by NS Dolkart
They found Phaedra and Bandu kneeling over Criton. Bandu had Goodweather safely in her arms, and Criton was crying out in pain while Phaedra tested his legs. “You’ll be all right,” she said reassuringly. “I think they’re only sprained.”
“Where’s the king?” Narky asked.
“I don’t know,” Phaedra said. “I haven’t seen him since the Yarek started growing. I don’t know if he’s still alive. But he didn’t really want to live. You heard him, right? He already considered himself rescued.”
Narky nodded, but she kept her gaze on him. She knew, he realized with a sudden sinking feeling. Let he who was murderer rescue the damned. She might not know Ketch’s name, or any of the details, but she knew.
Yet she said nothing. Did she somehow forgive him, even without knowing the details? Perhaps she felt that the prophecy absolved him – that the Gods had chosen him as the murderer long before it had happened, and had manipulated him into doing the deed. Or perhaps not. Wishing it worked that way didn’t make it so.
Phaedra finally turned away from him, and Narky wandered off to find the king. The battlefield was still smoldering to his left, and Goodweather’s trunk was growing to his right. He looked up at the heavens, wondering if he would find the dragon there. There was no sign of Salemis.
Everything is changing, Narky thought. Smoke and live wood rose up to the sky together, and clouds of gray ash billowed around the Yarek’s new foothold in the world. Narky wiped stinging, smoky tears from his good eye. He did not know what tomorrow would look like. He hoped it was better than today.
Acknowledgments
There are so many people I would like to thank for their help in bringing this book into the world. Firstly, to my wife, my siblings, and our friends David Chapman and Kate Costello for helping me plot out the outline before we even knew it was an outline. Thanks to Shauna Gordon-McKeon and Molly LeBlanc for pointing out gender imbalances and other social assumptions in the first few chapters, and thereby being responsible for making Psander a woman. Thanks also to Sam Ross, to my sister-in-law Becca, and to my parents (and to Dave and my wife and siblings again) for helping me read through the whole thing out loud to catch my mistakes, and to Laurel Amberdine for being an excellent (and very fast) gamma reader.
Thank you also to Jon D Levenson, whose book Creation and the Persistence of Evil served as inspiration for the theology of my world. And thanks to Christopher Luna for recommending it!
Enormous thanks go to my agent, Evan Gregory, for finding this book a loving home, and to the talented and amazingly supportive folks at Angry Robot for being that home. I’m truly honored to be working with you all.
Lastly, thanks to you! Yes, you, the reader, for giving my book a try and even making it to the acknowledgments page. I hope you enjoyed it!
About the Author
NS Dolkart is a graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. By day, he leads activities in a nonprofit nursing home; in the evenings he cooks with his wife and plays with their two children, and only late at night does he write his tales of magic and Godhood. He doesn’t sleep much. Silent Hall is Noah’s first novel.
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nsdolkart.com • twitter.com/N_S_Dolkart
ANGRY ROBOT
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The gods must be angry
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An Angry Robot paperback original 2016
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Copyright © N S Dolkart 2016
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N S Dolkart asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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UK ISBN 978 0 85766 566 9
US ISBN 978 0 85766 567 6
EBook ISBN 978 0 85766 568 3
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-0-85766-568-3
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