The Deadlord

The Deadlord walked through the graveyard, frost and the frail bones of rodents crunching under his black boots. Headstones stood on all sides like rows of broken grey teeth. Moss and lichen spots clung to their faces like rot. As he walked, the hard turf parted and hands draped in pale, peeling flesh fumbled in the cold air. The dead dragged themselves up, standing on corpse-white legs to greet their king.

There was no joy in it. The Deadlord looked over his motionless flock with hollow eyes shining green in the soft moonlight. His heart was empty, blacker than his charred soul. He met the watering eyes of each of his subjects, daring them to resist the threads he had woven through the shadow realm, binding them to his will. His bright, vacant eyes met no resistance. What was command worth without someone to resist and test his strength.

His eyes flashed, catching sight of the great man. He was tall with a barrel gut and broad shoulders. The titan marched through the ranks of the risen. Every step seemed to peel back the shrouds of shadow and death from his form. The Deadlord could feel the thread begin to fray.

The titan held his gaze. There was hunger in his frozen white eyes. He had been a slave to greed in life. The Deadlord could hear echoes of his hunger reverberating in the shadow realm. Hunger for food, drink and flesh.

The titan’s great ham of a hand closed around the Deadlord’s neck, drawn to the scent of his blood. Living blood. He hungered for it.

‘Thank you,’ the Deadlord said, his voice like fallen leaves turning to mulch underfoot. He raised one hand between them, palm out. The grip around his neck tightened and his lungs burned for breath. He touched his palm to the titan’s chest and felt the thread snap. The great man’s flesh drifted away in grey-green strips. He dissolved in a thick pool of brown muck around the Deadlord’s feet, pale yellow bones sticking up through the slime.

‘Anyone else?’ the Deadlord asked, looking around at his motionless, blank-faced subjects. ‘No? Let’s be off then.’

Boyar Dracul #1

John Haker’s blog, post #1: Travels in Transylvania

I never saw myself writing a blog. To be honest with you, I’ve only ever been an infrequent user of social media. It just goes to show how much has changed in the past few weeks. Of course, none of it will mean anything to you unless you know something about me. I’m in my twenties or thirties, work for a niche corporate law firm in the city and to date nothing much exciting has happened to me. Does that sum it up well enough? I suppose you can tell I’m not keen to give too much away about myself. This is my first blog post after all!

Now imagine this for a turn of events. Right now, as I type, I’m sitting in the airport lounge waiting to board a flight to a place I’ve barely heard of, let alone thought about visiting. The Transylvanian Alps, somewhere in Romania. I’m travelling for business, not pleasure, and have absolutely no idea how long for. That’s right. It’s an open-ended business trip and I’m crossing every finger I’ve got hoping it won’t all be board meetings (bored meetings?) and tax planning.

I suppose it would be wrong to go any further without explaining the purpose of my travel. I’m going to advise a high net worth foreign client on some general matters of our corporation law. Not particularly gripping stuff for the uninitiated, I imagine. This is a very personal adventure for me. I’m happy to admit I was unscrupulous in acquiring this opportunity, but it’s best not to go into detail. Suffice to say this one trip could give my career the jumpstart it needs.

But that is nothing to the excitement I feel at the prospect of meeting the client himself, the real prize in this adventure. You see, I consider myself to be something of an amateur historian. I don’t readily delve into the unfamiliar without first doing all I can to learn and understand what it is I’m getting myself into. In the last few days of research, lukewarm at first but almost feverish in my appetite to discover more as my eyes were opened to this fascinating man, I’ve become something of an expert in the life and personal history of Boyar Dracul.

The first thing you should know about the man, the living legend to put it better, is that boyar is a title in that part of the world. Its equivalent would be our duke or count. Not to say my client holds such a title, though records indicate he comes from a long aristocratic line stretching back through imperial courts, local insurrections and bloodsoaked wars against invaders from the East. Boyar is his given name and I wonder what his noble parents expected of their son, hanging such a lofty title before a child’s eyes to chase after with all his strength.

It seems he has done just that, through sheer tireless will if not through virtue. Boyar Dracul’s name smears the cover of every local news website, blog and gossip column on a fairly regular basis, as far as I can read them. Those available in English paint a picture of a man for whom scandals and smear campaigns are things to be courted, rather than shied away from. His name even crops up in the occasional national spread, hints thrown out in evasive suggestion that his presence can be felt in some recent upsurge in organised crime, a new wave of local government corruption.

Pictures show a man in his sixties, dressed in dour clothes more often than not, but always surrounded by every possible trapping of wealth and success. Ah, but the real measure of the man can be found in his eyes, if I’m not mistaken. There’s clearly something in them, a fire which never dies. An insatiable thirst for life which defies his apparent age.

Of course, I may have utterly misjudged the man, but time will tell. For now, my flight is being called and I’d rather not miss it.

–

Follow the links to find my books on Kindle:  Servants of Infamy – Vikingr – Firequeen

The Grip

Apologies for the long delay in posting!

Here’s another extract from my work-in-progress…

A warm ripple of a thrill went through him, as it always did when he caught sight of her home. It sat on the very edge of town, at the end of a short, narrow road where the most destitute and despised residents of Vidar’s Fast dwelt. Here, nothing was changed on the eve of war. Desperate children shuffled about, stooping to fish a misplaced trinket from the brown mire underfoot. Haggard women hopped over rivers of urine, balancing teetering piles of laundry in their lithe, dirt-streaked arms.

The smells were overwhelming, but sweet enough with rot and dung to be almost pleasant. Eldris dragged the seething miasma into his nose with great gulps, savouring the soothing sensation of being home. Vandar, deep in his cups, would often proclaim to anyone in earshot that he loved every woman in the Middle Isles, and had bedded half of them, but wouldn’t touch the cleanest maid in the Grip, named for the way it clung unwanted to the town. So Rothir griped, the Grip was a foetid pit of debauchery, vileness and heresy.

He knew they were both wrong. For as long as Eldris could remember, he was drawn to the stinking slum like a moth to a stuttering candle flame. It sprung up from lower ground than the rest of Vidar’s Fast, sewage and other detritus flowing down its cramped streets, but it contrived to match the rest of the town’s height. He blinked up in wonder at the soaring old tenements, gasping at how the leaning, ramshackle timber structures could bear their own weight when they came so close to touching overhead that only a sliver of sunlight could slice through the gap.

His pace slowed as he tracked through the winding streams of piss and mud, knowing better than to waste effort attempting to avoid them. There was no time to watch his footfalls anyway. Eldris was utterly absorbed by his surroundings, drowning in the familiar strangeness of this unknowable side of his hometown.

Women, covered from head to toe by tattered shawls and threadbare dresses even in their own houses, knelt on the rough boards of their hearths and gave whispered pleas to the gods. He hesitated each time he passed an open door or window, listening in rapt discomfort to their hushed prayers. When he first came to the Grip, he imagined a hundred causes for their devotion. Begging for food to fill their children’s bellies. Asking for their husbands to find a job which wouldn’t sully their hands with the stench of the cesspit or carthorse.

But it was always one thing they begged the gods to give them, rocking on their knees under the force of their own desperate earnestness. ‘Forgive me. Forgive me.’ For what? Eldris asked himself. He never saw them take a strange man to their bed, stumble drunk in the gutter or raise a word in reproach of the gods. The same gods who robbed them of dignity, cut their lives short before their bloom and gave them nothing but scraps for their children to fight over.

Eldris quickened his pace, forcing himself to be deaf and blind to their suffering. In his mind’s eye, he couldn’t help seeing the comfortable cottages  and blazing halls of his kinsmen, boisterous children laughing as they ran along clean streets and hearing the drunken curses of their fathers.  When Rothir returns, I’ll make him do something. I’ll tell him the gods spoke to me of that’s what it takes. There must be something…

–

Follow the links to find my books on Kindle: Vikingr – Servants of Infamy – Firequeen

Mist and Cloud

He waited for Vandar’s tall frame to fade into the shadows of the forest then turned and made his way towards the stone stairs. It was easy going at first, tripping down the gently sloping steps as they stole down the side of the chasm. Ferns and lichen grew from fissures in the rock, brushing against his arms as he passed and sprinkling dew on the worn surface beneath his feet.

After descending only a dozen yards he was forced to check his pace. The stairs grew steadily steeper and slick with rain which hung in the air as a fine drizzle. Clouds of silver mist materialised in the canyon, lingering above the green canopy until Eldris couldn’t see a single tree. He was caught in a place between worlds. Above was a mass of grey cloud, hard walls of granite between and a floor of white haze below.

Zero One Zero

Okay, where should I start? I have an idea, something which might grab your attention. No doubt it’s something you’ve wondered about. The Day The Internet Broke. Let’s start with that day, that one event which shattered the crystal cage we built around ourselves and revealed just how decrepit our sense of security was in relation to the enormity of the risk we faced.

In my office, waiting for a PhD student who, in stark contrast to her usual precise punctuality, was more than half an hour late. God forbid I would be forced to eat lunch in the campus cafeteria, rather than strolling into town and visiting my favourite deli. But if she didn’t arrive soon, it seemed more and more certain that I would be forced to compromise in saving what little was left of my afternoon break.

“Professor!” Her voice shredded the calm aura of my office. You have to understand, I am a man of no small pretensions. It has always been my aim to affect an air of studious impenetrability, my corner of the crowded campus being an oasis of serenity where minds could come together in restrained discourse. All of my students understood this unspoken rule and she was no exception. In spite of this sacred trust, she burst in like the furies were at her back and shouted. “You won’t believe what happened!”

Harry Potter and the Pensioner of Azkaban

The black void of the dementor’s face opened, spreading a wave of horror and sorrow through the room. Its rotten hand reached across the table, drawing a red X over a number on a small square of crisp parchment.

A word issued from its mouth in a thin, sinister hiss.

“Bingo.”

A Divine Tragedy

Sophie felt it, even to the precise millimetre of tarmac where her wheel spun out. Whatever happened before was forgotten and following that only a chaotic roar of rubber on concrete paving slabs. Then there was the impact, a deafening grind of metal on brick and the sound of her car bonnet crumpling in front of her.

Somewhere at the end of the crashing and grinding, the blaring sirens, it all stopped. The lights were silenced and the sirens wiped out. Just emptiness after that, with the crystalline memory of the slip, the skid, the spin which took her from being a living woman to a…

Well, what am I? she asked herself. Quite clearly, even with every sense she had relied on since birth ripped away, Sophie knew she was dead. You just don’t get up and walk away from a crash like that.

“Do you know what it was?” The words echoed out over a boundless hollow space, but at the same time seemed to be reaching her ears from a mere step away. “Can you hear me, Sophie?”

A Slave’s Lot

“Keep marching, filth!” the veteran spat, swiping at Ongur’s back with his long whip.

The lash snapped across the heavy burden hanging from Ongur’s shoulders and, for the first time since their journey began, he was glad to be carrying it. Then the whip’s barbed tip raked the exposed flesh behind his thighs, a searing pain which made him howl in agony.

“March!”

Ongur didn’t hesitate a second time. He stumbled forwards, or rather upwards, towards the distant summit of the sun-drenched dune. Sand swept away underfoot to run in cascading bronze waves towards the dune’s base. It made every step a torment and more than a few times he suspected his steps only brought him further from rest. Days of marching under his heavy load without rest, water or comfort.

Such was a slave’s lot.

The College of Mithria

Varsania, a fantasy world currently under construction…

The College of Mithria’s red stone walls rose above the squat stone terraced villas and shopfronts of the city. Its bloody façade standing out in contrast with the emerald and topaz haze of the sprawling Muthril Delta.

It drew Kogur like a rag-winged moth to a quivering flame. The steeples, domes and jutting finger of the clock tower shimmering in the ponderous humidity. Hawkers spat at her feet when she passed, as if her grubby, shuffling presence was enough to drive away their custom. You think it’s easy being a slave? she imagined challenging them in her frail voice. I’ll wait until enemy hordes come and drag you from your home… See how you like the kiss of the lash. 

The skeletal alleyways of Mithria held no secrets from her. She threaded her way between rag-and-bone beggars, slaves with hollow skin sagging from their cheeks and the blundering girth of gluttonous citizens; the clock tower was a constant compass point guiding her bare feet in their weary pursuit.

Sanctuary, the word was a beacon drawing her on. What if the gates are locked? she thought, steeling her heart against the anguish which accompanied doubt. I can’t walk forever. I won’t be free much longer. The master will come for me… His guards, his snapping hounds, the dreaded lash. 

Somehow, the college seemed to hear her voiceless words. It wavered into existence through a pall of dust kicked up by feet tramping down the main street, petitioners making their way to the imperial palace under a weight of injustice and expectation.

There were thousands of them; their bodies formed a swift-flowing moat standing between her and the promise of sanctuary. Hope turned to despair as hobnailed boots clattered down the alleyway behind her. The coarse yelps of the master’s hounds as they caught her scent chilling her blood. Kogur ran and abandoned herself to the marching throng.

Follow the links to find my books on Kindle: Vikingr – Servants of Infamy – Firequeen

The Cannibals

-The beginning of something new?-

The corpses lay one on top of another in a grisly tower of butchered flesh and twisted limbs. Shadowed echoes of their screams seemed to chill the surrounding air. The topmost man had been decapitated, a deer’s head sewn onto his neck, mouth open in a grotesque imitation of human surprise. Eldris staggered back and fell against the trunk of a tall pine. His bowels loosened in fear and he felt a damp warmth spread down his legs. The fragrant scent of the pine needles which carpeted the clearing wasn’t enough to stifle the sickeningly appetising smell of flesh roasting over a cooking fire. Human flesh, he realised.