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

  ‘But we need to kill the lion first.’

  Dae Hyo grinned wolfishly. ‘That’s part of the fun.’

  ‘Not when I’m so weak I can’t draw a bowstring. Or – you’re not expecting me to use my knife, are you?’

  ‘Don’t worry, brother, I’ll do the killing. You just need to watch.’

  It occurred to Krish to ask why he needed to be there at all, but he knew the answer. The murders Dae Hyo had done at his command, those blood-soaked moments he preferred not to dwell on, had bound them tight.

  ‘How do we know where the lion is?’ Krish asked. ‘Did you find its lair?’

  ‘Better – I found its food. Lions don’t like to shift themselves when the sun’s high. They hunt at night mostly, and they don’t want to run too far even then. Lazy fuckers, but who can blame them? And they’re clever, you can’t deny that. They scout the land, just like I did, and find the places other animals are bound to go: watering places, mostly. Then they find a nice thick bush and hide in it until something juicy steps past.’

  Krish looked at the river, rushing past to their left. Its banks were steep and rocky, offering no sure footing. The larger beasts wouldn’t drink here if they had another choice.

  Dae Hyo’s expression was shadowed in the darkness but Krish thought he was smiling. ‘You found the watering place,’ he guessed.

  ‘I found it,’ Dae Hyo agreed.

  They followed the course of the water downstream, the moon bright enough to guide their steps. Olufemi had told him they were heading for the coast and he’d always known that rivers led to the ocean eventually, though he’d never seen it. But the ocean that ate the rivers of his home was in the east. The one they now sought was to the west. It didn’t seem possible he’d come so far, to the other side of the world.

  Many things that had happened in the last few months didn’t seem possible to him. His da’s death was the least of it now, though sometimes he felt a shock of loathing when he remembered what he’d done. And then to find that he was heir to the Oak Wheel and, more than that, a god. But what did that really mean? His prow god still sat at the bottom of his pack, a fist-sized white stone whose name he hadn’t yet dreamed. Was he that kind of god? Or was he more like the Five who shared a home with his true father the king?

  As the water hissed over the rocks to his right and the night-time murmurings of the grasslands came from the left, he searched inside himself for what might make him different from other men. He couldn’t think that there was anything. He needed food and water like anyone else, and pissed and shat it out again the same as them. Olufemi told him he’d brought power back to the runes, but he hadn’t felt it. And runes were a sort of writing, which he knew nothing of.

  He looked at Dae Hyo, who was scanning the landscape with his usual vigilance. The warrior had left his turban back at the camp, and the hair was flying loose from his topknot, curling in wisps round his pale face. His eyes were clearer than usual and his smell pleasanter. He’d drunk far less since they’d left Smiler’s Fair.

  Having a friend – a brother – was almost as strange to Krish as anything else. He wasn’t sure he knew how to do it, but Dae Hyo seemed content enough. It was loyalty the other man valued and Krish could offer that, at least. And he’d learn the Dae ways too, if it pleased the warrior. His hair had already grown a little. It wouldn’t be too much time before he was able to bind it into his own topknot.

  Dae Hyo was slowing now, placing his feet more carefully and almost silently. That was one lesson Krish had learned well and he softened his own footfalls until Dae Hyo abruptly stopped, dropping to a crouch, and Krish knelt beside him.

  The other man’s breath was hot against his ear as he whispered, ‘There, beyond that apple tree, do you see?’

  The surface of the little lake was so still, its waters showed a perfect reflection of the flower-strewn shore. Their colours were lost to night, but their shapes were clear: big sprays of petals and stems covered in tiny bells and another, perched on the end of a long, tall stem, that looked like a goblet.

  The animals took him a little longer to pick out, hidden among the plants. He heard their lapping at the water first, carried over the still night air. And then he saw the curved tooth of a boar and, further along, the branched antlers of a deer.

  ‘Where is the lion waiting?’ he asked Dae Hyo.

  The warrior pointed to a clump of bushes only fifty paces from the water. The leaves were so thick nothing was visible within. It seemed strange that the creatures drinking at the lake didn’t sense the predator waiting so very near, but the wind was heading from the water towards the lion’s shelter and onward to Krish and Dae Hyo. The animals couldn’t smell the lion – and the lion would be unable to scent him and Dae Hyo.

  ‘Are we close enough?’ he asked as the other man began to string his bow. It was a long shot, even for a good marksman.

  Dae Hyo shrugged. ‘I’d prefer the lion to eat the pig, and us to eat the lion, but if you fancy ending up in his belly yourself, go nearer.’

  A deer wandered away from the water and Krish froze, but it galloped past the bushes and no attack came.

  ‘Are you sure the lion’s there?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s there. A man gets a feeling for these things.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he kill the deer?’

  ‘Well, do you prefer pork or venison?’

  ‘Pig’s better – more fat on it,’ Krish said, though he’d only recently tried either.

  ‘There you go then. Beasts have tastes like us and that lion knows what it wants.’

  The hog was still snout-down in the water. Its tusks looked wickedly sharp and Krish wondered that the lion would choose that for its prey over the more fragile deer. But then he imagined Dae Hyo in the same situation and was quite sure his brother would have picked the harder challenge too. The thought made him smile, and then the boar moved.

  Krish tensed, fingers gripping unconsciously at a bowstring he didn’t have. But the boar was in no hurry, waddling away from the water with an easy gait.

  The wind had stilled and the air felt thin and stretched, as if every animal at the lake and insect in the grass had paused to watch the outcome of the dual hunt. Krish realised he was holding his own breath and released it on a long, quiet sigh. Dae Hyo’s usual restless fidgeting was gone. The warrior held himself with perfect, taut concentration as he studied the scene beneath them.

  Even so, when the attack came it was almost too fast. The lion’s coat looked grey in the moonlight. It growled low and lethal as it leapt, claws extended and mane floating behind it. The boar screamed and raised its tusks and, as the two met, Dae Hyo loosed his arrow.

  The shaft struck the lion in its flank. The beast roared, stumbled and then rose to its feet with the arrow protruding from its side, rising and falling with the breath it still drew. Its head swung and its eye cut through the darkness with ease to fix on its attacker. And then it was charging towards Krish and Dae Hyo while Dae Hyo pulled a second arrow from the ground in front of him and the boar took its chance and fled.

  Krish had forgotten how fast a lion could move, and this one was twice the size of the creature he’d once lured to its death. It was on them before Dae Hyo could draw the bowstring, and instead he was forced to grab the arrow in his fist and thrust it towards the great golden eye.

  The lion twisted its head so that the arrow only grazed its cheek. It roared again, loudly and straight into Dae Hyo’s face. The warrior flinched from the noise, the beast opened its massive jaws, and Krish didn’t even realise that his knife was in his hand until he’d plunged it into the lion’s breast.

  The blade found the space between the creature’s ribs by sheer chance. It was stopped a moment by the thick muscle of its heart, but Krish pressed forward, teeth gritted in a mirror of the lion’s snarl, and then it was all the way in. The pommel quivered with the heart’s last beats until the lion’s breath rattled in its throat and it collapsed to the ground.

&nb
sp; Dae Hyo stood stunned for a moment. The creature’s claws had raked his face and his eyes were wild as he looked down at the corpse of the thing that had so nearly killed him. Then he looked at Krish and laughed.

  Krish lay sprawled on the ground, his legs pinned beneath the dead lion. He could feel now how vastly it outweighed him. Its head was tilted to the side and it had died with its mouth open so that he could count every one of its sharp, blood-browned teeth.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ Dae Hyo asked, pushing against the beast’s flank until Krish could pull his legs free.

  ‘Only bruised. And tired.’

  Dae Hyo sat beside him and sighed. ‘I tell you what, you’re not the only one. A fight takes it out of a man, no matter how few seconds it lasts. And you killed a lion, brother. A lion! You hardly need its balls.’

  Krish grinned, suddenly giddy with more than blood loss. ‘But only because you hurt it first. It didn’t even see me.’

  ‘That’s why we hunt together. Look at it!’ Dae Hyo ran a hand along the creature’s jaw, almost gentle. ‘Killing a lion isn’t a one-man job.’

  Krish’s eyes filled with sudden and shaming tears. He didn’t understand why he was crying and he swiped them away angrily.

  ‘You are hurt,’ Dae Hyo said, but Krish shook his head.

  ‘What do you think it means, what Olufemi says about me?’ he asked.

  ‘That you’re a god?’

  ‘That I’m a god, that I brought the runes to life. Everything.’

  Dae Hyo frowned fiercely and stared at his own fingers.

  ‘Is it true?’ Krish asked.

  ‘About the runes, yes, I saw it happen. Something woke that mark of hers and it swallowed up the fire like water. We should have burned to death but we walked right through. I hear the best of the Maeng like to dance on coals to prove themselves, but that’s nothing to striding through the flames themselves.’

  ‘And being a god? I don’t … I don’t feel like a god. I don’t know how a god’s supposed to act.’

  ‘However they like, it seems to me. Belbog and Bogdana enjoy doing good things, they’re worth praying to, and Dana their daughter married her uncle Volos when she was asked, which was very dutiful. But then he turned against them and made all sorts of mischief and demons too. And as for the rest: Mladen only likes hunting and Svarog prefers to do nothing at all. They say that’s why the Eom worship him, because he’s the only god who loves idleness as much as them.’

  ‘I suppose it’s the same with the Five,’ Krish said. ‘The Lady makes storms and all sorts of weather – depending on what mood she’s in. You can pray to her to make the sun shine, but she doesn’t always listen. And the Fierce Child doesn’t care for men at all. He only looks after the wild animals.’

  ‘There you are, you see.’

  It wasn’t entirely clear what Krish was supposed to be seeing, but he smiled and leaned back against the lion’s cooling corpse. The moon was sinking below the horizon, leaving almost total darkness behind, but he didn’t miss it. He didn’t have to be alone any longer; nothing else truly mattered.

  3

  She felt something she knew her sisters didn’t share. The sunlight shattered into rainbows as it passed through the ice dome above, and the food was venison and pear, and everything was as it always had been by Mizhara’s grace, and yet she was restless. Perhaps it was the child growing within her. She might have asked one of her sisters, but pregnancy was so rare among them, how was she to know what was normal and what unique to each mother?

  It was the ninth day of her oroboros. She’d spent it in the great library, poring over the Perfect Law, as the Perfect Law itself dictated, but had written not a note in commentary. Her mind had been empty. No, worse: her mind had not been empty; it had been filled with thoughts of him. He was now in the care of others of her sisters, those in the early days of their own orobori, when work was to be done. But it didn’t seem to her that caring for her husband was a form of labour.

  She wasn’t adept at reading those born of the dark lands. Still, she was sure Eric wasn’t happy. Logic told her that he couldn’t be, when he’d been so badly hurt. His nose had returned to health and his wounds hadn’t festered, but there would be no regrowing his missing fingers and toes. Men were vain of their appearance, she’d been taught, and Eric had much to be vain about. What he’d seen in the mirror had pained him – that expression at least had been clear to her.

  Mizhara hadn’t meant for the thirteen husbands to be distressed. ‘Treat them as you would that which is most dear to you,’ it was written in the Perfect Law, ‘for their flesh is as mine in my regard.’ Was she truly obeying Mizhara’s will by sitting here while Eric suffered?

  Several of her sisters looked round as she stood. Mizhara hadn’t left commandments concerning the appropriate length to sit at table, but by convention they all rose together. She avoided their gazes as she walked the length of the room to the exit, though if challenged, she felt confident she could justify her actions.

  But she was puzzled to feel her breath shorten as she drew near to Eric’s room. Maybe this too was a consequence of the baby growing inside her. It was very strange to feel her body out of her own control. She paused outside, staring at the hazy white outline of his bed and the fuzzy brown blot of his bedding. Was she wrong to come? Did something other than duty to Mizhara drive her? It was a worrying thought and she dismissed it. Her devotion to the Perfect Law remained absolute; it was merely her understanding of it that had changed. She wasn’t ready to take the long walk into the white waste.

  Eric lay with his back to her. She was sure he sensed her presence but his gaze remained fixed on the wall.

  ‘Husband?’ she said tentatively.

  He had been sullen since the injury, but to her surprise he rolled on to his side to face her and even smiled a little. With his nose so much better the expression wasn’t as twisted as it had been. His ear was ragged where the cold had torn away some of the tissue, but the rest of his face was as fair as it had always been, soft-featured and big-eyed. The world was filled with imperfect things and Mizhara had commanded her Servants to treasure them all the same. A focus on that which was deformed and damaged could only lead to harm. It was the path Yron had trodden to his ruin and the world’s.

  ‘You come to see me?’ Eric asked.

  ‘I came to see if you are well.’

  ‘Well, ain’t you a thoughtful one?’

  Sometimes, she’d found, Eric said the opposite of what he truly meant, but she didn’t believe this was such a time. ‘Your welfare is my concern, husband.’

  He sat up in bed, so that the thick furs fell away to reveal his thin chest. It was cold in the room, and his delicate white skin prickled into goosebumps, but he didn’t attempt to cover himself.

  ‘I ain’t feeling too bad,’ he said. ‘Ear’s not hurting and I can feel my fingers – the ones I got left.’ She winced a little at his words but he laughed. ‘It’s all right, honest. I’m over my snit. Sorry if I was snappy before.’

  ‘You behaved exactly as you ought.’ She paused to consider her words, troubled by them. They weren’t strictly true and Mizhara had commanded truth above all else, but she had surely only meant between her Servants. The truth was a sharp-edged thing and these sunless people might be too fragile for it.

  ‘Nah, I was rotten to you – it weren’t right.’ He looked momentarily downcast, but he quickly seemed to shrug it off, rising from the bed to pull on his shirt. She watched his remaining fingers, nimble as they tied the ribbons at its front, slowly covering up the almost hairless skin of his chest. When he picked up his fur jacket and shrugged it on, she wrenched her eyes away.

  ‘You wish to go outside?’ she asked.

  ‘Thought we could go for a walk. It gets boring, trapped in here. I know you got your studying, but these are long days when a boy ain’t got nothing to fill them.’

  The days weren’t long but endless in Salvation, where the sun never set. And Eric too might
have filled them with study: the oroboros was for him as much as any Servant. But she said neither of these things; she merely nodded and strode through the door after him.

  He led her through the golden birches that grew in ordered ranks to one side of the city. The leaves filtered the constant sunlight, offering dapples of shade and a more gentle illumination. She often came here herself on the first day of her oroboros when she reflected on all that she hoped to achieve in the twelve days to come. Mizhara had caused the trees to grow where nature would have bred none and she felt the remnant of her mistress’s magic beneath their boughs, a gift she’d left behind when she departed. It warmed her to think that Eric too found comfort here. There was little else that they shared.

  ‘It’s pretty, ain’t it?’ Eric said.

  She nodded, gaze still on the trees. The breeze was icy but it moved the leaves in a pleasing dance.

  ‘I grew up in a forest,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? Up in the Moon Forest, or down in the Moon Forest I ought to say now. But I left when I was twelve and I ain’t spent much time near anything growing since.’

  She tried to imagine what a forest might look like. Mizhara had spoken of them when she wrote of her campaign against Yron in the dark world, yet no living Servant but one had ever left Salvation. Its ice crept into all her imaginings and the woodland of her mind was more white than green.

  ‘Do you miss your home?’ she asked him.

  ‘Best not to cry about what’s past. It’s only what’s coming what matters.’

  That was a very odd idea, as if all that had gone might be erased, leaving nothing but a white blankness like the snows in front of them. Mizhara’s presence and words were all behind them and if they didn’t look back, how would they see their mistress?