Queen of all the Knowing World Read online

  Fegran the officially appointed commissionaire, as opposed to Fegran the old friend, didn’t waste any more time with niceties. He didn’t ask for the scales to be brought out to him but, rather, strode over to the household’s iron locker, where all butchers had to keep all measuring equipment safe from tampering. Using his own large band of individually coded keys, Fegran unlocked the door, opened it, and swiftly extracted the scales and their attached timer.

  With another, smaller key, Fegran unlocked the scales’ compartment where the punched-hole recordings were kept.

  The recordings were stacked quite compactly within the base, Jarek’s reputation for quality and honesty being such that his scales were normally checked only once a year. And then only so that the compartment wouldn’t get too full.

  With nothing much more than a glance, Fegran spotted that the more recent weights and timings he was concentrating on would be impossible to achieve for a man working on his own. Imp couldn’t miss the way his anguished grimace etched ever deeper into his face as he uncovered more and more evidence of his friend’s wrongdoing.

  ‘Do you know why there’s been a delay in receiving my licence?’ she asked forthrightly.

  ‘Impersia!’ Her mother was appalled by Imp’s rudeness.

  Jarek was even more surprised by Imp’s rudeness than his wife was: he hadn’t applied for a licence for Imp, believing her to be too weak, too vulnerable, to become involved in butchering.

  Far from Fegran snapping irately at Imp for her impertinence, however, he looked up, studying her closely.

  ‘A licence, you say?’

  Imp Knew what he was thinking: how could such a whippersnapper of a young girl like this possibly help slice and weigh buisoar meat.

  But she also Knew – which was why she had blurted out her ridiculous lie – that Fegran wanted to help his old friend: he just needed a reasonable excuse to allow him a bit of leeway in the decision he would soon have to make.

  It was illegal to Know a commissionaire while he was conducting business. Yet he hadn’t prepared any defence against such an action, primarily because no one within the household – despite their heavy intake of intuitional meat – should be capable of Knowing him without their attempts being incredibly obvious to even the most inexperienced person.

  He hadn’t detected her Knowing of his thoughts. She was developing her powers far more rapidly than she had realised or hoped for. She didn’t dare, of course, attempt using those powers to make him forgive her father’s indiscretion: that would be going too far, a definite capital offence. And one that Fegran would probably be almost instantly aware of.

  ‘We applied for it a few weeks back: that’s why I’ve been helping my father.’

  Imp spoke with far more confidence than she felt. If she were only flattering herself that she Knew what the commissionaire was thinking, then…then it didn’t really bare thinking about, as she would just have made everything far worse.

  ‘Hmn, I suppose that if you’ve suffered from some unfortunate mix up of forms…’

  He looked towards Jarek with an easy yet definitely conspiratorial narrowing of his eyes.

  ‘Yes, yes: it does happen, doesn’t it?’

  Jarek’s relief was obvious, despite the way he tried to grimace as if irritated by the unacceptable delay.

  ‘Quite obviously, Jarek, you’ve been suffering from malicious rumours in relation to your business.’

  Stacking the punched recordings within his own secure carrying case, Fegran locked the scale’s base once more. Placing the case under an arm, he made to leave, but not before regarding Imp’s parents with a sorrowful face.

  ‘Hoak was a remarkable boy, Jarek, Venia: we all miss him greatly. I’m so sorry for your sad loss. I only wish I could do more.’

  ‘Fegran, you’ve done so much for us,’ Venia declared, tearfully reaching out for and caressing his free hand.

  ‘Just make sure, Jarek,’ Fegran said with a hard-edged sternness, ‘that you make sure the girl’s licence comes through as soon as possible!’

  As Fegran reached the door, he turned towards Imp with an irritated frown.

  ‘It’s good to Know you girl,’ he said, making sure she realised how close she had come to making things far, far worse.

  *

  Chapter 8

  1,000 Years Later

  Desri began to back away from the unhurriedly approaching Barane.

  She was tempted to run. She realised, however, that she’d only be running into the hands of the boy waiting down the other end of the alley. The boy she had first caught spying on her.

  He was waiting around the corner for her. Just as Barane had probably planned all along.

  ‘She’s not running, like you said she would Barane!’

  One of the boys sounded disgruntled that the plan wasn’t working out the way it was supposed to.

  ‘Perhaps she wants to be permanently scarred.’

  Barane grinned maliciously, drawing ever closer, a glint in his eyes that seemed to say to Desri that he was pleased she wasn’t running. He was going to go ahead with scarring her, his expression said, if only for her impudence and stupidity.

  Far down the other end of the alley, Desri heard the hidden boy’s shuffling feet. No doubt he was preparing to come up behind her, to make sure there was no escape.

  There was an angry, bestial growl.

  The shuffling of feet became a hard, heavy scrabbling, more like a team of horses being forced into an abrupt gallop. Suddenly, that thunderous beat of charging horses was rushing up behind her, rapidly getting louder with every passing split second.

  Before her, Barane’s mouth dropped open into a terrified gawping. The boys ranged just beyond him similarly quaked in terror, their eye’s visibly white and globular in fright.

  Desri didn’t have time to whirl around and see what had terrified them so. She didn’t need to.

  With the speed and force of a fierce gust of wind, something as dark and massive as coagulated shadows slammed into Barane. It sent him flying into the air, striking the ground awkwardly. He sprawled across the floor, the knife spinning uselessly from his hand.

  ‘He’s dead, he’s dead!’

  ‘Let’s go, go!’

  With screams of fright, every boy there but the unconscious Barane spun on their feet, setting off at a hurried, terrified run.

  Desri was instinctively prepared to run too. This huge, dark, rampaging form that seemed to have almost instantaneously appeared alongside her had an air of nightmares, of every human fear, about it.

  Fortunately, the buisoar wasn’t interested in her, or the fleeing boys.

  Continuing its ferocious charge, it hurtled across the ground towards where Barane had been so brutally flung. It straddled the fallen boy, ready to finish him off with a swipe and smash of a powerful foreleg, or a brutal goring of its armoured snout – but it froze, its breathing loud and laboured, a pained groan emanating from its otherwise hungrily slavering maw.

  Desri should run; most of her whole mind was relentlessly screaming this out to her. And yet, it was ‘most’, not ‘all’. A sliver of her mind, a mere sense as opposed to a definite, reasoned thought, was also calmly telling her she had nothing to fear. Despite all the signs to the contrary.

  The massive beast still straddled the fallen Barane, still remained still. It was as if, Desri sensed rather than reasoned once more, he were fighting his urge to kill, to eat. As if he were going through a painful internal struggle to fight his instinctive needs. Just as she had had to go against her instinctive impulse to run away.

  With an anguished growl, a frustrated smashing of a great paw, balled up like a fist, into the ground, the buisoar turned to glare furiously at Desri.

  Desri didn’t flinch; rather, she curiously stared back into those light-absorbing eyes, wondering what had caused this nightmarish beast to spare Barane’s life. Could there really be an intelligent, even reasoning mind lying somewhere behind eyes that coul
d be mistaken for unfathomably deep pits?

  The buisoar stirred, swung more towards her; still she didn’t turn and flee. With an irritated snort, the beast began to rise up and up, lifting itself up from its normal four-legged stance to an even more intimidating two-legged pose. Its looming height was now even more apparent and terrifying.

  ‘Stu…pid pri…de!’

  Its voice was as gnarled as if a tree had made its first attempts at speaking.

  It spat out every syllable as if they’d had to be conjured up somewhere deep within its being. Caught and brought up through its body in a vortex of whirling flesh and bone, each word was at last thrown away through the mouth like unwanted garbage.

  He snarled, a strange mix of both intense fury and deep anguish.

  Then he dropped on all fours again with a growl of relief, a sad shake of his head.

  He spun around on his massive paws and, with a final pained, gravelly sigh, loped away into the alley’s darkness.

  *

  Chapter 9

  1,000 Years Earlier

  Jarek should have been angry with Imp for stupidly attempting to use the Knowing on his old friend Fegran.

  He had to admit, however, that she had given him a chance to avoid losing his licence; and if her reward for that was that she also received a licence, then so be it!

  She would also have to accompany him on any further hunts too, of course. Venia had complained, naturally. Yet as he had calmly pointed out to her, they now had little choice about this matter. To restrain her from attending would now also endanger Fegran, who had risked a great deal to give them this opportunity.

  Even so, he insisted that Imp dressed as a boy. He also insisted that she continued to stay as long as possible with the horse and cart, until their prey was weakened to such an extent that it was no longer quite so dangerous. Venia had asked why Imp couldn’t stay with the cart until they were ready to start butchering their catch, only for Jarek to point out that the awarding of a licence depended upon the recipient being capable of taking on a full role in the hunt. He was already taking a risk, he added, with the restrictions he’d imposed on her.

  However, without Hoak to aid him in his hunting and killing of the beast, without the strength of the netters to help him butcher it afterwards, Imp’s presence did nothing to lessen Jarek's increasingly exhausting struggles to bring in any meat of quality. The catches were still necessarily small. Moreover, the slowness of his butchering resulted in a waste of what could have been higher quality meat if only he’d managed to process it quicker.

  Both high-level customers and, with them, their money continued to leach away from Jarek’s business. Increasingly desperate, he knew he had to find some way of bringing in the big kills once more, no matter how much more dangerous hunting such beasts would be.

  He saw a chance to begin the long climb to restoring his reputation one day when, quite by good fortune rather than any particular expertise, a huge beast became trapped and panicked within the maze strung up by his netters. Rushing back to the cart, he pleaded with Imp to simply act as a distraction, allowing him to gradually ram home hook after barbed hook. He would use drags and anchors that would both increasingly slow the beast down while also fully enraging it.

  Imp eagerly agreed.

  She was taking part, at last, in her first true hunt.

  *

  Chapter 9

  1,000 Years Later

  Naturally, it was loftily declared by Barane’s father in the market square, he would lead the hunt for the buisoar.

  Equally naturally, in recognition of his display of unparalleled bravery in defending a poor girl from being attacked by the beast, Barane himself would be accorded the honour of being second in command.

  No one could blame the cadets for fleeing from such a ferocious, unpredictable beast the previous night. They were only lightly armed, with daggers. A buisoar prepared to enter a town, however, was obviously a danger even to fully armed gangs of men, unless they knew how to deal with such a formidable foe.

  Even Barane modestly admitted to the assembled, terrified crowd that, he too, would have been far wiser to run away. He had been armed with nothing more than a small dagger himself, after all. Yet he’d found himself with no choice but to intervene, for the beast had been set upon taking away a poor, defenceless girl to be its midnight feast.

  The girl, he added sadly, was supposedly Academy material; in light of the fear she’d understandably displayed when faced with the beast, however, he had little choice but to suggest that the admissions board should rethink her acceptance. It would surely be intolerable to force such an obviously unprepared girl to regularly accept the similar torments faced on a daily basis by cadets and officers.

  Of course, Desri hadn’t been invited to stand anywhere near the centre of the square, from where all these pronouncements were being delivered. She was far back in the crowd, fuming over false allegations she had no way of refuting.

  She was tempted to storm through the crowds, barge past the people saddling up and preparing for the hunt.

  She realised, however, that by the time she’d forced her way through everyone blocking her way she’d be too late to accuse Barane of lying now that the declarations had moved on to the free meat the hunters would make available once the beast had been successfully brought down. Besides, she would be dismissed once again as a silly, frightened girl trying to salvage some residue of pride.

  (‘Stupid pride’: isn’t that what the beast had snarled at her? What had he meant? That Barane was stupidly proud? Or that she was? That her pride had almost got her killed, or at least scarred for life?)

  Barane’s ridiculous lies had persuaded her that, after all, she would be attending the Academy. She wanted to show hum that she was a better person than he could ever hope to be: she would make sure she beat him at everything he attempted, humiliating him as often as she could.

  And the very first of his attempts that she was going to thwart would be this damned hunt. There was no way she was going to let them hunt down a beast that had saved her.

  A beast that could talk.

  A beast she wanted to talk to.

  *

  Chapter 10

  1,000 Years Earlier

  All Imp had to do, her father declared, was wave a red piece of cloth in front of the trapped beast. While making sure, of course, that she was always on the other side of a barrier of netting.

  The beast was caught in the maze. It wasn’t going anywhere, unless it had the wit about it to find and spot the gaps between the many layers of nets. But they had to kill it before it tired itself out, making its meat drop precipitously in value.

  Imp waved the blood-red cloth, as directed by Jarek. Amongst the multitude of greens and browns of the forest, the red shone as brightly as a setting sun. To draw the beast out from wherever it was at the moment, somewhere deeper within the extensive maze, she also used a doe-call – a whistle-type device that made a wailing similar that of a wounded doe.

  The doe’s cry rang out as an invitingly easy kill, an effortless feast. Amongst the noises of the woodland, there now came a heavy snorting, a relentlessly thunderous crushing of undergrowth, the toppling of small trees.

  Imp was excited. She was also terrified.

  She quaked, her arm feeling limp, dead. She had to force herself to wave the cloth with more vigour, to blow harder on the doe-call.

  The blistering cracks, the growling of the oncoming storm, grew louder, drew nearer. A dark shape, like a patch of night thrown into the day, appeared amongst the trees, expanding, devouring everything in its path. Nothing resisted it. Everything subserviently crumpled before it.

  It could have been an unstoppable avalanche, an unforgiving flood.

  But it was worse; it was an oncoming buisoar.

  At least, Imp thought, she was on the other side of the net. Yet her father was out there somewhere, somewhere hidden between her and the charging beast. Even if the beast failed
to spot him, it could trample and kill him purely by accident.

  On that score, at least, she needn’t have worried. As the beast hurtled seemingly relentlessly towards her, swallowing up the forest lying before it as if it were nothing but so much fodder, her father suddenly leapt up from the thick undergrowth along its side. As he rose swiftly to his feet, he brought up with him a huge metal hook, with the sharpest point it was possible to hone.

  Combining the movement of his rising with an expert flexing of his powerful muscles, Jarek swung the massive hook about his head, directing its barb towards the beast’s relatively softer, more supple flesh lying between leg and body. He drove the point home as deeply as he could, utilising the power of the beast’s own momentum to drive that barbed point deeper and deeper into the flesh.

  Letting go of the hook before he was jerked off his feet, he flung himself aside, falling back into the veiling undergrowth, his body clothed in the colours and scents of the forest he now wished to instantly become an indistinguishable part of.

  The beast whirled around as swiftly as it could, but it was too late to see the cause of this abrupt, penetrating pain. It charged around anyway, hoping to catch sight of its tormentor, its agony strangely increasing with every move it made as the hook’s many ropes and anchors snagged and fouled on branches and rocks.

  The hurtling beast snapped branch after branch, pulled up rock after rock, but each time the hook dug ever deeper into its flesh. Meanwhile, the anchors and coiling ropes searched endlessly for more solid obstacles to catch onto.

  While the beast had been distracted by her father’s attack, Imp had sprinted towards another net, judging as quickly as she could the best position to be in to attract its attention once again. She had to draw it away from her father, but not so far that he’d be left too far behind to make another attack on the beast.

  She waved the cloth again, blew as loudly as she could on the doe-call.