Excerpt

Excerpt: THE SENTINEL MAGE by Emily Gee (Open Road)

Civilian Reader Excerpt , , , , , , ,

GeeE-CK1-SentinelMageToday, I have an excerpt from Emily Gee‘s The Sentinel Mage, the first book in the Cursed Kingdoms trilogy, provided by Open Road Media. Here’s the synopsis:

In a distant corner of the Seven Kingdoms, an ancient curse festers and grows, consuming everything in its path. Only one man can break it: Harkeld of Osgaard, a prince with mage’s blood in his veins. But Prince Harkeld has a bounty on his head–and assassins at his heels.

Innis is a gifted shapeshifter. Now she must do the forbidden: become a man. She must stand at Prince Harkeld’s side as his armsman, both protecting and deceiving him. But the deserts of the Masse are more dangerous than the assassins hunting the prince. The curse has woken deadly creatures, and the magic Prince Harkeld loathes may be the only thing standing between him and death.

The novel is currently in ORM’s “Coming of Age” eBook promotion. CR published a review of the novel when it first was published, in 2011. Read on for the excerpt… Continue reading →

Excerpt: SIGNAL TO NOISE by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Solaris)

Civilian Reader Excerpt , , , , ,

SIGNAL TO NOISEA new literary fantasy from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Signal To Noise is a very good novel, and is a story about love (young and not), music and sorcery. Due to be published by Solaris Books in February 2015, the publisher has allowed me to share this excerpt. I’ll post my review later this week. First, here’s the synopsis:

Mexico City, 1988: Long before iTunes or MP3s, you said “I love you” with a mixtape. Meche, awkward and fifteen, has two equally unhip friends — Sebastian and Daniela — and a whole lot of vinyl records to keep her company. When she discovers how to cast spells using music, the future looks brighter for the trio. The three friends will piece together their broken families, change their status as non-entities, and maybe even find love…

Mexico City, 2009: Two decades after abandoning the metropolis, Meche returns for her estranged father’s funeral. It’s hard enough to cope with her family, but then she runs into Sebastian, reviving memories from her childhood she thought she buried a long time ago. What really happened back then? What precipitated the bitter falling out with her father? Is there any magic left? Continue reading →

Excerpt: THINGS HALF IN SHADOW by Alan Finn (Gallery Books)

Civilian Reader Excerpt , , , , , , ,

FinnA-ThingsHalfInShadowToday, we have an excerpt from Alan Finn‘s Things Half in Shadow, a historical and supernatural thriller. Published by Gallery Books in the US today, here is the synopsis:

Postbellum America makes for a haunting backdrop in this historical and supernatural tale of moonlit cemeteries, masked balls, cunning mediums, and terrifying secrets waiting to be unearthed by an intrepid crime reporter.

The year is 1869, and the Civil War haunts the city of Philadelphia like a stubborn ghost. Mothers in black continue to mourn their lost sons. Photographs of the dead adorn dim sitting rooms. Maimed and broken men roam the streets. One of those men is Edward Clark, who is still tormented by what he saw during the war. Also constantly in his thoughts is another, more distant tragedy — the murder of his mother at the hands of his father, the famed magician Magellan Holmes… a crime that Edward witnessed when he was only ten.

Now a crime reporter for one of the city’s largest newspapers, Edward is asked to use his knowledge of illusions and visual trickery to expose the influx of mediums that descended on Philadelphia in the wake of the war. His first target is Mrs. Lucy Collins, a young widow who uses old-fashioned sleight of hand to prey on grieving families. Soon, Edward and Lucy become entwined in the murder of Lenora Grimes Pastor, the city’s most highly regarded — and by all accounts, legitimate — medium, who dies mid-séance. With their reputations and livelihoods at risk, Edward and Lucy set out to find the real killer, and in the process unearth a terrifying hive of secrets that reaches well beyond Mrs. Pastor.

Blending historical detail with flights of fancy, Things Half in Shadow is a riveting thriller where Medium and The Sixth Sense meet The Alienist — and where nothing is quite as it seems…
Continue reading →

Excerpt: WILD SEED by Octavia E. Butler (Open Road)

Civilian Reader Excerpt , , , ,

ButlerOE-P1-WildSeedA little while back, Headline began publishing some of Octavia E. Butler‘s critically-acclaimed backlist in the UK. I haven’t read any of the novels, yet, but I fully intend to do so. In the US, Open Road Media started releasing some of the author’s earlier novels in eBook, and were kind enough to let me run this excerpt from Wild Seed, part of the Patternist Series — which also includes Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark and Patternmaster. Here’s the synopsis:

When two immortals meet in the long-ago past, the destiny of mankind is changed forever

For a thousand years, Doro has cultivated a small African village, carefully breeding its people in search of seemingly unattainable perfection. He survives through the centuries by stealing the bodies of others, a technique he has so thoroughly mastered that nothing on Earth can kill him. But when a gang of New World slavers destroys his village, ruining his grand experiment, Doro is forced to go west and begin anew. He meets Anyanwu, a centuries-old woman whose means of immortality are as kind as his are cruel. She is a shapeshifter, capable of healing with a kiss, and she recognizes Doro as a tyrant. Though many humans have tried to kill them, these two demi-gods have never before met a rival. Now they begin a struggle that will last centuries and permanently alter the nature of humanity.

Continue reading →

Excerpt: MISTWORLD by Simon R. Green (Open Road)

Civilian Reader Excerpt , , , ,

GreenSR-TotE1-MistworldMistworld is the first novel in Simon R. Green‘s Twilight of the Empire science fiction series. It was recently released in eBook form via Open Road Media, who have also included it in an end-of-year sale. To celebrate all these things, the publisher has allowed me to share this excerpt. First, though, here’s the synopsis:

An outlaw planet becomes the target of a shadowy, deadly force

Long before the start of a galactic rebellion, Mistworld is just another rebel planet, cut off from the fruits of empire by a punishing blockade. In a spaceport where ships hardly land anymore, and any piece of high tech is worth far more than its weight in gold, a medieval order has imposed itself on this once-rich world: The strong rule, the weak perish, and no one is too rich to steal.

Investigator Topaz is one of the few honest people left on this cutthroat planet. With her husband, Sergeant Michael Gunn, Topaz does what she can to keep the crooks who run Mistworld in check. But when the corrupt Empire devises an unprecedented scheme to attack the ESP shield that guards Mistworld, Topaz is the only one who can save the planet from being overrun. An enemy fleet lurks just off world—but it is the enemies at home whom Topaz and Gunn should fear the most. Continue reading →

Excerpt: THIEF by Mark Sullivan (Minotaur/Quercus)

Civilian Reader Excerpt, Upcoming , , , , , , , ,

SullivanM-RM2-ThiefUSCo-author of Private Berlin and Private L.A. with James Patterson, Mark Sullivan‘s next novel is THIEF. Due to be published on December 16th, 2014 (next week), by Minotaur. It is the third novel featuring Robin Monarch — following Rogue and Outlaw. The series is published in the UK by Quercus Books, and will publish Thief on December 31st in eBook, and January 1st in print. For more details on the series, scroll down to the end of the post.

Here is the synopsis for Thief:

Robin Monarch is a man with a complicated past and dangerous present.  He’s been a soldier, a CIA agent, a freelance operative but first and foremost, Robin Monarch is a thief of the highest order. Orphaned at twelve, Monarch originally stole for survival, then he stole for his friends and cohorts, now he steals to order, and to give back to the to the woman who saved his life many years ago.

With the help of his team, Monarch breaks into the legendary Christmas party of Beau Arsenault, a shady investor and behind-the-scenes player at the very highest levels of power politics. Arsenault is not above bending or breaking the rules if there’s illicit profit to be made. Monarch has decided that those illicit profits will be better used to take care of orphans and street kids. Using the party as cover to break into Arsenault’s secret vaults, Monarch comes away with two unexpected things. One is a bullet — he gets shot when he’s caught trying to escape with tens of millions of negotiable instruments. The second is a lead on what might be his most audacious exploit ever. A previously undiscovered tribe in South America may well have the secret to the most sought after knowledge in history — that of eternal life. And Robin Monarch must use all his skills — as an operative, as a thief — to keep this secret from falling into the worst possible hands.

And now, a (lengthy) excerpt… Continue reading →

Excerpt: THE LADY by K.V. Johansen (Pyr)

Civilian Reader Excerpt , , , ,

JohansenKV-M2-TheLady

THE LADY, the second novel in K.V. Johansen‘s two-part Marakand series, is published today by Pyr Books. To celebrate the release, and just in case you weren’t aware of the novel (or series), here’s the first chapter to whet your appetite…

THE LADY

Chapter 1

The man had been like an older brother to him ever since his parents had got him hired into the caravan-mistress Gaguush’s gang, but sometimes Zavel could hate the self-righteous bastard of a Westgrasslander. Like now. All he had wanted was the loan of a few coins, but no, he got a tongue-lashing instead. As if Holla-Sayan had never had a drink or two more than sat well the next morning, or gone with an easy woman. And if that wasn’t what he was up to now, skulking down the street with his eyes running anxiously to those two slim figures who’d walked ahead and were now waiting arm in arm, a Grasslander caravaneer with the long braids of the road and another with her Nabbani-black hair cut short as a Marakander boy’s. That one looked around, wondering where her victim had got to.

Zavel had Holla-Sayan by the arm, stopping the man just walking off on him, and now he dug in his fingers. Gaped wordless a moment. Couldn’t be. And Holla had been right with them, a hand under the Nabbani’s elbow, all friendly, when Zavel had spotted the threesome, the Westgrasslander and the two women, one of whom was—Ivah. The past year hadn’t treated her well. She was gaunt and pallid, but cutting her long hair was no disguise at all; he knew the sly narrow eyes, yellow brown as his own, the delicate features and tight little mouth, bruised black as it was. She knew him, too. He saw her eyes widen in shock, and damn if she didn’t look to Holla-Sayan in some appeal.

“Holla!” He let go Holla-Sayan’s arm, pushed away from him. “Ivah! You murdering, bastard whore of the Lake-Lord, you—” His knife was in his hand and he leapt for her, reaching to grab her by the front of her coat, to jerk her close and into the stabbing blade, but he choked, jerked backwards himself by the hood of his coat, Holla, damn him, and he spun around, slashing. Holla-Sayan knocked his arm aside and a fist hit his jaw. He heard the thud of it, felt the jarring clack of his teeth. Then nothing. Continue reading →

Excerpt: THE GENOME by Sergei Lukyanenko (Open Road)

Civilian Reader Excerpt , , ,

LukyanenkoS-TheGenomeThanks to Open Road Media for allowing CR to share this excerpt from Sergei Lukyanenko’s THE GENOME. Here’s the synopsis…

Five months after the horrific accident that left him near death and worried that he’d never fly again, master-pilot Alex Romanov lands a new job: captaining the sleek passenger vesselMirror. Alex is a spesh — a human who has been genetically modified to perform particular tasks. As a captain and pilot, Alex has a genetic imperative to care for passengers and crew — no matter what the cost.

His first mission aboard Mirror is to ferry two representatives of the alien race Zzygou on a tour of human worlds. His task will not be an easy one, for aboard the craft are several speshes who have reason to hate the Others. Dark pasts, deadly secrets, and a stolen gel-crystal worth more than Alex’s entire ship combine to challenge him at every turn. And as the tension escalates, it becomes apparent that greater forces are at work to bring the captain’s world crashing down.

Read on for Chapter Three… Continue reading →

Excerpt: THE REVOLUTIONS by Felix Gilman (Corsair)

Civilian Reader Excerpt , ,

GilmanD-TheRevolutionsHeader

CHAPTER ONE

It was the evening of what would later be called the Great Storm of ’93, and Arthur Archibald Shaw sat at his usual desk in the Reading Room of the British Museum, yawning and toying with his pen. Soft rain pattered on the dome. Lamps overhead shone through a haze of golden dust. Arthur yawned. There was a snorer at the desk opposite, head back and mouth open. Two women nearby whispered to each other in French. Carts creaked down the aisle, the faint tremors of their passing threatening to topple the tower of books on Arthur’s desk, which concerned explosives, and poisons, and exotic methods of murder.

He was writing a detective story. This was something of an experiment. Not knowing quite how to start, he’d begun at the end, which went:

That night the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral broke through London’s black clouds as if it were the white head of Leviathan rising from the ocean. The spire and the cross shone in a cold and quite un-Christian moonlight, and diabolical laughter echoed through the night. The detective and his quarry stood atop the dome, beneath the spire, each man ragged from the exertion of their chase.

“Stop there, Vane,” the detective called; but Professor Vane only laughed again, and began to climb the spire. And so Dr Syme pursued.

GilmanF-RevolutionsUKPBWhich was not all bad, in Arthur’s opinion. The important thing was to move quickly. It was only that month that Dr Conan Doyle had sent his famous detective off into the great beyond — chucking him unceremoniously from a waterfall in Switzerland — and the news that there would be no more stories of the Baker Street genius had thrown London’s publishing world into something of a panic. In fact, there were nearly riots, and some disturbed individuals had threatened to torch the offices of the Strand Magazine. The hero’s death left a gap in the firmament. The fellow who was first to fill it might make a fortune. It was probably already too late.

For the past two and a half years Arthur had been employed by The Monthly Mammoth to write on the subject of the Very Latest Scientific Advances. He wasn’t any kind of scientist himself, but nobody seemed to mind. He wrote about dinosaurs, and steam engines, and rubber, and the laying of transatlantic telegraph cables; or how telephones worked; or the new American elevators at the Savoy; or whether there was air on the moon; or where precisely in South America to observe the perturbations of Venus; or whether the crooked lines astronomers saw on the fourth planet might be canals, or railroads, or other signs of civilization — and so on. Not a bad job, in its way — there were certainly worse — but the Mammoth paid little, and late, and there was no prospect of advancement there. Therefore he’d invented Dr Cephias Syme: detective, astronomer, mountain-climber, world-traveller, occasional swordsman, et cetera.

Vane dangled by one hand from the golden cross, laughing, his white hair blowing in the wind. With the other hand he produced a pistol from his coat and pointed it at Syme.

“What brought you here, Syme?”

The Professor appeared to expect an answer. Since Dr Syme saw no place to take shelter, he began to explain the whole story — the process by which, according to his usual method, he had tackled each part of Vane’s wild scheme — how he had ascended that mountain of horrors — from the poisoning at the Café de L’Europe, to the cipher in the newspaper advertisements that led to the uncovering of the anarchists in Deptford, which in turn led to the something or other by some means, and so on, and thus to the discovery of the bomb beneath Her Highness’s coach, and thus inevitably here, to the Cathedral.

Arthur sketched absent-mindedly on his blotting paper: a dome, a cross, inky scudding clouds.

The notion of the struggle on the dome had come to him in a dream, just two nights ago; it had impressed itself upon him with the intensity of a lightning flash. Unfortunately, all else remained dark. How did his detective get there? How precisely had they ascended the dome (was it possible?). And above all: what happened next?

Nothing, perhaps. In his dream, Dr Syme fell, toppling from the dome into black fog, nothing but hard London streets below. Not the best way to start a detective’s adventures. Something would have to be done about that. Perhaps he could have poor Syme solve his subsequent cases from the afterlife, through the aid of a medium.

Dr Syme lunged, knocking the pistol from the Professor’s grip, but his enemy swung away, laughing, and drew from his coat a new weapon: a watch.

“We have time,” the Professor said. “Dr Syme, I confess I have arranged events so that we might have time and solitude to speak. I have always felt that you, as a man of science, might see the urgent need for reform — for certain sacrifices to be made —”

Arthur’s neighbour began to pack his day’s writings into his briefcase. This fellow — name unknown — was stand-offish, thin, spectacled. Judging from the pile of books on his desk, on which words like clairvoyance and Osiris were among the most intelligible, his interests tended to the occult. He closed his briefcase, stood, swayed, then sat back with a thump and lowered his head to his desk. Arthur sympathised. The dread hour and its inexorable approach! Soon the warders would come around, waking up the sleepers, emptying out the room, driving Arthur, and Arthur’s neighbour, and the French women, and all the scholars and idlers alike out to face the night, and the rain, and the wind that rattled the glass overhead.

Midnight! The Professor waited, as if listening for some news to erupt from the befogged city below.

“Well,” Syme said. “I dare say I know your habits after all this time. I know how you like to do things in twos. I knew there would be a second bomb. At the nave, was it, or the altar? I expect Inspector Wright’s boys found it quick enough—”

A terrible change came across the Professor’s face. All trace of civilization vanished, and savagery took its place—or, rather, not savagery, but that pure malignancy that only the refined intellect is capable of.

Howling, the Professor let go of the cross and flung himself onto Dr Syme.

Pens scratching away. Rain drumming on the glass, loudly now. A row of women industriously translating Russian into English, or English into Sanskrit, Italian into French. Arthur’s neighbour appeared to have fallen asleep.

Arm in arm, locked together in deathly struggle, the two men fell — rolling down the side of the dome — toward

Toward what, indeed!

“By God,” said Inspector Wright, hearing the terrible crash. He came running out into the street, to see, side by side, dead, upon the ground —

Arthur put down his pen, and scratched thoughtfully at his beard.

His neighbour moaned slightly, as if something were causing him pain. Concerned, Arthur poked his shoulder.

The man jumped to his feet, staring about in wild-eyed confusion; then he snatched up his briefcase and left in such a hurry that scholars all along the rows of the Reading Room looked up and tut-tutted at him.

***

Rain sluiced noisily down the glass. Lamps swayed in mid-air. Thunder reverberated under the dome as the Reading Room emptied out.

Arthur’d thought he might try to bring out his friend Heath for dinner, or possibly Waugh, but neither was likely to venture out in that weather. Bad timing and bloody awful luck.

He collected his hat, coat, and umbrella. These items were just barely up to the Reading Room’s standards of respectability, and he doubted that they were equal to the challenge of the weather outside. Certainly the manuscript of Dr Syme’s First Case was not — he’d left it folded into the pages of a treatise on poisons.

Outside a small band of scholars, idlers, and policemen sheltered beneath the colonnade. Beyond the colossal white columns, the courtyard was dark and the rain swirled almost sideways. In amongst it were stones, mud, leaves, tiles, newspapers, and flower-pots. Some unfortunate fellow’s sandwich-board toppled end-over-end across the yard, caught flight, and vanished in the thrashing air. Arthur’s hat went after it. It was like nothing he’d ever seen. A tropical monsoon, or whirlwind, or some such thing.

He was suddenly quite unaccountably afraid. It was what one might call an animal instinct, or an intuition. Later — much later — the members of the Company of the Spheres would tell him that he was sensitive, and he’d think back to the night of the Great Storm and wonder if he’d sensed, even then, what was behind it. Perhaps. On the other hand, anyone can be spooked by lightning.

He was out past the gates, into the street, and leaning forward into the wind, homewards down Great Russell Street, before he’d quite noticed that he’d left the safety of the colonnade. When he turned back to get his bearings, the rain was so thick he could hardly see a thing. The Museum was a faint haze of light under a black dome; its columns were distant white giants, lumbering off into the sea. The familiar scene was rendered utterly alien; for all he could tell, he might not have been in London any more, but whisked away to the Moon.

His umbrella tore free of his grip and took flight. He watched it follow his hat away over the rooftops, flapping like some awful black pterodactyl between craggy, suddenly lightning-lit chimneys, then off who-knows-where across London.

*   *   *

The Revolutions by Felix Gilman is published tomorrow in the UK by Corsair.

Excerpt: ASSAIL by Ian C. Esslemont (Transworld)

Civilian Reader Excerpt ,

Esslemont-6-Assail

A Novel of the Malazan Empire

Prologue

North territory of a new land

Of the Jaghut wars:

Seventh century of the 12th Lamatath campaign

33,421 years before Burn’s Sleep

The woman ran at a steady unhurried pace. her breath came as long level inhalations through the mouth and out through her wide nostrils. Sweat darkened the front and back of her buckskin shirt. Her moccasins padded silently over stones and pockets of exposed sandy soil. That she was running up a wide rocky mountain slope, and had been for most of the day, attested to iron strength and endurance. She dodged round slim poles of young pine, white spruce and birch. She jumped rocks and slid and scrambled up steep gravel talus fans. She knew she could outpace her pursuers, but that she would never shake them from her trail. Yet still she ran on.

She knew that once they tired of the chase, they would take her. She judged it ironic that the same desperate urge to continued existence that drove her also lay behind their relentless pursuit – though they had relinquished their claim to it long ago.

Still she scrambled on up the slope, for one hope remained. One slim unlikely chance. Not for her survival; she had given that up the moment she glimpsed the hoary eldritch silhouettes of her pursuers. The one slim chance lay for vengeance.

Knife-edged broken rock cut her fingers as she scrabbled for handholds. It flayed her moccasins. The surrounding steep slopes of tumbled stone and talus heaps were just now emerging from winter; ice clung to shadowed hollows and behind the taller boulders. Snow still lay in curved dirty heaps, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding gravel. She took vigour from the chill bite of the high mountain air, knowing it perfectly natural rather than any invoked glacial freeze. Taking cover in a stand of pine, she paused to risk a glance behind: no movement stirred upon the slope below, other than a smallish herd of elk just now clattering their way downvalley. No doubt disturbed by her passage.

Yet she knew she was not alone. She also knew her pursuers needed not to show themselves to run her down. She’d hoped, though, they would at least grant her this one small gesture.

A lone figure did then step out from the cover of tumbled glacial moraine. It was as if she’d willed its appearance. The tattered remains of leathers flapped about its impossibly lean frame. A dark ravaged visage scanned the slope, rising to her. The white bear hide that rode atop the head and shoulders hung as aged and winddried as its wearer. She and he locked gazes across the league that separated them – and across a far larger unbridgeable gulf as well.

So far behind? she wondered. Then she understood and in that instant threw herself flat.

Something shattered against the rocks next to her. Flint shards thinner than any blade sliced her buckskins and flensed the skin beneath.

She jumped to her feet and returned to scrambling up the slope. She reached a ridge that was a mere shoulder of the far taller slope: a jagged peak that reared far above. Here she paused a second time, exhausted, her lungs working, drawing in the icy air.

Then she screamed as a spear lanced through her thigh, pinning her to the bare stony surface. She fell back against a rock and took hold of the polished dark haft to draw it. A skeletal hand knocked hers aside.

The same fleshless visage that had caught her gaze below now peered down at her. Empty dark sockets regarded her beneath the rotting brow of a white tundra bear. Necklaces of yellowed claws hung about the figure’s neck – presumably the claws of the very beast it wore – while the scraped hide of the beast’s forelimbs rode its arms down to the paws tied with leather bindings to its own hands. Ribs darkened with age peeked through the mummified flesh of its torso. Rags of leather buckskin lay beneath the hide, all belted and tied off by numerous leather thongs. A long blade of knapped flint, creamy brown, its tang wrapped in leather, stood thrust through a belt. ‘Why flee you here, Jaghut?’ the Imass demanded.

‘I flee destruction,’ she answered, her voice tight with suppressed pain.

Others of the Imass warband now walked the ridge. The bones of their feet clattered on the rocks like so many stones. ‘Caves above, Ut’el,’ one of their number announced, pointing a flint blade higher up.

The Imass, Ut’el, returned its attention to her. ‘You would seek to lure us to ambush,’ it announced.

‘If you say so.’

‘I am disappointed. You have brought death to your kin as well.’ It faced one of the band. ‘Take scouts. They are occupied?’

This Imass dipped its hoary skull where the flesh and hair had fallen away in patches. ‘Yes, Bonecaster.’

Bonecaster! the woman marvelled. A mage, shaman, of the breed! If she should bring this one to destruction then all would have been worth the struggle.

The Bonecaster returned its attention to her. She sensed its mood of disappointment. ‘I had thought you a more worthy prize,’ it murmured, displeased.

‘As we had hoped for more worthy successors.’

‘Victory is the only measure of that, Jaghut.’

‘So the victors would soothe themselves.’

The undying creature raised its bony shoulders in an eloquent shrug. ‘It is simply existence. Ours or yours.’

She allowed herself to slump back as if in utter defeat. ‘You mean the elimination of all other than you. That is the flaw of your kind. You can only countenance your family or tribe to live.’

‘So it is with all others.’

‘No, it is not. You are merely unable to see this.’

‘Look about, Jaghut. Raw nature teaches us…’ Ut’el’s whisper faint voice dwindled away as he slowly raised his bone and dried tendon features to the higher slope.

‘How fare your scouts, Bonecaster?’ she asked, unable to keep a savage grin from her face.

‘They are gone,’ he announced. His gaze fell to her. ‘Others are there.’ He now shook his nearly fleshless head in admiration, and, it seemed to her, even horror. ‘My apologies, Jaghut. I would never have believed any entity would dare…’ He drew his flint blade. ‘You are a desperate fool. You have doomed us all – and more.’

‘I am merely returning the favour.’

All about, the remaining Imass warriors flinched as if stung, drawing their blades of razor-thin flint. ‘Purchase us what moments you can,’ he told them flatly. His tannin-brown visage remained fixed upon her.

The warriors dipped their heads. ‘Farewell,’ one answered, and they disappeared into snatches of dust.

Above, figures now came pouring from the cave mouths: stone grey shapes that ran on oddly jointed legs, or all four limbs at a time.

‘I am tempted to leave you to them,’ Ut’el said. ‘But we Imass are not a cruel people.’

‘So you would absolve yourselves over the centuries, yes?’ She took hold of the spear haft. ‘That is fortunate. Because we Jaghut are not a judgemental people.’ And she heaved herself backwards in one motion, yanking the spearhead from the ground to tumble off the ledge, spear in hand.

He swung, but the blade cut just short of her as she slipped from the narrow ridge. Her buckskins snapped in the wind. ‘I leave you to…’ she yelled as she plummeted from sight down the sheer thousand-foot drop.

. . . your doom, Ut’el Anag, Bonecaster to the Kerluhm T’lan Imass, finished for her. He turned to face the high slope. The grey tide of creatures had finished his band and now closed upon him.

In what he considered his last moments, he raised his flint blade to his face. He watched how the knapped facets reflected the clouds overhead, how the reflections rippled like waves on clear lake water.

No. This is not yet done. I so swear.

He stepped into the realm of Tellann as the first of the clawed hands snapped closed upon the space he once occupied.

*   *   *

Hel’eth Jal Im (Pogrom of the White Stag)

51st Jaghut War

6,031 years before Burn’s Sleep

Esslemont-6-AssailHere evergreen forest descended mountain slopes to a rocky shore. Shorebirds hunted for crabs and beetles among tide-pools and stretches of black sand beaches. From their perches on tree limbs and among the taller rocks larger birds of prey watched the shorebirds and the glimmer of fingerlings in the shallows.

A morning mist hung over the bay. The air was still enough for sounds to cross from one curve of the shore to the other. The figure that arose from the seaweed-skirted boulders was not out of keeping with the scene. The tattered remains of leathers hung from its withered, mummified shoulders and hips. A nut-brown flint blade hung thrust through a crude twisted-hair belt tied about its fleshless waist. Over its head of patches of stringy hair and exposed browned skull it wore a cap cut from the cured grey hide of a beast more at home on sundrenched savanna than temperate boreal forest.

Similar figures arose, one by one, here and there about the shore. They gathered around the first arrival, and though gender was almost impossible to tell among their fleshless desiccated bodies, skin little more than paper-thin flesh over bone, this one was female and her name was Shalt Li’gar, and she was of the Ifayle T’lan Imass.

‘What land is this?’ one of the band, J’arl, asked. In answer, she raised her head as if taking the earth’s scent through the exposed twin gaps of her nostrils. ‘I know it not,’ she judged. ‘No account of it has been shared with me, nor with those with whom I have shared.’

‘Others of us must have found it before, certainly,’ another, Guth, commented.

‘And what became of them…?’ Shalt answered, thoughtfully, peering into the mist to the far shore of the sheltered bay.

The other ravaged faces turned as well and all were silent and still for a time. So quiet and motionless were they that an eagle flew overhead to stoop the waters, its talons slicing the surface. It rose with a fish struggling in its claws, and perched in a nearby half-dead fir to tear at its meal.

The faces of all the Imass had turned silently to follow the course of its flight.

‘Favourable, or unfavourable?’ J’arl asked into the continued silence.

‘Are we the eagle?’ answered another. ‘Or the fish?’

Shalt extended a withered arm to the bay. ‘Others are fishing as well,’ she pronounced.

They started picking their way round the curve of the shore.

First to emerge from the mist were the prows of hide boats pulled up on the strand of black gravel that climbed steeply to the forested rocky slope. Smoke trailed through the trees. Shalt glimpsed a stout log structure high on the slope. Figures now came running down a trail. They carried spears armed with stone heads, maces of stones tied to wood handles. They wore stained and beaded leathers and animal hide capes.

‘Humans,’ Guth observed, unimpressed. ‘We should search inland.’

‘Pity they choose not to talk,’ Shalt judged, almost with a sigh. ‘We will scout inland.’

J’arl thrust up a withered hand, all sinew and bone. ‘I ask for a pause. There is something…’

Shalt regarded him. She tilted her age-gnawed head. ‘A presence?’

‘Something,’ he repeated, wary, as if unwilling to say more.

The local people had formed a line inland. They yelled and shook their weapons. Shalt studied them: much taller than she and her stock. Prominent jaws, large teeth. Similar in features – probably the descendants of a small breeding population. Such was not so unusual among her own kind, long ago.

Her band was disappearing one by one, moving on, when one of the locals shouted something Shalt understood: ‘Be gone, demons from the outside!’

The words used made all her remaining band reflexively draw their blades. For they were in the Jaghut tongue. Shalt stepped forward. ‘Whence came you by this language?’ she asked in the same tongue.

‘It is known to us of old, demon,’ an elder answered, sneering.

Known? she repeated, wonderingly. How can this be?

‘And we have been warned of your kind,’ he continued. ‘Be gone! You are not welcome here.’

Shalt raised her chin, the flesh worn away from one side of her mandible, and scented again, deeply. What came on the air staggered her, and were she not of the Imass she would perhaps have fainted into unconsciousness from the challenge it presented to her very core.

‘Abomination…’ J’arl breathed in an exhalation of cold air. He raised his blade.

No! Shalt cried to herself. They are human! We mustn’t slide down this path… it will lead us to annihilation.

J’arl started forward and Shalt acted without thought. Her blade sliced through vertebrae at the juncture of neck and shoulder. J’arl slumped, though she knew he was not finished utterly.

Up and down the shore her band exploded into a whirling mêlée of Imass striking Imass. Flint blades clashed and grated in a burst of clamour that sent all the nearby birds skyward in alarm. A group coalesced round Shalt, who directed them into a line defending the milling locals.

‘Flee the coast!’ she shouted to the people as she blocked a strike from Guth. ‘Flee!’

‘They will be found,’ Guth promised her as he strained. ‘If not us, then others.’

Shalt cut him down as well and wept as she fought, for he had been a companion of uncountable years.

She spared the mêlée a glance and despaired. The aggressors far outnumbered the defenders. Yet she was First of the Band for a reason and she fought even as all her allies fell about her. She was last, giving ground, suffering strikes that shaved dried flesh from her limbs and cut rotted hide from her shoulders. Now her skills overcame the constraints of the attackers, who fell one by one before the two-handed blade, so thin as to be translucent, that she flicked and turned as lightly as a green branch.

A blow took her skull. It severed bone down past her right occipital ridge. Yet even as her skull shattered she dropped this last aggressor and wailed at the necessity, for it was Bruj’el, a bull of a warrior, and cousin to her mate gone these many centuries.

She turned to the people. She could sense her animating spirit fleeing its flawed vessel. Her Tellann-provided vision was darkening, withdrawing. She fell to her bony knees. She dropped her blade to brace herself with one hand and breathed out one last fading sigh to the staring, awed figures.

‘Hide yourselves…’

***

Ian C. Esslemont’s Assail is published in the UK tomorrow, by Transworld Books. Esslemont is the author of four other Malazan novels, also published in the UK by Transworld: Night of Knives, Return of the Crimson Guard, Stonewielder, Orb Sceptre Throne, and Blood and Bone.

Esslemont-Malazan-1to5