Devices and Desires (Engineer Trilogy) by K. J. Parker

Author:K. J. Parker [Parker, K. J.]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction And Fantasy, Epic, Fantasy fiction, Fiction - Fantasy, Fantasy - Epic, English Science Fiction And Fantasy
ISBN: 9780316003384
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2010-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The unmaking [he read] is the crown, the very flower of the hunt; therefore it follows that it must be conducted solemnly, seriously and with respect. There are two parts thereof, namely the abay and the undoing. First, let the carcass be turned on its back and the skin of the throat cut open most carefully up the length of the neck, and let cuts be made through the flesh to the bone. Let the master of the hunt approach then, with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and let the huntsmen sound the death on their horns; thereafter let the hounds first and then the lymers be loosed so that they might tear at the neck before they are coupled up, that the taste thereof might quicken them to the chase thereafter. Then let a forked stick with one arm longer than the other be set up in the earth beside the carcass, and let the master with his garniture split the skin from throat to vent…

Valens frowned. The book, with its brightly coloured pictures and carefully pumiced margins, had cost him the price of a small farm; but all they'd done was loosely paraphrase Cadentius, leaving a few bits out and dressing up other bits in fancy prose. For a start, the lengthwise cut was part of the undoing, not the abay; and whoever wrote this had no idea what a garniture was.

He sighed, closed the book and stood up. The woman in the red dress had sworn blind that it was the last known surviving copy of a rare early text attributed to Polinus Rex, but Polinus was three hundred years earlier than Cadentius, who'd been the first to have the master roll up his sleeves. He'd been had; twenty good-weight thalers he'd never see again, and still the woman in the red dress hadn't brought a letter…

Through the window he could see the raindrops dripping from the pine-branches. It was a hunting day, but there wasn't any point going out in this; there'd be no scent in the wet, the mud would make the going treacherous, the deer would be holding in the high wood where there'd be precious little chance of finding them. The sharpness of his disappointment surprised him; the rain would stop soon, there would be other days, the deer would still be there next week, but every day lost was a precious thing stolen from him, a treat held just out of reach to tease him. Instead, he'd have to read letters, convene the council, do work. He smiled; he could hear his eight-year-old self saying it, not fair. To which one of many voices replies: life isn't fair, the sooner you learn that, the better.

It wasn't fair that she hadn't written back; it had never been this long before, and it was no good saying there hadn't been a suitable courier, because five women in red dresses had been and gone (a velvet cloak, a set of rosewood and whalebone

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