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

by Rebecca Levene

  ‘Dae Hyo!’ Krish said. ‘I hoped it was you!’

  ‘I’m not so easy to kill,’ he croaked and his brother smiled and clasped his shoulder.

  ‘Listen,’ Krish said. ‘You’ve got to tell me – where is the bliss kept?’

  Dae Hyo stared at him as slaves began to bandage his wounds. Krish barely attended to them. He hardly seemed to notice Dae Hyo was hurt. ‘Please,’ Krish said. ‘The bliss. I need it.’

  Dae Hyo didn’t know how long he’d slept. He hadn’t wanted to, but someone had poured liquid down his throat and too late he’d recognised the taste of purple sorghum juice. He woke still in the pleasant daze of the drug, the pains in his legs and chest like descriptions of themselves, the sensations far removed from him.

  They’d placed him in a plain white room beside a window. Other beds were occupied, but when he levered himself up on to his elbows, he saw that their residents were all either asleep or unconscious. Svarog’s cock, he thought two of them might actually be dead. He recognised nearly all of them as people he’d seen around the Etze house.

  There was noise outside, the rumbling of many voices. It was probably what had woken him. Movement wasn’t much of a pleasure, but he turned himself in the bed until he could see through the window. Outside, a crowd pressed close enough that they were blocking much of the light. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, but anger sounded the same in any language. Then he heard another voice rising above theirs: Krish.

  Getting up was even less of a pleasure, but once he got to his feet he found he could stay there. He took a crutch from beside the bed of a thin-faced boy who was still sleeping or unconscious, and used it to hobble down the corridor and out of the building.

  He elbowed his way through the gathered mages and hobbled on. The sorghum was fading and his head felt clearer and the pain sharper. Krish was speaking again, but the murmurs of protest from all around drowned him out. And then Dae Hyo was at the front of the crowd and could see his brother clearly.

  They were in the grand square that held the tall pillars where the craziest of the mages liked to perch. High above, some of them bent to watch the commotion on the ground. Around the square windows were open and mages leaned out of them. There were slaves too, many hundreds of them facing down the mages.

  ‘We’re not leaving,’ Krish shouted, struggling to raise his voice above the noise of the crowd. Beside him, Olufemi repeated the words in the mage’s own language and an angry wave of protest washed back over them in response.

  A man near the front – another relative of Olufemi’s, to judge by the shape of his chin – said something sharp to her and then something sharper to the slaves all around her and Krish. It seemed to be a command, but the slaves stared at him and did nothing.

  ‘They won’t obey you any longer,’ Krish said. ‘I have the keys to the bliss. They answer to me now.’

  That caused some consternation but no fear. ‘Do you think they can stop us from taking you?’ the man said. ‘They won’t fight for you, foreigner.’ Which was exactly what Krish had told Dae Hyo.

  His brother only smiled. Dae Hyo had never seen that expression on Krish’s face before: so cold and confident. He remembered all at once the way Krish had looked as he confessed to his part in the death of the Dae and suddenly it was the mages Dae Hyo feared for. In that moment, his brother seemed capable of anything.

  ‘I don’t need them to fight for me,’ Krish said. ‘I need you to fight for me. My father is coming and I can’t beat him without you.’

  ‘Your father is not our enemy,’ the mage said. He took a step forward and the crowd followed. Dae Hyo knew that at any moment their anger would crest and break and Krish and Olufemi would be crushed beneath it. Krish must know it too, but his brother only smiled, nodded to the slave and shouted, ‘Now!’

  The mages shrank back from an attack they knew couldn’t come as the slaves ran towards them. But the slaves kept on running, past the mages and towards the houses – into the houses and on top of them. And from further away, where more slaves must have been sent, came the first crash of breaking glass.

  Dae Hyo didn’t understand the horror it brought to the mages’ faces. The sound came again and again, echoing a hundred times from every corner of the city – and from right behind him. He turned and saw a white-skinned slave swing a stick at the mirror hung beside the door. It shattered into irreparable pieces as more crashes echoed. All over the city, in every direction Dae Hyo looked, he could see the glint of sun from the shattered mirrors of Mirror Town.

  ‘What have you done?’ the old man said to Krish. ‘The worm men will murder us! You’ve killed us all!’

  There was a tumult of noise, anger and screams and the continual shattering of glass as the slaves continued their work in every street of the city.

  ‘No,’ Krish said. ‘The worm men are mine. Anyone who serves me is safe from them. I’m giving you a choice: serve me and be safe, or oppose me and die.’

  35

  Sang Ki had understood an oasis as a figure of speech – and deployed it with some frequency – but until coming to the Silent Sands he’d had no appreciation of its reality. When he saw the shimmer of green on the horizon, he felt the draw of it in his guts: shade and water and living things after three days of shelterless dunes and the pitiless sun.

  The reconnaissance mission had seemed a good idea when he’d proposed it. But that had been in the comfort of Little Cousin’s ship in the immediate aftermath of the burnt woman’s miscarriage. He looked at her now, swaying on a litter held between two malbeam, the scaled and horned mounts the desert Ahn used in place of horses and questioned his decision.

  Little Cousin’s doctor said that she’d recovered from the miscarriage, yet she’d barely spoken since. Whenever anyone approached her, she turned her mutilated face from them and closed her eyes. Though she hadn’t seemed to much care for the babe when it was inside her, now she mourned its loss. Sang Ki thought perhaps that he did too. The child had been a boy. The pitiful thing that had come out of her had been far enough along for that to be clear. It might have been his brother. It was strange that while it had lived it had been no more than an idea to him. Dead, it seemed more real: his flesh and blood decaying in a shallow grave on the Misa’s bank.

  Or perhaps they were both simply laid low by the unbearable heat of this place. The landscape offered little distraction from it. At first there had been rocks and low drab bushes and sometimes, in the distance, other bands of Ahn, the red-and-gold scales of their malbeam and desert mammoths glinting in the sunlight. But yesterday they’d entered the true desert and since then there had been nothing but sand: hillocks and mounds and waves of it. Sang Ki had found it beautiful at first. Now it was merely monotonous.

  He’d approached the journey here with some enthusiasm. The desire to see a landscape he’d only read of had been his reason for volunteering. Or … his eyes were drawn to the burnt woman, her body swathed in the blue Ahn robes they all wore. She lay so still she might have been dead.

  He must be honest with himself. A desire to visit the Silent Sands had been half his reason for coming. As for the other half – well, the Ashane army that Cwen had no doubt already met seemed likely to include Nethmi’s fratricidal uncle Puneet. He’d never had any love for Nethmi, and now that she was a declared murderess and childless, he would surely leap at the chance to be rid of her.

  And, curse it, Sang Ki should want rid of her too. Yet what if she truly wasn’t Nethmi? What if she was no more than an innocent resident of Smiler’s Fair? Sang Ki no longer believed he knew the answer; he only knew he wasn’t quite ready to see her hang. And so here he was in a hot wilderness that was like a mirror to the icy waste in which he’d spent his youth.

  ‘You don’t love our land, I think,’ Little Cousin said, his malbeam kicking up a cloud of sand as it trotted over to flank Sang Ki’s.

  ‘I’m surprised you love it,’ Sang Ki said. ‘I thought you River Ahn scorned the desert
for the plains.’

  ‘Well, I do like a bit of greenery, but variety is what adds the salt to life, not so? And I’ve travelled the desert crossing with my kin before, to see the route my goods take to the lands beyond.’

  ‘You’ve been to the savannah itself?’

  ‘The verges only – those aren’t a people who welcome strangers, nor the Eternal Empire, which allows none within its borders. But if I can discover something they desire enough, well then. Most rules are far from being iron, if the right incentive can be found to bend them. One day, fat man, I shall see those distant lands and all the secrets they keep.’

  ‘This is variety enough for me,’ Sang Ki admitted.

  ‘No – never say so! You’ll grow to love this place, as a man may grow to love a woman who’s fair of heart but foul of face. Auntie will tell you, there’s beauty here if you know where to look.’ He glanced ahead, to the woman leading their band. She was nearly as large as Sang Ki himself, though he suspected that most of her bulk was muscle.

  ‘I’ll certainly love it more when it yields some water and, if the Five are generous, fruit.’

  ‘Those I can promise you. Huimsaeg is the foremost oasis in the northern sands. My kin have controlled it for two hundred years and travellers pay gold to stop there. But you shall sup at the spring for free, my friend.’

  The sun was touching the tops of the trees by the time their party reached them. They were languid things: long, corrugated leaves drooping from the top of their hairy trunks and bunches of small brown fruit drooping from the leaves. Little Cousin leaned to pick one and passed it to Sang Ki. It was sticky and sweet, but his mouth was so dry he could barely swallow it.

  The Ahn made camp with their usual efficiency. They strung sheets from branches to form sun shelters and bundled blankets beneath them for the freezing night. The burnt woman was laid gently in one such shelter while a young man, barely more than a boy, knelt to offer her a waterskin. Sang Ki saw him trickle the liquid past her mouth, but she didn’t make the effort to swallow it.

  Others were leading the mounts on, towards the spring that gave the oasis its life. Sang Ki hurried after and fell to his knees in the mud beside the small pool, gulping great mouthfuls of it from his hands and then pouring it in fountains over his head. He’d never fully appreciated water before. It was sweeter than any drink he’d ever tasted.

  By the time he returned to the camp the Ahn had spread cushions around a cheerfully leaping fire. He settled on to a pile of them and held out his hands to the flames. Daylight was fading and with it the warmth of the sun. Sang Ki stared through the trees towards the desert, but he could see nothing beyond the circle of the fire. He felt an odd sensation of watchfulness about this place, of being observed. Perhaps it was all the life here, after days without: insects and lizards and shockingly bright red-and-blue birds observing them tilt-headed from the trees and calling out in raucous voices.

  Little Cousin was deep in conversation with his kin, his normally irrepressible humour at least a little held down by the bulk and authority of his aunt, who frowned quellingly at whatever he was saying. Sang Ki knew that the Desert Ahn considered themselves senior to the Water Ahn. Or perhaps Little Cousin simply understood that in this trackless landscape he was entirely dependent on his aunt. For reasons that hadn’t been explained, she was known as Mother of Wasps. She reminded Sang Ki of his mother.

  They brought Sang Ki a bowl of bean and blood broth, so spicy it heated him more than did the fire. A young woman took another bowl to the burnt woman, who set it on the ground beside her but made no attempt to eat it. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen her accept food and realised that he couldn’t. Sighing, he picked up his own bowl and crossed the encampment to sit beside her.

  ‘It’s really very tasty,’ he said. ‘Or at least, it has a great deal of flavour, though whether that flavour is an enjoyable one, I’ll leave you to decide.’

  He thought she might not respond at all, but finally she shrugged and said, ‘I’m not hungry.’

  They could have carried on in that vein, he supposed, talking and saying nothing. ‘I’m sorry about your baby,’ he said instead.

  ‘Are you?’ Her eyes were narrow brown slits in her scarred face. ‘And why would you think I was? If I was Nethmi, wouldn’t I want that baby dead? The son of the man she killed.’

  ‘A child doesn’t inherit its parents’ crimes, or so I was always taught,’ he said.

  She spooned a little of the broth into her mouth, wincing at the taste of it. He’d noticed how she shied away from fire and torch, as if the mere thought of heat pained her now. She swallowed and asked, ‘Was Lord Thilak guilty of some crime?’

  ‘Hardly. My father was a shipborn lord.’

  ‘But Nethmi killed him. Did she have no cause?’

  ‘So now the victim is to blame for his own murder?’ His voice remained level only through supreme effort.

  She clenched her fist, the bubbled scars of her burning tightening to their limit. ‘I don’t know. But people mostly don’t kill for no reason, unless they’re mad. Was Nethmi mad? Or did she have some reason to hate your father?’

  ‘My father was her husband!’ The anger burned inside him, but beneath it he felt something hollow, a black pit of doubt. ‘He treated her as a husband should,’ he insisted.

  ‘Maybe she didn’t want to be wed.’

  Of course she hadn’t. His father had known that, as had Sang Ki. They’d discussed the marriage as a stratagem, Puneet’s hatred of Nethmi as a tool and her weak position as an advantage.

  He remembered the Brotherband and the human wreckage they’d left in their wake. He’d thought himself so much above them, but if a woman went unwilling and powerless to her marriage bed, how much better was it truly? Marriage was a far pleasanter word than rape, but how could he deny that his father had taken Nethmi against her will? And when he was dead, he’d meant for Sang Ki to do the very same thing. Sang Ki had taunted her with it! He remembered their conversation in the library of Winter’s Hammer with vivid and shaming clarity.

  In front of him, the camp carried on its business. The Ahn warriors talked among themselves, Little Cousin chattered to his aunt and the fire crackled and sent bright sparks into the growing darkness. But between him and the burnt woman was a silence louder than any of that noise. ‘Who are you really?’ he asked her at last. ‘Are you Nethmi?’

  She only shook her head and asked, ‘How much further to Mirror Town?’

  ‘A week, I think. Maybe a little less. These lizards of theirs are fast movers and the Ahn know the swiftest ways. Wait, I can show you. I’ve brought my … my father’s maps.’

  He was glad of the chance to compose himself as he fumbled in his pack. But when he unrolled the parchment on to the ground before her, he paused, startled.

  ‘I see Mirror Town,’ she said, resting her figure against the jagged coast. ‘But where are we?’

  He put his own finger a few inches from hers, inland and north, where the map showed the very oasis in which they sat. ‘We’re here, perhaps a hundred miles from our destination.’ And then he moved his finger onward, only a little sideways from their course. Beneath it was scribbled a skull and a symbol that hadn’t been worn by a living person for many hundreds of years. ‘And here is a place I would very much like to see.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Little Cousin said the next morning. ‘Not to be done, fat man. Not even to be considered!’

  ‘It’s only a small detour.’ Sang Ki ran his finger over the map he’d laid before the Ahn trader. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t suggest it yourself.’

  Beside Little Cousin, his aunt shifted her bulk until she could turn the full strength of her frown on Sang Ki. ‘And where did you get this map, Ashaneman? All our trails? All our water? This knowledge is ours, not yours.’

  Sang Ki thought of saying that knowledge was no particular person’s possession, which was its best quality. But the huge woman didn’t strike him as someone who’d
appreciate the sentiment. ‘It’s an old map,’ he told her. ‘I believe my grandfather bought it from one of your fellow tribesmen more than fifty years ago. I assure you, I have no designs on your trade routes. I do, however, have a very great desire to visit the grave of the Geun. Come now, Little Cousin, surely you must understand the appeal, to see the last resting place of the Fourteenth Tribe? I’m astonished you haven’t visited it yourself.’

  ‘Fat man, it’s a burial ground. Spirits without children to mourn or serve them. Angry spirits.’

  ‘Angrier than those beneath the water where you were so keen to take me? It seems to me the parents of those murdered children might be somewhat more enraged than the spirits of the Geun, who only wandered and perished from hunger and thirst.’

  ‘Oh, but the spirits in the water are foreigners – their gods take care of them.’

  ‘Their god is dead,’ Sang Ki pointed out.

  ‘And ill came of that visit, not so?’ Little Cousin’s eyes flicked to the burnt woman, huddled in the roots of a tree. ‘Worse harm will come from this one. Besides, what is there to see but bones?’

  ‘Bones and treasure,’ Mother of Wasps said to Sang Ki disapprovingly. ‘Don’t think you’re the first to ponder it. We all know the ancestors brought wealth with them on their ships, and where is the wealth of the Geun?’

  ‘It hadn’t entered my mind.’ It truly hadn’t, but such a denial was bound to sound false.

  Little Cousin smiled at him, though. ‘He’s telling the truth, Auntie. It’s only knowledge he wants, and the pleasure of going where no one of his tribe has gone before, not so?’

  ‘Just so,’ Sang Ki agreed.

  ‘Then why does he have maps of all our lands?’ Mother of Wasps asked.

  ‘I’ll give them to you,’ Sang Ki said with sudden inspiration. ‘Every chart I have of the Silent Sands. You may use them yourself – or burn them if you choose.’ The foolishness of the offer occurred to him the instant after he made it. How would the Ashane army find its way to Mirror Town without his maps? He must hope it had some of its own.