The Art of Hunting Read online

‘I thought a void arrow could stop anything.’

  The archer’s gaze remained locked on Duna and her mount. The Agaroth was a maelstrom of living corpses and metal – a great howling juggernaut that loomed high above the flat earth and the pockets of withered scrub. Its huge hooves drove deep into the muddy earth as it came lumbering towards them at a frightening pace.

  Conquillas loosed another void arrow.

  The arrow shot over the palisade wall and struck the oncoming beast again. This time it pierced its chest where, presumably, its heart would be located. But again, the sorcerous missile had no effect. The ground around them shook as the Agaroth’s speed increased.

  The soldier glanced at his companion’s quiver. Strangely, there seemed to be more than nine arrows in there. ‘How many of those do you have?’ he asked.

  ‘A score or so,’ Conquillas said, pulling yet another free and notching it to his bow string.

  ‘I didn’t think there were that many left in the world.’

  Conquillas sent a third arrow whizzing across the earth towards the goddess and her mount. This struck the beast in the left eye. The Agaroth screamed and huffed and batted the air with one massive hoof, but it barely slowed. A moment later it came charging at Conquillas with even greater urgency. Now that there was less than three hundred yards between them, the other soldiers started firing their mortars and cannons. Concussions sounded all around them. Smoke filled the air.

  ‘I retrieve them,’ Conquillas remarked.

  ‘The arrows? From beyond the edge of creation?’

  Conquillas raised his bow again. ‘Fortunately, time does not exist outside the cosmos,’ he said. ‘The void arrows are always present.’ He loosed the fourth arrow and then a fifth and sixth in quick succession, but each missile plunged straight through the creature without harming it. He frowned. ‘Nevertheless, getting them back is not straightforward. It can sometimes take hundreds of years to find them, so I do not like to waste them.’

  ‘How many do you have left?’

  The archer lowered his bow and stared at their oncoming foe. Duna and her mount were now less than two hundred yards away. Most of the other soldiers in the compound abandoned their guns and fled, despite shouted orders from their commander to remain at their posts. Conquillas ignored the commotion. His full attention remained fixed on the enemy. ‘I suspect the Agaroth lacks a brain and any critical organs,’ he muttered. ‘It is not living in a sense we recognize. But if it is an abstract creation, then it must be formed by the will of its rider. And there lies the problem. The only way to destroy such a fiend will engender grave repercussions, I fear. I must have more time to think of a better solution.’

  He reached into a pocket in his padded tunic and took out a small silver whistle, which he proceeded to blow into. It made no sound, or at least none that the soldier could hear.

  But he heard the shrieks that soon filled the skies above them.

  ‘Dragons,’ he cried.

  The winged serpents must have been waiting in the thunderclouds above them. There were three of them, all monstrous, each wearing horned and spiked helmets and dark metalled armour over their scaly red hides, war dragons if ever there had been any. Now, at Conquillas’s behest, they tore down through the air, diving towards the oncoming foes at reckless speeds.

  ‘Dah’le ne kustol,’ Conquillas muttered. ‘Ne kustol.’

  ‘What was that?’ the soldier said.

  ‘They must tread with care.’

  One of the dragons broke to the west, its vast wings thumping, while the remaining two continued to swoop downwards. These began to loop around each other in helix formation. At the last instant one banked sharply aside, while the other rushed at the goddess, its great black claws seeking to rip her from the saddle of the monster she rode.

  Duna flicked her lash skywards, and there was a flash of white light. As that cord of energy swept up to meet the attacking serpent, it grew to a hundred times its length.

  Crackle.

  The whip passed straight through the onrushing dragon, slicing it in half from neck to rump. The pieces fell amidst a cloud of blood and smacked into the ground behind the goddess, where they lay with the great wings still twitching.

  The remaining two dragons shrieked as they wheeled around their fallen comrade.

  The goddess lashed her whip above her head in triumph. It ripped through the air like lightning. And then she reined her beast around and brought it over to the fallen serpent, whereupon the Agaroth lowered its head and began to devour the remains.

  A chorus of shrieks filled the heavens and both surviving dragons now turned and swept in from the north, flying so low their claws raked the ground.

  And the Agaroth began to change.

  ‘Mercy,’ the soldier said. ‘What’s happening?’

  As the entropic beast gorged itself on dragon flesh, it was growing larger with every passing moment. And as it grew it altered its shape. Its head became elongated, developing into a snout full of black teeth. Ears sprouted from its skull. Hooves became claws. Its rump stretched out, writhing snake-like across the earth, until it took the form of a tail. From its back there unfolded enormous fans of bone that shuddered and grew sheets of translucent skin.

  ‘It looks like a dragon,’ the soldier said.

  In half a hundred heartbeats the Agaroth had transformed itself into the likeness of a great winged serpent. Now it thrashed its newly formed wings and lifted itself airborne. Gales blew around it, raising clouds of grit and tearing leafless shrubs from the earth.

  Conquillas’s war dragons did not falter, but came straight at the monster, raking its neck savagely with their claws and teeth.

  ‘Ne kustol!’ Conquillas cried.

  But it was already too late. As the war dragons engaged Duna’s mount, a strange and terrible fate befell them. The entropic beast absorbed them. One instant the dragons were involved in savage combat, the next they all but vanished inside the monster. The soldier saw red wings flapping uselessly, a tail thrashed, and then nothing remained in the air but the goddess and her hellish mount.

  The Agaroth grew larger still. And from its shoulders it sprouted two new necks and two new heads and two new maws crammed with glassy black teeth. It turned its baleful eyes back towards the men in the compound.

  ‘Shit shit shit,’ the soldier said.

  ‘Run,’ Conquillas cried.

  ‘What about you?’

  Duna and her mount came surging through the air towards them, and the soldier could see that its forelimbs comprised great swellings of corpse muscle and human bones and blood-black organs still dripping. Scores of the living dead gaped out at the world from the beast’s chest and shoulders or shuddered and howled and chattered in madness. It came at them, furious, dragging behind it a storm of dust.

  All of the other soldiers were now fleeing, the commander included, but Duna did not even seem to notice them. Her dark and savage eyes were fixed on Conquillas.

  Who raised his bow.

  ‘Daughter of Fiorel!’ he cried. ‘Halt there or die!’

  The beast’s wings thundered, and it slowed, halting its dive. Its three necks writhed like snakes, its mouths hissing and snapping at the air. And upon its back Duna looked down and laughed.

  She was pale and achingly beautiful with a soft, tapering face and elegantly arched brows, and yet to look upon her was to feel horror. There was no glimmer of humanity in her eyes: merely raw and inhuman power. She wore armour fashioned from mirrored silver and sculpted around her small breasts. Her lash crackled constantly and scorched the air around it. Her hair blew out behind her head like silk funeral pennants, lifted by winds that seemed not to exist in this world. The hand that clutched the Agaroth’s saddle horn was covered in tiny runes that looked red and painful. The soldier could see scratch marks and old scabs there, as if those imprinted designs caused her endless irritation. On her left hand Duna wore a ring that seemed composed of nothing but white light.

  The sh
ape-shifting beast lowered one of its heads towards Conquillas.

  ‘I warn you, Duna,’ the Unmer lord said.

  ‘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.’

  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 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 scrutin
y. 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.