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Graeme S. Houston's website
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Diesel ebooks
Category:
Fantasy
Publisher: Stonehedge
Type: Fiction
Pages: 180
Copyright: May 30, 2007
ISBN-13: 9781602760233
This is a book about our deepest fears.
No one knows where the noki came from, or how they got here, but they are terrible fiends. Black as night, drifting, floating wraiths which can drift through any substance as if they were ghosts, but their claws can be as sharp and as solid as the sharpest blade, when they want them to be. The tentative civilisations have survived only because the noki have a deadly aversion to jade; jade posts keep them at bay, jade weapons will kill them, jade walls are impenetrable to the noki, but the noki are growing in number, and now they even have men helping them. Posts moved to let them in, prisoners taken, these are new and troubling times, and nowhere is safe - not any more.
He has spent his life hunting them. His name is Rigel, he who abandoned the priesthood, and lived to tell the tale. He flits through the jungles like his quarry, hounding them as they have hounded the rest of humanity for centuries. He dabbles in the black arts of sorcery, and pacifies angry Gods with succinct rhymes. Everything is simple, until he finds the smouldering remains of a village, which tells him of these troubling new times.
Talyin who is destined to be a priestess, her cousin Asli, a warrior monk from the island of Chiku who calls herself Emma but is not quite what she seems, a man called Thuan from the furthest east, and Rigel are thrown together and parted again amidst the staggering backdrop of three civilisations, each of which is affected by the noki, each of which will fall unless someone can solve the mystery and rid the world of the noki. Is ever anything so simple?
Excerpt
It was then that the shadows swooped upon the village, surrounded it in a black veil of interlacing figures. They slid over the ground in an unnatural way, and hugged the village as close as those jade posts would allow them. The noki screamed torment, and the men of the village watched and waited suddenly unsure of themselves. Swiftly, shadows broke from the rest and darted towards the jade posts. The guards shot arrows at the figures, the jade arrowheads cascading off chain mail armour, feebly, and with a heave a post was pulled and thrown aside opening up a terrible gap where the noki poured forward and through the walls like wraiths, into the midst of the village. In the night, high, shrill, terrified screams erupted as startled crows took to flight and shot deeper into the jungle.
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