I write novels under the name of Steven Erikson.  I amnearing completion of a ten book Fantasy series entitled ‘The Malazan Book ofthe Fallen.’  These novels are set on a fictitious world that is Homeric innature—magic and meddling gods—but at a technological level somewherearound late Roman Empire.  Progress has stalled, as magic has supplantedtechnological innovation.  Unfortunately, magic is also highlydestructive. While these epic novels seek to portray a history in an entertaining style, theunderlying themes concern the life cycles of cultures and civilizations(including those of nonhumans) against the backdrop of environmentaldegradation.

Seven Stories Press (USA)

     Before becoming a full-time writer, I worked as anarchaeologist for eighteen years (and still find myself on digs when time andopportunity permits).  In that career I worked in central Canada (NorthwesternOntario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan) and in Belize, Central America.  Myspecialties (pretty much by default) included stone technology, rock art, andsurveying (in the latter I seem to have a knack for finding sites).  I makefull use of this experience and the perspective it has given me when writing myfantasy novels.
     Two days ago while in my local bookstore the cover of yourbook, Endgame, caught my eye.  Two things sold me on the book—the subtitleand the fact that it was Volume One, which implied to me an author with a grandvision (something that, for obvious reasons, I find appealing).
     Taking it home and opening it up, I found the twentypremises.  I was floored.
     In the fourth novel in my series I introduced, ratherbrutally, a character emerging from an isolated tribal culture, who findshimself first a slave, then an escaped slave, within the far larger world ofcivilization of which he previously knew nothing.  He ultimately concludes,after numerous travails, that civilization is an abomination, and so he vows todestroy it.
     As this character is terse and rather inarticulate, herarely expounds on the reasons for his conclusion.  As the author, however, Ineeded to give much thought to such matters.
     So, in seeing and now reading your book, I find myselfshaking my head again and again, as I see you make the same observations I havemade; yet where I work through the vehicle of fiction to express the fullest range of emotions I am feeling (sometimes my series feels like a ten thousand page requiem for our species, or a long, drawn-out howl verging on utter despair; as I search in desperation for moral gestures of humanity, no matter how small, no matter how momentary, in the midst of self-inflicted carnage), you have done away with the pretense of the ‘other world.’
     I am about two hundred pages into your book, and I would like to take the opportunity to comment as I go—without expectation of any engagement on your part—in the hopes that my observations will be of interest to you.
     1.  Northwest indigenous cultures were something of an aberration in the Americas, primarily because the subsistence base was extraordinarily fecund.  While it possessed functional mechanisms for maintaining that base, there is no possible certainty that such a system, barring absolute isolation, would have persisted unchanged.  Of this, more later.
     2.  It is perhaps comforting to view the Hunter/Gatherer culture as the ideal system for humanity’s survival in a balanced, self-sustaining environment.  Without doubt, it remains the longest-lasting system in human history, and clearly the post-city-state forms continuing to this day will not prove anywhere near as successful (for all the reasons discussed in your book); but that longevity did not come from some inherently unique virtue of the life style.  Hunter/Gatherer groups that persisted into modern times are universally peripheral groups.  In other words, they have been pushed into regions unsuitable for anything but the hunter/gatherer style of living (which is why, as technology advances, these regions continue to shrink).
     The loci where horticulture and animal husbandry first emerged all reveal evidence of similar periods of transition from a previously existing hunter/gatherer system.  Both horticulture and animal husbandry are products of necessity, survival mechanisms.  Neither constituted an ‘improvement’ in the quality of living among the people concerned.  They were more labour intensive; they wore out bodies, wore out teeth, created rich environments for contagion and parasites—basically, they killed people in ways not experienced by the hunter/gatherers.  They also created hierarchies that had not previously existed.  So, if the new lifestyle was in fact more miserable than the previous one, why choose it?
     The answer is found in the faunal remains excavated at such transition sites.  Basically, the hunter/gatherers had no choice.  They’d depleted the wild game and other resources they traditionally depended upon—they were, in fact, too efficient.  To put it another way: we as a species are too efficient.
     Necessity forced the capture and control of prey animals. Necessity established the notion of territorial possession—ground to break, seeds to plant, harvest to reap—and from this rose the imperative to protect and defend that territory.  At precisely the same time as the first sedentary villages appeared, so too did walls and fortifications.

Seven Stories Press (USA)

     3.  City-states and empires existed in the Americas long before European contact, revealing the cycle of rise and fall with all the endemic destruction of civilizations the world over.  I recall standing on a pyramid in the Guatemalan jungle (back in ‘83), during the modern civil war (that had everything to do with land), and perversely feeling a strange optimism.  After all, when the Mayan Priest-King stood where I was standing, only a few centuries ago, he could see the vast expanse of his demesne—planted fields out to every horizon.  I’m sure he believed it would last forever (just as we believe our civilization will last forever, that we are somehow exempt from the rise and fall cycle that afflicted every previous civilization).  He didn’t realize that his culture was unsustainable.  That it was destined to collapse even before European contact.  He believed as did the pre-Inca civilizations in Peru and Chile.  Why did I feel optimistic?  Because I was surrounded in jungle.  The natural world had reclaimed everything.  It had healed, and in a very short time.
     Agriculture was already making inroads in North America by the time Europeans arrived.  If not for the return of the horse, nomadic hunting, warrior societies like the Teton Sioux and the Lakota and the Comanche, would all have converted to horticulture, as did many of their neighbours, for example the Mandan.  The horse opened the Great Plains to native hunters.  Prior to its arrival, bison hunts occurred on the peripheral regions of the Great Plains, taking advantage of the herds’ seasonal migrations.  With the horse, hunters could chase those herds into the very heart of the grasslands.  In addition to this cultural revolution centered on the bison hunt, the warrior cultures quickly comprehended that raiding farming communities was far more rewarding than actually adopting farming for themselves.  The Hopi, Navajo, Mandan and countless other nascent farming tribes in North America were under sustained assault from the horse-warrior tribes; and even here the situation was growing dire.  Genocide was forcing farmers to abandon their way of life.  Some simply took up the raiding habits of their belligerent neighbours (as did a number of the Apache sub-tribes). Others vanished.
     By the time of the first major inroads of Europeans into heartland America, the indigenous nations were in the midst of very tumultuous times.  The Lakota had been driven south by the Ojibwa and the Cree.  Until they acquired the horse, they were in fact on their way out; suddenly they were on the ascent.  By the time of the Sioux Wars, the Lakota were at the apogee of their culture, and had already exterminated a number of rivals.
     It’s risky to romanticize the pre-contact cultures of the Americas.  One thing that haunted me and haunts me to this day is the nature of the empires of Central and South America.  In their essence (as far as I can see), they were psychotic civilizations (amazingly, Gibson’s ‘Apocalypto’ film portrayed this descent into hell beautifully, if that word can be used to describe such brutal insanity).  And they were intrinsically formed to catastrophically self-destruct.
     4.  I am sure you are aware of the book, 1491, which describes the nature of the Americas prior to contact.  This book recounts the circumstances of the collapse of the cultures of the New World.  One section chimed chillingly with the evidence I have observed firsthand: at bison kill-sites.  In the period between initial European contact and subsequent explorations and settling, the indigenous human populations of the Americas dropped by as much as ninety percent, as those populations were genetically resistant to parasites rather than diseases (the opposite to Old World populations).  When explorers spoke of idyllic Edens on the east coast, they were describing depopulated wilderness.  They also made note of all the abandoned villages (not just the US east coast, but up the Amazon as well). When explorers wrote of bison herds stretching from horizon to horizon on the Great Plains, they were in fact witnessing the effect of the virtual elimination of the primary predator—humans.  Bison in their tens of millions were an anomaly.
     There is a bison jump site in Wyoming that was used extensively just before and then after European contact.  It’s a small one, a sinkhole, in fact, and so could not take down large percentages of the herd. Accordingly, the animals killed in the jump were thoroughly processed—nothing that could be used was left behind.  Contrast this with one of the longest used bison jumps in North America: Head-Smashed-In in Alberta, Canada (worth a visit, by the way).  There are gaps in the usage of this site, but in the broader sense it was continually used for about eight thousand years.
     In times of plenty, the killed bison were barely processed at all.  There was such a glut of dead animals that the butchery became highly selective (tongues, hoofs, etc).  The rest was left to rot.  Needless to say, such slaughter resulted in feast/famine cycles (thus explaining the gaps in usage).
     With the return of the horse the last subspecies of bison resident on the Great Plains was essentially fucked.  It had run out of places to hide.  If not for massive depopulation of humans, they would probably have joined bison antiquus and bison occidentalis.  Not to mention mammoths, giant sloths, etc (and the rival predator species dependent upon them).
     The tool-kit we find at sites reflects the transition: in the Paleo period the spear-points are big, to suit big game.  By the Archaic period, following the extinction of the big game, the spear-points get small, to suit the animals left.
     Archaeology and paleoanthropology are disciplines engaged in a rather awkward dance round more than one giant elephant (or mammoth, if you will) standing in the middle of the room.  It is not the cultural habits of a people that determine value judgements of virtue and vice.  Hunter/Gatherers are not implicitly more ethical than city-states (except perhaps in the context of human relations [and that has more to do with the imperative of maintaining the status quo in a self-limiting, communal society]—definitely not in the context of resource exploitation).  I have excavated scores of New World sites—we dig up their garbage.  It is of course mostly biodegradable (barring stone waste and fired clay), so not much survives.  I have also camped near a still-active Wild Rice harvesters’ campsite (a traditional activity still practiced by local native groups), and found that future archaeologists would have no trouble recovering artifacts—the place was a garbage dump of cans, tinfoil, bottles and plastic.  Is this the result of a destroyed indigenous culture? No, it is the continuation of a traditional practice, that of throwing your crap away and not giving a fuck.
     In paleoanthropology, there is presently a huge debate regarding the extinction of the Neanderthals.  It turns out that said extinctions of various populations of Neanderthals throughout their range occurred at different times within a certain window, wi

     In this respect, I see civilization as but a particularly efficient expression of what has always been with us (and may be implicit in all life—even the virus kills its host and then moves on).  The primary distinction between hunter/gatherers and the hierarchical systems that followed was one of efficacy.  Hunter/gatherers could alter and manage their environment to some extent (and we may look at large mammal extinctions in the New World around the period of the first specialized big-game hunters, the Clovis Culture, as an example of that); but never to the extent that horticulturalists, pastoralists and agriculturalists could.  The fundamental urge was/is one of control and stability, which together comprised safety.

     We desire stability and security above all else, even love. The tragedy lies in the very short-sightedness of such concepts as stability and security.  Stability requires stasis, the kind of gesture to achieve equilibrium that we see in a deer caught in the headlights.  Security measures safety in moments, not weeks, not months, not even years.

     Culture is the pursuit of these two things above all else, which is why it is universally incapable of collectively focusing on the long-term.  Individually, we are generally forced to such long-term considerations after the traumatic annihilation of all immediate stability and security, and even then we seek the first place of safety we can find—somewhere from which to take measure, to recover what we can of our equilibrium.  It seems likely that our species will, as you say, suffer a corresponding trauma, that of collapse.  There will be those who escape, who hunker down, and likely survive.  Most won’t.

     As I mentioned earlier, sometimes I just want to howl.

     I recall a ‘holy fuck’ moment from a few years back.  Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan.  We were staying at a B&B and the owner, a transplanted businessman from Calgary, upon hearing that I was an archaeologist, excitedly told us of two sites just outside the park boundaries but on community pasture.  He drew us maps.  One site was a tipi ring site; the other an unexcavated bison jump.  The tipi ring site was closest so we headed there first.

     Tipi rings leave me crushed—for this reason:  they consist of a ring of boulders once used to hold down the sides of a tipi, and to stand beside one is to look down on evidence of the last natives who ever camped there. The very last.  Forever.  What had been part of a seasonal round, used year after year for countless generations, was over.  Such places are desolate, ineffably forlorn.  In such places, I often weep.

     The site was off a section road.  We arrived with two thunderheads massing in the sky, but by their trajectories both would miss us. A storm had passed earlier that left at least one cow lying legs in the air in the pasture on the other side of the road, lightning-struck.  On this trip, it was just my wife and me (our son was at camp).  As we walked over the unbroken prairie towards an old, abandoned radio tower on concrete feet, I scanned the ground, seeking out the telltale boulder rings.  Instead, I started making out someone else.  As did my wife, who drew close when she saw me light a cigarette—something I normally don’t do at prehistoric sites.  But the remnants I saw surrounding us, sharing the hill top with the defunct tower, belonged to a Medicine Wheel.  A big one, mostly destroyed.  Off to our left was a small cairn of boulders.  This was a holy site, and we were trespassing.

     We returned to the car and headed overland, off road, to the bison jump.  Seeing it for the first time, I could not believe my eyes.  A huge section of the cliff had collapsed into the valley, burying most of the kill zone but exposing masses of bones nonetheless.  Looters had dug a few holes here and there, looking for ‘arrow-heads’ but my attention was more on the bones themselves.  Because two animals haunt my dreams.  Bears and bison.  And their respective habitats haunt my dreams as well; boreal forest and the grasslands.

     I found plenty of bones, but very few butcher marks.  Most of the horns had been left behind as well, as had the hoofs (plenty of toe bones).  There were a lot of juveniles.  Generally, the animal remains found at the actual kill-site comprise those left unprocessed, as the area of processing meat, skin, marrow, etc are generally off to one side, up-wind of the kill-site.

     We found a few arrowheads (actually, spear-points), of a style known as Oxbow, which dates to around 4000 years ago.  The vista at the head of the jump was one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.  Directly below, however, was a place of death, and wanton waste.  If the hunters spoke to the bison, they had nothing good to say.

     Despite this, the grasslands do indeed possess a kind of beauty even in the midst of their unnatural desolation.  You can still find pronghorn antelope, jack rabbits, red-tail hawks, prairie dogs, mule deer and coyotes.  Just no bison.  And no Plains Cree.

     That was a day of two ‘holy fucks’ and they have marked me for good.  And I came away feeling closer to the indigenous peoples of this land (I’ve worked and lived alongside many)—just as profligate as the rest of us, after all.  A sobering feeling.  And closeness here does not imply comfort of any sort.

     The East Coast of North America was crowded with confederations and nascent nation-states when the Europeans arrived—and those native groups were warring with each other over the usual things: territory and the resources in that territory.  The Moche and the Aztecs repressed countless peoples.  The Inca carried little children to mountain tops and smashed their skulls in.  The Maya drugged virgins and threw them into cenotes.  The Puebla and their pre-cursors ate each other—and lovely as the view from those cliff-face towns are, they were built there for self-defense.  Long before the Dutch arrived, the inhabitants of a chain of islands in a Pacific archipelago were locked in an endemic war that resulted in genocide and enslavement.  The first human colonists of Easter Island gave us all the perfect analogy for resource depletion and the collapse that followed.  The colonization by humans of Australia and New Zealand (and Madagascar) resulted in the extinctions of most large animals—by hunter/gatherers, no less.

     It is simply too easy to ascribe all vice upon a dominant civilization, and lather thick the virtues of less-dominant ones (indigenous or otherwise, especially since the notion of ‘indigenous’ is something of a misnomer: ultimately, we’re all indigenous to Africa).  The distinction depends upon efficacy and capacity—but even the smallest group capable of sustaining itself can exhibit the fullest range of human traits one might consider insensitive, reprehensible and ultimately suicidal.

     Whew.

     

     The second ‘letter’ was written after reading Volumes I and II of Endgame. The tone shifts from the personal to rather more academic, as I was more consciously engaged in formulating an argument, rather than simply observing; and my audience had shifted from Jensen himself to … someone else)…

     

     As much as it makes my skin crawl to say this, let us assume that Jensen’s vision of the idyllic future of hunter/gatherer subsistence for the chosen few, arriving as a consequence of the active destruction of civilisation, is somehow confirmed as viable, how do we get there?  Before I address that, let’s look at the initial assumption.  It is predicated on the notion that such cultures existed and thrived in the past (to which I would point out that yes, they existed, and might even be seen to have thrived, indeed for a very long time, but that life in that system was far from idyllic; one need only look at the paleo-forensic evidence to see the signs of stress, injury, periods of deprivation and malnutrition, and endemic diseases and parasitic invasion, to know that life was hard and plagued with suffering and misery. And as soon as strategies arrived that had the potential to mitigate that difficult existence, those who could jumped at them).  Whether such an idyllic existence existed in the past is, however, not really the point.  The point is, and this is what Jensen is precisely addressing, how do we return to it, given the planet’s present condition?

     The answer is, we can’t.  We have long since passed the point of no return.  Let us now look at the possible scenarios to reaching Jensen’s goal  (and this goal is born of the heartfelt desire to save the wild animals of the world).  In the broadest sense, there are two.  Both are dependent on a radical depopulation of the human species, down to perhaps one or two percent of the present population.  The distinction lies in how we get there, and it is in that distinction on which everything hinges.

     Hunter-Gatherers need something to hunt and something to gather.  Without them, the hunter-gatherer starves.  Accordingly, for that last one or two percent of humanity left after the fall of civilisation, there needs to be enough animals left to hunt and eat; and there needs to be abundant edible plants to harvest and maintain.  Having one and not the other is of course possible, as with the traditional Inuit or strictly vegetarian cultures (not that many of those ever truly existed), but these were very specific in their characteristics. And for the populations in question, biological adaptation was a crucial factor in survival.  Finally, the biome being exploited was in each instance fecund enough to sustain viable (if small) populations, all other things being equal (ie the presence of ice).

     What will those hardy survivors of civilization’s end eat? The answer to that depends on how the other ninety-eight percent died; more specifically, on how quickly they died.  If civilisation falls with minimal loss of life, or if it crumbles over a matter of a few years or even a decade or so, then we are looking at six billion very hungry people.  What will they eat when the last stockpiles of processed food are gone?  Why, they will eat everything (a present-day corollary can be found in the Congo, where civilization has already collapsed).  They’ll start with the best stuff first: every animal wild and domestic they can track down and slaughter.  Once those are all gone, they’ll turn to lesser creatures—those more difficult to capture or of little or no nutritional value.  And finally, when they too are all gone, when every forest is silent, when the skies are truly empty, they will turn to the last source of food available to them: each other.

     This scenario, of slow or gradual collapse, will in fact trigger an absolute extinction of every wild and domestic animal on Earth, concluding with us.

     Those people who did what they could to prepare for the end will find themselves under siege.  They will live (for a time) in heavily fortified enclaves, desperately defending their livestock, seed-store and harvest, and indeed, the delicious biomass that is their family and friends. Equally (or better) armed raiders—getting hungrier by the moment—will descend upon those enclaves in ever more desperate waves of need.  And attrition will tell in the end.  The bullets will run out; the defenses will be breached; defenders will die; and even if all that is survived, all the livestock will have been stolen, and malnutrition and disease will descend. Medicines will run out or expire, losing efficacy.  Eventually, should the enclave prevail and survive the year or two of absolute horror, they will be looking upon a lifeless world.  They will have eaten the last attacker shot or speared to death.  At which point, they had better pray to whatever hard-eyed gods they’ve rediscovered, that the climate’s deterioration doesn’t then hit them with drought, because they have no reserves.  If, for whatever reason, their crops fail, they will all die.

     Jensen advocates taking down civilisation piece by piece, hydroelectric dam by microwave tower, Wal-Mart by oil tanker.  He advocates a steady destruction, at some point reaching a threshold of zeal so that the point of no return is finally reached, and it all crashes into ruin.  That sounds like a slow process to me.  In fact, it sounds like the perfect recipe for the violent slow-death scenario I have just described.

     No, one needs to knock off ninety-eight percent of humanity through something faster, fast enough to leave populations of wild animals mostly intact.  Nuclear Armageddon won’t do it, since it’ll likely kill most of those animals.  So what are we left with?  Conventional wars take too long.  No, what we need is something biological.  Let’s call it the Ultimate Plague. Maybe it’s diabolically created and released to do its work; maybe it’s the inevitable consequence of overuse of antibiotics; maybe it just shows up.  But it needs to be virtually untreatable.  It needs to kill everyone, well, almost everyone.  Leave us a few to inherit the hunter-gatherer idyll.  Of course, the Ultimate Plague doesn’t skip the Chosen, the ones with well-stocked hidey-holes and an arsenal on their cellar wall; nor the ones in their happy communes busy learning the old ways of living.  Presumably, unless someone climbs inside a sealed bubble and stays there for as long as necessary, or takes to the hills (but then, there’s Bill the neighbour doing the same thing, damn him), the Ultimate Plague will disregard even those boundaries of righteousness and moral purity.  Since that is the case, then, there is no guarantee that the ones who survive the plague also happen to be people capable of surviving in a wild, uncivilized world.  At least there is one consolation to this scenario: the wild animals return.  Earth recovers from our manic depredations.  And maybe one percent of the one percent surviving the Ultimate Plague then manage to eke out a living for a while longer.

     This latter scenario, in fact, is the only one with the potential to achieve what Jensen wants.  But, as one can see, its outcome is neither controllable nor ideal, and most certainly it is not guaranteed to create a hunter-gathering utopia of harmony and perpetual sustainability.

     Well now.

     Let’s reiterate.  I run through these thoughts:  Jensen wants spasms of destruction, ultimately leading to the fall of civilization, and with that fall, the end of humanity’s ever expanding front of destruction upon the natural world.  I fully understand his sentiment, and I understand as well, his need for attacking those skeptics who hold to a darker view of human nature—a view so much darker that many of them have concluded we’re not worth saving.  That conclusion infuriates him and he heaps no end of scorn upon such believers, primarily because he views such a conclusion as a convenient excuse for inaction. 

     He has a vision.  It is born of a collection of beliefs in the world that once was, the world that preceded this present civilization.  It is a collection of beliefs imbued with denial, ignorance, wishful thinking and whole heaps of noble-savage romanticism.  But he needs it, for without it he can offer no viable alternative to our present mess.  Without it, there is no light at the end of the bone-walled tunnel.  Accordingly, he reserves his most vicious attacks for those who, in seeing what he sees with respect to the un-sustainability of modern civilisation, most egregiously arrive at a conclusion fundamentally different from his own; specifically, that a backward step to hunter/gathering is unworkable and doomed to fail; and secondly, that the destruction of modern civilization serves no purpose and will in no way achieve an earthly paradise for the chosen.

     But I need to make a slight correction on that last point. The destruction of modern civilization as advocated by Jensen does serve a purpose.  Alas, it has nothing to do with saving the wild world.  Rather, the sentiment being exercised is one of personal satisfaction.  It is, in fact, about vengeance.  Vengeance as a virtue; vengeance as the mobilized hand of Nature swinging down to destroy the destroyers, to slay the slayers.  It is, in essence, the hand of God’s wrath. 

     But look at this objectively.  He actually has righteousness on his side, because civilization is really making a mess of things.  He also has the biblical imperative of an eye for an eye, hard and cold justice against the sinners, and oceans of blood miraculously parting to guide his chosen few out of the ravaged, death-worshipping hell he has both helped to bring down (civilization) and thereafter helped to create (in the messy ashes of post-civilization).

     So, it is important to attack and denigrate those people (environmentalists, scientists, writers, etc.) who—seeing what he sees—then possess the audacity of seeking another way through the ongoing wreck that is civilisation.  Who, indeed, see no value in destruction per se (for it will not win a brave new world for anyone), and therefore endeavour to participate in civilization and therein seek to mitigate its destructive nature.

     There’s another way of looking at this: it is worthy and indeed imperative that we save the wildness of our world; and accordingly, we need to continue fighting the good fight.  At the same time, what little conscience civilization possesses is the only thing keeping wild animals and their habitats alive.  Jensen wants to end civilization to save the wild animals, when ending civilization will actually seal the annihilation of every wild animal walking, flying or swimming on this planet.  What irony.

     The present situation?  How fares the health of modern civilization?  There may be some blips of recovery, but in essence we’re going down.  We cannot sustain our present lifestyle but we’re not willing to surrender it, and so we proceed as we have always done, and it’s killing the planet and with it, us.  Blowing up dams and Wal-Marts will only make the fall that much uglier, and the wild creatures of the world will suffer as a consequence of this appalling virtue of vengeance.  Finding clean energy alternatives and boycotting the destructive, de-humanizing underpinnings of iniquitous manufacture and trade systems, might—just might—hold the wolves of expansion at bay for a little while longer.

     There is no question that things cannot continue unchanged: we are fast reaching our limits and more than one threshold has already been crossed.  Is there a solution?  Is there a way through to a new and viable way of living?  I wish I knew, but frankly—and I truly hate to say this—Jensen doesn’t have a workable answer.

     Wisdom doesn’t come cheap.  Sometimes it arrives too late. But even then, it will find its expression, forcing the changes that need forcing, finding ways through that simply didn’t exist before.  What can civilisation do to help?  It can house and protect wisdom; more importantly, it can make available the resources needed to put that wisdom into practice.  Without that cocoon, wisdom yields nothing.  Standing in the wreckage of a destroyed civilization, whatever satisfaction the scene yields soon fades.  What takes its place?  An empty stomach. Wisdom doesn’t come cheap, and sometimes it arrives too late.   Mister Jensen: take a step back and give this some more thought.  Surrender those most cherished hopes and beliefs about what was and what might be again.  You’re a smart man and if anyone can find a way through, it’s you.  But destroying civilization?  It may satisfy, but it wins nothing, and doing it will kill the very things you love and value above all else.

     Finally, let’s say you win.  You lead your crusade of destruction and manage to bring it all down.  Though I do possess survival skills, I don’t really expect to personally survive the terrible age that will follow.  No matter.  I’ll give you this word of advice.  In your army there will be many soldiers who care nothing about saving the world, people or wild animals.  They’re in it because they like destroying things.  They get off on it.  Best keep a loyal friend guarding your back, because those soldiers will turn on you.  Sooner or later, they will turn on you.  If you’ll forgive the corporate analogy, you can bank on it.  On the rarest of occasions, vengeance can be a virtue.  Mostly, it’s anything but.

     Good luck.

The intrepid necromancers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, scourges of civilization, raisers of the dead, reapers of the souls of the living, devourers of hope, betrayers of faith, slayers of the innocent and modest personifications of evil, have a lot to answer for and answer they will. Known as the Nehemoth, they are pursued by countless self-professed defenders of decency, sanity and civilization. After all, since when does evil thrive unchallenged? Well, often: but not this time.

Hot on their heels are the Nehemothanai, avowed hunters of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach. In the company of a gaggle of artists and pilgrims, stalwart Mortal Sword Tulgord Vise, pious Well Knight Arpo Relent, stern Huntsman Steck Marynd, and three of the redoubtable Chanter brothers (and their lone sister) find themselves faced with the cruelest of choices. The legendary Cracked Pot Trail, a stretch of harsh wasteland between the Gates of Nowhere and the Shrine of the Indifferent God, has become a tortured path of deprivation.

Will honour, moral probity and virtue prove champions in the face of brutal necessity? No, of course not. Don’t be silly.

PS Publishing (UK)

 


PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2009)  •  signed/traycased  •  ISBN: 978-1-84863-058-1

PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2009)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 978-1-84863-057-4

Elan Plain, west of Kolanse

     THERE WAS LIGHT, AND THEN THERE WAS HEAT. He knelt, carefully taking each brittle fold in his hands, ensuring that every crease was perfect, that nothing of the baby was exposed to the sun. He drew the hood in until little more than a fist-?sized hole was left for her face, her features grey smudges in the darkness, and then he gently picked her up and settled her into the fold of his left arm. There was no hardship in this.

Bantam Press (UK)

     They’d camped near the only tree in any direction, but not under it. The tree was a gamleh tree and the gamlehs were angry with people. In the dusk of the night before, its branches had been thick with fluttering masses of grey leaves, at least until they drew closer. This morning the branches were bare.

     Facing west, Rutt stood holding the baby he had named Held. The grasses were colourless. In places they had been scoured away by the dry wind, wind that had then carved the dust out round their roots to expose the pale bulbs so the plants withered and died. After the dust and bulbs had gone, sometimes gravel was left. Other times it was just bedrock, black and gnarled. Elan Plain was losing its hair, but that was something Badalle might say, her green eyes fixed on the words in her head. There was no question she had a gift, but some gifts, Rutt knew, were curses in disguise.

     Badalle walked up to him now, her sun-charred arms thin as stork necks, the hands hanging at her sides coated in dust and looking oversized beside her skinny thighs. She blew to scatter the flies crusting her mouth and intoned:

         ’Rutt he holds Held Wraps her good
         In the morning
         And then up he stands—’

     ’Badalle,’ he said, knowing she was not finished with her poem but knowing, as well, that she would not be rushed, ‘we still live.’

     She nodded. These few words of his had become a ritual between them, although the ritual never lost its taint of surprise, its faint disbelief. The ribbers had been especially hard on them last night, but the good news was that maybe they had finally left the Fathers behind.

     Rutt adjusted the baby he’d named Held in his arm, and then he set out, hobbling on swollen feet. Westward, into the heart of the Elan.

     He did not need to look back to see that the others were following. Those who could, did. The ribbers would come for the rest. He’d not asked to be the head of the snake. He’d not asked for anything, but he was the tallest and might be he was the oldest. Might be he was thirteen, could be he was fourteen.

         Behind him Badalle said,

         ’And walks he starts
         Out of that morning
         With Held in his arms
         And his ribby tail
         It snakes out
         Like a tongue
         From the sun.
         You need the longest
         Tongue
         When searching for
         Water
         Like the sun likes to do . . .’

     Badalle watched him for a time, watched as the others fell into his wake. She would join the ribby snake soon enough. She blew at the flies, but of course they came right back, clustering round the sores puffing her lips, hopping up to lick at the corners of her eyes. She had been a beauty once, with these green eyes and her long fair hair like tresses of gold. But beauty bought smiles for only so long. When the larder gapes empty, beauty gets smudged. ‘And the flies,’ she whispered, ‘make patterns of suffering. And suffering is ugly.’

     She watched Rutt. He was the head of the snake. He was the fangs, too, but that last bit was for her alone, her private joke.

     This snake had forgotten how to eat.

     She’d been among the ones who’d come up from the south, from the husks of homes in Korbanse, Krosis and Kanros. Even the isles of Otpelas. Some, like her, had walked along the coast of the Pelasiar Sea, and then to the western edge of Stet which had once been a great forest, and there they found the wooden road, Stump Road they sometimes called it. Trees cut on end to make flat circles, pounded into rows that went on and on. Other children then arrived from Stet itself, having walked the old stream beds wending through the grey tangle of shattered tree-?fall and diseased shrubs. There were signs that Stet had once been a forest to match its old name which was Forest Stet, but Badalle was not entirely convinced—all she could see was a gouged wasteland, ruined and ravaged. There were no trees standing anywhere. They called it Stump Road, but other times it was Forest Road, and that too was a private joke.

     Of course, someone had needed lots of trees to make the road, so maybe there really had once been a forest there. But it was gone now.

     At the northern edge of Stet, facing out on to the Elan Plain, they had come upon another column of children, and a day later yet another one joined them, down from the north, from Kolanse itself, and at the head of this one there had been Rutt. Carrying Held. Tall, his shoulders, elbows, knees and ankles protruding and the skin round them slack and stretched. He had large, luminous eyes. He still had all his teeth, and when the morning arrived, each morning, he was there, at the head. The fangs, and the rest just followed.

     They all believed he knew where he was going, but they didn’t ask him since the belief was more important than the truth, which was that he was just as lost as all the rest.

         ’All day Rutt holds Held
         And keeps her
         Wrapped
         In his shadow.
         It’s hard
         Not to love Rutt
         But Held doesn’t
         And no one loves Held
         But Rutt.’

     Visto had come from Okan. When the starvers and the bone-?skinned inquisitors marched on the city his mother had sent him running, hand in hand with his sister who was two years older than he was, and they’d run down streets between burning buildings and screams filled the night and the starvers kicked in doors and dragged people out and did terrible things to them, while the bone-?skins watched on and said it was necessary, everything here was necessary.

     They’d pulled his sister out of his grip, and it was her scream that still echoed in his skull. Each night since then, he had ridden it on the road of sleep, from the moment his exhaustion took him until the moment he awoke to the dawn’s pale face.

     He ran for what seemed forever, westward and away from the starvers. Eating what he could, savaged by thirst, and when he’d outdistanced the starvers the ribbers showed up, huge packs of gaunt dogs with red-?rimmed eyes and no fear of anything. And then the Fathers, all wrapped in black, who plunged into the ragged camps on the roads and stole children away, and once he and a few others had come upon one of their old night-?holds and had seen for themselves the small split bones mottled blue and grey in the coals of the hearth, and so understood what the Fathers did to the children they took.

     Visto remembered his first sight of Forest Stet, a range of denuded hills filled with torn-?up stumps, roots reminding him of one of the bone-?yards that ringed the city that had been his home, left after the last of the livestock had been slaughtered. And at that moment, looking upon what had once been a forest, Visto had realized that the entire world was now dead. There was nothing left and nowhere to go.

     Yet onward he trudged, now just one among what must be tens of thousands, maybe even more, a road of children leagues long, and for all that died along the way, others arrived to take their place. He had not imagined that so many children existed. They were like a great herd, the last great herd, the sole source of food and nourishment for the world’s last, desperate hunters.

     Visto was fourteen years old. He had not yet begun his growth-?spurt and now never would. His belly was round and rock hard, protruding so that his spine curved deep just above his hips. He walked like a pregnant woman, feet splayed, bones aching. He was full of Satra Riders, the worms inside his body endlessly swimming and getting bigger by the day. When they were ready—soon—they would pour out of him. From his nostrils, from the corners of his eyes, from his ears, from his belly button, his penis and his anus, and from his mouth. And to those who witnessed, he would seem to deflate, skin crinkling and collapsing down into weaving furrows running the length of his body. He would seem to instantly turn into an old man. And then he would die.

     Visto was almost impatient for that. He hoped ribbers would eat his body and so take in the eggs the Satra Riders had left behind, so that they too would die. Better yet, Fathers—but they weren’t that stupid, he was sure—no, they wouldn’t touch him and that was too bad.

     The Snake was leaving behind Forest Stet, and the wooden road gave way to a trader’s track of dusty, rutted dirt, wending out into the Elan. So, he would die on the plain, and his spirit would pull away from the shrunken thing that had been its body, and begin the long journey back home. To find his sister. To find his mother.

     And already, his spirit was tired, so tired, of walking.

     

     At day’s end, Badalle forced herself to climb an old Elan longbarrow with its ancient tree at the far end—grey leaves fluttering—from which she could turn and look back along the road, eastward, as far as her eyes could retrace the day’s interminable journey. Beyond the mass of the sprawled camp, she saw a wavy line of bodies stretching to the horizon. This had been an especially bad day, too hot, too dry, the lone waterhole a slough of foul, vermin-?ridden mud filled with rotting insect carcasses that tasted like dead fish.

     She stood, looking for a long time on the ribby length of the Snake. Those that fell on the track had not been pushed aside, simply trampled on or stepped over, and so the road was now a road of flesh and bone, fluttering threads of hair, and, she knew, staring eyes. The Snake of Ribs. Chal Managal in the Elan tongue.

     She blew flies from her lips. And voiced another poem.

         ’On this morning We saw a
         tree With leaves of grey
         And when we got closer
         The leaves flew away.

         At noon the nameless boy With the
         eaten nose Fell and did not move
         And down came the leaves
         To feed.

         At dusk there was another tree Grey
         fluttering leaves Settling in for the
         night Come the morning They’ll fly
         again.’

     

     
Ampelas Rooted, the Wastelands

     

     The machinery was coated in oily dust that gleamed in the darkness as the faint glow of the lantern light slid across it, conveying motion where none existed, the illusion of silent slippage, as of reptilian scales that seemed, as ever, cruelly appropriate. She was breathing hard as she hurried down the narrow corridor, ducking every now and then to avoid the lumpy black cables slung along from the ceiling. Her nose and throat stung with the rank metal reek of the close, motionless air. Surrounded by the exposed guts of Root, she felt besieged by the unknowable, the illimitable mystery of dire arcana. Yet, she had made these unlit, abandoned passageways her favoured haunt, knowing full well the host of self-?recriminating motivations that had guided her to such choices.

Tor (USA)

     The Root invited the lost, and Kalyth was indeed lost. It was not that she could not find her way among the countless twisting corridors, or through the vast chambers of silent, frozen machines, evading the pits in the floors over which flagstones had never been installed, and staying clear of the chaos of metal and cables spilling out from unpanelled walls—no, she knew her way round, now, after months of wandering. This curse of helpless, hopeless bewilderment belonged to her spirit. She was not who they wanted her to be, and nothing she said could convince them of that.

     She had been born in a tribe on the Elan Plain. She had grown into adulthood there, from child to girl, from girl to woman, and there had been nothing to set her apart, nothing to reveal her as unique, or gifted with unexpected talents. She had married a month after her first blooding. She had borne three children. She had almost loved her husband, and had learned to live with his faint disappointment in her, as her youthful beauty gave way to weary motherhood. She had, in truth, lived a life no different from that of her own mother, and so had seen clearly—without any special talent—the path of her life ahead, year after year, the slow decay of her body, the loss of suppleness, deepening lines upon her face, the sag of her breasts, the miserable weakening of her bladder. And one day she would find herself unable to walk, and the tribe would leave her where she was. To die in solitude, as dying was always a thing of solitude, as it must ever be. For the Elan knew better than the settled peoples of Kolanse, with their crypts and treasure troves for the dead, with the family servants and advisors all throat-?cut and packed in the corridor to the sepulchre, servants beyond life itself, servants for ever.

     Everyone died in solitude, after all. A simple enough truth. A truth no one need fear. The spirits waited before they cast judgement upon a soul, waited for that soul—in its dying isolation—to set judgement upon itself, upon the life it had lived, and if peace came of that, then the spirits would show mercy. If torment rode the Wild Mare, why, then, the spirits knew to match it. When the soul faced itself, after all, it was impossible to lie. Deceiving arguments rang loud with falsehood, their facile weakness too obvious to ignore.

     It had been a life. Far from perfect, but only vaguely unhappy. A life one could whittle down into something like contentment, even should the result prove shapeless, devoid of meaning.

     She had been no witch. She had not possessed the breath of a shaman, and so would never be a Rider of the Spotted Horse. And when the end of that life had come for her and her people, on a morning of horror and violence, all that she had revealed then was a damning selfishness—in refusing to die, in fleeing all that she had known.

     These were not virtues.

     She possessed no virtues.

     Reaching the central, spiral staircase—each step too shallow, too broad for human strides—she set off, her gasps becoming shallower and quicker with the exertion as she ascended level after level, up and out from Root, into the lower chambers of Feed, where she made use of the counterweighted ramp that lifted her by way of a vertical shaft past the seething vats of fungi, the stacked pens of orthen and grishol, drawing to a grating, shivering halt on the base level of Womb. Here, the cacophony of the young assailed her, the hissing shrieks of pain as the dread surgeries were performed—as destinies were decreed in bitter flavours—and, having regained some measure of her wind, she hastened to ascend past the levels of terrible outrage, the stench of wastes and panic that shone like oil on soft hides among shapes writhing on all sides—shapes she was careful to avoid with her eyes, hurrying with her hands clapped over her ears.

     From Womb to Heart, where she now passed among towering figures that paid her no heed, and from whose paths she had to duck and dodge lest they simply trample her underclaw. Ve’Gath Soldiers stood flanking the central ramp, twice her height and in their arcane armour resembling the vast machinery of Root far below. Ornate grilled visors hid their faces save their fanged snouts, and the line of their jaws gave them ghastly grins, as if the implicit purpose of their breed delighted them. More so than the J’an or the K’ell, the true soldiers of the K’Chain Che’Malle frightened Kalyth to the very core of her being. The Matron was producing them in vast numbers.

     No further proof was needed—war was coming.

     That the Ve’Gath gave the Matron terrible pain, each one thrust out from her in a welter of blood and pungent fluid, had become irrelevant. Necessity, Kalyth well knew, was the cruellest master of all.

     Neither soldier guarding the ramp impeded her as she strode on to it, the flat stone underfoot pitted with holes designed to hold claws, and from which cold air flowed up around her—the plunge in ambient temperature on the ramp evidently served somehow to quell the instinctive fear the K’Chain experienced as the conveyance lifted with squeals and groans up past the levels of I leart, ending at Fyes, the Inner

     Keep, Acyl Nest and home of the Matron herself. Riding the ramp alone, however, the strain of the mechanism was less pronounced, and she heard little more than the rush of air that ever disoriented her with a sense of falling even as she raced upward, and the sweat on her limbs and upon her brow quickly cooled. She was shivering by the time the ramp slowed and then halted at the base level of Eyes.

     J’an Sentinels observed her arrival from the foot of the half-?spiral stairs that led to the Nest. As with the Ve’Gath, they were seemingly indifferent to her—no doubt aware that she had been summoned, but even were that not so they would see in her no threat whatsoever to the Matron they had been bred to protect. Kalyth was not simply harmless; she was useless.

     The hot, rank air engulfed her, cloying as a damp cloak, as she made her way to the stairs and began the awkward climb to the Matron’s demesne.

     At the landing one last sentinel stood guard. At least a thousand years old, Bre’nigan was gaunt and tall—taller even than a Ve’Gath—and his multilayered scales bore a silvered patina that made the creature seem ghostly, as if hewn from sun-?bleached mica. Neither pupil nor iris was visible in his slitted eyes, simply a murky yellow, misshapen with cataracts. She suspected the bodyguard was blind, but in truth there was no way to tell, for when Bre’nigan moved, the J’an displayed perfect sureness, indeed, grace and liquid elegance. The long, vaguely curved sword slung through a brass ring at his hip—a ring half embedded in the creature’s hide—was as tall as Kalyth, the blade a kind of ceramic bearing a faint magenta hue, although the flawless edge gleamed silver.

     She greeted Bre’nigan with a nod that elicited no reaction whatsoever, and then stepped past the sentinel.

     Kalyth had hoped—no, she had prayed—and when she set eyes upon the two K’Chain standing before the Matron, and saw that they were unaccompanied, her spirits plummeted. Despair welled up, threatened to consume her. She fought to draw breath into her tight chest.

     Beyond the newcomers and huge on the raised dais, Gunth’an Acyl, the Matron, emanated agony in waves—and in this she was unchanged and unchanging, but now Kalyth felt from the enormous queen a bitter undercurrent of . . . something.

     Unbalanced, distraught, Kalyth only then discerned the state of the two K’Chain Che’Malle, the grievous wounds half-?healed, the chaotic skeins of scars on their flanks, necks and hips. The two creatures looked starved, driven to appalling extremes of deprivation and violence, and she felt an answering pang in her heart.

     But such empathy was shortlived. The truth remained: the K’ell Hunter Sag’Churok and the One Daughter Gunth Mach had failed.

     The Matron spoke in Kalyth’s mind, although it was not speech of any sort, simply the irrevocable imposition of knowledge and meaning. ‘Destriant Kalytb, an error in choice. We remain broken. I remain broken. You cannot mend, not alone, you cannot mend.’

     Neither knowledge nor meaning proved gifts to Kalyth. For she could sense Gunth’an Acyl’s madness beneath the words. The Matron was undeniably insane. So too the course of action she had forced upon her children, and upon Kalyth herself. No persuasion was possible.

     It was likely that Gunth’an Acyl comprehended Kalyth’s convictions—her belief that the Matron was mad—but this too made no difference. Within the ancient queen, there was naught but pain and the torment of desperate need.

     ‘Destriant Kalytb, they shall try again. What is broken must be mended.’

     Kalyth did not believe Sag’Churok and the One Daughter could survive another quest. And that was another truth that failed in swaying Acyl’s imperative.

     ‘Destriant Kalyth, you shall accompany this Seeking. K’Chain Che’Malle are blind to recognition.’

     And so, at last, they had reached what she had known to be inevitable, despite her hopes, her prayers. ‘I cannot,’ she whispered.

     ‘You shall. Guardians are chosen. K’ell Sag’Churok, Rythok, Kor Thuran. Shi’gal Gu’Rull. One Daughter Gunth Mach.’

     ’I cannot,’ Kalyth said again. ‘I have no . .. talents. I am no Destriant—I am blind to whatever it is a Destriant needs. I cannot find a Mortal Sword, Matron. Nor a Shield Anvil. I am sorry.’

     The enormous reptile shifted her massive weight, and the sound was as of boulders settling in gravel. Lambent eyes fixed upon Kalyth, radiating waves of stricture.

     ‘I have chosen you, Destriant Kalyth. It is my children who are blind. The failure is theirs, and mine. We have failed every war. I am the last Matron. The enemy seeks me. The enemy will destroy me. Your kind thrives in this world—to that not even my children are blind. Among you, I shall find new champions. My Destriant must find them. My Destriant leaves with the dawn.’

     Kalyth said no more, knowing any response was useless. After a moment, she bowed and then walked, feebly, as if numb with drink, from the Nest.

     A Shi’gal would accompany them. The significance of this was plain. There would be no failure this time. To fail was to receive the Matron’s displeasure. Her judgement. Three K’ell Hunters and the One Daughter, and Kalyth herself. If they failed . . . against the deadly wrath of a Shi’gal Assassin, they would not survive long.

     Come the dawn, she knew, she would begin her last journey.

     Out into the wastelands, to find Champions that did not even exist.

     And this, she now understood, was the penance set upon her soul. She must be made to suffer for her cowardice. I should have died with the rest. With my husband. My children. I should not have run away. I now must pay for my selfishness.

     The one mercy was that, when the final judgement arrived, it would come quickly. She would not even feel, much less see, the killing blow from the Shi’gal.

     A Matron never produced more than three assassins at any one time, and their flavours were anathema, preventing any manner of alliance. And should one of them decide that the Matron must be expunged, the remaining two, by their very natures, would oppose it. Thus, each Shi’gal warded the Matron against the others. Sending one with the Seeking was a grave risk, for now there would be only two assassins defending her at any time.

     Further proof of the Matron’s madness. To so endanger herself, whilst at the same time sending away her One Daughter—her only child with the potential to breed—was beyond all common sense.

     But then, Kalyth was about to march to her own death. What did she care about these terrifying creatures? Let the war come. Let the mysterious enemy descend upon Ampelas Rooted and all the other Rooted, and cut down every last one of these K’Chain Che’Malle. The world would not miss them.

     Besides, she knew all about extinction. The only real curse is when you find yourself the last of your kind. Yes, she well understood such a fate, and she knew the true depth of loneliness—no, not that paltry, shallow, self-?pitying game played out by people everywhere—but the cruel comprehension of a solitude without cure, without hope of salvation.

     Yes, everyone dies alone. And there may be regrets. There may be sorrows. But these are as nothing to what comes to the last of a breed. For then there can be no evading the truth of failure. Absolute, crushing failure. The failure of one’s own kind, sweeping in from all sides, finding this last set of shoulders to settle upon, with a weight no single soul can withstand.

     There had been a residual gift of sorts with the language of the K’Chain Che’Malle, and it now tortured Kalyth. Her mind had awakened, far beyond what she had known in her life before now. Knowledge was no blessing; awareness was a disease that stained the entire spirit. She could gouge out her own eyes and still see too much.

     Did the shamans of her tribe feel such crushing guilt, when recognition of the end finally arrived? She remembered anew the bleakness in their eyes, and understood it in ways she had not comprehended before, in the life she had once lived. No, she could do naught but curse the

     deadly blessings of these K’Chain Che’Malle. Curse them with all her heart, all her hate.

     Kalyth began her descent. She needed the closeness of Root; she needed the decrepit machinery on all sides, the drip of viscid oils and the foul, close air. The world was broken. She was the last of the Elan, and now her sole remaining task on this earth was to oversee the annihilation of the last Matron of the K’Chain Che’Malle. Was there satisfaction in that? If so, it was an evil kind of satisfaction, making its taste all the more alluring.

     Among her people, death arrived winging across the face of the setting sun, a black, tattered omen low in the sky. She would be that dread vision, that shred of the murdered moon. Driven to the earth as all things were, eventually.

This is all true.

See the bleakness in my eyes.

     Shi’gal Gu’Rull stood upon the very edge of Brow, the night winds howling round his tall, lean form. Eldest among the Shi’gal, the assassin had fought and defeated seven other Shi’gal in his long service to Acyl. He had survived sixty-?one centuries of life, of growth, and was twice the height of a full-?grown K’ell Hunter, for unlike the Hunters—who were flavoured with mortality’s sudden end at the close of ten centuries—the Shi’gal possessed no such flaw in their making. They could, potentially, outlive the Matron herself.

     Bred for cunning, Gu’Rull held no illusions regarding the sanity of Mother Acyl. Her awkward assumption of godly structures of faith ill fitted both her and all the K’Chain Che’Malle. The matron sought human worshippers, human servants, but humans were too frail, too weak to be of any real value. The woman Kalyth was proof enough of that, despite the flavour of percipience Acyl had given her—a percipience that should have delivered certitude and strength, yet had been twisted by a weak mind into new instruments of self-?recrimination and self-?pity.

     That flavour would fade in the course of the Seeking, as Kalyth’s swift blood ever thinned Acyl’s gift, with no daily replenishment possible. The Destriant would revert to her innate intelligence, and that was a meagre one by any standard. She was already useless, as far as Gu’Rull was concerned. And upon this meaningless quest, she would become a burden, a liability.

     Better to kill her as soon as possible, but alas, Mother Acyl’s command permitted no such flexibility. The Destriant must choose a Mortal Sword and a Shield Anvil from among her own kind.

     Sag’Churok had recounted the failure of their first selection. The mass of flaws that had been their chosen one: Redmask of the Awl.

     Gu’Rull did not believe the Destriant would fare any better. Humans might well have thrived in the world beyond, but they did so as would feral orthen, simply by virtue of profligate breeding. They possessed no other talents.

     The Shi’gal lifted his foreshortened snout and opened his nostril slits to scent the chill night air. The wind came from the east and, as usual, it stank of death.

     Gu’Rull had plundered the pathetic memories of the Destriant, and therefore knew that no salvation would be found to the east, on the plains known as the Elan. Sag’Churok and Gunth Mach had set out westward, into the Awl’dan, and there too they found only failure. The north was a forbidding, lifeless realm of ice, tortured seas and bitter cold.

     Thus, they must journey south.

     The Shi’gal had not ventured outside Ampelas Rooted in eight centuries. In that short span of time, it was likely that little had changed in the region known to humans as the Wastelands. Nonetheless, some advance scouting was tactically sound.

     With this in mind, Gu’Rull unfolded his month-?old wings, spreading the elongated feather-?scales so that they could flatten and fill out under the pressure of the wind.

     And then the assassin dropped over the sheer edge of Brow, wings snapping out to their fullest extent, and there arose the song of flight, a low, moaning whistle that was, for the Shi’gal, the music of freedom.

     Leaving Ampelas Rooted … it had been too long since Gu’Rull felt this . . . this exhilaration.

     The two new eyes beneath the lines of his jaw now opened for the first time, and the compounded vision—of the sky ahead and the ground below—momentarily confused the assassin, but after a time Gu’Rull was able to enforce the necessary separation, so that the vistas found their proper relationship to one another, creating a vast panorama of the world beyond.

     Acyl’s new flavours were ambitious, indeed, brilliant. Was such creativity implicit in madness? Perhaps.

     Did that possibility engender hope in Gu’Rull? No. Hope was not possible.

     The assassin soared through the night, high above a blasted, virtually lifeless landscape. Like a shred of the murdered moon.

In the fictitious country of Canada the arts scene is ruled by technocrats who thrive in a secret, nepotistic society of granting agencies, bursaries, awards and peer review boards, all designed to permit self-proclaimed artists to survive without an audience.

In Revolvo, self-proclaimed “hack genre writer” Steven Erikson provides a daring expose of creative skullduggery in the wilds of a country suffering an interminable identity crisis. The names of plenty of real people have been changed and all specific details of the setting have been messed with, so if anyone guesses a certain prairie city in the middle Canada, where the author used to live, well, you’d be plain wrong. Besides, it was a long time ago and his memory is not so good.
 


PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2008)  •  jacketed hard cover  •  ISBN: 978-1906301736

PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2008)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 978-1906301729

On the Letherii continent the exiled Malazan army commanded by Adjunct Tavore begins its march into the eastern Wastelands, to fight for an unknown cause against an enemy it has never seen.

The fate awaiting the Bonehunters is one no soldier can prepare for, and one no mortal soul can withstand—the foe is uncertainty and the only weapon worth wielding is stubborn courage.In war everyone loses, and this brutal truth can be found in the eyes of every soldier in every world.

Destinies are never simple.Truths are neither clear nor sharp.The Tales of the Malazan Book of the Fallen are drawing to a close in a distant place, beneath indifferent skies, as the last great army of the Malazan Empire seeks a final battle in the name of redemption. Final questions remain to be answered: can one’s deeds be heroic when no one is there to see it? Can that which is unwitnessed forever change the world? The answers await the Bonehunters, beyond the Wastelands…

 


Bantam Press (UK)  •  London (2009)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 0-593-04633-1

Bantam Press (UK)  •  London (2009)  •  trade paperback  •  ISBN: 0-593-04634-X
 

 

Tor Books

In Letherii, the exiled Malazan army commanded by Adjunct Tavore begins its march into the eastern Wastelands, to fight for an unknown cause against an enemy it has never seen.

And in these same Wastelands, others gather to confront their destinies. The warlike Barghast, thwarted in their vengeance against the Tiste Edur, seek new enemies beyond the border and Onos Toolan, once immortal T’lan Imass now mortal commander of the White Face clan, faces insurrection. To the south, the Perish Grey Helms parlay passage through the treacherous kingdom of Bolkando. Their intention is to rendezvous with the Bonehunters but their vow of allegiance to the Malazans will be sorely tested. And ancient enclaves of an Elder Race are in search of salvation—not among their own kind, but among humans—as an old enemy draws ever closer to the last surviving bastion of the K’Chain Che’Malle.

So this last great army of the Malazan Empire is resolved to make one final defiant, heroic stand in the name of redemption. But can deeds be heroic when there is no one to witness them? And can that which is not witnessed forever change the world? Destines are rarely simple, truths never clear but one certainty is that time is on no one’s side. For the Deck of Dragons has been read, unleashing a dread power that none can comprehend…

In a faraway land and beneath indifferent skies, the final chapter of ‘The Malazan Book of the Fallen’ has begun…

 


Tor Books  •  New York (2010)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 978-0-765-31009-5

Tor Books  •  New York (2010)  •  trade paperback  •  ISBN: 978-0-765-31655-4

PS Publishing (UK)

• Guest Editorial by Stephen Jones
• The Handover by Michael Marshall Smith
• Night Falls, Again by Michael Marshall Smith
• One Two Three by Michael Marshall Smith
• And a Place for Everythingby Michael Marshall Smith
• Old Flame by Michael Marshall Smith
• A London Story (non-fiction) by Michael Marshall Smith
• REMtemps™ by Michael Marshall Smith
• The Intruders (novel excerpt)by Michael Marshall Smith
• Dinner at Baldassaros by Lucius Shepard
• Age of Sorrowsby Nancy Kilpatrick
• In Fetu by James Cooper
• Hearing Aidby Rick Hautala
• Rainy Day People by T.M. Wright
• If You See Me, Say Hello by Thomas Tessier
• The Luxury of Harm by Chris Fowler
• D-Lebby Allen Ashley
• Closet Dreams by Lisa Tuttle
• Summers Lease by Chaz Brenchley
• Call Waiting by P.D. Cacek
• This Rich Evil Sound by Steven Erikson
• Mud Skinby Paul Jessup
• Distress Call by Connie Willis
• Between the Cold Moon and the Earthby Peter Atkins
• The Last Testament of Seamus Todd by Graham Joyce
• Eels by Stephen Gallagher
• Thumbprint by Joe Hill
• Graduation Afternoonby Stephen King
• Who Dies Best by Stephen Volk
• Peep by Ramsey Campbell
• Discovering Ghosts by Tim Lebbon
• Nothing Prepares Youby Mark Morris

 


PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2007)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 978-1-905834-81-5

PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2007)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 978-1-905834-92-1

Solaris (UK)

• Introduction by George Mann
• Who Slays the Gyant, Wounds the Beast by Mark Chadbourn
• Reins of Destiny by Janny Wurts
• Tornado of Sparks by James Maxey
• Grander Than the Sea by Tim Pratt
• The Prince of End Times by Hal Duncan
• King Tales by Jeff VanderMeer
• In Between Dreams by Christopher Barzak
• And Such Small Deer by Chris Roberson
• The Wizard’s Coming by Juliet E. McKenna
• Shell Game by Mike Resnick
• The Song Her Heart Sang by Steven Savile
• A Man Falls by Jay Lake
• O Caritas by Conrad Williams
• Lt. Privet’s Love Song by Scott Thomas
• Chinandega by Lucius Shepard
• Quashie Trapp Blacklight by Steven Erikson

 


Solaris (UK)  •  London (2007)  •  paperback  •  ISBN: 978-1-84416-523-0

So they’re telling me I need to talk about what I talked about in all these pages which had my bestest cover ever with green crayon and blue crayon because they’re the only ones Glora Feeb hasn’t eaten yet and bits of bark and moss and a dragonfly water beetle which is what they are before they crawl out and unwrap their wings, but it’s only the shell because the dragonflies climb out through a hole in the beetle’s back and then they dry up, which is what I’m going to do when I dry up too, climb out through the hole, I mean. And that’s what was on the cover using LePage’s glue, the white stuff that tastes like toothpaste without the mint or chili pepper if it’s my sister’s toothpaste when she’s not looking because she’s too busy staring at her new phone all the time, probably because it doesn’t work, it’s got no cord! But that cover’s gone I don’t know where maybe to the Smithsonian and I’d tied strings through the holes to keep all those pages in order, especially since I forgot to number them, only it’s not real string it’s five lb test monofilament fishing line that says 8 lb on the box but it’s old and Grandma Matchie says fishing line that’s old doesn’t weigh as much as when it’s new, not that I can tell the difference can you? Besides it’s not like pages weigh a lot or fight back much. Anyway the pages I’m supposed to talk about got numbers now because grown-ups are obsessed with putting things in order but I’m not good at taking orders which is where all the trouble started so I’ll stop now. the end.
 


PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2005)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 1-904619-12-6

PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2005)  •  trade paperback  •  ISBN: 1-904619-13-4

Mind the Hole. In a world of ozone depletion, toxic deadzones, internicine brew-ups and lifeless oceans, nothing has changed. Or so it seems, but in the break-away Lakota Nation, in the heart of a land blistered beneath an ozone hole the size of the Great Plains of North America, something is happening.

Tracked by a growing global audience of online subversives and electronic muckers, a lone anthropologist wanders the deadlands, recording observations that threaten to bring the world’s powers to their knees.

Past and future; restless ghosts and rogue corporations; rad-shielded cities and unprotected peripheral populations; all now face each other, across a chasm once wide but growing ever narrower.

Mother Earth is poisoned beyond any hope of resuscitation. Humanity beyond any hope of redemption — but one last lesson of life awaits…

When Nature starts losing the game, Nature changes the rules. We’ve turned paradise into Hell, and in Hell, the Devil Delivers…
 


PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2005)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 1-904619-15-0

PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2005)  •  trade paperback  •  ISBN: 1-904619-14-2

A sinister, diabolical killer stalks the port city’s narrow, barrow-humped streets, and panic grips the citizens like a fever.

Emancipor Reese is no exception, and indeed, with his legendary ill luck, it’s worse for him than for most. Not only was his previous employer the unknown killer’s latest victim, but Emancipor is out of work. And, with his dearest wife terminally comfortable with the manner of life to which she asserts she has become accustomed (or at least to which she aspires) — for her and their two whelps — all other terrors grow limp and pale for poor Emancipor.

But perhaps his luck has finally changed, for two strangers have come to Lamentable Moll… and they have nailed to the centre post in Fishmonger’s Round a note requesting the services of a manservant.

This is surely a remarkable opportunity for the hapless Emancipor Reese… no matter that the note reeks with death-warded magic; no matter that the barrow ghosts themselves howl with fear every night; and certainly no matter that Lamentable Moll itself is about to erupt in a frenzy of terror-inspired anarchy…. After all, it’s work… and working is better than not working.

Isn’t it?

First in a series of novellas taking place in the Malazan Empire.

PS Publishing (UK)

Night Shade Books (US)

 


PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2002)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 1-902880-35-8

PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2002)  •  trade paperback  •  ISBN: 1-902880-34-X

PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2004)  •  trade paperback  •  ISBN: 1-902880-34-X

Night Shade Books (US)  •  San Francisco (2007)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 1-59780-004-X

Night Shade Books (US)  •  San Francisco (2007)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 1-59780-005-8

Night Shade Books (US)  •  San Francisco (2007)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 978-1-59780-004-4