Secrets of the Fire Sea (52 page)
He didn’t know that the seeds of the wheat he was noticing had blown in from one of the distant city’s ruptured farm domes, now emptied of the last of humanity, and he certainly didn’t realize that there was a new network of lichen filaments growing under Jago’s dark soil, sapping the poisons, cleansing the burnt, barren ground.
Days later, however, when Cutter saw many more of the heads pushing through, he fell to his gnarled knees and muttered guttural sounds of thanks to the goddess of fertility
–
and in that he was part-right, for it had been a goddess who had created the lichen network – a push here, a nudge there, modifying, with a little hint of irony, the death spores left over from an ancient war to a far better purpose.
But the goddess wasn’t around to hear Cutter’s prayers any more, nor would she have approved of them if she had been. She might have approved of his next thoughts, though.
If the clan grew these, they wouldn’t need to root around in the dark fruitless forests – they wouldn’t need to hunt so much.
And then what might they do?
The Court of the Air
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves
The Rise of the Iron Moon
Secrets of the Fire Sea
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2010 1
FIRST EDITION
Copyright © Stephen Hunt 2010
Stephen Hunt asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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EPub Edition © JANUARY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-30171-3
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