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

  ‘Min Soo assures me that she will live, if given the proper treatment,’ Sang Ki told her.

  His mother knew him too well. She folded her arms and silently waited for the rest.

  ‘She’s pregnant,’ Sang Ki said, ‘which apparently means we can’t hang her. Although who’s to tell if we do? I doubt any of my men would much care.’

  ‘I care.’ Min Soo flicked his long purple hair over his shoulder. ‘And I will tell.’

  ‘Of course we won’t hang her,’ his mother said. She turned to Min Soo and added, ‘Please wait outside.’

  Min Soo folded his arms in turn and stood stubbornly still. It occurred to Sang Ki that the Eom and his mother were remarkably similar. ‘You gave her to my care. I won’t let you kill her.’

  ‘I don’t plan to,’ his mother said flatly. ‘You can treat her in a few moments. Now wait outside.’

  Sang Ki had yet to see his mother lose a battle of wills. The Eom grunted and strode through the open tent flap, pulling it closed behind him. In the sudden gloom the smells of unguent and scorched flesh seemed far stronger.

  ‘Why don’t you plan to kill her?’ Sang Ki asked.

  ‘The baby, of course.’

  ‘Are you really so sentimental? There are two of Gihan of Fort Greenshore’s anatomy texts in our library. If you recall, the man dissected pregnant mothers before one of their fathers put a trident through his eye. Nethmi can’t be more than a few weeks gone. I’ve seen the pictures, and what lives inside her now is little different from a tadpole.’

  ‘A tadpole that in a few months’ time could inherit Winter’s Hammer. A tadpole that will need you as its regent. Without this child we could lose the fort entirely – King Nayan would have the right to pass it to another lord.’

  ‘But this child isn’t my father’s. How can it be? There’s no roundness in her stomach, no milk in her breasts. Thilak’s child would be showing itself by now, more than three months later.’

  His mother shrugged. ‘Some babies grow slowly.’

  ‘Even if that’s true, even if it is Thilak’s, its mother is the woman who killed him.’

  ‘Do you think I’ve forgotten?’ Her face twisted for a moment in pain and he looked away. He found her grief hard to bear, too much a reflection of his own.

  ‘Then must we really care for her?’

  ‘Yes. You won’t be disinherited when I can prevent it. Thilak wouldn’t have wanted it and he wouldn’t want his own child dead. It’s … it might be the last thing we have left of him. We need to remain here while she gets well, but we’ll take her back to Winter’s Hammer for the birth.’ His mother looked down at Nethmi, writhing in pain on already bloody sheets. ‘Then we can hang her.’

  2

  The smoke of Smiler’s Fair lingered in the east. The blue of the sky was smudged with grey across the horizon and in places flocks of crows thickened it to black, while the smell of burning wood and flesh lingered in the endless grass of the plains. Three days’ walk from the ruins of her former home, and Olufemi felt as if she would never escape the shadow of its destruction.

  Ah well, better to look ahead, where Krishanjit and Dae Hyo were outlined at the top of a small rise. The boy was regaining his strength more slowly than she would have liked. Her salves had stopped the wounds on his legs from festering, but the blood he’d lost wasn’t easily replaced. Dae Hyo had his arm slung round the younger man’s waist and was half supporting him as they followed the river seaward. Earlier the warrior had been scouting their route ahead, but he’d reappeared as soon as the boy needed him. Olufemi suspected he’d been watching them from a distance, like a mother with a newly walking child.

  Adofo shifted on her shoulder, tightening his scaly tail round her neck. The lizard monkey’s moon-coloured eyes were fixed on Krish, as they had been since she’d found the boy. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘The sun’s still hours from setting but we’ll have to stop. Can’t have him dying of exhaustion.’ Not now, after everything she’d been through to find him.

  Adofo chittered in what she took to be agreement and she pushed herself to catch the others up, her arthritic joints protesting the use.

  ‘We can stop here,’ she told them. ‘There’s water and that copse of willows will shield us from hunting eyes.’

  Krish sighed in relief and sank to his rump on the rocky ground of the riverbank. His eyelids drooped and there was an unhealthy pallor to his brown cheeks. Adofo screeched and unwound his tail from her neck, galloping across the ground to deposit himself in the boy’s lap. Krish absently stroked the lizard monkey’s head as their mirrored eyes met.

  Adofo had been deserting her more and more in the last few days. The jealousy she felt was absurd, of course. His affinity for Krish was the evidence she’d sought that the boy was indeed everything she’d hoped: Yron’s new avatar in the world. But the creature had been hers for so long. And with Vordanna and Jinn gone – with Vordanna and Jinn dead, she had to face it – Adofo was all she had left of her past. The future Krish opened to her seemed very uncertain.

  As she watched Krish and Krish watched her pet, Dae Hyo set about making camp. He’d done the same every night since their first night together, though back then he’d been spattered in the blood of the men who might have been their allies. He’d bathed in the river since, but she still saw their senseless slaughter whenever she looked at him. And Krish had permitted it. He’d encouraged it.

  But he’d also wakened the runes, after long centuries of silence. She remembered the astounded joy she’d felt as the flames had died at the moon rune’s command and went to kneel beside Krish, pulling unguents from her pack.

  ‘My legs are feeling better,’ he said. ‘I don’t need the ointment.’

  ‘You’ll stop using it when I tell you and not before.’

  He sighed and coloured but undid his trousers so that she could pull them down to expose the deep cuts scoring his thighs. There’d been a time when a young man would have blushed with joy, not shame, at the thought of undressing before her, but that time was many years past. His penis remained unflatteringly limp as she smoothed the honey-scented paste into his skin.

  ‘If I’m a god,’ he said, watching her fingers and not her face, ‘how can I be hurt?’

  ‘You are Yron.’ She felt sure of it now, and not just because of his strange silver and black eyes.

  ‘I’m Krish. Krishanjit. I was born, I grew, I raised goats.’

  ‘Yes – you were the son of a goatherd, but also the son of a king. A person can be more than one thing at once.’

  He pushed her hands away to tie his trousers himself. ‘But I wasn’t my da’s son. That was a lie. King Nayan was always my father, I just never knew it.’

  ‘Well … maybe not that, then.’

  ‘And where was Yron when I wasn’t here? Was he someone else?’

  ‘You were made flesh a thousand years ago, and again long before that.’

  ‘And when he wasn’t me or, or whoever that was before, where was he? What is he? What does it mean to say I’m a god when I’m still just me?’

  As she studied his face she saw a bright curiosity and maybe enough intelligence to understand. ‘Yron is an idea,’ she told him. ‘A very deep idea, one of the two most profound that exist in the world, and both the source and the solution of the runes. A concept is eternal, its physical manifestation in the world transient, but they are two aspects of the same thing.’

  ‘Like … like talking about a meal and the actual food itself.’

  ‘Yes! Very good, Krishanjit. It’s the same with your mother – your real mother. She died when you were born, but that didn’t change the relationship between you or end the concept of motherhood itself. If all the mothers in the world were killed, the idea of motherhood would still exist until someone else gave birth and became a mother of flesh again.’

  He stroked his trousers over the cuts on his leg. ‘Yron is immortal, but I can die.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So I’m
not any different from any other man. I’m not any stronger or safer.’

  ‘You’re not quite so easy to kill. And now the runes are awake we can make you stronger still: the only way to use the runes is through you, through service to you.’

  ‘But the other Yron, a thousand years ago, he died, didn’t he? Or I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘He was killed,’ she admitted.

  ‘How?’

  ‘It was his sister, the sun. She too was made flesh in that age, and they fought, as you and she are always destined to fight. She defeated and murdered him.’

  ‘And won’t she be after me now?’

  ‘No, she’s gone. When she saw what her people had done in her name to her brother’s followers, the hundreds of thousands of deaths, she chose to leave the world and she never returned. You’re safe, Krishanjit – we’ll make you safe.’

  Safe from his sister, at least. When she turned from the boy, she saw that Dae Hyo had started a fire blazing as they spoke. ‘Do you think that’s wise?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’ll douse it when the sun sets. My brother needs hot food.’

  She couldn’t argue with that and watched in silence as he plucked the two plump birds he’d shot during their walk. His expression suggested he thought she should take over the task, but she’d never learned menial work in Mirror Town and had seen no need to master it after leaving.

  While the meat roasted over their fire, Dae Hyo and the boy talked quietly, nonsense about the right flowers to weave into your horse’s bridle and the correct berries to bring when wooing a woman. Dae things, which should mean nothing to the moon’s heir, but Krish had declared himself Dae with a brutality that still shocked Olufemi.

  It was as they were eating that she heard the hoofbeats approaching. She looked up, alarmed, but it was already too late. The rider was less than a hundred yards away and staring in their direction. Dae Hyo’s wretched fire had probably drawn his eye.

  She looked to the warrior, expecting that he’d draw one of his many weapons, but he gulped down the haunch he’d been chewing, leaned back on his elbows and shouted, ‘Be welcome, friend. There’s meat to share if you want it.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Olufemi hissed as Krish asked ‘Why?’, but the warrior only smiled at their questions.

  The stranger’s horse trotted closer and Olufemi forced her expression into calmness as she saw his face. He was Ashane, like Krish himself and like the men who were pursuing him. The newcomer wore no marks of allegiance, but then neither had the ragtag force that had invaded Smiler’s Fair. And there was a sword slung at his side.

  ‘You’ve ridden fast,’ Dae Hyo said, eyeing the horse’s lathered flank.

  The man swung himself gracefully from the saddle. ‘It’s true, I’ve been pushing Unmol too hard.’ He patted his mount and then pulled out a cloth and began drying her.

  ‘In a hurry, then. I tell you what, it’s hard to blame you in these troubled times. That place –’ Dae Hyo nodded towards the smoke on the horizon ‘– fell apart like a wormy apple and all the maggots crawled out.’

  The man raised an eyebrow, clearly wondering if the warrior meant to imply he was himself one of those maggots, but Dae Hyo’s innocently friendly expression seemed to reassure him. ‘Dangerous times indeed. You’re citizens of Smiler’s Fair yourselves, then?’

  ‘Just passing through when the fire started,’ Dae Hyo replied. ‘And yourself?’

  The man had a shipborn face, all clean lines and smooth skin. It barely wrinkled as he smiled. ‘The same. I’m Ravindu of Fort Daybreak.’

  ‘Dae Hyo and Dae Krish,’ the warrior offered before Olufemi could prevent him. ‘And this is Olufemi, a mage of Mirror Town.’

  Ravindu nodded, seemingly unconcerned by the names, but did his eyes linger a moment too long on Krish as the boy rose to greet him? Olufemi had lived through three days of unrelieved tension, and no longer trusted her own judgement. Still, as she watched Dae Hyo hand a roasted bird leg to the stranger and then a flask of vodka, she was certain she didn’t trust his judgement either.

  ‘You’re heading the wrong way if you mean to return to Ashanesland,’ she said to the stranger as he stripped the bird’s bones clean with his teeth.

  ‘As are you,’ he pointed out.

  ‘But we’re not Ashane.’

  His eyes flicked again to Krish and then back to her. The hand not holding his meat had shifted to hover above the hilt of his sword and a cold wave shivered through her. But he merely pulled his blue-checked trousers straight.

  ‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘I came to Smiler’s Fair to escape … problems in Ashanesland. It wouldn’t do to return there, not if I value my life.’

  ‘I see.’ It was plausible. The fair had always been a refuge.

  The sun had sunk towards the western horizon as they spoke, and now only a sliver remained. The night was Krish’s time, but the boy looked nervous as Dae Hyo quenched the fire with river water to let the concealing darkness grow.

  ‘Afraid of who might see us?’ Ravindu asked.

  ‘Maggots,’ Dae Hyo said and rolled on to his side, eyes shut in the instant sleep that Olufemi envied.

  It took her far longer to escape consciousness. Age had brought that affliction and worry sharpened it. Krish’s moon-silver eyes remained open a while too, but eventually his weakness overcame him and he began to gently snore. Ravindu’s eyes had shut almost as quickly as Dae Hyo’s and his chest moved gently; perhaps he was sleeping, or perhaps merely feigning it.

  She reached down to hug Adofo, accustomed to warming him in the cold spring nights. But there was only a dent in the blankets where his body had briefly lain. She looked again at Krish and saw open silver eyes again – but they weren’t the boy’s. The lizard monkey blinked as he shifted against Krish’s chest and then turned away from her to wrap his limbs round the boy.

  She’d spent so long, so very many years imagining how it would be when Yron’s heir was found. She’d never imagined this.

  Krish woke to find a hand over his mouth and another pressed against his chest. He struggled for a frantic moment before something – maybe the elderflower-oil-and-whisky smell, or the rough feel of the palm – told him it was Dae Hyo. When he stilled, the other man released him.

  The warrior grabbed his elbow to steady him as he rose and pointed to their left. Ravindu was sleeping there, turned on to his back with one arm curled against his chest and the other flung out towards them. He was very still. Krish’s eyesight at night had always been strong, but he couldn’t see the stranger’s chest moving. And there was a smell too, one Krish had grown familiar with. The instant he recognised it he realised that the puddle of black around Ravindu’s throat was blood and the dark slash across it a mortal wound.

  He started back, heart pounding, only to see Dae Hyo’s smile. The warrior showed his knife. He turned it in the moonlight to reveal the long stain along its blade before wiping it clean on the grass and sheathing it.

  ‘You killed him?’ Krish asked.

  Dae Hyo frowned and put a finger to his lips, though Krish couldn’t see any reason for stealth now: the man was dead. Dae Hyo hooked an arm under Ravindu’s pack, gestured Krish to follow and strode away along the riverbank.

  They walked for several minutes in silence, but Krish couldn’t leave the question unanswered. He’d given Dae Hyo orders to kill – to murder – three days ago. Had his brother taken them as a general instruction? ‘Why did you kill Ravindu?’ he risked whispering when Dae Hyo stopped.

  ‘I didn’t like the look of him.’ Dae Hyo dropped to his knees and opened the dead man’s pack, pulling out clothes and food and cooking pots to strew them on the ground.

  ‘Then why did you invite him to our fire?’

  ‘It’s simple, brother. I didn’t want him to ride off and tell anyone else where we were and I couldn’t be sure an arrow would kill him at that distance. But I know if I was hunting a man I’d want to identify him by more than his tracks. I didn’t
think he’d turn down the chance to study us up close, and he was safer where we could see him.’

  ‘Unless he attacked us.’

  ‘No cause for fear – he was only a little man. Didn’t put up any sort of a fight when I slit his throat.’

  ‘That’s because you did it while he was sleeping.’

  ‘Yes, but – ah!’ Dae Hyo turned to Krish, grinning and waving a sheet of parchment he’d drawn from the stranger’s pack. It was a drawing of a boy’s face. It took Krish a moment to realise that it was his own: hollow-cheeked and wild-eyed. He’d seen his reflection so seldom that it jolted him how half-starved he looked. And he knew what the drawing meant: Ravindu had been hunting him.

  ‘How did you know it was there?’ he asked.

  ‘I didn’t. I was looking for coin or metal but this is good, isn’t it? I always prefer to know I haven’t killed a man for nothing. And look, three gold wheels, twelve feathers and a, well I’m not sure, to be honest with you. But it’s metal and it has a man’s face stamped on it, so it must be a coin. The horse as well: two more and we’ll be able to make much better time. A good night’s work.’

  ‘But … if he was dead already, why were we whispering?’

  ‘What? Oh.’ Dae Hyo threw the parchment away and pocketed half the coins before handing the rest to Krish. ‘I didn’t want Olufemi to hear. Lion hunting isn’t women’s business. They’re too kind: it hurts them to think of the death, and it’s not a man’s business to upset them.’

  ‘Lion hunting?’ Krish felt as if Dae Hyo had woken him halfway through a conversation he’d started with himself.

  ‘I saw the tracks when I was scouting earlier. Big fucker.’

  ‘Is lion good to eat?’ Krish had killed one of the great cats once himself, but he’d only thought about taking its pelt, not its flesh.

  ‘I don’t know. The flesh is just flesh; it’s the balls we want. That’s where a beast’s strength is. It’s different with men – decent ones, anyway. They keep their strength along with their love in their stomachs. But animals only think about their cocks and the gods put all their power in that part of them. You’re weak at the moment and not getting better quickly enough. I can see the mage thinking it. You may be this moon god she talks about, but you’re in a man’s body and that body needs healing. The lion’s balls will do the trick.’