‘Who?’
‘Mizhara. After she had slain her brother she meant to destroy his Servants too, every last one of them, though Yron’s death had driven them to madness. I begged her not to. I told her that the war was won and the killing could end but she had grown drunk on blood and she refused to heed me. And so we fought.’
‘You – you fought Mizhara?’
The Hunter ran her fingers along the four deep scars across her face. ‘I killed her. I did not mean to – or perhaps I did. I can no longer remember. And I have spent all the long years since trying to atone for her crimes, and for mine.’
Perhaps this was delirium. She could feel her mind drifting, sometimes present in the now and sometimes elsewhere, lying beside Eric as the sweat cooled on his body, or in a future she had once imagined, raising her daughter with him. ‘Mizhara can’t be dead,’ she said, in a time while she was present. ‘We’d be … we’d be driven – insane. Like … We’d be insane like them. Like … the monsters.’
‘Your madness is the sun’s, not the moon’s and it does not take the same form as theirs. But madness it is: the search to erase your selfhood, the endless following of endless rules that have no meaning. Only I was spared your insanity with that spark of Mizhara’s power inside me that I took from her when she died. I used it to place two footprints in the ice, footprints that would never fade, and I told my sisters they were hers. I told them that she had left the world in horror at what had been done in her name. And so she should have, if there had been any goodness left inside her. But godhood had driven it from her. They have always been born human, each time they come to us, and each time they forget what that means.’
They climbed the stairs to Salvation, first rock beneath the Hunter’s feet and then ice and the welcome glow of the sun. But the light was fragmented and the walls stained with darkness.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘Rii took her revenge,’ the Hunter said. ‘Salvation is no more, but perhaps it can save you yet.’
Others of her sisters were here. Some stopped to stare at her bloody form in the Hunter’s arms, but there were wounds among them too and twice the Hunter stepped over a still and broken body. They were alone when they reached the great machine at the heart of the city.
It was as wrecked as her body, its wheels smashed and its cogs broken. An energy seemed to linger around it, sometimes visible as jagged flashes of light, the residue of the power that had once animated it.
‘Mizhara left a little of herself in this device,’ the Hunter said. ‘If it is possible for you to be healed, it is possible this will accomplish it.’
The Hunter walked through the wreckage, heedless of the jagged spikes of metal and the lightning strikes of power that spat and hissed all around. When she reached the very centre, she laid her burden down and stepped back. ‘I believe the choice may now be yours. Do you wish to be saved? If so, the power is here to do it – you have only to reach out and take it.’
She wasn’t sure. Did she want to live? She’d wished to die before, and Eric had saved her. She’d betrayed her sisters and her goddess and brought a monster into the world. But that had all been Eric’s doing. He’d told her that he loved her, but he’d only cared about the thing growing inside her. Why should she die when he lived? She must undo the things he’d done.
The power was all around her. She felt it sparking against her skin and it was easier than she’d imagined to reach out with some hidden part of her and touch it, to draw it in. It was a trickle at first, warm and pleasant, and then it was a flood. She felt it flowing in her veins and through her nerves. It healed what had been torn and bound what had been broken, until she felt her body as perfect as it had always been. As perfect as her law.
Her power flowed back into her from where she’d left it, so many years ago. She’d been absent from the world, and now she knew what that absence had done. She’d won a great battle but the war was still to be fought and she knew her enemy’s face.
Mizhara rose from the centre of the machine her brother had made and that she’d turned to a better purpose. Yron had been reborn and it was only right that she’d returned to face him. She felt a moment of disorientation as she remembered two lives, a god and a god’s Servant. She remembered two childhoods, one in warmth and one in cold, two homes, two husbands, two loves. But there was only one hate: Yron and all who served him, and in that hatred she found wholeness.
Acknowledgements
This book wouldn’t exist, or would exist but would be much worse, without the help and patience of a lot of people. Matt Rowan, Matt Jones and David Derbyshire all provided brainstorming assistance while writing and brilliant feedback on an early draft. Naomi Alderman enabled me to understand Cwen, Jared Shurin was invaluable in sorting out my magic, Josh Rice gave military advice, Ian Farrington helped me with coastal features (and general loveliness), and David Bryher spent many long walks talking it all through with me and also just putting up with me.
At Hodder, I’ve hugely appreciated the work and support of Fleur Clarke and Ellie Cheele. And finally, as ever, my fantastic agent James Wills and editor Anne Perry have gone above and beyond to make the book as good as it can be, and encourage as many people as possible to give it a go. I owe you all big time.
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The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods Page 49
