a pack on her back and then setting a haunch of the bear to roast on it. He hadn’t thought he’d have any appetite for the thing that had nearly killed him, but the smell of the cooking meat grew increasingly tempting and when she pulled the haunch from the fire, he tucked into it with a will.
She took a little of the meat herself, but only looked at it as it dripped fat on to the snow. ‘This is the moon’s place,’ she said when he was nearly finished.
He looked up at her, hoping his face didn’t betray him. ‘Mizhara’s enemy, you mean.’
‘Yes. Yron’s servants fear the sun, but lead shields them from it and is poison to my own kind.’
‘It was dangerous for you in there? But you walked in easy as you please.’
‘I could not have remained long.’ She seemed to understand his doubting look and lifted her foot across her knee to show him the heel. It was scorched black all the way through to her skin, which was burnt and blistered where it had touched the metal.
‘Thank you,’ he said again, realising more of what it had cost her to save him.
‘Why have you come here, Eric?’ she asked.
It gave him such a shiver to hear her say his name that he almost replied. But he couldn’t admit he’d found this place by following a path in the city below, and by the time he’d thought of what he could say, it was too late. His silence had stretched to a guilty length.
‘I am not like my sisters,’ she said. ‘I was born among your kind ten hundred years ago, and I sought them out again when the folk wandered lost over the ice. I led your people to the forest and I have lived among them since. My sisters think they treasure their husbands but they do not understand you.’
‘And you do?’ It came out sounding halfway between hostile and fearful.
‘I know your thoughts.’
It was the worst answer possible, leaving him to wonder just what she did know. ‘I can tell you ain’t like them,’ he said. ‘You’re talking to me about something that ain’t Mizhara.’
Her face, normally impassive, showed some expression then. He couldn’t read it, though, and it was quickly gone. ‘My sisters spend their bright days thinking of our mistress, but mine are occupied with her brother’s legacy.’
‘The monsters of the Moon Forest.’
‘Not all Yron’s servants are monstrous,’ she said. ‘I knew him in his youth, before he became that which he was. There was much joy in him, more joy than in my mistress. One cannot always know what a person is or will become. One cannot always judge a liver, or a heart, by the body in which it is housed.’
‘I don’t know nothing about that. I’m just a servant to the Servants, ain’t I? The affairs of gods ain’t my problem. My job’s to service Drut—’ He caught himself the moment he said it, but it was too late.
‘Drut?’ she asked.
He shrugged and made himself meet her eye. ‘One of my wives. It only means—’
‘I know quite well what it means.’ She lapsed into a long silence, her eyes on the distant horizon. Then she sighed and dropped her meat on the snow uneaten. Still warm, it melted the crust of ice and grease and blood spread through it, messing up the whiteness.
‘You have no idea of the danger of your path,’ she told
him, sounding sad rather than angry. ‘I had hoped that no person would have to concern themselves with the affairs of gods again, but it was not to be. Yron has returned and the world must face him. I do not wish for this battle. I sought above all to avoid it. But I will fight it and I am not accustomed to defeat. Do you understand?’
Drut had never been so far from Salvation. Mizhara had drawn no illustrations in her Perfect Law and therefore there were no paintings in any book the Servants possessed, no pictures of anywhere in the wide, dark world. Drut had imagined the sea, but her imagination had been entirely wrong.
She stood on the icy cliff and watched it hurl itself against the rocks and wondered at the power of it. This was what her goddess possessed: this untameable strength. She’d never imagined that correctly before either. She’d seen it as something orderly and contained, like the Servants’ lives in Salvation. But if such a thing as the sea existed in a world over which Mizhara once ruled, then Mizhara must be more powerful and terrifying even than this.
The ships were already docked. Drut saw small figures below, the ovals of their faces turned up to her. She returned to her sled and clicked her tongue at the wolves, urging them to take the winding path down to the shore. Once she might have walked it herself, just for the pleasure of the motion, but her pregnancy had rendered her ungainly. She still found herself startled, on waking, to feel the round bulk of her belly. But then she’d remember that Eric’s daughter sheltered inside it and the burden seemed light.
The ships bucked on the waves, struggling to be free. She watched the men at work unloading the crates, sure-footed on the walkways despite the wild motion. They were wrapped in furs that showed only their eyes, yet she found herself imagining what was beneath, the muscles straining in their arms and legs as they worked. This was what Eric had done to her. She sometimes felt as if her entire life before him had been a hazy dream and he’d woken her to the sharp-edged realities of the world.
Finally, the ship’s captain saw her and crossed the deck to greet her. ‘Gold?’ he asked. His accent was thick and his eyes narrow and caged in wrinkles.
As she handed him the payment crate, she wondered what he saw when he looked at her. She was clad in furs too, but they left her hands and face bare. She felt the cold as the darklanders did, but it couldn’t wound her as it had her beloved Eric. Her belly, full with child, was concealed from the captain. She fought the urge to pull back her furs and display it, to show him the new life that was growing inside her.
‘There,’ he said, when he’d counted and bitten every coin. The crates were piled haphazardly on the dock, far more of them than she’d anticipated. She and her sisters weren’t many; she hadn’t thought the shipment would be so large and her sled was too small to carry even a tenth of it.
‘Do you have—’ she asked, but the man had already turned from her. He shouted an order and the sailors swarmed up the beams and ropes of their ships. The lines were freed and the sails raised in a flurry of movement and then the wind was caught and the ships were drawing away, plunging up and over each wave and spraying salt-filled water in their wake.
Drut watched them as they headed for the horizon. She knew nothing of their land of origin, which wasn’t a part of the land below where Eric and all the husbands had once made their home. She knew little of that land either, only what the husbands told, and they seldom spoke of the time before they came to Salvation. Even Eric, normally so ready to smile and speak, gave her little when she asked about his years before. Maybe he felt the same way she did: as if the part of his life that mattered had begun when they met. The thought pleased her.
But she would like to know more of the world. She’d like to see more, to know more than the ice of Salvation and the snow of the land on which it sat. If this war came, she knew she would get her wish. One thousand years after their ancestors had departed the darklands, she and her sisters would finally travel south once again.
The crates had been nailed shut. She looked at them, at the profligate use of metal just to secure them. There was no shortage of iron in the other lands, where the worm men never ventured and mining carried no risk of death. She’d brought no tools, so she set her nails into a narrow crack on one side and tore. Mizhara had given her Servants more strength than any darklander.
The swords spilled out onto the wooden dock with a clatter that set the circling seabirds scattering. Their cries echoed from the cliffs, a lonely sound.
Drut bent to the weapons and lifted the nearest. She grasped the leather sheath and pulled the blade free, holding it wavering in her right hand. Her left tested the edge of the blade and blood beaded along her thumb. This was a thing meant to kill. She swung it gently – and then more wildly as she heard the footsteps behind her and spun to face the newcomer.
Her sister smiled and stepped back. It was the one the darklanders called the Hunter, her skin glowing with a golden light that surely couldn’t be Mizhara’s. She’d allowed herself to be given a name and, even worse, to be worshipped as a god in the lands below. The other Servants called her ‘Abomination’, but Drut had a name too and she’d broken her oroboros to be with Eric.
‘What are you doing here?’ Drut asked.
‘I came to assist in the transport of the weapons,’ the Hunter said. She gestured behind her and Drut saw that the beast Rii was perched at the top of the cliff, a black hill against the blue sky.
‘I’m surprised you trust her with this,’ Drut said.
‘I trust my control of her, as it was I who bound her.’
‘But she hurt you when you did.’ Drut gestured at the terrible scars on her sister’s face.
The Hunter looked startled, moving her hand to touch them as if she’d forgotten they were there. ‘Who told you this?’
‘When you came, I read my sisters’ accounts of you in the library, from when you were still among us. You told them that Rii lashed out when you bound her and gave you those wounds.’
‘Indeed,’ the Hunter said, calm once again, ‘I did tell them that.’ She moved to the shattered crate, stooped to find a sword of her own and drew it with far more grace than had Drut. The long steel looked natural in her hands. Drut saw that she was holding it in both and shifted her own grip on the pommel. The weapon immediately felt more comfortable.
‘Well-made weapons,’ the Hunter said. ‘Do you believe they will ever see use?’
‘Why else would we buy them?’ Drut asked, but she understood her sister’s question: the call for war hadn’t yet been made, despite the bitter news the Hunter had brought them. ‘Such a decision must be debated,’ she said. ‘It can’t be made in haste. We have no choice but to search the Perfect Law for guidance.’
‘No choice?’ The Hunter frowned, and stepped forward suddenly, swinging the sword in short, strong arcs. She raised a brow and Drut realised she was expected to do the same. Her own movement was less sure, and her feet stumbled as she moved. The uncentred weight of her belly made it more awkward still.
‘Thus,’ the Hunter said, and showed her again.
‘We are the Servants of Mizhara,’ Drut said, repeating the motion.
‘So we are.’ Now her sister was demonstrating a more complex attack. It felt right to imitate her, the two of them moving together almost like the dance that Eric had secretly taught her to do with him.
‘We are the Servants of Mizhara,’ the Hunter said as she led their motions. ‘Mizhara’s enemy has returned to this world, and yet we do nothing.’
‘Seeking the right path isn’t doing nothing.’
‘Spending days and weeks and months poring over the pages of books whose words you already know is worse than nothing. The Perfect Law will not tell my sisters how to act, because Mizhara did not know that Yron would return. But Mizhara spoke of the evil he brought to the world and her duty – and ours, as her Servants – to protect against it. My sisters believe that Mizhara would have counselled caution but she was far fiercer than they think. They buy weapons for a battle they
will never find the resolve to fight, and in the meantime it is my hawks who are left to shoulder the burden that should be ours.’
Her hawks. Her darklanders, the ones she’d guided to their new lands and in return accepted worship from. Drut dropped her sword to the wooden dock.
The Hunter sheathed her own but kept it in her hand. ‘My hawks call me Bachur.’
‘Names are forbidden,’ Drut said stiffly.
‘You are mistaken. Our sisters have forgotten that once we all had names given us by Mizhara. One of our sisters, long ago, decided that to take on our mistress’s task ourselves would be sacrilege, but I do not think it so.’
Bachur had known Mizhara. It was a shocking thought. The Hunter had breathed the same air as their goddess, heard her speak, knew how her voice had sounded. ‘But Mizhara left us long before I was born,’ Drut said. ‘She left us the Perfect Law and it’s all we have to guide us.’
‘And yet,’ the Hunter said, ‘you have also taken a name.’
Drut felt her face move against her will, her expression betraying her. This was another way in which Eric had changed her, an unwanted one. She could no longer shield her thoughts from the world. ‘It’s not a name,’ she said. ‘Drut means “beloved” in my husband’s tongue.’
‘Your husband? But Bachur means merely “eldest”. We are the same in this: others have chosen to name us and we have accepted it. The difference is, my name came from a goddess and yours from a man.’
‘Eric meant nothing bad by it.’
‘I have met and spoken to your husband. A strong heart beats in him, for all that he still looks little more than a boy. He is one of my nation, did he tell you that? Had events and human hearts shifted differently, he might have been born with the hawk mark on him, and you would never have met.’
The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods Page 28
