The Art of Hunting (3 page)

‘You may yet appeal to my mercy,’ she said. ‘Kneel now and beg that I might end your life rather than prolong it.’ Her tongue tasted the air. ‘The worth of such an
appeal shall be determined by how entertaining you can make it, Lord Conquillas.’

‘I have no quarrel with you, Duna. But you have no right to be in this realm. Return to your garden or I will have no choice but to stop you.’

The Agaroth’s wings pounded.

‘My very existence grants me that right,’ Duna said. ‘Power grants me that right. Why do you think you can stop me, Conquillas?’

‘I will shoot you dead.’

She smiled. ‘And my father will remake me and scorch this world for your insolence. I’m growing bored with this conversation, archer.’

‘Fiorel would not destroy this world,’ Conquillas said. ‘I believe he has plans for it.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘You
believe
?’

The Agaroth was edging closer to them. They would soon be within range of the goddess’s lash.

‘I also believe that, were you to die, he would not remake you,’ Conquillas added. ‘He does not love you, Duna. Your lusts embarrass him. You have risked the lives of your kin
by coming here.’

Suddenly her face twisted into a snarl. ‘How dare you!’ she cried. ‘You mortal! You . . .’ Her voice choked off and she let out a growl. ‘You dare lecture me? I am
a god!’

And then she swept back her lash, as if to strike the archer.

Conquillas shot his arrow.

It scorched through the air and struck Duna between the eyes and passed through her head without pause. The soldier could hear it fizzing away into the sky even as he saw the goddess topple
forwards and lie slumped across her saddle horn.

Without her will to sustain its form, the Agaroth abruptly collapsed into its component parts. A great deluge of bones and corpses and dragon flesh fell from the air and struck the ground before
them.

The soldier gaped. ‘You killed her,’ he said.

‘She was arrogant to assume I wouldn’t.’

‘You killed a god.’

‘An entropath,’ Conquillas said. ‘But a young one, and not particularly powerful. I myself am considerably older than Duna was.’

‘But she was the daughter of the creator!’

Conquillas nodded. ‘That was unfortunate,’ he admitted.

The soldier couldn’t tear his eyes from the goddess’s dead
body, which now lay in a pool of gore and dragon guts and among the corpses of soldiers who had been killed at Arrash and Morqueth – men who had at last found peace in death. ‘What do
you think Fiorel will do?’ he said.

‘I do not know what he will do.’ Conquillas regarded his bow for a moment. ‘Fiorel is a terrible meddler. He certainly has plans for this world, and possibly plans for me. He
might attempt to strike me down tomorrow, or three hundred years from now. Or he might simply ignore the matter. Duna was always causing him trouble.’

‘You think he might just ignore what you’ve done?’

Conquillas shrugged. ‘I will retrieve my arrows, just in case.’

CHAPTER 1

She found herself in a high corrie where the granite mountains reared over her like dark and monstrous waves. Their snow-topped crests blazed with the light of a billion stars,
of constellations scattered across the vacuum like pulverized glass. The air here was razor-thin and elemental, so cold it hurt her lungs. She could hear freshets crackling through broken stone
– and the wind, keening as it ripped plumes of ice from unassailable heights. The crystals fell as curtains of scintillations, shimmering against the dark and the stars. She breathed in and
nearly sobbed.

Down here the base of the corrie had been artificially levelled and excavated everywhere to form scores of deep depressions in the rocky ground. Each had been filled with a poison from a
different sea and then illuminated from below. They glowed like the stokeholes to chemical furnaces. She recognized cherry-red Mare Regis brine and the bottle-green brine of the Mare Verdant and
there the vinegar gloom from the Sea of Lights. And yet more held poisons unknown to her, the pits shining in the dark with chromic and gunmetal hues or throbbing pinks and lilacs.

In the centre of these excavations there lay like some storm-flipped skiff a shack constructed from dragon bones. A fierce and bloody light burned within its walls and cast across the earth
great clenching seams of flame and shadow. She glimpsed someone or something moving about inside and she thought she heard a noise like a whetstone drawn across steel. But then the wind cried out
again and drowned all other sounds.

Ianthe began to make her way towards the shack, but then she halted.

Amber seawater filled the pit to her right. A fathom down there toiled a stooped and scrawny figure more corpse than man. He was naked above the waist and bent over, his fists and muscles agleam
like nodes of bone as he dragged an iron plough through the sediment under his feet. His skin was milk white, his hair a diaphanous foam. Whenever he reached the limit of his prison he turned his
plough and worked in the opposite direction. Gem lanterns set in each corner threw spiderlike shadows across mortared walls, and as Ianthe peered closer she felt that she recognized this figure
from somewhere.
Something in his gait.

He must have sensed her presence, for he halted and lifted his head.

Ianthe shuddered. The man had no eyes.

The pit opposite held brine as pink as starfish meat. A table had been placed in the middle of this pool and dressed with plain farmhouse plates and cups. A woman and a young girl stared down at
their crockery, but there was no food set out before them. The waters gave their flesh a febrile aura. Watching the scene tickled a memory of Ianthe’s childhood. This pair, like the Drowned
farmer, were familiar.

Don’t look up, please, don’t look up.

Both woman and child looked up at her.

Ianthe cried out.

She hugged her stomach and ran towards the shack, shaking her head as if she might dislodge those crow-picked visages from her mind. She hurried onwards, the lights from the open pits glazing
her skin. And as she ran she saw men, women and children below the waters, some unmoving and some engaged in simple tasks: a blind greybeard shaping a table leg; a blind schoolteacher turning blank
pages; two blind men wrestling upon a coppery mulch of keys. She recognized them all, for they were her own memories corrupted in some dreamlike fashion.

At last she reached the shack. Here she stopped and tried to steady her shuddering heart. Red furnace light bled through the latticework of bones. She glimpsed flames crackling within, part of a
rusted metal desk, hooks and loops of chain depending from the ceiling. She laid her hands upon the smooth black joists and peered between them. Hundreds of small glass phials – ichusae?
– stood glittering in wire racks upon the desk. And there she spied the whetstone she had heard. But no sword. No owner.

‘So it’s you.’

Ianthe spun to face the voice.

The Unmer prince stood outside the shack door. He was every bit as handsome as she remembered: young and pale and slender, strong of jaw and with a rickle of hair as golden as summer hay. He
wore a white uniform brocaded with silver cord and crusted with gemstones around the collar and lapels. His posture averred the calm confidence and arrogance of his noble heritage. His violet eyes,
so clear and sharp, crackled with a hint of cruelty. They were very old eyes indeed, at odds with his youthful appearance. His hand rested on the pommel of a curved sword lashed to his waist by a
red silkspun cummerbund. His gaze lingered a moment on her torn and bloody Haurstaf robe, then snapped back up to meet her own expression of wonder.

‘Do you know where you are?’ he said.

‘I’m dreaming?’

‘
I’m dreaming
,’ he said. ‘My dream. You’re the interloper.’

Ianthe felt herself wilt under his unflinching scrutiny. She was suddenly acutely aware of her sorry state of dress, her bruised and naked feet. She raised a hand to hide her swollen lip.
‘Maybe it’s
my
dream,’ she said, ‘and
you’re
the interloper.’

‘How could
I
possibly invade
your
mind?’

‘How could I invade yours?’

‘You’re Haurstaf.’

‘I’m
not
Haurstaf.’

A sudden rumble of thunder broke across the mountain tops, startling Ianthe. It seemed to her that this dream world had just voiced her anger. And now it looked to be assuming her mood. The
stars above, so clear mere moments ago, were being swallowed quickly by dark reefs of cloud.

The prince glanced up and gave a mirthless smile. ‘You’re already changing things,’ he said, ‘asserting control, asserting your own dominance. It’s a Haurstaf
trait.’

Another crack of thunder. Lightning ripped across the north, illuminating the corrie and the mounded mountains around them. In that instant it seemed to Ianthe that they were standing in the
heart of an ocean tempest, that those granite peaks would come crashing down and obliterate them both. But then cold, quiet darkness returned.

In a low, measured tone, she said, ‘I told you, I’m not Haurstaf.’

He studied her for a moment longer, his brow furrowed in thought. Then he turned and swept a hand towards the luminous pools. ‘These mountains are the Lakuna Aressi. The pools . . .’
He gazed at them with the detachment of someone lost in their own memories. ‘My father told me stories of this place when I was young, that’s why I dream of it.’ He hesitated
again, idly rubbing a tiny white brine scar on the back of his hand. ‘The real brine pools didn’t contain
these
people. You brought them here with you. They’re your
memories.’ His white teeth flashed. ‘May I ask why you have imagined them all to be blind?’

Ianthe looked away, her heart quickening.

The storm in the heavens began to dissolve. The thunderclouds thinned to a haze and then to nothing and moments later the stars had been restored to their full brilliance in that cold clear
sky.

‘What is your name?’ he said.

‘Ianthe.’

‘I am—’

‘Paulus Marquetta,’ she said.

‘You know of me?’

If only he knew the truth. How many times had she gazed on him from afar? She had seen him through the eyes of his own captors, a lonely prisoner kept in a cell deep below the Haurstaf palace.
She had looked upon his sleeping face, the golden tangle of his hair upon his pillow, so peaceful and beautiful, and him so utterly unaware of his power over her. And through his own eyes
she’d read the letters he’d written to his dying princess;
I was with you when she died
, she wanted to say.
In your loneliest moments, I was there beside you. In my mind I
held your hand and kissed your brow and loved you.
But she couldn’t talk of this, not even in a dream.

‘Everyone knows you,’ she replied. ‘Son of King Jonas the Summoner and Queen Grace.’

‘Jonas the Summoner,’ he said. ‘That is one of the kinder epitaphs you could have chosen. Those who blame him for the downfall of my race call him Jonas the Whiteheart.’
His brow wrinkled and he pursed his lips. ‘I’ve seen you before, Ianthe.’

She shook her head.

‘Yes. Twice. Once with Briana Marks . . . and then again at the palace entrance, after the attack. A man carried you away.’

A man?
Ianthe couldn’t recall anything about that.

‘You were unconscious,’ the prince said. ‘Your rescuer wore Unmer armour and carried Unmer weapons, but he was human. A soldier, but not Haurstaf, his flesh had been badly
scarred by brine. He looked . . .’The prince snorted. ‘We have a saying in Unmer . . . The closest translation is: he looked like a battlefield.’

Granger? She had peered through his eyes often enough, observed his brine-scratched hands gripping the wheel of the emperor’s stolen steam yacht as he pursued the Haurstaf
men-o’-war.
And destroyed them.
She recalled the battle, the cannon fire, the smoke and screams. Granger had harpooned their own vessel and dragged it behind him like a dragon
carcass, until Ethan Maskelyne had severed the cable. But then they had abandoned the sinking yacht. Granger had earned his death, for all his greed and for the suffering he had caused Ianthe and
her mother, and yet she had felt no desire to watch him drown.

He had returned for her?

‘My family owe this man a debt of gratitude,’ Marquetta said. ‘We would reward him handsomely.’

‘Why?’

‘He freed us.’

‘No.’ She tried to recall what had happened, but her memories of the attack skirled like snowflakes in the wind. There had been a concrete cell. A Haurstaf soldier. A man in a white
coat. She remembered the door slamming shut, the soldier perspiring heavily.

‘Are you with him now?’ Marquetta said. ‘Does he watch over you while you dream?’

They’d hurt her and she’d cast her consciousness away from that terrible place, dislocating herself from her own suffering. She had drifted through the Sea of Ghosts, that great void
of perceptions and in her anguish and fury she had . . .

Oh, god.

‘Will you bring him to the palace at Awl?’ Marquetta said.

What have I done?

‘You have my word that neither of you will be harmed.’

A gust of wind lashed her hair. She felt hail sting her face. The returning thunder boomed like cannon fire.
A battle at sea.
And all around her the mountains appeared to swell. Why had
Granger taken her away? Why couldn’t he have just left her there to die?

Marquetta glanced between Ianthe and the heavens. ‘I have made a mistake,’ he said. ‘This man . . . He didn’t rescue you. He abducted you?’

Ianthe felt tears welling in her eyes. ‘He’s my father,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand.
He
didn’t free you. It was me. I killed them.’ She
began to sob. ‘I didn’t mean to, I . . .’

She turned and ran.

‘Wait!’

He seized her wrist.