Richard K. Morgan's Blog, page 8
July 8, 2013
Read and Recommended…
Kameron Hurley.
Not that I haven’t read some other stuff too, recently (on which, more as soon as I’m done with Dark Defiles and can grab a decent amount of time to write it down. Promise.). But. Kameron Hurley.
There’s been a lot of talk about some of the first novel shortcomings of God’s War, and some of it perfectly well-founded, but it’s all utterly beside the point. Kameron Hurley’s writing is the most exciting thing I’ve seen on the genre page since I picked up Peter Watts’ Blindsight five years ago. It has some of the same characteristics as Watts’ work, too – an eye for the casual brutality of the universe we inhabit, an unrelenting critique of the stupidity and cruelty so common in human behaviour and, twined in with all this, a thin, tightly wound thread of empathy and yearning after something better, something humane, in the face of all that horror.
What Hurley’s writing has (and it’s something not one in a dozen genre practitioners seems able to generate) is passion.
It doesn’t hurt that there’s also a rare freshness to the material, and a heady dash of high octane noir worked into the mix.
I am, as of now, officially an addict.
June 16, 2013
Dublin Up
Second in a very limited series of public appearances I’m making this year – the good people of the National Irish Science Fiction Convention have asked me to be guest of honour at OctoCon 2013. Details are here.
Somehow, in all those years of literary aspiration and then all these years of literary success, I never managed to get it together to visit Dublin, so this is going to be a joy at a whole number of different levels. I get to rattle around the city of Yeats, Joyce and Roddy Doyle to name but three; I get to drag my two year old son along to his first SF convention; oh, and I get to hang out, chewing the fat and shooting the shit about genre with like minded souls for a whole weekend. Ranting too, probably.
Maybe there’ll be a panel about GrimDark……
‘hem.
Anyway – maybe see you there.
June 10, 2013
Away the Crow Road
We’re pretty remote out here, but news got through all the same. Quite remarkable how much loss this feels like.
Find some raw spirit on your shelves, or wherever it may be. Raise a glass.
Iain Banks. The man is gone, the words remain.
May 25, 2013
Writer’s Retreat
Under the paper-thin guise of keeping my son’s bilingual heritage topped up, we are back in southern Spain for three months. Local writing conditions look more or less like this:
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Perhaps as a result, The Dark Defiles is taking shape at a steady one to two thousand words a day, and no weekends off for good behaviour. Means a lot less time in the pool or the ocean with family but, hey – I suffer for my art, bartender. More excerpts incoming presently and, if time allows, maybe even a whole new Read and Rec’d list, as promised. Watch this space.
(Special extra credit will be given for picking up that late eighties soundbite)
April 12, 2013
The Calm before the Storm
They waited a full day and night for Ringil Eskiath to show.
Everyone was briefed, everyone knew their place. The locals hid in their homes, the League privateers held ambush positions down at the harbour and all along the edges of the bay. Lookouts took the high ground at either end, and the watchtower at Dako’s Point. Certain among the imperial marine prisoners were held in a beer cellar not far from the docks, ready to be hauled out and used for bargaining or simply as shields. Klithren sat at a table in the Inn on League street, played dice against himself and waited for word.
Ornley held its breath.
The privateers were sanguine – they knew how to sit tight. It was part of their trade to wait, sifting the haze at the horizon for signs of enemy shipping or a change in the weather, sometimes for days on end, and nothing to break the monotony but the soft rocking of the vessel on the swell. You learnt patience out there, you had to. No percentage in getting all riled up ahead of time. The fight, the storm – these things would be upon you soon enough. Take the empty hours and breathe them in like pipe-house smoke, they’d be yours for a meagre enough span in the end.
The townspeople were less sanguine. Maybe if you were a soldier boy you could sit scratching your arse like this all day long, but gouging a living out of the Hironish isles took work. You were up with the dawn or before, out to sea and casting your nets, or into the surrounding hills to tend your livestock. There were dry-stone walls to be maintained, crops to be checked for blight, crows and gulls to be kept at bay, eventually the harvest; thatches to be renewed or repaired after storms, peat to be dug and cut and stacked for drying. Nets to be mended, hulls to be ripped of barnacles, scrubbed and pitched; there was gutting and cleaning, salting, packing, the smokehouse to tend. Did these bloody blade artists ever stop to think how food ends up on their plates and fire in the grate to keep out the chill? Thank the Dark Queen we never got that garrison they promised us after the war, if this is all they’re good for……
The hours limped by like aging mules, overladen with expectation, one slow step at a time. Late into the afternoon, some representation was made to Klithren, that they could not sit like this indefinitely and when did he expect to be done with this Outlaw-Enemy-of-the-League-brought-to-Justice shit? Because the goats out on Whaler’s Rise wouldn’t milk themselves, you know, and there were-
At which point, Klithren looked up at the little knot of spokesmen, and gave them a thin smile that dried the words in their throats.
He waited a couple of beats and then, when no more complaints looked to be forthcoming, he nodded. Two privateers stepped in from the corners of the room, and the spokesmen were ushered away, to recriminate bitterly with each other out in the street.
Klithren, for his part, stared after them until the tavern door slammed, then he went back to his dice. Cup and roll, out onto the scarred wooden table-top with a bony rattle. Scrutinise the faces the worn cubes offered up.
Scoop and cup, and roll again.
“He’ll come, Venj,” some later claimed they heard him murmur. “You’ve not long to wait now, mate.”
But whoever he was talking to seemed destined to disappointment. Afternoon turned into evening, and what miserable grey light there’d been all day went down into dark without any sign of the outlaw or his ship. The customary lamps were lit along the harbour wall and the wharf-front, the waiting privateers stretched cramped limbs, and cursed, and settled in to wait some more.
“Going to be a long fucking night,” someone grumbled out on the harbour wall and the men down the line all laughed.
“Figure it’ll be worth your while,” someone else called back. “I was at Rajal beach in the war, I saw Ringil Eskiath fight. Never seen anything like that, before or since. We take him down tonight, you’re going to have a tale to get you laid the rest of your natural life.”
More laughter, punctuated this time with lewd commentary.
“Yeah, or you’ll be dog meat,” sneered a grizzled and corpulent privateer sprawled spread-legged with his back to the wall a couple of yards down from the original speaker. “And your soul sent screaming to hell.”
And he prodded morosely with the tip of his killing knife at the crack between two of the harbour wall flagstones he sat on. Around him, the laughter damped down a bit. Stares fell on him, a few of the men shifted out from the wall so they could see him more clearly.
“Say what?”
The grizzled privateer glanced up, saw he had an audience.
“Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “I don’t know nothing about Rajal beach, but before I got this gig, I worked muscle for Slab Findrich back in Trelayne-”
“That slaver piece of shit?” A younger privateer hawked and spat.
“Too fucking right, that slaver piece of shit. Findrich pays double the going rate for good men in Etterkal.”
“What’d he pay you, then?”
Jeers. Further down the line, a sergeant bellowed for quiet.
“Yeah, laugh it up.” The corpulent privateer glowered and dug harder with his dagger. The blade tip made a tiny scraping that put your teeth on edge. “I was in Etterkal when Ringil Eskiath came calling last year, when Findrich put the bounty out him. I saw what was left of the Sileta brothers when they finally found them.”
The jeers dried up with the mention of the name. Everyone knew that story, some version or other. Tavern tale spinners in Trelayne had been drinking off it ever since the news broke. Mothers down in harbour end used it these days to quieten their unruly infant sons – behave, or Ringil Eskiath’ll come for you in the night and do you like the Sileta brothers.
The privateer looked round with a thin smile, nodding.
“Slab Findrich threw up when he saw what was done,” he said. “I was there at his side. And I’ll tell you this much for free. Nothing human could have done that.”
“Ah, come off it,” somebody scoffed. “What is this Eskiath, a fucking demon now? You think there aren’t half a hundred whores and losers in harbour end who’d have cut the Siletas up the exact same way if they got the chance.”
“But they weren’t cut up.” Scrape, scrape went the knife point, along the crack and the listeners’ nerves. “It wasn’t a blade that did it, it wasn’t that kind of damage.”
Silence. Lamplight dappled out in thin lines across the black harbour waters. Out to sea, a barely heard sound that might have been gathering thunder.
Someone cleared their throat. “Look-”
“He’s just a man,” snapped the privateer who claimed to have been at Rajal beach. “Fast with a blade and not afraid to die is all. Seen it before plenty of times.”
The corpulent storyteller scowled. “That’s what you think. Maybe he was still a man back at Rajal, but no man could have-”
“You!” The sergeant, grown tired of the raised voices, had stirred himself and come stalking down the line. “Yeah, you – fatty. Shut the fuck up, before I kick your larded arse down in the cellar with the prisoners.”
The rest of the privateers broke up – ripples of snorting laughter along the harbour wall. The sergeant rounded on them.
“That goes for anyone else around here who thinks this is all a big fucking joke. You stow that shit, right now. Call yourselves men of war? You’re on watch, all of you – not down the tavern with your pox-ridden sisters on your arm.”
The laughter died abruptly. The sergeant glared up and down the line, spaced his words for impact.
“When this outlaw faggot piece of shit comes creeping into harbour tonight, I want men on this wall, not a gaggle of fucking fishwives. Do I make myself clear?”
It seemed, from the ensuing quiet, that he did.
Still, he stood a while longer, daring anyone to catch his eye. When no-one looked like taking up the challenge, he evidently judged his point made and headed back to his post. Muttering snaked in his wake, but it was muted, and there was no more conversation along the harbour wall for quite a while.
The privateers settled once more to waiting.
But the only thing that came creeping into harbour as the night wore on was a thick, low-lying sea fog that blanketed vision, muffled sound and chilled them all to the bone.
*
“I know you can’t see to steer in it,” said Ringil patiently. “You don’t need to steer in it. The ship will steer itself.”
Not really accurate, but about as close to the truth as he wanted to get. If he’d told captain and crew what was really going to steer Dragon’s Demise through the fog, Gil suspected he’d have an all-out mutiny on his hands.
This swordsman-sorcerer gig was turning out harder to balance than you’d expect.
Lal Nyanar, for instance. There he stood on the helm deck, fine aristo features pinched up in a frown, shaking his head. Torches bracketed at the rail gave a flickering yellow light, enough to make out the salients. Below them on the main deck, the mist roiled and crept like something alive. Above and ahead of them it wrapped tendril fingers through the rigging and around the masts.
“This….” Nyanar gestured weakly. “This is no natural fog.”
Ringil held onto his temper. “Of course it’s not natural – you saw me summon it, didn’t you? Now can we please get underway while it lasts.”
“You put all our souls in danger with this northern witchery, Eskiath.”
“Oh, please.”
“I think,” said Senger Hald dryly, “That my lord Ringil is most concerned at the moment with our temporal well-being. To which I must concur. There will be time enough to worry about the salvation of our immortal souls once we’ve saved our mortal skins.”
Ringil masked his surprise. “Thank you, commander. I do believe you’ve stated the case admirably there. Captain?”
Nyanar looked betrayed. Hald was probably the closest thing to a soul-mate he had on the expedition. Both men had washed up in the company through sheer chance. Both had been witness to the arrival of the Helmsman Anasharal whilst they were about entirely routine duties, and so in the interests of keeping the secrets of the quest between as few as possible, both had been promptly seconded to the command.
But more than that, they were both of a kind. Both were Yhelteth born and bred, both came of noble stock – Hald might lack the staggering wealth of the Nyanar clan in his own family backdrop, but like most home-grown military commanders in the Empire, his lineage would be impeccable – and both had contented themselves with moderate careers in soldiering that kept them close to home. Neither man had seen more than superficial deployment during the war. Neither man had previously been outside the Empire’s borders.
Now here they were, up on the mist-ridden outer rim of the world, the sun-baked certainties of Yhelteth three thousand miles astern, and suddenly Hald was breaking ranks. Buying into this infidel sorcery and the dark northern powers it called on. Casting off the sober tenets of the Revelation and trusting to an unholy alien faith. Worse still, they had no Citadel-assigned invigilator along to weigh in – Jhiral moved swiftly enough to crush that custom as soon as events at Afa-marag gave him the upper hand. The palace, he declared, could not possibly trouble the Mastery for valued officers of the faith when they must surely be needed here at home to help with the purges; the northern expedition must perforce rely on the individual piety and moral strength of its members without recourse to clerical support; as, in fact, must all naval and military commands, for the time being at least, until this deeply shocking crisis has passed. No, really, such an outpouring of pastoral concern is touching, but his Imperial Radiance insists.
No invigilators, no clear moral compass, no working chain of command, and the only viable father figure around wears a scar on his face and has demons at his back.
You had to feel sorry for Nyanar, caught up in it all through no fault of his own.
No, you have to kick his arse and get him moving.
“Captain? Are we agreed?”
Nyanar looked from Ringil to Hald and back, mouth pursed tight as if he’d just been served a platter of peasant gruel. He turned his back and stared out into the fog.
“Very well,” he snapped. “Sanat, raise anchor, make sail. Inshore rig.”
“Aye sir.” Sanat sent a practised first mate’s call rolling down the length of the ship. “Raise anchor! Make sail!”
The call picked up, was echoed across the decks. Men moved in the rigging, vaguely seen, and canvas came tumbling down. Inshore rig, taken as read. Grunted cadences from the prow and the repeated graunch of wet rope on wood as the anchor came up.
Dragon’s Demise shifted and slid on the swell. Began to move with purpose.
Ringil felt himself relax a little with the motion. He thought it had been touch and go for a while back there. Not for the first time, he wondered if the powers he was acquiring under Hjel’s tutelage were really worth the trouble spent getting them.
What point, after all, in racking yourself to produce a handy sorcerous mist, if the men you led wouldn’t follow you into it?
*
They’d watched him raise hands to the sky and contort his face, like some barking mad market square prophet of doom. A knot of sailors not otherwise occupied gathered on the main deck below to stare. They’d heard the muttering sounds he made deep in his throat, seen the splay-fingered traceries he cast across the air. He supposed they must have done some muttering themselves, some more clutching at their precious talismans, but he’d been too lost in it by then to notice. Too busy pouring his entire focus into the glyphs he made, because in the end that was the only way it would work.
You must write upon the air like a scribe, Hjel tells him on a cold stony beach somewhere at the margins of the Grey Places. The air itself is parchment, read continually by powers waiting for command. But such powers can only read what is written clearly, can only answer commands clearly expressed. Cast poorly and you are no better than a clumsy scribe, blotching or scrawling your script. Cast poorly or in error, and there will be no answer.
Now try again.
It takes days.
It takes morning after bleak early morning, going down to the shore again and again from the cold, coarse-grassed dunes where Hjel’s gypsy band are camped; it takes day after day of standing there facing the ocean like an enemy, clawing at the air, grating the learnt strings of polysyllables until his throat is raw. It takes days, and not even Hjel’s caresses under canvas at night can take away the impatient frustration it stirs in him.
But finally, one morning, he goes down to the shore in an odd, empty mood, alone – Hjel turns over under the blankets when he rises, mumbles something, does not open his eyes – and he stands there, and he casts, and this time he does it right.
The mist rolls in from the sea, blots out everything around him.
Wraps him in its damp embrace.
Now, aboard Dragon’s Demise, it came as second nature. His throat had long since accustomed itself to the harsh sounds he needed to make, his fingers had grown supple with practice. And whatever elemental powers lurked in the coves and straits of the Hironish, now they leapt to do his bidding. He sensed them – rising off the darkened ocean’s surface like cold steam, pouring down out of gullies and caves in the ancient cliffs along this coast, circling the anchored vessel in fitful band-light like curious wolves, darting in now and then to stalk the decks unseen by human eyes, to ruffle the flames of a torch, or brush past crew members with wild, unhuman hilarity, leaving the brief touch of chilly tendril fingers and shivers on the spine.
He felt them gather on the helm deck at his back.
He felt them breathing down his neck.
He gathered their cold breath to him like a cloak, he breathed it in. He smiled as the ikinri ‘ska came on like some icy battlefield drug.
He heard, as if in a dream, the lookout overhead, calling out the fog as it rolled in and wrapped them.
The ikinri ‘ska syllables died away in his throat, scuttling back down under cover, their work done. The muscles in his cheeks and jaw eased out of their cramping grimace and his arms sagged to his sides. His aching fingers hung loose, his eyes – he wasn’t aware he’d closed them – snapped suddenly open, and he found himself staring into Senger Hald’s face.
The marine commander shuddered visibly in the torchlight.
Turned away.
*
Dragon’s Demise made curiously good time down the coast, as if the same elemental forces that had brought the fog now clung to the masts and filled the cautiously-rigged canvas with their breath. As if they were anxious to see the ship arrive. Once or twice, the helmsman remarked that it felt as if something was dragging on the hull. But they were a prudent distance out from the shore in five fathoms or more of water, and when Nyanar glanced askance at Ringil, the Trelayne knight just shrugged.
Now and then, off the port bow, they heard the rumbling prowl of a storm. But it was faint and distant to the east, and showed no signs of coming for them.
These are not trivial sorceries, Hjel warns him, when he has the magic down. The elementals are capricious, and their range is wide. Unleash them, and their mischief will be general. Try not to worry about it too much, it’s a price you have no choice but to pay. That they do your will in your vicinity is the trick. What havoc they wreak elsewhere need not be your concern.
Ringil shrugs. Sounds no worse than most men I’ve commanded.
He stood alert throughout the night, though, listening intently to the storm and ready to pull down the ikinri ‘ska on the elementals’ heads if they showed signs of getting cute.
The fog held. The storm stayed away.
They made Ornley harbour with the dawn.
April 5, 2013
Raise a Glass
In the summer of 1987, a freshly minted graduate, I was down in London paying off student debt – a mercifully lightweight business back in those halcyon days of free university education and even maintenance grants for those who’d committed the grave neo-liberal sin of being born to parents of limited means. That said, money was still tight – like a lot of aspiring writers, I’d not thought to gird myself with any kind of back-up career option and so was working the usual variegated series of jobs you see in so many author bios. I was mostly broke as result, but still managing to have a pretty good time. You know how it is. After the comfort and confines of university, suddenly the whole rough world was out there for the tasting and I seemed to have an infinite amount of time to work through the menu. I’d barely even scratched the surface of my twenties, everything was ahead of me. Somehow, being broke didn’t put much of a dent in the wonder of it all.
It did, however, put a dent in my expenditure on books. I didn’t get to buy them very often, and I never bought them new. That wasn’t as crushing a blow as it might seem. Charing Cross Road was full of musty second-hand bookshops back then, and I only lived a half hour walk away. Didn’t even need to take the tube.
Then one day, I found myself making an exception to my vow of second-hand bookishness. It was a novel I found in one of those grubby-glass-fronted independent bookshops still existing back then along the Tottenham Court road. It had a curious, Soviet-realist derived front cover, a tumble of broadsheet accolades on the back and it lacked any kind of useful blurb. I had no idea what it was actually about, so I opened it up and started to read. About five minutes and a half dozen pages later, I carefully shuffled through the contents of my wallet, separated out the three pound notes (remember them?) that I needed and in an ecstasy of consumer guilt I paid for Iain Banks’ The Bridge, marched back to my (shared) room at UCL Halls of Residence, and read the book cover to cover that same afternoon.
I’d never read anything like it. It blew me away.
I sometimes think I’ve never read anything like it since.
Later that week, I lent The Bridge to my room-mate – read this, it’s fucking brilliant!! – went out and broke my vow again. I bought everything this Banks guy had ever written. Fortunately for my finances, that turned out to be only two other novels, The Wasp Factory and Walking On Glass. They set me back another hard earned four pounds fifty, but when I paid this time I was clear-headed about what I was doing. Whatever this guy wrote, I would read, as soon as I could lay my hands on it. Some luxuries are worth the sacrifice. When Espedair Street came out, I got it in hardback.
Twenty five years later, I still own those books, the very same copies, and Iain Banks is dying.
It’s hard to communicate how that feels. I only ever met Iain once, extremely briefly, and we barely exchanged hellos. I don’t know him in any real sense. But in just as real a sense, he’s been a constant companion throughout the last twenty five years. Reading his books marked a lot of the major stages of my life. I pre-ordered them at the British Council library when I worked my first ESL job in Ankara. I evangelised about them to colleagues who, years away from the UK, had never heard of the man. Back in London during the early nineties, I brandished them at friends and lovers as a powerfully human alternative to the smugly cold and clinical early fiction of Ian McEwan (Banks could go head to head with McEwan for atrocity and horror, but somehow an irrepressible humane and human warmth always soaked through the prose). I lent them to my wife when we first met, with much the same words as I’d used to my room-mate seven years previously. Her English wasn’t that great back then, and yet nineteen years on she still remembers The Wasp Factory and The Bridge as if she’d read them a couple of weeks ago. Talking incessantly about them (along with Reservoir Dogs and the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge) was a significant supporting beam in the structure of our early relationship. The way our feelings chimed over those books was an early indicator that, this time around, we might be playing for keeps.
Then there’s the direct literary influence – Banks was an early weapon for me in my secession from the po-faced literary establishment. He was a bloody great broadsword of kinetic fictional prowess, pointing the way you could go if you weren’t up for this gnawing, angst-ridden navel-gazing the English literary scene seemed so wedded to at the time. His books were about stuff, in a way that so much other so-called literary fiction of the period wasn’t. Shit happened in them – violent, exciting, often silly, hilarious, fantastical shit. Just as you could see the man’s human warmth underlying the prose, so you could detect a delight in fireworks on the page and daft jokes for their own sake. No-one was less surprised than me to discover that the man was also writing outrageously sardonic wide-screen space opera. I can still recall the smile that came to my lips when, reading Consider Phlebas on a plane back to a job in Istanbul, I first stumbled on the deadpan names of the Culture’s starcraft and what they implied about the Culture as a whole. Later, I became a fully paid up devotee of the sardonic wit and black humour of those Minds, drones and other assorted dream machines. Later still, that same sardonic black humour would creep in and tinge my own writing to no small extent.
Lastly, there’s the man himself. As I said, I don’t know Iain in any real sense, but in all the conversations I’ve had with people who do, I have quite literally never heard anyone say a bad word about him. Every single commentary has been either admiring or complimentary or both. That’s no mean achievement in any walk of life, and in the nervy, gossipy world of authors, aspiring and published and their critics, it’s almost beyond belief. I can’t think of a single other writer – a single other person, really – about whom I could say the same thing. To rub so many people so thoroughly up the right way, you really do have to be a remarkably decent human being.
And then you read that personal statement linked to above, the die-hard gallows humour and utter lack of self-pity, and you realise that to remarkably decent you must also add unassumingly courageous and colossally strong. And then you start to see where all those dynamic, powerful and ultimately humane fictional visions were drawn from over the years
We are not just going to lose a great writer this year, we are going to lose a great heart. I only hope I have half the same heart and humour when my turn comes around.
So raise a glass, wherever you are, whoever you are. To Iain Banks, the writer, the man. Iain – I never knew you, and that was my loss. But your writing etched the backdrop of the life I’ve lived so far, and you remain an example to the end. All best wishes for all the time you have left.
March 15, 2013
Grim, Dark and Straw
So it seems I’m writing GRIMDARK!!!
Who knew?
Well, certainly not me. There I was thinking, I’d just transferred my whole future noir schtick over the fence from SF into a fantasy landscape – a bundle of goods that Colin Greenland once nailed (rather eloquently, I thought) in this review of Broken Angels here as the pulse, the urgency, of pulp: its preoccupation with the overwhelming odds against truth and justice; its climate of loss and death.
But over here in fantasyland, it seems there’s a posse or two going round who don’t hold with that sort of thing. Overwhelming odds against Truth and Justice? A climate of Loss and Death? Listen here, mister, this is a nice town, full of nice folks who don’t want no trouble. We don’t got none of that trash-talking GrimDark filth around here, and we don’t need none neither.
Really? Are you sure? I mean, it’s just, I see Red Joe Abercrombie’s horse tied up over there at the rail. He seems to have a bed for the night. And, well, couldn’t help noticing the old Game of Thrones saloon as I rode in, all lit up fit for a celebration. That’s Georgie Martin’s place, isn’t it? Seems awful busy…..
You’re not hearing me boy. I said – we don’t got nothing for your sort around here. We don’t got no GrimDark, we don’t want none neither.
O-kay, boys. I get the picture. But could you at least, you know, tell me what GrimDark actually is – so I don’t go and trouble these fine people with it, without meaning to.
You trynna be funny, boy?
Uh – no. I’m just, uh, curious, you know. As to what exactly GrimDark would, uhm, be. Exactly.
(a sudden silence. the half-wit with the shotgun quivers with righteous indignation)
Go on, Missy Aitch – whyn’t you tell him, tell him good.
You shut your mouth, Damien, we don’t need to explicate ourselves to the likes of him. We don’t need-
I’ll tell him, then, if n you won’t. See here, mister, it’s like this, it’s all blood and gore and bein’ mean to womenfolk n all, and it’s dark too, just no hope anywhere, that’s what, no good men or heroes or anything nice at all, nobody smiling or happy or bakin’ a apple pie or nothing like that-
No, you fool, it ain’t got nothin’ to do with pies-
Leo says-
I don’t care what Leo says, THAT AIN’T IT!
(a second silence)
Uhm – are you ladies and gentlemen acquainted with a Mr McCarthy at all, from the Territories? He would have been through here a couple of times, I reckon, and that you’ve just described is -
You done been told once already, boy – don’t you git no smart mouth on you. We don’t mess with them from the Territories, that ain’t none of our concern what they do up there. This here is a nice town for nice folk, and we-
Like apple pie. Yeah, I think I got that bit.
It ain’t got NOTHIN’ to do with PIE! I already done SAID that!
Al-right, then. Nothing to do with pie. Fair enough. Take it easy there, put the rope down. But can you tell me what it does have to do with? Exactly.
It’s-
(silence)
Anything, anything at all that-
(more silence)
And who’s doing it? Exactly?
(then, everyone together in a rush)
Bein’ mean to women folk-
All that there gore and blood-
Right. Too many swords and battles and-
No, no, we LIKE that.
You like that? Ehm. But you said-
Too much BLOOD! You touched in the head, boy, or you just deaf? Not too much swords, not too much axes. Too much BLOOD!
O-kay. So good with the swords and axes, but no blood. And no being mean.
No bein’ mean to WOMENFOLK!
Right. But being mean to menfolk – that’d……..be okay, would it?
Well (some shuffling) Not TOO mean, no. Just……..normal kinda mean. Just regular kind, unnerstan?
Not really. Uhm, look-
No, YOU look, mister. This is a nice town, with nice folk in it, and we don’t aim to have no GrimDark around here. We don’t need to explicate ourselves to the likes of you, we know GrimDark when we seen it, and it is a SIN. Now that’s good enough for us, and it goddamn well better be good enough for you if you plan on stayin’ in this town.
Damn straight!
O-kay. Yeah.
(pause)
So probably best you be movin’ on, alright?
Uhm, no. Look, gentlemen, ladies, here’s what I’m going to do for now. I’m going across to the saloon there and buy Red Joe a drink I owe him from way back. Now if you would be so good as to select one or two of the more, ehm, intellectually coherent among your number, and send them over with some clear explanation of what you mean by this GrimDark, who’s committing it, whether here or out in the Territory, and on what evidence you’d base that claim, well, then I guess we could all sit down with the marshal and talk about it like civilised citizens. How’d that be?
Take your time. Gonna be right here, waiting.
February 2, 2013
Imperialism Redux, Cut-Off and Sunday Morning Coming Down
For those who were asking, PicoCon now have a payment portal up for those wanting to buy tickets – it’s live on the Con website here.
You’ll see from the timetable they’ve posted that I’m giving my Guest of Honour address on Sunday morning at 10.30 – something which doesn’t scare me as much as it once would have. In fact, it doesn’t scare me at all, Baldrick. Twenty months of fatherhood have made me into an entirely tougher, more functional person in the hours before noon. These days I laugh in the face of six am wake-ups, and tweak the nose of the dreaded breakfast by pre-dawn light. By 10.30 I’ll have been awake for hours. So have no fear, bring your hangovers and your come-downs along, and I promise not to talk too violently or make any loud bangs.
See you there!
postscript on the Great January Signing Sale – there are still a few orders coming in, still a few spare copies kicking around, so I’m going to keep channels open for another couple of weeks. But after that, I’m really going to have to wrap up – not least so I can put remaining stock back on my shelves and vacuum the office floor. So if you’ve stumbled in late, or are suddenly the recipient of an unexpected tax refund and don’t know what to do with your newfound wealth, then jump right in. The hard cut-off date is Friday Feb 16th, just before I head out to Imperial. Any requests I receive on or before that Friday will be fulfilled, anything after will……….fall…………into……….the………….void……..
………
…….
…splish!
January 8, 2013
Workspace Wanted
So there’s this…….
That’s my office floor you’re looking at, and as you can see, things are getting a bit out of hand.
Of course, it doesn’t help that areas previously designated for storage of my personal shit have now been annexed for storage of personal shit belonging to my son instead – and as anyone with a toddler will know, small children own a quite inordinate amount of shit relative to their size.
All of which means that for a limited period only - The Great January Signing Sale is Now On!
Well, I did say, last time this happened, back in 2009, that I’d have another sale someday – it’s just I naively estimated that I’d need about seven years before I built up the required levels of stock again. Turns out it took barely four. So here we go again, procedure as before:
I’ll sign and/or personalise to e-mail order as requested, and then sell you the resulting copy for cover price plus postage – with the exception of the very beautiful Subterranean Press limited editions of The Steel Remains and The Cold Commands, which will go for a flat $100 a copy plus postage (Sub’s cover price for these is $75, but I don’t want to undercut such a small-scale quality-driven operation. Your extra 25 bucks buys you a personalisation on top of the existing signature that all Subterranean editions carry as standard).
If that seems fair, all you need to participate are:
1) A pay-pal account
2) A home address
3) Some money
To save time and math, I’m going to band all postage costs at a couple of basic levels – Big (hardback, trade paperback) and Small (mass market paperback). This will obviously vary with destination.
So – mail me with what you want, I’ll let you know if I’ve got copies, and I’ll give you a price. If you’re agreeable to that price, you make the payment into the pay-pal account I give you, and I’ll send the book off as soon as confirmation comes through.
For now, you can assume that I have multiple copies of UK and US editions, both paperback and hardback, back as far as Woken Furies – spares of Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Market Forces, unfortunately, are all already gone. I’ve also got foreign language editions of pretty much everything I’ve written, translated into everything from Finnish to Korean (some of whose covers are very cool indeed), and a small selection of audiobooks (which I’ll sign and/or personalise in marker on the back of the case). Ask for specifics, and ye shall receive. Additionally, for gaming and/or comic enthusiasts, I have a sheaf of the original individual edition Crysis comics from IDW, numbers 2 through 5 (stock of 1 and 6 is already exhausted, I’m afraid).
As I say, this is for a limited time only, specifically for the purposes of clearing some space, and I expect (I hope!) supply will decline quite fast – so if you’re interested, for either yourself or a gift for someone else, I’d advise you to get in quick!
December 15, 2012
Tidings of Comfort and Joy
The house Tand’s men took her to was on the upper fringes of the town, just before Ornley thinned out into a scattering of isolated crofts. It was high ground, and there would have been a great view back down the slope of the bay to the harbour, if the air below hadn’t been quite so clogged with drifts of murky, low-lying cloud.
At least we’re out of the rain.
It was something Tand appeared to take comfort from as well. He put back the hood on his cloak as they walked the last couple of turns in the street, looked approvingly up at the sky. He was doing his best not to look smug.
“Seems to be clearing,” he said.
She tried not to sound too bad-tempered. “You really think we can trust this confession, Tand?”
“Oh, most certainly. Nalmur’s a good man, one of my best. He knows his work.”
Nalmur was leading the group. He glanced back at the mention of his name.
“I’d stake my life on it, my lady. We got at least three other squealers leading us to this bloke by name, and when he talked, well – you know it when a man cracks, you can almost hear it happen. Like a rotten tree branch going, it is.”
She masked a desire to bury one of her knives in his throat. “Right. And have you left this cracked man in any fit state to talk to us?”
“Oh, yes, my lady. Didn’t need to rough him up much past the usual.” An opened palm, explanatory. “He’s a family man, see. Good lady wife, a pair of strapping young sons. Plenty to work with.”
She saw smirks creep out on the faces of the other men in the group.
“Yes, thank you Nalmur.” Perhaps Tand saw something in her face. “You can spare us the details, I think.”
“Just as you like, my lord. My lady. But that confession is rock solid. You could build a castle on it, sir.”
Tand tipped her a told-you-so look. She worked at not grinding her teeth.
They took the final turn in the street, found themselves facing a short row of cottages, dwellings more hunched and huddled than the buildings lower down the hill. A brace of Tand’s men were loitering outside an opened door about halfway along the row. They were guffawing about something, but when they saw the approaching party, they stiffened into quiet and an approximation of drilled military attention.
A curtain twitched in her peripheral vision. She didn’t bother to look round. You could feel the eyes on you all the way along the street. Gathered at the edges of the darkened windows and in the gap of doors cracked a bare inch open, waiting to slam. Watching, hating as the booted feet tramped by.
It was the post-war occupations all over again.
Greetings from the Emperor of All Lands – we come to you in peace and the universal brotherhood of the Holy Revelation.
But if you don’t want those things, then we’re going to fuck you up.
Tand had taken the lead. He nodded at his saluting men and stepped between them, ducking in under the low lintel. Archeth followed, into the soft glow of a banked fire in the grate, and candles lit against the day’s end gloom. There was a pervasive smell of damp from the earthen floor and the whiff of voided bowels to go with it. A sustained, hopeless keening leaked in from the next room. Three more of Tand’s mercenaries stood guard over a man stripped to the waist and strapped to an upright chair.
Nalmur and the rest of the squad crowded in after her.
“Well then,” said Tand. “Nalmur, will you do the honours?”
Nalmur took a theatrical turn around the chair and its occupant. As Archeth’s eyes adjusted to the light, she made out bruising on the man’s face, crusted blood from the broken nose, a series of livid burn marks across chest and upper arms. His breeches were soaked through at the crotch. Nalmur dropped a friendly arm around his shoulders, and the man flinched violently against his bonds.
“My lord, my lady – meet Critlin Tilgeth, first warden of the Aldrain flame, Hironish chapter. Master Critlin here likes to get together with his pals a couple of times a year in a stone circle just west of here and invoke the spirits of the Vanishing Folk. Which they do by dancing around naked and fucking each other’s wives senseless. I guess you got to find something to fill your evenings with up here.”
Belly laughs from the men around her.
“Get on with it,” she said harshly.
“Yes, my lady.” Nalmur slapped the tied man amiably on one cheek. Straightened up. He switched to accented but serviceable Naomic. “Tell us about the grave again, Critlin. Tell us what you did.”
“Yes. Yes, we dug-” Critlin swallowed hard. His voice sounded as broken as his face. Low and shaky, a pleading in it, like raindrops trembling on the underside of a roof’s edge. His eyes kept darting to the doorway into the other room, the source of the endless weeping. “We dug it up. We – we went at night. The day before Quickening Eve, when the waters are low.”
Archeth frowned. “What waters?”
“He means the gap at Grey Gull peninsula, my lady.” Nalmur, for all the world like a tutor helping out a feeble student under examination. “Says the currents bring more water in at certain times, make it harder to cross.”
“But-” She shook her head irritably. “There was a dead sheep in that grave, that’s all we found, we didn’t….”
They’d been using Tethanne, while Critlin gaped uncomprehendingly back and forth, between this evil-eyed black woman and his tormentor-in-chief. Archeth made an effort, shunted the constant keening to the back of her mind, summoned her own creaky Naomic.
“You uh – you took the Illwrack Changeling out – and put a, uhm – deformed? Yeah – a deformed sheep in his place? What – position? – no, wait, what condition – what condition was the body in?”
Critlin hesitated. He seemed puzzled by the question, maybe confused by her fumbling, error-strewn speech. Nalmur fetched him a massive clout across the side of the head.
“The lady Archeth asks you a question! Answer, and be quick about it! Or perhaps you think little Eril’s jealous of the caresses his big brother’s had from my men. Perhaps he’d like some of the same?”
The wailing from the next room re-doubled. Critlin moaned deep in his chest and strained against his bonds. Nalmur grinned and raised his hand again.
“That’s enough!” Archeth snapped.
The hand came down. A small, angry smile played around the corners of Nalmur’s mouth for a moment, but he bowed his head. Archeth leaned in closer to Critlin. He shrank from her, as far as the chair-back would allow. The stench of shit wafted as he moved. She raised her hands, palms outward, backed away again.
“Just tell me,” she said quietly. “Was the body intact? Had it decayed at all?”
“Intact,” blurted Critlin. “It was intact! The sheep was but recently slaughtered. We took it from Gelher’s flock and-”
“Alright, that’s it you little goat-fucker!” Nalmur, stepping in with fist clenched and swinging. Archeth swung up and round, put a knife-fighter’s block in the way.
“I said that’s enough.”
Nalmur recoiled from touching her, whether out of respect for rank or superstitious dread, it was hard to tell. But there was a tight anger in his face.
“My lady, he is taking the piss. He’s-”
“He is broken!” Her yell froze the room. One of Nalmur’s men, already on his zealous way to the other room, stopped dead his tracks. Archeth swung on him, pointed. “You! You step through that door, I will fucking kill you.”
Tand stirred. “My lady, the man shows a distinct lack of respect, given his station. Joking at our expense should hardly go unpunished.”
“I will kill you.” Still eye-balling Nalmur’s man. “Don’t test me, human.”
And abruptly it was there in her head, like some unfolding map of a battle campaign she’d only heard rumour of until now. How it could be done, how it would go. The rest of Tand’s men, their positions in the room, the gnarled hilt of each knife she carried, how to reach them, in what sequence, how many spilt-blood seconds it would take to fucking kill them all…..
These fucking humans, Archidi. Grashgal’s voice, almost toneless, empty of anything but the distant trickle of despair, as the Kiriath laid their plans to leave. They’re going turn us into something we never used to be.
Hadn’t he called it right?
Didn’t she feel it herself, day-in day-out, the corrosive rub of human brutality, human cruelty, human stupidity against the weave of her soul. The slow erosion of her own moral certainties, the ground she gave up with every political compromise, every carefully balanced step in the Great Kiriath Mission, every lie she told herself about necessary sacrifice in the name of building something better…..
Through the doorway, the constant keening. Her hands itched for the hilts of her knives.
Maybe it was just fucking time.
Menith Tand was watching her, fascinated. She felt his gaze like shadow in the corner of one eye, and something about it, about being observed, pulled her back from the brink.
“You want to live, you stand down,” she told the mercenary by the door. Voice flat now, as flat and emptied out as Grashgal’s had ever been. “Nalmur, get your men out of here.”
Nalmur looked at Tand, outraged. The slave magnate nodded soberly.
“But my lord, this man is-”
“Broken. Remember?” Archeth fixed her eyes on Critlin as she spoke, didn’t look round, didn’t look at Nalmur at all. She didn’t trust herself to. “You heard him break, you said Like a rotten tree branch. Couldn’t miss it. Your work here is done, sellsword. Now get out, and take your thugs with you.”
It took less than a minute to clear the house. Give Nalmur his due, he ran a tight enough crew. A sharp whistle brought a couple of younger mercenaries out of the room the keening was coming from. A gruff command and everybody trooped out, leaving Archeth and Tand alone with Critlin. Nalmur was last man out, slamming the door ungraciously shut.
The room seemed suddenly larger, less oppressive. Even the weeping next door seemed to ebb a little.
Archeth crouched in front of Critlin’s chair, made herself as unthreatening as she knew how. The Naomic came a little easier this time around. Just getting Tand’s men out of the house felt like a headache lifting.
“Listen to me, Critlin. Just listen. No-one’s going to hurt you anymore. You have my word. No-one’s going to hurt your family, no-one’s going to hurt you. Just tell me again about the body.”
“The……the sheep?”
She drew a deep breath, staved off a krin-driven impulse to grab Critlin and start slapping him. “No, not the sheep. The body in the grave. What state was the body in the grave in?”
“But…..” Critlin stared. His voice quavered. “There was no body in the grave.”
Archeth shot a glance at Tand.
“Look,” the slave magnate began angrily. “You told my men-”
Critlin cringed as if Nalmur had just come back through the door.
“There was bone,” he gabbled. “Just bone, just fragments of it, tiny, nothing left but that. The rest was just….rotted…..”
His voice petered out. He was staring at them both as if they were insane. Archeth groped for some context.
“Well – were you surprised by that?”
He looked back at her numbly.
“Surprised?”
“That the Illwrack Changeling’s body had rotted? Did that surprise you?”
“N-no, my lady. He has been dead these four thousand years.”
“Yeah, but-”
She shut her mouth with a snap. Recognised suddenly which side of reasonable they’d all somehow ended up.
Because if these last weeks have been anything at all, Archidi, it’s a lesson in how badly myth and legend butt up against the real world.
And yet here she still was, wanting to know why a body put in the ground four millenia ago wouldn’t be in decent condition when you dug it up.
This place is driving us all insane.
“Alright, so there was no body.” Tand seemed to have moved past his previous anger – there was a deadly metronome patience in his voice now. “Or at least nothing much left of one. And you expected that. So why bother digging up the grave in the first place?”
“The lodge elder ordered it, my lord.” Critlin’s head sagged forward. He seemed to be giving up some final thing. “To take the sword.”
Archeth gave Tand another significant look. “There’s a sword now?”
The slave magnate shrugged. “He was a warrior, was he not, this Illwrack Changeling? Makes sense that they’d bury him with his weapons.”
“Alright, so you took the sword.” Archeth rubbed at her closed eyes with finger and thumb. “But, look – why bury a fucking sheep in its place? Why would you do that?”
“The lodge-master ordered that too, my lady.” The words were falling out of Critlin’s mouth now, stumbling to get out. He was done, he was over some kind of hill, and his eyes flickered more and more to the door into the other room. “Gelher’s flock have the run of Grey Gull – several were born last season with deformities – the lodge-master said it was a sign, that the soul of the Changeling had awakened – most died at birth, but two or three survived until this year. So the lodge-master said we must sacrifice one such in thanks – lay it in place of the sword. We did only as he ordered us, as our oath demanded.”
Archeth drew Quarterless from the sheath in the small of her back. The knife blade glimmered in the low light.
“Where is the sword now?”
“Taken back, my lady.” His eyes were fixed dully on the blade. For one chilly moment, Archeth thought she saw a longing in that gaze that made no distinction between Quarterless cutting his bonds or his throat. “Back to Trelayne. There will be a ceremony. The lodge-master says rejoice, the Aldrain are returning.”
She shivered, not sure if it was his words or the look in his eyes that caused it. She shook it off, knelt at his side and sliced through the cords binding his legs to the chair. He began to weep, like a small child. The stench from where he’d pissed and shat himself was stronger this close in. She cut the cords off his chest and arms, ripped them loose with unneedful violence. She stood back, let the sliced leavings of cord dribble out of her hands onto the floor.
She swallowed hard.
“Go to your family,” she said. “You will not be harmed further. You have my word.”
Critlin staggered upright, clutching at one arm. He limped away into the other room. Archeth stared after him, locked up in a paroxysm of something she could not name.
Menith Tand cleared his throat. “Perhaps, my lady-”
“Give me your purse,” she said distantly.
“I beg your pardon?”
She stirred as if awakening. Turned on him, Quarterless still in her hand. Words like hammered nails into wood. “Give me your mother fucking purse!”
Tand’s lips tightened almost imperceptibly. The same chained rage she’d seen in his eyes at the inn was there again. But he reached carefully beneath his cloak and fished out an amply swollen soft black leather purse. Weighed it gently in the palm of his hand.
“I do not care for your tone, my lady.”
“Yeah?” She reached back and put Quarterless away in its sheath. Safer there, the way she felt right now. “Then take it up with the Emperor when we get back. I’m sure you’ll be able to buy yourself an audience.”
“Yes, no doubt. Using the same funds that have made me a significant sponsor of this expedition and-”
She chopped him down. “Of which I am nominated imperial commander. Are you going to give me that purse or am I going to take it from you?”
Brief stillness between them. The faint reek of shit from the stained torture chair she stood beside. Horseplay commotion from Tand’s men out in the street. Raised voices – they seemed to be squabbling about something. In the next room, the keening went on as if Critlin had never been released.
Tand tossed the purse at her, hard. Two centuries of drilled reflex took it out of the air with knife-fighter aplomb.
“Thank you.”
The slave magnate turned away and headed for the door. He paused, hand on the latch, and looked back at her. The fire was out in his eyes now, and he looked merely – thoughtful.
“You know, my lady – you would be ill-advised to make an enemy of me.”
She should have left it alone, but the krin still sputtered and smoked in her like a pissed out camp-fire. The words were out of her mouth before she knew it.
“I think you have that backwards, Tand. I’ve seen better than you strapped to an execution board in the Chamber of Confidences.”
He held her gaze for a sober moment, then shrugged.
“Understood,” he said tonelessly. “Thank you for your candour.”
He turned the latch and went outside to his men. Archeth watched the door close on him, then cast about in the dampish, shit-smelling room as if she’d dropped something of value somewhere on the earthen floor. She closed her eyes briefly, too briefly, then forced herself to the door into the next room and the source of the keening. She leaned there in the doorway, curiously unwilling to actually step over the threshold.
On the big sagging bed that constituted the room’s only real furniture, like huddled shipwreck survivors on some fortuitous raft, a young woman sat and hugged two young boys to her. All three had had their clothing torn or sliced apart and now only the woman’s tight embrace held the remnants against their pallid flesh. The eldest boy looked to be about ten or eleven, the younger more like six or seven. Both their faces and bodies were marked, beginning to bruise. The woman’s eyes were closed tight, one swollen cheek was gouged where someone had struck her, most likely with a belt-end or maybe just the back of a heavily-ringed hand. Her lips were moving in some voiceless litany, but it was her throat the keening came from, the only sound she made, and she rocked in time with it, back and forth, back and forth, a rigid couple of inches either way.
Critlin was slumped on the ground near the doorway, curled into himself and crumpled back against the wall in a way that suggested he’d simply leaned there and slid down the stonework until the floor stopped him. He was less than four feet from his family and staring at them as if they’d sailed from some harbour quay without him. His left hand reached out for them, had got as far as resting on one of his own up-jutting knees, now hung there limp and lifeless.
Archeth swallowed and stepped into the room. Crouched at Critlin’s side, tried to fold his nerveless fingers around the purse. “Here. Take this.”
He barely looked at her.
“Take – look, here – just fucking take it, will you.”
The purse hung in his hand a scant second. Then it tugged loose with its own weight, fell from his slackened grip and into the dirt he sat on.
Muffled clink of imperial silver within.
Greetings from the Emperor of All Lands.
She got up and backed out.
Went back through the room they’d tortured Critlin in, as if pushed by a gathering wind. Yanked open the door and stepped out into the murky evening street.
Found a sword tip at her throat.
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