by Sam Sykes
‘Your charge?’
‘It takes a long time to explain,’ Mahalar said. ‘A longer time to convince you. But we have been convinced for a long, long time. This is our charge. These are our oaths.’ He shook his head. ‘We break them for no one, Sebast.’
He glanced to Shalake, nodded. He felt the wind break as the great Shen’s club rose into the air. He felt the air stand silent as the great Shen’s voice followed.
‘SHENKO-SA!’
‘No! PLEASE!’
He heard the sound of a melon splitting, a sack of fruits hitting the earth. He smelled blood on the air and sighed.
‘I am sorry, Sebast.’
‘We do as we have to,’ Shalake said. ‘If he found those humans he sought …’
‘I know,’ Mahalar said. ‘But I was told you sent warriors to deal with them.’
‘Yaike says that they are dead.’
‘And who told Yaike?’
‘Togu.’
‘Then be on your guard. Togu has forgotten much in his time away.’
‘We have not,’ Shalake said. ‘If they still live, we will kill them. The longfaces have been sunk, continue to sink as we find them. The demons …’
‘Are coming,’ Mahalar said.
‘You can sense them?’
‘As easily as I can sense you.’
‘How long?’
‘Not very.’
‘Why now?’
‘They are called.’
Mahalar turned to stare up the great stone staircase. He could feel the mountain towering above him, smell the rain clouds that hung about its peak. And deep within its stone heart, he could hear a sound, fainter, but growing louder.
A heart, beating.
‘She,’ he whispered softly, ‘is stirring.’
Acknowledgements
I poured a lot of stuff into this book. Mostly anger. But there was joy, love, humour and a bunch of other nice things, too. I would like to thank the people who pointed out just when I put too much love onto a page, because it was pretty gross, and those who thought there could have stood to be more anger from time to time.
Naturally, I’d like to thank my editors, Lou Anders and Simon Spanton, for their relentless work on it, and my agent, Danny Baror, for getting it into their hands. These are the men I respect so much I can’t give them silly nicknames.
Not so for my gurus. I’d also like to thank Matthew ‘Wouldn’t You Just Kill Her’ Hayduke, John ‘Needs More Sex’ Henes and Carl ‘Okay, I Know That Sounds Cool, but Picture It in Your Head and Tell Me It Doesn’t Sound Stupid’ Cohen for providing their unique insights.
It was a collaborative effort. But I did most of the work.
That’s why I get more pages than they do.
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Sam Sykes 2011
All rights reserved.
The right of Sam Sykes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2011 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 09035 4
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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