Chapter 1 The alarm bells clanged her awake. Fire! Sergeant Jabari leapt to her feet, her hands pulling on her leather jacket and boots automatically. She rushed out of the barracks, joining a dozen other women awakened by the alarm in the pre-dawn gloom. Rasha called down from the tower: “It’s over near the Boreas […]
– 1 – “My usual, please, Master van der Kerk.” “Mistress Chuli, good to see you again,” replied the man behind the counter. “That’d be a block of Gouda and a block of my own Ambroli, right?” Chuli smiled, white teeth bright against dark brown skin. “Yes. I love your Ambroli… can’t find it anywhere […]
Bortras wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm, the clean one. Over the years he’d learned how to keep one section of one forearm relatively dry and clean, especially for that purpose, even though the rest of him was usually wet and covered in filth. He no longer bothered with […]
Celephaïs, the royal city of King Kuranes, features in the periphery of many of my stories, but as so many important people and things are found there it obviously deserves a book of its own. These stories help explain how some things work in the Dreamlands, flesh out the city and a few nearby places, […]
“I’m dead, you know,” he said suddenly, breaking the silence of the room. The fire still crackled away merrily, and the enormous black dog in front of it whacked its tail against the stone hearth, no doubt expecting some attention at the voice. The King turned to look at Master Richard. “Well, this is the […]
The phone was beeping and rattling on the nightstand. Eyes closed and face half-buried in the pillow, he scrabbled around, grabbed it. Dragged it closer. “What?” “George, it’s me. Tony. You awake?” “mrgl… yeah, I guess. What the fuck, Tony!? It’s three in the fucking morning!” “George, wake up. This is important.” “Yeah, yeah, I’m […]
304 Bleth Chapter 1 Prologue Sit there. Record every word I speak. I will review your work personally… yes, I read your foreign writing, Han scribe. And if there is one error, you will suffer. These scrolls are for my own reference. I have lived long, I suspect longer than you can imagine. My memory, […]
“Is the King in today?” The doors were massive, apparently carved of single slabs of rose crystal, every inch covered with carvings of heroes and monsters and more, cavorting across their polished faces. I could not identify the legends they illustrated, although I recognized several of the nightmarish creatures depicted there, fortunately not rendered in […]
The first story in the Book of Richard, “Fleeting Dreams,” started the whole thing. The original idea came to me decades ago, probably in the mid-1970s when I was doing a lot of RPG stuff (playing and writing), but it took half a century to get it down on paper. I can’t post that part […]
Chapter 1 The shantak circled lazily around the fort, wings barely moving as it drifted downward. There was a crash as the scorpion a few meters away let loose, sending a bolt into the air. Jake watched it rise ever so slowly to impact neatly on the shantak’s chest. It would have been a kill […]