The Art of Hunting (26 page)

‘We need to move more quickly,’ he said. ‘Use the lances whenever you need to.’

Now ejecting licks of flame whenever the parasite’s searching tendrils drew too near, the three men skirted the grove of trees and soon reached a raised hillock which offered a view of the
entire island. Maskelyne checked his locator again only to discover that the source of sorcery was now somewhere behind them. They had walked past it.

Carefully, the men retraced their steps. Maskelyne now kept one eye on the locator, adjusting the lamp arm to keep the filament at its brightest. It was directing him towards the grove of
trees.

‘How much fire do you have left?’ he asked Spenratter.

‘Not much,’ the dive master replied. ‘But I imagine there’s enough left between us. Unless you’re planning on spending the night here.’

Maskelyne indicated the tangle of trees and bushes ahead of them. ‘See if you can clear that scrub,’ he said. ‘Our target, it seems, lies in there.’

Spenratter nodded. He made an adjustment to his lance and then stepped forward of the other two. Then he squeezed the trigger.

A huge gout of fire burst forth from the weapon, engulfing the vegetation before him. Bushes crisped and went up in balls of flame. Spenratter kept up the onslaught until the fire had taken firm
hold. The lower branches of the trees now crisped and blackened as flames grew.

A violent shudder ran through the ground. Maskelyne staggered, but managed to keep himself from falling. Spenratter, however, was unbalanced by his lance and lost his footing. The stout man
rolled and then scrambled upright again, helped to his feet by a hand from Pendragon just as a fresh network of tendrils snaked across the ground towards him.

Maskelyne aimed his own lance at these and burned them away.

The island moved a second time. Suddenly and with great fury, the land
bucked
, throwing all three men from their feet. As Maskelyne hit the scaly ground, he spied Spenratter roll a
second time and leap upright. The dive master came quickly to the aid of Pendragon, who had fallen into a mass of tendrils and was now struggling against them. Every time it seemed he might pull
away, a dozen more filaments reached over him, winding themselves around his legs and neck. The dive master drenched the young sailor in fire and then dragged him to his feet.

Then, suddenly, from the thicket came a vast and terrible moan.

Spenratter grabbed his arm, pulled him round.‘Look there!’ he cried, jabbing his finger at the burning undergrowth. ‘Hell have mercy, look at that thing!’

Much of the smaller scrub had burned away, allowing Maskelyne a view into the heart of the thicket. And what he saw there momentarily stopped the breath in his throat. From the ground there rose
a great mass of bloated skin, in which could clearly be seen two enormous weeping eyes, a pair of fist-sized nostrils and a black gulf of a mouth as wide as a man. He realized he was looking at the
face of the parasite’s host.

As the vegetation around it burned away, that gross visage coughed and sputtered and fixed its terrified eyes upon the three interlopers. It opened its prodigious maw and let out a baleful howl.
And then it cried out in Losotan, ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it.’

Spenratter swung his lance around to torch the thing, but Maskelyne stopped him. A hundred more tendrils were snaking across the ground towards them, and he feared they lacked enough liquid fuel
to see them safely back to the tender. He had a theory he wanted to test. He turned to the face and yelled, ‘Recall the tendrils.’

‘Please, I beg you,’ it replied. ‘I can’t breathe.’

‘Recall them, or we’ll scorch your skin.’

The great wet maw shuddered and cried, ‘No! Please . . .’

Maskelyne nodded to Spenratter, who stepped forward and raised his dragon lance a second time. Now it was pointed directly at the grotesque visage.

‘Last chance,’ Maskelyne said.

‘I’ll try!’ the face replied. ‘Please, don’t . . .’

It closed one enormous eye and its other eye fluttered and its monstrous brow furrowed, as though it was struggling to untangle some mental knot or puzzle. Was it, as Maskelyne suspected, in
communication with the samal? Were the two minds connected? He got his answer a moment later, when the slender tentacles halted, and then drew back into the scaly ground.

Pendragon scanned the ground around them, and then seemed to relax. The face amidst the smouldering vegetation was now wheezing and weeping and spitting ash from its lips. Tears coursed over its
great soot-smeared jowls. Its bloodshot eyes rolled and flinched.

‘You will note,’ Maskelyne said, ‘that our actions have been in self-defence. We have no reason to harm you unless you give us one.’

‘Father attacked you,’ the face said. ‘Not me.’

‘Father?’

‘What did you expect?’ it raged, suddenly furious. ‘It’s hungry!’

Maskelyne frowned. ‘Are you referring to the parasite? The samal?’

Rage faded from the face as rapidly as it had appeared. It looked momentarily confused, and then appeared to latch onto some sort of understanding. ‘Samal,’ it said. ‘That was
his name once. We sailed from Losoto to fight at Galia. On the second day out it rained frogs.’

Spenratter gave Maskelyne a worried look, then circled a finger to one side of his brow.

Madness? Yes. Of course, the host was mad
. Could anyone endure such profound and inhuman changes to their nature and remain sane? That this creature could still communicate with them at
all was a far greater boon than Maskelyne could ever have hoped for.

‘Do you have a name?’ he asked the thing.

‘Tom.’

Maskelyne found himself smiling at the incongruity of it all; such a simple and common name seemed an unlikely match for a dribbling monster such as this. He said, ‘You fought in Galai,
Tom?’

Again, the look of uncertainty crossed those gross and flaccid features. ‘And who claims that I didn’t?’ Tom replied. ‘That man is a liar. I fought, yes, and there were
men who saw me fight. Is it my fault all those witnesses are dead?’

‘No one is claiming you didn’t,’ Maskelyne said. Then something occurred to him. This creature, hideous as it was, had retained enough humanity for Maskelyne to recognize its
paranoia. It had been, he felt, rather too defensive. He added, ‘No one is calling you a deserter, Tom.’

The face reddened. ‘I was rowing towards the enemy!’ it roared. ‘The wind turned me about. The currents took me. I could have ended the war that night. An assassin’s
blade in the dark of Rogetter’s cabin. That’s all it would have taken, but for the wind and the currents. And now you all accuse me of immoral conduct? Of siding with the enemy?
I’ve done nothing wrong!’

Spenratter came alongside Maskelyne. ‘If he fought at Galai . . .’ he said.

‘Then he’s over six hundred years old,’ Maskelyne said quietly.

‘That’s a harsh sentence, even for a deserter.’

Maskelyne turned to look at him. ‘I disagree.’ He turned back to study that huge distorted face; it was agitated, breathing quickly and sweating profusely. And then he examined the
crystal locator. Could this hideous creature be the source of such powerful sorcery? Why, then, had the Drowned brought him so many keys? Maskelyne felt sure he was looking for a container of some
sort. He thought for a moment, then said, ‘We’ve come for the box.’

Eyes like ship-floats glared back at him.

‘Let’s do it the easy way,’ Maskelyne said. ‘There’s no need for you to endure any more suffering, Tom.’

‘Father won’t let you have it,’ the face replied.

‘Then he’ll have to watch you burn.’

The face squirmed with despair. ‘Please,’ it said. ‘The box keeps us warm.’

‘If it’s heat you want . . .’ Maskelyne nodded to Spenratter, who raised his dragon lance.

‘No!’ the face cried. ‘You can have it. Take it and leave us be.’

Spenratter lowered the lance.

The ground shuddered again, and the face became a scrunched mass of flesh, as if it were enduring some new, internal agony. A moment later, the lamp filament on Maskelyne’s locator began
to flicker. The source of the sorcery was moving. The land around them bucked, not as fiercely as before, but enough to rattle the scorched trees and bushes.

With another ominous quake, the ground before the three sailors suddenly opened. The skin of the land split and drew back, revealing a deep mass of glistening red muscle-like material. Brine
sprayed up through this newly formed crevasse, like a whale’s exhalation, and spattered the surrounding land. Maskelyne edged towards the opening and peered down.

Through the gloomy waters he perceived a squirming mass of pale tentacles. Most were as slender as the roots of young trees, but a few were as thick as a man’s waist. These could only be
the veins and gullets that connected the host to the parasite in the sea below. They writhed in that poison like an endless nest of snakes. In the depths far below, Maskelyne thought he glimpsed
the great dark shadow of the samal itself.

The tentacles convulsed and shifted suddenly. Something appeared below the hole. Maskelyne stepped back as the parasite thrust the object up through the gap and held it there, ten feet above
their heads, in a hundred writhing tentacles.

It appeared to be a coffin, fashioned from dull grey metal. And it was hot. Even from where he stood in his suit, Maskelyne could feel the immense heat radiating from that box.

The samal set the box down on the ground to one side of the hole, and then its tentacles unravelled themselves from the object, and withdrew, flailing wildly as they disappeared back into the
hole. With a final shudder and exhalation, the hole in the ground slammed shut like the mouth of a predator.

Maskelyne approached the container. ‘And where, may I ask, did you find this?’

The face appeared to recover from its ordeal. It rolled its tremendous eyes upon the three men. ‘Father picked it up,’ it said. ‘Long ago. From a place with
buildings.’

‘What sort of buildings?’

‘The sort with food in them,’ the face growled. ‘Take it and leave like you promised.’

Maskelyne held his hand over the container for a moment, then pressed his gloved hand against its metal lid. It was too hot to touch for more than a few moments. He wandered around it. It
clearly resembled a coffin. It was made of metal, with a handle at each end, and utterly unadorned as far as he could tell – which was itself unusual for an Unmer creation. He tried to lift
the lid, but it would not shift. Then he located a keyhole in the middle of one side.

‘Oh my,’ he said.

‘What?’ Pendragon said.

‘Why would anyone build a coffin with a lock in it?’

‘Bone thieves,’ Pendragon said.

Maskelyne looked at him. ‘Are there such things?’

‘You can get thirty gilders for a sorcerer’s skeleton.’

‘Really? Why?’

‘Elixirs.’

Maskelyne grunted. He wondering which – if any – of the millions of keys the Drowned had brought him might fit that lock. For this had to be the source of their queer behaviour.
A sorcerer’s coffin submerged in the ocean.
By leaving their keys on his shore, the Drowned had been sending him messages about it for years.

But whatever was compelling them to do so?

He had no intention of trying to find the correct key, if it even existed. He had gas cutting-torches aboard the
Lamp
. ‘If we slide the lances through these handles,’ he
said, ‘we should be able to carry it between us.’

They slipped the narrow ends of each of their lances through the opposite handles, and so were able to hoist the coffin between them. It was almost unbearably heavy, and yet Maskelyne found the
strength from somewhere. By short stints with much grunting and cursing, they manhandled the thing back to the tender.

Only after they were half a mile distant from the parasite, did Maskelyne feel that it was safe to remove his helmet. He wiped the sweat from his brow and took a long draught of water from the
tender’s supply. He handed the cup to Pendragon and gave him a wry grin. ‘You survived, then.’

‘Seems I did, sir,’ the young man replied. He kept his eyes fixed on their mysterious new acquisition. ‘What do you think it is?’

Even from where he sat, Maskelyne could feel the heat radiating from the box. He shrugged. ‘It’s an enigma to be solved,’ he said. ‘We’ll open it once we get
aboard.’

‘What if it’s . . .?’ The young sailor’s voice tapered off. ‘What if it’s dangerous?’

‘Everything the Unmer make is dangerous,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘I’m sure this will be no exception.’

When the reached the
Lamp
, Maskelyne climbed aboard and relinquished the tender over to Mellor and his team of men. They used the dredging crane to hoist up the container and set it on
the bathysphere deck, whereupon Mellor examined the artefact and turned to Maskelyne. ‘Do you think this is the lock for which the Drowned bring you keys?’ he said.

‘It’s certainly possible,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘Perhaps even likely.’

‘But which key fits?’

‘Who cares?’ Maskelyne said. ‘We’ll cut it open.’

Mellor summoned the best of their welders – a tough, grizzled little man named Teucher, who lowered his mask and sparked his gas flame to life and bent over the Unmer coffin. The crew
gathered round to watch as Teucher’s flame slowly ate into the metal around the lock. It was a long process, constantly interrupted by Teucher’s need to back off to recover from the
heat, but finally the gas torch cut away the last of the steel around the lock. A circle of red-hot metal hit the ship’s deck with a clang, and Teucher stood up.

Using rags to protect their hands, two crewmen seized the front of the lid and heaved it open. Maskelyne stepped forward and gazed down at the coffin’s contents.

It was full of molten silvery grey metal.
Lead?
Maskelyne squatted down and peered at the substance more closely. Hot fumes assaulted his nostrils. The heat from it was atrocious. There
had to be some energy source inside that liquid, something keeping it molten.

‘What is that?’ Mellor said.