Art of Hunting

by Alan Campbell

  ‘I don’t need it,’ Granger replied. ‘I’m dead.’

  Conquillas looked at him strangely. ‘Even the dead need rest,’ he said.

  Granger did sleep. And on the morning of the tournament finale, he was woken up by a chorus of drums. He groaned and fell out of bed, his armour clanking against the stone floor. It whined in protest. He sniffed.

  Was that stench really coming from him?

  He got up and applied Siselo’s perfume to the joints of his armour. It helped a little. And then he wandered outside to see what all the fuss was about.

  The drums were coming from the arena in the centre of the hall, and so Granger pushed his way through the crowds surrounding it. King Marquetta, as it turned out, was giving a demonstration of his skill with a blade.

  He was stripped to the waist, fighting a cutting box.

  Cutting boxes were particularly vicious little Unmer artefacts, and the one facing Marquetta now was typical. A decorated metal cube, about four inches to a side, it hovered before the young king at head height. From one side protruded a simple blade, less than an inch long. The weapon would seem innocuous enough, were it not for the terrifying speed with which the box attacked.

  As Granger watched, the artefact shot through the air so quickly he lost sight of it. Marquetta moved his blade suddenly. There was a clang and sparks appeared a foot to the left of him. The box dropped to the floor and lay there, buzzing and trembling for a few moments, before it drifted back into the air.

  The crowd applauded.

  The drums beat again. Someone shouted, ‘Seven.’

  Granger yawned and left him to it. He went to find Conquillas.

  Behind him the crowd applauded again. ‘Eight!’ came the shout.

  He found Conquillas breaking his fast outside his tent. Siselo looked unusually glum.

  ‘She has some concerns,’ the dragon lord explained.

  ‘About you fighting?’

  Conquillas nodded.

  Granger said nothing. She wasn’t the only one.

  His opponent for the third round was a Valcinder cut-throat named Manfred Barder who fought with dagger and bow and wore archaic tanned leather armour that turned sorcery back upon the sorcerer. He had fried the brain of an old Unmer Brutalist in the previous round and then stabbed him in the liver before the man could even yield.

  Granger’s armour whined when it came close to the man, but since any sorcery he employed was directed inwards, the cut-throat gained no advantage over him. It turned out to be Granger’s easiest fight so far.

  Conquillas won his bout against a knight from north Anea. This man had been bodyguard to one of the emperor’s rivals and had displayed preternatural skill with a short sword and shield. But he fell before the Unmer dragon lord. The Bahrethroan Brutalist came close to destroying an assassin, also from Valcinder, while Marquetta and his uncle fought solidly against the last two warlords in the games – both of whom were heavily bolstered by sorcerous artefacts.

  So twelve became six, and still Fiorel had not made an appearance.

  The remaining combatants were Granger, Conquillas, Marquetta and Cyr, the Bahrethroan sorcerer Cobul and a mercenary – a tanned and muscular woman named Golsa who fought on behalf of the lord of the Gunpowder Isles. She was a phenomenally skilled warrior, using mace and blade to devastating effect, and inked in protective sigils that had foiled every sorcerer she’d come up against. She had woven metal wire into her face and arms to give herself a frightening appearance. But the most frightening thing of all was her ability to bend the geometries of the space around her.

  Golsa claimed it was a natural talent, and yet Granger suspected her of using some sort of Unmer device – a pin or a chain, or even the wire set into her own skin. He watched her fight one of the Unmer lords – a thin grey-haired man who was one of the most talented swordsmen Granger had ever seen, second only to the Anean knight Conquillas had bested. He outmatched her abilities with a blade – and yet he could not land a strike upon her as Golsa bent the space between them. A blow aimed at her neck would bite into the dust under the Unmer swordsman’s feet. His thrusts went wide of the mark, not because he lacked accuracy, but because the space around him constantly changed shape. Her own blows came at him from unexpected angles, pounding him to the ground before he finally yielded.

  Golsa was certainly a horror to behold. But was she the shape-shifter? The tattooed Bahrethroan sorcerer had also arrived from nowhere, and he was just as formidable an opponent. Granger had watched him hurl savage energies around the arena without the use of an amplifier.

  And yet it also occurred to him that Fiorel might have assumed the form of Duke Cyr, or even King Marquetta. It seemed fitting that the duke’s patron should fight in his stead, or else be summoned to stand in for the king whom he had helped bring to power. Neither the duke nor Marquetta seemed overly worried to be facing Conquillas in the arena. Was that because they knew they could not be defeated?

  Granger was in his tent, thinking all this over when someone tapped against the canvas door.

  ‘Come in,’ he said.

  Conquillas entered. ‘Marquetta wants to make a deal,’ he said.

  ‘What deal?’

  ‘One final bout,’ he said. ‘Two teams of three, to the death.’

  ‘I’m already dead.’

  Conquillas didn’t smile. ‘He is prepared to overlook that.’

  ‘Who does he want fighting alongside him and Cyr?’ Granger asked. ‘Golsa or the Bahrethroan? Which one of them is the shape-shifter?’

  Conquillas was silent for a long time. Finally he said, ‘He wants you to fight alongside him and Cyr. He said he would give you this one last chance to join the winning side. If you refuse, then we draw lots.’

  Granger stared at the other man. ‘He’s playing games with us.’

  ‘That is his offer.’

  ‘I’m not Fiorel.’

  The Unmer lord did not reply.

  ‘Tell him I refuse. We’ll each draw for our third fighter.’

  Conquillas nodded. ‘So be it.’

  They drew the Bahrethroan sorcerer, which left the mercenary Golsa to fight alongside the king and Duke Cyr. Granger wondered if this had been Marquetta’s intention all along and his offer had just been to sow doubts in Conquillas’s mind.

  In all our minds. He thought back to something Conquillas had said: Would you know? If it became a perfect copy of you, every cell and every drop of blood. Every memory. Would you know that you had been replaced?

  And so, as the tournament drums beat one last time, Granger walked into the arena next to the dragon lord Argusto Conquillas and Jian Cobul, a sorcerer from Bahrethroa who could destroy a man with a whisper and a gesture. Opposite them stood a mercenary from the Gunpowder Isles, Duke Cyr of Vale, and Paulus Marquetta – the newly crowned king of Anea.

  Cobul whispered to Granger, ‘The name’s Cobul.’

  ‘I know,’ said Granger.

  ‘Beware the duke’s halberd.’

  Granger turned to him. ‘What?’

  ‘The halberd. I sense sorcery there. Something he hasn’t yet unleashed.’

  ‘Like what?’

  The Bahrethroan just shrugged. ‘Something powerful.’

  The bout official stepped forward and raised his hands. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he cried. ‘From more than eight score combatants from across the kingdom of Anea and countless outlying provinces, we are down to the final six. Two teams, here to fight for a purse in excess of six hundred thousand gilders. On my right . . .’

  Granger turned to Conquillas and whispered, ‘Could you shoot the duke’s halberd from his hand?’

  ‘That is a two-handed weapon,’ Conquillas said.

  ‘Could you do it?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ He opened the top of his quiver, letting the air rush inside.

  ‘. . . and from the distant shore of Bahrethroa,’ the bout official went on, ‘the legendary Brutalist sorcerer, Jian Cobul, master of the secret fires at
the heart of creation . . .’

  ‘I didn’t write this,’ Cobul said. ‘They make it up themselves.’

  ‘I know,’ Granger said.

  ‘And on my left,’ the bout official said, ‘King Paulus of Anea, son of Jonas the Summoner and Queen Grace Constance Lavern . . .’

  ‘How are we going to split the winnings?’ Cobul asked.

  Granger shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

  ‘I mean I hadn’t thought about it,’ Granger said.

  ‘So three ways is fine with you?’ Cobul said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. I just wanted to clear that up. Sometimes people have different ideas when it comes to sharing—’

  Granger drew his sword. ‘We’re starting now,’ he said.

  The bout official had backed away and called the start of the fight.

  ‘Oh,’ Cobul said.‘Right.’ He turned suddenly and unleashed a maelstrom of power at their three opponents – a great surge of light and darkness that tore across the arena . . .

  . . . and burst into a million scintillations.

  Duke Cyr stood there with his fist clenched at his chest. A hazy green sphere of light surrounded him and his two companions. His barrier had dispersed Cobul’s assault like so much smoke.

  Granger glanced left to see Conquillas notch two arrows to his bow string simultaneously. Granger himself began to phase. As he summoned forth the sword phantoms, he experienced the familiar sensations of his mass and strength increasing. In a heartbeat he had created a hundred copies of himself within the same space. Then two hundred, then five.

  Conquillas loosed his arrows . . .

  . . . which struck the green sphere and flared to nothing.

  The sphere of energy began to darken.

  Conquillas frowned. ‘That barrier is too powerful to be Cyr’s doing.’

  ‘Fiorel?’ Granger asked. He continued to multiply himself, increasing his strength a thousand fold, two thousand fold, four thousand fold. His armour began to whine as it reached the limits of its endurance.

  He strode forward and struck the sphere with his sword.

  The force should have been enough to split a mountain in two, but the sphere of energy merely darkened again. Now he could no longer see their opponents inside it, just vague shapes. Was Cyr using the barrier to mask some further sorcery? Was he trying to obscure Fiorel’s true identity?

  Cobul unleashed another blast of force, but it had no effect other than to darken the sphere still further. Cyr’s barrier had become almost black.

  And now it began to rise into the air before them. Five feet, then ten, then twenty. There it hovered, motionless above the arena floor, a swirling bubble of dark energy.

  ‘He’s created a rift,’ Conquillas said. ‘A new universe. He’s been using the power we throw at it to fuel its creation.’

  Granger gazed up at it. ‘To shield them from us?’

  The ground beneath them started to shake violently. Stone cracked underfoot. All around, spectators cried out in alarm and rose from their seats. ‘I think not,’ Cobul said. ‘I think it’s to shield them from Fiorel.’

  Massive tremors continued to shake the great hall. The whole arena jolted suddenly to one side, throwing Granger from his feet. He landed on his back and looked up at the distant ceiling. And in the arched stonework he saw a monstrous face.

  He called over to Conquillas. ‘You said Fiorel can assume any form?’

  ‘Any form he knows.’

  ‘Look up,’ Granger said. ‘We’re inside him. Fiorel is the Halls of Anea.’As he said this, the whole arena began to crumble around them. Great cracks ran through the tiers of seating. Chasms opened to the left and right of them. Stone snapped, shattered, fell away into darkness. Screams sounded all around them as the spectators fled from the destruction or disappeared into one of the ever-widening holes.

  ‘Siselo,’ Conquillas cried.

  The three men joined the panicked crowds fleeing the arena as the ground behind them crumbled to nothing. They cleared the top of the stepped seats. Ahead of them the competitors’ compound was collapsing. Wires strung with gem lanterns snapped or fell as the poles toppled. People were disoriented, unsure which way to go. Conquillas pushed his way through a group of men. ‘Siselo!’ he cried.

  They heard her calling back somewhere to the left.

  ‘I’ll get her,’ Granger said.

  He began conjuring sword phantoms. Eight disparate replicates that he sent bulling through the crowds in the direction of the girl’s cry. Their perceptions all crowded into his mind.

  He saw men and women trampled underfoot and others falling over each other in desperate panic and fights and cries of agony or fear. Barrels and tables upended, crockery smashed. Rope and tin and broken stone. A hundred faces. A thousand faces.

  He spotted her.

  She was crouched in a space between the shattered walls of a compound hut, sobbing with fear. Granger scooped her up in the arms of whichever replicate was nearest. They were all him and he was all of them, and he could hardly differentiate between himself and any of them. Another part of him glanced up.

  Cyr’s sphere of energy was drifting through the air above his head. And in the ceiling far above that he could see the enormous face of the god Fiorel. It was formed of ever-shifting stone and bore a strangely calm, almost serene expression. Rubble and dust rained down from it. Its eyes opened and then its mouth and it spoke with the voice of a mountain.

  ‘Conquillas.’

  Granger’s replicate reached them and set Siselo down next to her father. He stooped and picked her up, hugging her fiercely.

  ‘Conquillas.’

  Granger, Cobul and Conquillas climbed a mound of rubble to better survey the situation. Stone and dust continued to rain down, smashing to the ground all around them, pulverizing the merchants’ stalls and the wreckage of the compounds and the bones and flesh of the fallen. The air was becoming difficult to breathe. Granger could see Cyr’s sphere drifting away over it all. It was almost at the exit tunnel. But the ground between them and escape was wreathed in dust clouds and riven with great dark crevasses. There was no way to cross.

  Conquillas set down his daughter and aimed an arrow up at that vast face in the ceiling.

  Fiorel chuckled. ‘Much time has passed, Unmer lord.’

  ‘Let my child go free,’ Conquillas said.

  Above them, stone eyes narrowed. ‘Tell me, why should I show mercy now when you showed none to Duna?’

  ‘I am flawed,’ Conquillas said. ‘You are not.’

  ‘Not good enough,’ the shape-shifter said.

  ‘Then I’ll make you a deal,’ Conquillas said.

  ‘What deal?’

  Conquillas lowered his bow. ‘Let her go,’ he said. ‘And I’ll fight you.’

  The great stone face frowned. ‘This is your deal? I refuse.’

  Conquillas sat down on the rubble and set his bow down beside him. Then he spread his empty hands. ‘Then do what you will. I won’t resist. And you will never know.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Which one of us is the greater being.’

  Fiorel roared. ‘I am a god. Set against me, you are nothing.’

  ‘Only because you have greater power,’ Conquillas said. ‘But take that away and what is left? If you assumed my form, copied my every cell, if you made yourself identical to me and then challenged me to a duel, I would win.’

  Fiorel considered this.

  ‘There is no shame,’ Conquillas said, ‘in admitting that the notion terrifies you.’

  The god chuckled again. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I agree. But if you lose, then she loses too. I will find her.’

  Conquillas nodded.

  Fiorel closed his eyes and a great tremor shook the ground. The crevasses between where they stood and the exit all closed, creating a path across the blasted ground by which they might cross.

  ‘Look after her,�
�� Conquillas said to Granger.

  ‘No!’ Siselo shrieked. ‘No, no, no.’ She tried desperately to cling to him, but the dragon lord gently pushed her into Granger’s arms.

  ‘Quickly,’ he said to Granger.

  Granger picked up the wailing child. ‘Cobul?’

  The Bahrethroan sorcerer seemed indecisive. He glanced up at the massive stone face and then he gazed at the path to the exit. Cyr’s sphere was nowhere to be seen. ‘Hell, I’m with you, Granger,’ he said. ‘That thing’s big.’

  They hurried away, leaving the dragon lord standing alone on a mound of rubble. Granger glanced back once. By then he was too far away to be sure, but it seemed to him that Argusto Conquillas had a smile on his lips.

  EPILOGUE

  King Paulus gazed down at the sleeping girl. Then he knelt by her bed and rested his cheek against the gentle swell of her belly. He listened, hoping to hear the baby’s heartbeat, but there was nothing.

  Duke Cyr turned his telescope back to the window. He couldn’t see the entrance to Segard from here in the palace, but he could see the pall of dust hanging over a ridge of trees where people were saying the tunnel had collapsed. Of the thousands who had ventured inside the Halls of Anea to watch the tournament, only a handful had escaped with their lives.

  ‘Fiorel should have been here by now,’ he said.

  ‘Let him enjoy his moment with Conquillas,’ the king said. ‘He’s waited long enough for it.’ He lifted his head from Ianthe’s belly. ‘I think Jonas, if it’s a boy.’

  Cyr nodded. But he remained preoccupied. The shape-shifter really ought to have arrived at the palace before now. What could possibly have delayed him? The somnabulum floating in the corner of the room chattered suddenly.

  King Paulus glanced up at it, before returning his attention to Ianthe. He looked at her for a long moment. Then he picked up a glass from the bedside cabinet and eased a little water between her lips. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘There’s no reason to stop at one child. We might have three or four.’

  ‘That would be sensible, sire,’ Cyr said. He turned his head at a sudden noise. A distant thumping, like a blacksmith’s hammer repeatedly pounding an anvil.