Category: Fantasy Publisher: Lulu
Type: Fiction
Pages: 315
Copyright: Feb 23 2008
ISBN-13: 9781847537294
A dark fantasy in which a man's struggle to free himself from an abusive childhood is complicated by the fact that both he and his abuser are sorcerers.
Are the sins of the fathers really visited upon the sons? And is there no way of breaking that cycle? Is evil doomed always to repeat itself, ruining everything good through its tainted seed?
These are not the questions young Oswy is asking himself when he is sold to the witch-Lord Sulien FitzGuimar. He's too busy wondering 'why me?!' They are, however, the questions which plague Sulien himself. Locked in a struggle for freedom, sanity, the very survival of his soul, Sulien must daily battle not only angels and demons, but the core of evil in his own heart.
When the King's sorcerer stages a coup, dragging ancient magic, the elves, and the royal court into his Empire-building plans, the woman he has set his sights on as a bride - timid, aspiring nun, Adela - sets out to find someone to oppose him. It's just unfortunate that the only candidates are cowardly Oswy, Adela herself and Sulien - who, deep in his heart, just wants to surrender and join him.
When the hope of redemption is balanced against the lure of revenge, which will prove stronger, flawed good or perfect evil?
Excerpt
Though the high hills where they stood were bathed in the hoar light of moon and stars the valley lay in utter darkness. The sinuous line of owls and bats swept down into it silently and disappeared. A smell came up from it - the dank, moist smell of passages under the ground.
"You mean to have the funeral now? In the middle of the night?" Adela asked, nervously. The cold smell of damp earth caught at her throat. A little-girl terror of churchyards rose up in her; the sense of all those dead things lying close by underfoot.
"Why not?" said Gennan. His words were careless, but he, even he, lowered his voice, unconsciously she thought, in reaction to the shadows. "If you can ease your heart before the morning, why spend the night sad?"
Adela picked her way carefully down into the valley's dimness, the elf-lord silent as a ghost beside her. Lights had begun to show now - seeds of cold blue light, drifting aimlessly on the air, sheets of dimly glowing vapor which twisted into strange shapes as she passed.
Gauzy, dreamlike, the veils of pale light floated about Adela as she walked. The cold from them spilled over her like a breath from a tomb. She shivered.
As though her thought had shaped them, mounds began to show, silhouetted by the gray light: A fleet of them like ships capsized, drowning endlessly beneath the faded grass.
Doorways gaped - the dank earth smell flowed out of them like another darkness. The stone lintels were all written over with deep runes, moss-grown but potent, an ancient magic guarding graves.
Some mounds had fallen in, still water lay polished like steel on their bowl-like surfaces. Some had been pillaged, leaving stained yellow bones lying scattered over the valley floor. Some were complete, doors shut tightly against prying eyes. Whatever lay in them still slept untouched. Adela hardly breathed, frightened they might wake.
They came out from among the mounds, but the dark prows brooded behind them, a silent presence at their backs. Rings and trenches of stone lay exposed under the scarves of pallid light. Scattered stones and black empty graves stretched out of sight - an unquiet necropolis silvered by the glow.
"I am quite safe," Adela told herself nervously, "I am quite safe. Gennan is here," but when she looked at him, his skin whey-colored, the tips of his wolf teeth gleaming against his lips, she felt suddenly as though one of the dead was walking beside her, and she wanted to scream.
"I will not be put to shame again," she hissed fiercely at herself, "God will make sure I come to no harm. I am quite safe." But she could not make herself believe it.
"This is where the Fell Dwellers, humans, buried their corpses," said Gennan quietly. His breath brushed her cheek - cold as the night air. "Many hundreds of summers ago. I hope Needle will rest quietly among them."
"If there's some doubt of it," Adela whispered back, knotting her free hand in the folds of her hood to keep it from trembling, "Then for Heaven's sake don't bury her here."
"If she walks," Gennan said, shrugging, "She will have company."
Adela had to stop herself from pulling free of him and bolting.
By the side of one open grave a shallow mound of earth had been piled. Needle lay beside it on a pallet made of spears. A mantle of ermine had been draped over her, argent and sable like snow in shade, but her white face was uncovered to the night. Under the translucent skin the skull was already beginning to show.
Mourners stood silently about the bier and the yawning pit, their faces, icy and wan in the blue glow, twisted into masks of grief. Torch, his woodfire hair dimmed to bone-yellow, stood at the head of the grave and sang. It seemed to Adela, painfully aware of the twisting shadows, that if he fell silent all the lights would go out.
She looked for her lord. He had stepped up to the lip of the grave and was looking down as they lined the grave with the fur mantle and then lowered the elfen into the darkness. The haunted night pressed at her back. A twinge of panic stabbed her. Hurriedly she scrambled up to his side.
In the pit, the girl's body glimmered. There was the grating sound of wood being driven through dry earth - and then someone brought a shield heaped high with dust and gravel and emptied it over her face. An elfen in the crowd tossed back her head and began to keen - a horrible wailing which seemed to coil into Adela's lungs and make her choke with panic. She could not take her eyes off the body. She was sure it was going to move.
A second shield-full of earth cascaded down. A thin layer now covered the corpse, outlining the curves of its shoulders and small breasts like a sheet of silk. It was going to move. Adela knew it.
The rest of the soil went in - making a shallow swelling of dry earth not thick enough to keep scavenging beasts away from the dead flesh. They didn't know how to do this properly. Of course the corpse would walk. It was going to move now! She held her breath.
There was a whisper of sound; coarse soil shifting. A piece of gray flint on top of the heap shuddered and went tumbling. The mound itself bulged from within. A scream began in Adela's chest, pushed itself into her throat like bile. Torch faltered in his song. The ghastly lights dimmed and fluttered.
Hands pushed out of the earth like strange growths, scrabbled at the edges of the grave. The head came up, dust scattering. It opened its mouth - soil dribbled out - and groaned in gibberish. The closed eyes scanned the crowd and found Adela. It snuffed at the air, as if it could smell her blood. Then it began to climb out of the grave.
Adela screamed, a high-pitched, hysterical shouting which she hated but could not stop.
One by one, around her, the elves doubled up, howling with laughter.
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