What Rough Beast?
Art by Goran Gligović. I am thrilled with this cover.
~excerpt~
They did not light a fire. Stars were thrown spectacularly close up here. No moon was out.
Until a glow slid through chinks in stone on the far side of the ring, behind cultists who turned to the encounter in a stance with lifted arms, pale flares licking at them like disastrous meteors, and slowly the moon loomed above the rim. As spooky a moon as Duz had seen, with as near a thing to a face: a blistered, cracked, eroded face, bleary eyes in heavy pouches, an old person’s slobbery pout. A monstrous moon.
It seemed their signal.
Down at the fair the young had favoured city liquor, mash you buy cheap in the wine shops – even though summer was the time for fermented milk in frothy vats, sweet and astringent, a sting and a tang on the tongue. Duz had indulged to bloat on bubbly milk. Now the stick insect Duz had leapt carts against dragged out a night-black yak calf and quickly slit its throat. They caught its blood in a leather pail, and then they poured in milk – milk others freshly squeezed from the dead calf’s mother’s teats, a clump of them around her to hide what they had done. But she smelt the blood and was suspicious, and she struggled free: they flung the carcass downslope and she bellowed, her whitened eyes on that limp arc, and the yak cow blundered away after her child.
Raw milk and fresh blood, swirled together in a pail, and the stick insect first dipped a ladle and swallowed. Others followed him. One by one the cultists crouched and partook of this filthy drink.
Duz almost heaved up her belly of fermented milk. The smell alone made her queasy.
And the smell took her back, took her back to Ominan, though the last shaman’s ceremony she witnessed must be fifteen years ago. Raw milk, fresh blood, was the concoction a community gave its shaman, because it was spirits’ food, an anti-food a human stomach turned to think of. At Ominan people fed the shaman laughing, for he was not quite human, he was one too with the spirits, he belonged on both levels of existence. People prepared a pail for him with exaggerated displays of disgust, and teased him with the treat, for in his trance he was the victim of a more-than-human hunger, a crazed desire for this strange sustenance, and when they let him at it he lapped and splashed, his head right in the pail, the picture of a wolf deranged with thirst.
Nobody drinks an animal’s milk from the teat, and blood you put in sausages or soup. People cook.
What Rough Beast?
Among the yak nomads, rowdy, restless young have thrown themselves into a cult of were-beasts ridden by unknown spirits, and they stalk Goatskin.
They feel evil: evil by the lights of the intruder Temple, or by the banned old beliefs? And the shaman Goatskin searches for – a sad old man who set off on a quest his people call insane – what beast does he impossibly grapple?
In the starry high meadows, what inhabits the night? Whose evil?
What Rough Beast?, my second Goatskin novella (each a standalone), is being crowdfunded as one of four novellas from Brackenbury Books. Find us on Backerkit September 9-30. Here’s the link — do click and give us a look, and I hope support.
New Edge Sword & Sorcery Novellas 2025
The excerpt above is from early on in the story; you can hear it in situ as publisher Oliver Brackenbury reads the first couple of chapters.
Meanwhile I have an interview out at Black Gate, part of S E Lindberg’s series on Art & Beauty in Weird Fantasy. This was right up my alley, and a perfect excuse to ramble about my Decadent influences in both Goatskin novellas, Waste Flowers and What Rough Beast? Beauty, the stranger places one can find it, has always been a fascination of mine, and likely to be a presence in whatever I write.
Black Gate interview
