Leviathan Wakes: Book One of The Expanse

by James S. A. Corey

  How did you go about that?

  Well, back in 2007 I arranged a conversation. A friend of mine has a place just outside Santa Fe with a really nice living room that looks out over the desert, and she let me have kind of a party there. I called it my symposium. We had George R. R. Martin and S. M. Stirling and Walter Jon Williams and Melinda Snodgrass and a few others—a lot of the local folks—and basically we sat around all day talking about what epic fantasy is and does. Where it gets its juice. I have something like four or five hours of recordings from that. I took what we said there and I turned it over in my head until I really understood what my opinions were. And that was the start of The Dagger and the Coin.

  That sounds like a fascinating day. Was there a consensus? Did everyone there have more or less the same opinion on the subject?

  Not exactly, no. But there were points that were pretty widely agreed on. Epic fantasy has a lot to do with nostalgia. There’s that sense of looking back at a golden age, and a lot of the time with a sense of loss. Tolkien came up a lot. Pretty much everything since The Lord of the Rings has been written in imitation of or reaction against The Lord of the Rings. But it also has to do with how the story relates to nature, and whether the world is essentially benign.

  The biggest thing that I took away from it, though, is that epic fantasy—and maybe this is true for all literature—but epic fantasy is a conversation. Without Tolkien, you don’t have Terry Brooks, but you also don’t have Stephen Donaldson. Without Donaldson and the rise of the antihero in fantasy, you probably don’t have A Song of Ice and Fire. In a way, that gave me permission.

  Permission for what, exactly?

  Permission to react, I guess. Permission to be part of a greater body of literature than just what I’m doing right here. That sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? How about this: it gave me permission to take the things I love best and use them. So, for instance, I have a real fascination with medieval banking. There’s a book called Medici Money by Tim Parks I’ve read a half dozen times. So I grabbed that. And I thought about Dorothy Dunnett’s House of Niccolo books and George’s Ice and Fire books and all the adventure stories I grew up with. By talking about the things that unify the genre, I sort of loosened up about celebrating them. I thought about what it felt like to read David Eddings when I was fourteen, and get back to the things that would do that for me at forty. If that makes sense.

  You were talking before about writing novels as being different than short fiction. You’ve written a lot of short stories in your career. How do they differ from the longer work?

  Well, the short stories tend to be weirder than the books. They’re very different forms. There are stories that just pop in thirty pages that would lay there like yesterday’s fish at three hundred. I’d say I probably do more experimental, difficult-to-categorize short stories and then use the books to apply what I learned there.

  You have a long history, I understand, of working in writers’ workshops. You attended Clarion West in 1998. You are a frequent participant at the Rio Hondo workshop in Taos. You were in a critique group in New Mexico for almost a decade. How much do you think that kind of experience helps writers?

  For as much time as I’ve put in them and as much benefit as I’ve gotten from them, I’m actually still a little leery about them. If you get a good one, it’s invaluable. I have no doubt at all that I came out of Clarion West and Rio Hondo and the local crit group better than when I went in. But there’s the ones you didn’t talk about too. I took a bunch of creative writing classes in college that I don’t think did much. I was in a couple groups before that weren’t much use, and were really probably counterproductive. A workshop depends on the people in it. Good people are great. Lousy people are perhaps less great, right?

  introducing

  If you enjoyed

  THE DRAGON’S PATH,

  look out for

  THE KING’S BLOOD

  Book Two of The Dagger and the Coin

  by Daniel Abraham

  CAPTAIN MARCUS WESTER

  Sometime, centuries before, someone had built a low wall along the top of the rise. In the moonlight, the scattered rocks reminded Marcus of knucklebones. He knelt, one hand on the dew-slick grass. In the cove below him, three ships rested at anchor. Shallow-bottomed with paired masts. Faster and more maneuverable than the round-bellied trade ships that they hunted. One showed a mark on the side where she’d been struck not too many weeks before, the new timber of the patch bright and unweathered.

  On the sand, a cookfire still burned, its orange glow the only warmth in the early autumn night. From where they stood, Marcus counted a dozen structures—more than tents, less than huts—scattered just above the tide line. A well-established camp, then. That was good. A half dozen stretched-leather boats rested near the water.

  Yardem Hane grunted softly and pointed a wide hand to the east. A tree a hundred feet or so from the water towered up toward the sky. A glimmer, moonlight on metal, less than a third of the way to its tip showed where the sentry perched. Marcus pointed out at the ships. High in the rigging of the one nearest the shore, another dark figure.

  Yardem held up two fingers, wide brows rising in question. Two watchers?

  Marcus shook his head, holding up a third finger. One more.

  The pair sat still in the shadows made darker by the spray of fallen stone. The moon shifted slowly in its arc. The movement was subtle. A single branch on the distant tree that moved in the breeze more slowly. Marcus pointed. Yardem flicked an ear silently; he wore no earrings when they were scouting. Marcus looked over the cove one last time, cataloging it as best he could. They faded back down the rise, into the shadows. They walked north, and then west. They didn’t speak until they’d traveled twice as far as their low voices would carry.

  “How many do you make out?” Marcus asked.

  Yardem spat thoughtfully.

  “Not more than seventy, sir,” he said.

  “That’s my count too.”

  The path was hardly more than a deer trail. Thin spaces in the trees. It wouldn’t be many weeks before the freshly dried leaves of autumn fell, but tonight their steps were muffled by well-rotted litter and a summer’s soft moss. The moon was no more than a scattering of pale dapples in the darkness under the leaves.

  “We could go back to Porte Oliva,” Yardem said. “Raise a hundred men. Maybe a ship.”

  “That’s possible.”

  In the brush, a small animal skittered, fleeing before them as if they were a fire.

  “The one farthest from shore was riding lower than the others,” Marcus said.

  “Was.”

  “We come in with a ship, they’ll see us. It’ll be empty water by the time we’re there.”

  Yardem was quiet apart from a small grunt when his head bumped against a low branch. Marcus kept his eyes on the darkness, not really seeing. His legs shifted and moved easily. His mind gnawed at the puzzle.

  “If they see us coming on land,” he said, “they haul out boats and wave to us from the sea. We trap them on land in a fair fight with the men we have now, they have numbers and territory on us. We wait to get more sword-and-bows, and they may have moved on.”

  “Difficult, sir.”

  “Ideas?”

  “Hire on for an honest war.”

  Marcus chuckled.

  His soldiers were camped dark, but the sound of their voices and the smells of their food traveled in the darkeness. He had fifty men of several races—otter-pelted Kurtadae, black-chitined Timzinae, Firstblood. Even half a dozen bronze-scaled Jasuru hired on at the last minute when their contract as house guards fell through. It made for more tension in the camp, but the usual racial slurs were absent. They were Kurtadae and Timzinae and Jasuru, not clickers and roaches and pennies. And no one said a bad word about the Firstblood when one of them would decide who dug the latrines.

  And, to the point, the mixture gave Marcus options.

  Ahariel Akkabrian had been one of the firs
t guards when the Porte Oliva branch of the Medean bank had been a high-stakes gamble with all odds against. His pelt was half a shade greyer now, especially around his mouth and back, but the beads woven into it were silver instead of glass. He sat up on his cot as Marcus ducked into the tent. His eyes were bleary with sleep, but his voice was crisp.

  “Captain Wester, sir. Yardem.”

  “Sorry to wake you,” Yardem said.

  “Ahariel,” Marcus said. “How long could you swim in the sea?”

  “Me, you mean, sir? Or someone like me?”

  “Kurtadae.”

  “Long as you’d like.”

  “No boasting. It’s past summer. The water’s cold. How long?”

  Ahariel yawned deeply and shook his head, setting the beads to clicking.

  “The dragons built us for water, Captain. The only people who can swim longer and colder than we can are the Drowned, and they can’t fight for shit.”

  Marcus closed his eyes, seeing the moonlit cove again. The ships at anchor, the shelters, the hide boats. The coals of the fire glowing. He had eleven Kurtadae, Ahariel included. If he sent them into the water, that left a bit over thirty left. Against twice that number. Marcus bit his lip and looked up at his second in command. In the light of the single candle, Yardem looked placid. Marcus cleared his throat.

  “The day you throw me in a ditch and take control of the company?”

  “Not today, sir,” Yardem said.

  “Afraid you’d say that. Only one thing to do then. Ahariel? You’re going to need some knives.”

  Marcus rode to the west, shield slung on his back and sword at his side. The sun rose behind him, pushing his shadow out ahead like a gigantic version of himself. To his left, the sea was bright as beaten gold. The sentry tree was just in sight. The poor bastard on duty would be squinting into the brightness. The danger, of course, being that he wouldn’t look at all. If Marcus managed an actual surprise attack, they were doomed. He had the uncomfortable sense that God’s sense of humor went along lines very much like that.

  “Spread out,” he called back down the line. “Broken file. We want to look bigger than we are.”

  The call came back, voice after voice repeating the call. Timing was going to matter a great deal. The land looked different in the sunlight. The cove wasn’t as distant as it had seemed in the night. Marcus sat high in his saddle.

  “Come on,” he murmured. “See us. Look over here and see us. We’re right here.”

  A shiver along a wide branch. The leaves bent back light brighter than gold. A horn blared.

  “That was it,” Yardem rumbled.

  “Was,” Marcus said. He pictured the little shelters, the sailors scuttling for their belongings, for their boats. He counted ten silent breaths then pulled his shield to the front and drew his sword.

  “Sound the charge,” he said. “Let’s get this done.”

  When they rounded the bend that led into the cove, a ragged volley of arrows met them. Marcus shouted, and his soldiers picked up the call. From the far end of the strip of sand, ten archers stood ground, loosing arrows and preparing to jump into the last hide boat and take to the safety of the water, the ships, and the sea. The other boats were already away, rowing fast toward the ships and loaded with enough men to defeat Marcus’s force.

  The first was a dozen yards from shore and already sinking.

  In the bright water, hidden by the glare of the sun, nearly a dozen Kurtadae with long knives put new holes in the boats.

  Marcus pulled up, waving to his own archers to take the shoreline while the Jasuru charged the enemy and their boat, howling like mad animals. A few figures appeared on the ships, staring out at the spectacle on shore and in the tidepool. The first boat vanished. The second was staying more nearly afloat as the men in it bailed frantically with helmets and hands. They weren’t rowing, though. It wouldn’t get them any farther.

  Marcus lifted his hand and his archers raised bows.

  “Surrender now and you won’t be harmed!” he shouted over the surf. “Or flee and be killed. Your choice.”

  In the surf, one of the sailors started kicking for the ships. Marcus pointed at him with his sword. It took three volleys before he stopped. As if on cue, the black bobbing heads of Ahariel and the other Kurtadae appeared in a rough line between the sinking boats and the ships. As Marcus watched, the swimming Kurtadae lifted their knives above the water, like the ocean growing teeth.

  “Leave your weapons in the water,” Marcus called. “Let’s end this gently.”

  They emerged from the waves, sullen and bedraggled. Marcus’s soldiers took them one by one, bound them, and left them sitting under guard.

  “Fifty-eight,” Yardem said.

  “There’s a few still on the ships,” Marcus said. “And there’s the one we poked full of arrows.”

  “Fifty-nine, then.”

  “Still outnumbered. Badly outnumbered,” Marcus said. And then, “We can exaggerate when we take it to the taphouse.”

  A young Firstblood man walked out of the sea. His beard was braided in the style of Carbal. His eyes were bright green, his face thin and sharp. His silk robe clung to his body, making his potbelly impossible to hide. Marcus kicked his horse and trotted up to him. He looked like a kitten that fell in a creek.

  “Macero Rinál?”

  The pirate captain looked up at Marcus with contempt that was as good as acknowledgment.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” Marcus said.

  The man said something obscene.

  Marcus had his tent set up at the top of the rise. The stretched leather clung to the frames and kept the wind out, if not the flies. Macero Rinál sat on a cushion wrapped in a wool blanket and stinking of brine. Marcus sat at his field desk with a plate of sausage and bread. Below them, as if on a stage, Marcus’s forces were involved with the long process of unloading the surrendered ship, hauling the cargo to land, and loading it onto wagons.

  “You picked the wrong ship,” Marcus said.

  “You picked the wrong man,” Rinál said. He had a smaller voice than Marcus had expected.

  “Five weeks ago, a ship called the Stormcrow was coming west from Maccia in the Free Cities heading for Porte Oliva in Birancour. It didn’t make it. Waylaid, the captain said. Is this sounding familiar?”

  “I am the cousin of Prince Esteban of Carbal. You and your magistrates have no power over me,” Rinál said, lifting his chin as he spoke. “I invoke the Treaty of Carcedon.”

  Marcus took a bite of sausage and chewed slowly. When he spoke, he drew the syllables out.

  “Captain Rinál? Look at me. Do I seem like a magistrate’s blade?”

  The chin didn’t descend, but a flicker of uncertainty came to the young man’s eyes.

  “I work for the Medean bank in Porte Oliva. My employers insured the Stormcrow. When you took the crates off that ship, you weren’t stealing from the sailors who were carrying them. You weren’t even stealing from the merchants who owned them. You were stealing from us.”

  The pirate’s face went grey. The leather flap opened with a rustle and Yardem came in. His earrings were back in place.

  “News?” Marcus said.

  “The cargo here matches the manifests,” Yardem said. He was scowling, playing to the dangerous reputation of the Tralgu. Marcus assumed it amused him. “We’re in the right place, sir.”

  “Carry on.”

  Yardem nodded and left. Marcus took another bite of sausage.

  “My cousin,” Rinál said. “King Sephan—”

  “My name’s Marcus Wester.”

  Rinál’s eyes grew wide and he sank back on the cushion.

  “You’ve heard of me,” Marcus said. “So you know that the appeal-to-noble-blood strategy may not be your best choice. Your mother was a minor priestess who got drunk with a monarch’s exiled uncle. That’s your protection. Me? I’ve killed kings.”

  “Kings?”

  “Well, just the one, but you take the po
int.”

  Rinál tried to speak, swallowed to loosen his throat, and then tried again.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to reclaim our property, or as much of it as you have left. I don’t expect it’ll make up the losses, but it’s a beginning.”

  “What are you going to do with me?”

  “You mean if I don’t take you to justice? I’m going to come to an understanding with you.”

  A cry rose up from the beach below them. Dozens of voices raised in alarm. Marcus nodded to the captive, and together they walked out into the light. On the bright water below them, the ship farthest from the shore was afire. A plume of white smoke rose from it, and thin red snake-tongues licked at the mast, visible even from here. Rinál cried out, and as if in answer a roll of sudden black smoke bellied out from the flame.

  “Don’t worry,” Marcus said. “We’re only burning one of them.”

  “I’ll see you dead,” Rinál said, but there was no power in his voice. Marcus put a hand on the man’s shoulder and steered him back into the shade of the tent.

  “If I kill you or if I burn all your ships,” Marcus said, “then by this time next year, there’s just going to be another bunch like yours in the cove. The bank’s investments are just as much at risk. Nothing changes, and I have to come back here and have this same talk with someone else.”

  “You’ve burned her. You burned my ship.”

  “Try to stay with me,” Marcus said, lowering Rinál back to the ground. The pirate put his head in his hands. Marcus took the two steps to his field desk and took out the paper Cithrin had prepared for him. He’d meant to drop it haughtily at the pirate’s feet, but the man seemed so shaken he tucked it into his lap instead.