The Art of Hunting Read Online Free

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.’

272 YEARS LATER

CHAPTER 1
THE GIRL BENEATH THE WATER
    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