Art of Hunting

by Alan Campbell

  The shade of the forest gave Granger some relief from the blazing sun, but his arms and legs were already slick with sweat and his eyes began to smart and twitch from exhaustion. He passed a peasant couple, rugged and ancient, each of them pulling the arms of a cart laden with gathered wood. They stopped and stared after him. Granger strode on without a word, his armour humming faintly, his boots leaving deep impressions in the earth, and when he reached the bend in the path he was aggrieved to find the couple had not moved from that same spot but rather continued to stand silently and watch him.

  He encountered nobody else on that path, however. By late afternoon he had moved into the lee of the Irillian mountains, where the air was noticeably cooler. The land began to drop again and soon the smell of the sea permeated the forest. At dusk he reached the first of the settlements he’d been making for. It was a simple scrubbed-dirt and woodsmoke place, an uninspiring hamlet of rude wooden shacks and chicken wire dumped in an uneven clearing on the forested slope. Perhaps it had once been a river valley. Now it was a narrow coastal inlet. The Mare Verdant lapped the hillside a few yards below the houses, leaving an arc of viridian scum on the wet earth. White mist hung over green water, damp and silent. All along the shore dead trees stood like bones set in bottle glass; their white branches chalkscrawled through the haze. The villagers had cleared a patch of forest immediately before their settlement and were using this area to moor their boats against a white-wood pontoon.

  Granger breathed in the stinking metalled air and studied the boats. They were all shallow water fishing skiffs and outrigger canoes, none of them large enough to attempt a journey across open waters.

  ‘You’re not the first.’

  Granger turned to see an old man standing outside a woodshed next to one of the shacks. He had a splash of brine damage across his forehead and chin and long grey hair matted with filth. His jacket and breeches were threadbare and dirty. He regarded Granger with pale grey eyes and added, ‘The first deserter, I mean. Four of you already come through this way.’

  ‘Where’d they go?’

  The old man shrugged. He continued to study Granger for a long moment.‘Hell, son, you look like one of the Drowned. What’d you do? Go swimming?’

  Granger said nothing.

  ‘It’s none of my business where the others went,’ the man said. He took out a pipe and began loading it with tobacco from his front shirt pocket. ‘Evensraum would be my guess. Sure I just dropped them off in Addle.’

  ‘Addle?’

  The man jabbed the stem of his pipe east. ‘Two leagues that way.’

  ‘Why didn’t they take the trail?’

  The old man grinned, revealing a mouth empty of all but two teeth. ‘You ain’t been on Awl long, then?’

  Granger made no reply.

  ‘Addle’s a sea gypsy village,’ the old man said.

  Granger understood. To deal with the ever-rising seas, sea gypsies lived in floating villages. There would be no trail there. He said, ‘How much did you charge the others?’

  The old man shrugged. ‘Call it twenty sisters.’

  ‘I’ll give you two.’

  The man’s twin teeth appeared again. ‘Fair enough. Wait here, will ye?’

  He disappeared inside one of the shacks. Granger heard him argue with a woman, but the dialect was so strong he couldn’t make out much of their conversation. When the old man came out again he was carrying a gaff and a basket of mushrooms. He extended a gnarled hand, his palm marred by a small tattoo of some word that had long since blurred.

  ‘Two, you said.’

  Granger dug out two coins from his pouch and handed them over.

  The old man grinned. ‘I’m Fuller.’

  Granger nodded.

  Fuller waited a moment, presumably for Granger to reply, then he shook his head and sighed. ‘Aye, the other four wouldn’t give their names neither.’

  They walked down to the pontoon. Fuller clambered aboard one of the larger skiffs, set down his basket and gaff, and then cleared a pile of fishing nets to give Granger a seat in the stern. The boat rocked heavily as Granger got in, and sank down a clear three inches into the water, but she was dry in the bilge and seemed hale enough. He gripped the kitbag between his knees.

  ‘Hell’s that armour made of?’ Fuller asked. ‘Stone?’

  ‘Steel.’

  Fuller grunted. ‘Well, then it’s a bastard of a lump of steel.’ He untied and used the gaff to push off.

  They slipped out into the mist and the skeletal trees. It was as quiet as thought. Fuller slid his oars into the rowlocks and bent his back to pulling the small vessel gently across the mirror-glass waters. Even in the centre of the inlet the brine was less than a fathom deep and Granger could peer down into it and see moss-covered boulders strewn across the forest floor. It was like looking through a green lens. A school of long pale fish drifted away from the hull and he saw an eel wriggle and settle on the seabed. The other side of the inlet rose up out of the mist but Fuller turned the boat south and rowed them out into deeper water. Soon the trees thinned and the submerged land under their hull sank away. Even in the gloom the brine remained remarkably clear. Granger could see far into its depths. As they approached the headland at the southeastern end of the inlet, he spied three of the Drowned seated on the wooded hillside four fathoms down: a couple and a small child – and still fresh by the look of them. But for their grey skin and the oddness of their present location they might have been a normal family having a picnic.

  The Drowned man looked up and saw the boat pass over his head. He grabbed the child and carried it down the slope into deeper water, with his woman following behind.

  Granger glanced up at Fuller. It disturbed him that these three looked so recently drowned. But Fuller was bent over the oars, his eyes glazed with his own thoughts, and gave no indication that he’d seen anything under the brine.

  ‘How many of you in the settlement?’ he said.

  Fuller blinked, shaken out of his reverie. ‘What?’

  ‘How many families live back there?’

  ‘Just the one,’ he said. ‘Big family.’

  ‘You fish?’

  Fuller nodded. ‘And a bit of trade with the gypsies.’

  They were turning around the headland now, which opened into a much wider bay dotted with dozens of small islands. Beyond lay the open sea: a great shimmering slab of green. Most of the islands here were tiny, mere rocks overhung with vegetation, stunted trees and bushes – but one or two looked large enough to be inhabited.

  ‘You get many visitors?’ Granger asked.

  ‘A few deserters, as I said.’

  ‘They bring their families with them?’

  The old man shrugged. He looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Most of the men here have wives, children, I’d imagine. Here in Awl.’

  ‘Can’t say I recall.’

  ‘You don’t remember if you carried the men alone, or whether they had their families with them?’

  ‘Some had families,’ Fuller admitted. ‘Never charged ’em any more.’

  He continued to pull the oars through the emerald brine. The sun was setting behind the headland they’d rounded, turning the sky to dragonfire. Angry reflections coiled in the wake of the old man’s oars. The air remained still, breathless, and hung with curtains of pale green mist where the trees met the seawater. Granger noticed that they were making for one of the larger islands in the bay: a long, low, tree-covered mound, about three hundred yards from end to end.

  ‘I was surprised you didn’t haggle with me,’ Granger said.

  Fuller said nothing. Granger noted he had picked up the pace of his rowing.

  ‘So what’s on the island?’ Granger said.

  Fuller looked back sharply. ‘What’s this? What’re you accusing me of?’

  Granger shrugged.

  ‘I got a boat stashed there,’ Fuller said. ‘An old naval lander with a sweet little Losotan engine.’ He spat into the water. ‘An’
fifty quarts of whale oil. You expect me to row you all the way out to Addle?’

  ‘Why not keep the boat back there?’

  Fuller grunted. ‘Thieves is why,’ he said. ‘The whole damn island’s full of deserters looking for a way off. How long d’you think it would last back on the shore? Eh? Others have lost their boats.’ He glared at Granger in an accusatory manner. ‘You wake up one morning and your livelihood is just plain gone ’cos some goddamned freeloader stole it out from you in the night. It’s me who should be watching you.’

  They began to make their way around the island. Snarls of vegetation crowded the waterline, their submerged leaves and branches like specimens trapped behind green glass. Wild pines shaded the interior, and now Granger could see the outline of a simple shack or fisherman’s hut in there. He sniffed the air but couldn’t detect an aroma of smoke. His ambushers were not complete fools, then. He supposed they would be waiting for him in the hut or in the woods nearby.

  But he changed that assumption when they rounded the horn of the island and he saw Fuller’s boat. He whistled through his teeth. She was stolen, had to be. Or else the old man had been robbing and drowning travellers for many years to afford such a vessel. The southern aspect of the island curved inwards, the horns forming a natural harbour in which Fuller’s boat lay moored, ten yards out from the shore. She was an old naval assault craft, the type used by the empire to land horses and men on hostile beaches. Many decommissioned vessels had been converted into ferries over the years. Warlords sometimes used them to raid coastal settlements. She was forty feet long and fifteen wide, with an open deck and her wheelhouse and pilot’s cabin up front at the bow. Her brine-stained and storm-battered steel hull wasn’t much to look at nor particularly ideal for the open ocean, but she was a damn sight better than the skiff. These boats were as tough as they looked.

  It was also, Granger observed, large enough to hide several ambushers aboard.

  Granger assumed his new theory to be correct when Fuller steered his rowing boat directly towards the assault craft. They weren’t going to make landfall, after all. He loosened the cord at the top of his kitbag to make it easier to reach in and grab his sword in a hurry. The old man’s eyes darted to him suspiciously, but he said nothing.

  Finally, Fuller’s skiff clanked against the assault craft’s port side. He dropped anchor and told Granger to climb aboard, using the handholds running up the side of the hull. A moment later Granger found himself standing on the vessel’s open deck. Through the grimy wheelhouse windows he could see the ship’s rudder and engine controls – basic and well worn – and another hatch leading down to what would certainly be the pilot’s cabin in the bow.

  Fuller pushed the anchored rowing boat away from their propellers and then joined him. He frowned. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  Granger simply looked at him.

  ‘You’re clutching that kitbag like I’m going to steal it.’ Fuller eyed him suspiciously. ‘What’ve you got in there? A sword?’

  Granger reached into the kitbag and pulled out the sword. He felt a shudder in his mind as the replicates’ consciences crowded in on his own: one, two, three . . . Finally he sensed all eight of them nearby, standing in the brine below the boat. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You ever see one like this?’

  The old man moistened his lips. ‘Looks Unmer.’

  ‘It’s very rare.’

  Fuller held up his hands. ‘Well, fine as it is, I told you I ain’t going to steal your sword.’ But then he gave Granger a sudden wicked grin. ‘I can’t speak for them fellows behind you, though.’

  Granger heard the wheelhouse door open. He turned to face his ambushers.

  There were two of them: big, mean-looking types. They wore custom-made Losotan armour, scraped and bashed from countless skirmishes, but well maintained, with the plate and leather oiled against the sea air. And they carried short swords in whaleskin scabbards at their sides. Neither of them had drawn these blades, however. Instead they both clutched weighty steel hand-cannons. The weapons looked like home-made one-shots, pipes or mortar barrels adapted to fire naval large-calibre rounds. The Imperial Army called them fist mashers, on account of their nasty habit of blowing up when fired.

  Granger had encountered men like this a hundred times before: mercenaries who sold their services to one warlord or another. The first of them ducked through the wheelhouse door – he had a heavy brow like a shelf of bone and fierce, deep-set eyes. His face and hands had been badly scarred by brine, although not nearly as thoroughly as Granger’s own decimated flesh. The man who followed him was seven feet tall, but rangier, with a nervous gait and red spots spattered across his face – an unusual birthmark, perhaps, or even acid damage.

  The pair of them cleared the wheelhouse door, and then both raised their cannons to point at Granger’s face.

  ‘Drop the sword,’ said the rangier one.

  ‘Drop the cannons,’ Granger said.

  ‘You ain’t that quick, pal,’ the rangier one replied.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Granger said, ‘but I outnumber you.’

  The mercenaries grinned. But then their expressions turned to alarm as the boat gave a sudden lurch, and then rocked, as all around, Granger’s replicates climbed out of the brine. In moments eight of them stood on the deck and the wheelhouse roof and in the stern, all clad in the same weird Unmer amour Granger wore under his cloak, all dripping poisonous water from crackling metal plates and boots and gauntlets and from their hideous brine-scorched flesh. And all of them clutched a version of that same hellish blade Granger now pointed at the mercenaries.

  The two mercenaries swung their cannons around in horror and confusion. And then suddenly the stouter man wheeled his firearm round to face Granger. ‘What’s this?’ he cried. ‘Sorcery?’

  ‘Lower that firearm,’ Granger demanded.

  But the other man was frantic. And when one of Granger’s replicates moved suddenly behind him, he heard the sound and swung his cannon round and fired. The weapon discharged with a flash of light and a colossal bang. The shell struck the replicate’s armoured breastplate and burst into a cloud of spectral scintillations and fumes. The sword replicate staggered backwards against the port bulwark. But then it merely shook its head and regained its feet.

  The other mercenary threw his cannon down. ‘I want no part of this,’ he said. ‘Let me leave.’

  Granger was about to order his sorcerous unit to stand down when the one who’d taken the shell in the breastplate leaped forward and drove his sword deep into the neck of the man who’d fired at it. The mercenary let out a terrible scream and collapsed in a pool of his own blood, while his attacker jerked its sword free and turned to the other mercenary.

  ‘Enough!’ Granger roared.

  The replicate ignored him. It swung its copy of Granger’s blade in a vicious sideways arc, opening the throat of the remaining mercenary. That man seized his neck, but could not stem the jetting blood. He dropped to his knees, gurgling and hissing, then toppled forward.

  ‘Stop!’ Granger cried. He tried to drop the blade, but his hand would not release its grip of the cursed thing. Instead, he felt his arm stir, as – against his will – he found himself raising the weapon. He stared in horror at the replicate. It was making these motions. It was controlling the sword. And Granger was now compelled to copy it. He found himself turning to face Fuller, who stood there white-faced and wide-eyed with terror.

  ‘Run,’ Granger managed to say. ‘Go now.’

  He gasped, staggered forward, sword out-thrust, towards the old man. He could not stop himself. Again he tried to cast the weapon down. His hand remained clenched. He heard Fuller scream. And suddenly Granger realized that he had plunged the steel deep into the other man’s guts. Blood was already pulsing out of the wound. Fuller grabbed uselessly at Granger’s blade with his scrawny hands, slicing the skin of his fingers. Some compulsion forced Granger forwards, driving the sword in up to the hilt. He roared, and with his
power armour now crackling savagely, he lifted Fuller clear off the deck. The man had no weight at all, or else Granger now possessed inhuman strength. He merely swung the sword and cast the old man out over the side of the boat.

  Fuller splashed into the water ten yards beyond the bulwark.

  Granger found himself turning around again, only to discover that he was now face to face with his replicates. All eight of them stood around him and their dead eyes gazed into his own for a long time. And it seemed to Granger that he saw in those eyes a hint of savage satisfaction.

  One of them strode forward suddenly and stopped, its ghoulish face mere inches from Granger’s own. It reached over and clamped its free hand over Granger’s sword hand, squeezing his fingers tighter around the weapon’s grip.

  The world gave a sudden shudder.

  A great clattering noise rose in Granger’s ears, and he became aware of replicates all around him. Not eight, but many, many more. His addled mind sensed them standing on the seabed around the assault craft, hundreds of them down there under the brine, thousands perhaps. And more were appearing with every heartbeat. Granger felt his mind being pulled in all directions. Their perceptions, the perceptions of an army, crowded into him until it was too much to bear.

  He cried out in pain and terror. He was losing control.

  Control.

  He had to gain control over this sorcery.

  His eyes snapped open. The replicate was an inch from his face, its teeth bared in a hideous leer, as it squeezed Granger’s hand with brutal force. It opened its mouth and whispered, ‘The sword is limitless. You can be limitless. Do not fight us.’

  Granger butted it in the face, smashing its nose.

  The blow broke whatever thrall the replicate had over him, for it released his hand and staggered backwards. Granger felt a sudden pressure lift from his mind. He raised the sword as if to bring it swooping down across the neck of the replicate, and the hellish thing moved to parry with its own sword. He couldn’t stop it from acting independently, but now at least it couldn’t control him.