Dear Reader
Your amuse-bouche is served; cold, cutting and memorable.
Below, you’ll discover the first few thousand words from the opening chapters of Genesis of the Fall - Book 1 of the Derivations Series.
Should you find you find yourself hungry for more, perhaps craving the entrée, feel free to join my mailing list. It’s sure to tantalize your literary taste buds in anticipation of the release of Genesis of the Fall.
Chapter 1
The evening air blew gently through the opened doors of the run-down tavern, bringing with it the smell of looming rain mixed with the filth of the gutter that ran parallel to the building’s wall. The reek filled the barroom, a sad affair of rough-sawn tables and chairs, mixing with the sour tang of spilled beer and the scent of the meagre fare that had gone unsold.
The fetid breeze played at the wisps of curling hair that had escaped Loira Falds’ braid, pulling it to and fro across the width of her temple. She moved not a fraction to brush it back from her furrowed brow, seemingly oblivious to its encroachment. She stood, feet apart and hands on hips, in a manner that was only threatening when one considered the roiling knots in her forearms and the twitching muscle in her jaw. Though she was the only woman in the room, standing a good head shorter than all others gathered, she commanded it with a natural authority that had pushed the gazes of all the surrounding men down to the rotting floorboards. Save for one who possessed the courage, or the folly, to meet her glare.
“You were to leave with your charges an hour past, Faltus,” she stated, “and yet here you stand, well into what appears to be your third glass of horse’s piss. Is this what my coin has bought—nothing but your callow heart?”
The man, garbed in travel-stained cloth, fingered the axe at his belt before responding in an accent foreign to the lands of Húr.
“Faltus Ruthash, like his father before him, is no coward,” he proclaimed, anger and pride in his eyes. “Five generations of the Ruthash family have plied this trade. We know best when to move and when not to. I will not have some northern woman dictate to me my own craft. Let alone the daughter of a crippled man and an aged-out whore.”
“Easy, Faltus,” warned the barkeep, halting in the polishing of a filthy glass.
Loira smiled a dangerous little smile, one rife with a reckless desperation. She walked towards the large man, her pale blue eyes never leaving the muddy brown of his own. The last few steps she took at great pace, an effort made so she could hold firm his wrist just as he made to remove his axe from its belt loop.
“Oh, sweet Faltus,” she tutted, the humour in her voice at odds with the venom in her eye. “Fifteen years of foreign invasion have turned most men to cripples and twice as many mothers and daughters to whoring. You should count yourself lucky that it is so, or there would be no one willing to keep your bed warm, nor beggars’ cups for you to kick from desperate hands. But aye, callow you stand.”
The man snarled at her, enraged less by her words than by the muffled laughter they drew from the barkeep. Ruthash stepped back, making way for what Loira already knew was to come. The broad plain of his palm came flying towards her, laden with heavy rings of cheap metal and poor stone.
It was almost too easy.
Loira took a calculated step rearward, rocking on her heel as she watched Faltus’s weak attempt at assault sail past her. Fighting, in Loira’s opinion, was always best left to those who undertook it in the calmness of their heart and not only when the fires of emotion consumed reason.
She dropped to her knee just as the smuggler’s attempted strike sailed wide, unbalancing him. Seizing the opportunity, she lunged for his waist with one hand, tearing his skirmisher’s axe from his belt loop. Hooking the beard of the axe behind his knee, she tore it savagely towards and behind her.
The man went down like a tree before the storm of Loira’s intent, his head bouncing off the floorboards with a sickening crack. His hand reached for her, and Loira grabbed it, smelling victory, though she felt no satisfaction in it. Her knee went from floor joist to neck joint, the man’s jawbone cutting against her shin. A mirthless smile spread across her lips as she gripped his forefinger in one of her callused hands and his middle finger in her other, prying them slowly apart like a turkey’s wishbone. Faltus’s curses of outrage devolved into pleading whimpers of pain as he found his other arm pinned beneath his body.
“Quiet,” she commanded, eyes locked with those of her unwilling prisoner. “Don’t think yourself in a position of command in this tavern, or even in the borders of this town. You are providing a service to a desperate people, but should you attempt to leverage that for so much as a free pint I will find out, and you will feel my displeasure. Understood?”
Loira eased the pressure on Faltus’s neck, just enough for him to draw breath and nod with vigour. From the corner of her eye, she saw the barkeep laughing into a beer as he sipped from his own stock.
“You find yourself plying your trade in Húr, Master Ruthash. Unlike in your southern home, you are smuggling refugees, not slaves or those being sold into it. We have the means of holding you accountable. You will be watched on your way north to those parts of Húr that still stand free, unoccupied by our invaders. Don’t get comfortable. Understood?” Faltus nodded once more, his eyes wide. “Then rise.”
Loira let the smuggler stand, breathing mightily in his shame as he did so. She knew his type; a tribal man from the most southern deserts, to the south of the Easausian Empire’s territory, where the local culture held men of his skill and standing in high regard. Loira saw him only as a tool.
“You are a strange woman, Loira Falds, to be given such respect in a roomful of men,” he drawled, in a tone that hinted at approval, “though methinks perhaps you take it, instead of expecting it as given. Queer folk, you northerners.”
Before she had time to answer, old Seamus, the barkeep, interjected.
“Our Loira’s seen more war and bloodshed than most men twice your age, southerner. Gave her youth to the Seekers Corps when Easaus invaded southern Húr, did she. The respect she holds in these parts is freely given. Though she has more than the right to take it should fools fail to give it.”
Seamus poured another pint of ale and placed it before the dejected-looking smuggler.
He spoke on. “And as for her father and mother, well, you’d best forget the titles you gave them. Roil Falds lost a leg saving my boy in the first year of this eternal war. Once the south became occupied, his wife took to whoring to keep him alive, cos that’s the only trade hard times left to her. He loves her all the more fiercely for it, though I hope those days are behind them. Pray, southern son, that you might live long enough to attain such strength and nobility as those whose names ye blacken with the honorifics of ‘cripple’ and ‘whore.’”
The smuggler merely swallowed his drink, though he had the decency to look ashamed.
“You will lead the refugees out of town an hour before the sun shines on the morrow,” stated Loira briskly, pushing past a burst of compassion that had bloomed in her chest at old Seamus’s honeyed words. “Ryt and Wiln here will keep an eye on you until then.”
With that, Loira turned and departed the tavern, stepping into the overcast streets of Drystun Towne, a poorly settlement in the conquered central southlands of Húr. She walked towards the slum that sat in squalor at the town’s eastern edge, though it was hard to differentiate it from the rest of the squat wood and clay hovels that made up the once-proud town. The slum, a product of the town’s partial sacking some years earlier, housed the fifty would-be refugees that Faltus was to smuggle north under the noses of Easausian patrols uncounted. Amongst those collected there were three, two parents and a son, that she held most dear.
Goodbye already burned hot at the corners of her eyes.
She scratched at her thumb with her forefinger as she walked, pacing through the frigid mix of mud and shit, ignorant of the blood she dug up from the skin there. Thirty years of living, fifteen spent fighting, had seen a callused mountain develop upon her thumb and soul both. All it would ever do was grow.
END OF EXCERPT
Chapter 2
Carrion birds circled under leaden grey skies, crows grown fat from fifteen years of war and turmoil wrought on the scarred lands beneath their wings. He watched them for a time, a muted distraction from the chaos about himself, until the clouds gave up their water. The first raindrops forced his head down, leaving him to stare at the naked blade he held in one hand, its tip mired in the mud. Blood still dripped down its fuller, leaching down into the earth that was rendered a dark ochre from the blood of the men who had died upon it that daybreak.
The sword was not unfamiliar to him, its hand-and-a-half handle no stranger to his mud-splattered hands. He was not ignorant of its keen double edge, and its thirst for the marrow found in men’s neckbones. Nor was he dishonest enough to deny that it sent a small thrill through his hulking frame when will put that blade through the bodies of lesser soldiers than he. It pleased him and terrified him in equal measure. The giving way of meat to a butcher’s cleaver. The sound of that most glorious sin being committed. The damning of his own soul in the name of his god and kin.
Akrik Guilyn leaned over the rail of the overturned wagon he sat upon as the thought crossed his mind. With an undignified sound, his scant breakfast painted a pale green bloom against the blood- and rain-soaked earth, egged on by the ruminations of his mind.
The Hollow Prince of the Easausian Empire wiped the detritus of his shame from his chin with the side of his gauntlet-clad hand. He never felt so old as he did after the culling of men, especially those justified in the defence of their nation. Fools dying for a hearth they’d lost to a stronger foe years ago. Akrik lifted his eyes from the ground, forcing himself to appraise the battle-broken land around him, ensuring that he took those dead at his command into his field of view. Something burned through him at the sight of their rent bodies; self-hatred seemed to be his penance.
The plain about him was strewn with the dead and those still dying, their prayers and cries reaching him where he perched on the wagon. The reek of their insides turned out reached him too. Amongst them walked his legionnaires, dispatching the dying Húrian fighters with calculated thrusts of their imperial spears. Not fighters, thought Akrik as a great melancholy shored up his frustration. New citizens, gone astray. Misled by their gods and lessons of the past. Why can’t they just don the yoke I built for them, and toil in the offered peace? Surely it would be the best path for them? They know not when to accept that they are beaten. It’s not my fault they will not yield to a new master.
If he told it to himself often enough, perhaps he would come to believe it.
After more than a decade of Easausian occupation, and the five years of open war that had come before it, he harboured a grudging respect for those few that maintained the spirit to fight the banners of Easaus flying upon their lands. It was a thought he kept deep in his being, locked away with the other misgivings that made his chest ache.
Words floated to him where he sat in the deluge. A prayer to the God, gratitude and placations for His protection. A dirge for the dead, meant to ease the grief from those still living. But only for those who’d died in Easausian armour. The God, Akrik had been told to learn, cared not for the saving of heathen souls bound in Húrian fighting gear.
“May ye walk on gilded steps through gates of silver,” chanted the Clergess Anika Morglays to the loose circle of battle-weary legionnaires about her. “May the cowl of your mortality fall from ye at the God’s embrace. May you take solace knowing that your life was determined before you took your first breath, and that your last was decreed by the God even before He stepped from beneath his bower into this world…”
Akrik observed them as she spoke. Some wept. Some nodded. A few stood hard-eyed, enduring the prayer of the dead to a god they’d long lost faith in. He could not blame those hard-eyed men, but the scripture did not lie. Even their wandering faith was determined on the stone ledger of the God, as was his own.
Akrik twisted with a violent motion as the weak morning sun cast a moving shadow across his vision. He swung the killing edge of his sword around, halting it a hair’s breadth from the collar of the runner, a young page, who had approached his commander while he was still in the wroth of his black mood.
“What is it, boy?” he demanded, staring down the ruddy length of his blade to the wide eyes of the scrawny child who stood terrified before him.
The boy bowed so low he may as well have thrown himself prostrate in the mud, his trembling lips fighting hard to find words.
“Out with it, Prynside!” barked Akrik. “Or I’ll send you back to Easaus, to your blubbering lord of a father, in a manure sack so that he might smell your worth!”
The threat brought some colour to the boy’s face, as Akrik knew it would. Shame was ever the strongest motivator, especially when applied against the hubris of nobles and the spawn they whelped. Despite this, the lad’s lips still trembled as he spoke.
“My lord,” he squeaked out, “your Master of Heralds bids you good morrow and prays for your safe return. Ever he is your…”
“Are you trying to part your ear from your head?” growled Akrik with menace, moving the tip of his sword to rest above the terrified page’s ear. “Augnus should keep his flowered words for the bottoms of his cups and his whores. I care not for them.”
A tear rolled down the lad’s cheek, and Akrik felt a corner of his battle-hardened heart soften with empathy. It had been a hard morning. That was not the fault of the quaking page before him.
“Speak the words that matter,” Akrik stated sternly, lowering his blade, “and hold your chin high, boy.”
“M-m-my lord,” stammered the boy, “an emissary has arrived from Easaus proper, under the banner of the Holy Emperor Alesys Guilyn. The emissary is no common man in service of governance, but a noble, and is requesting an audience with your lordship.”
Akrik spat vehemently, the taste of bile again on his lips.
“And this emissary, this noble from the south—had he a name, boy?”
“I know it not, my lord,” whispered the child tearfully, pale as the morning sky and mortified at his shortcoming in not asking the Master of Heralds for it.
Akrik ought to have sent him flying into the mud with the back of his hand. Duty demanded better of the boy. Tears were inexcusable in the men of Easaus who served under him, in men of calibre, as was negligence in one’s duty. This his own emperor-father had known to beat into him, just as he knew he ought to teach it to this boy bound to him in his duty.
He would not subject this boy to this sort of paternal lesson, for he’d experienced it often enough to believe it a fruitless act in the cultivation of loyalty. It was a mercy he often extended to the populace of the nation he occupied. Discipline required a consistent and measured hand, and so, the page felt only the lash of the Hollow Prince’s tongue.
“You have failed your prince, boy,” he stated, “and failed yourself in doing so. Report so to your master. I shall make my displeasure known to him. Be gone!”
The boy scampered off for his mount, eyes hot as he departed, as if for the gallows.
Akrik watched him go before wiping clean his blade, sheathing it, and rising to his feet.
“Centurion Druin, Clergess!” he barked out, striding towards the cluster of twenty-odd soldiers.
Druin hurried to meet him, his eyes lingering cautiously on Akrik’s face before he saluted. Behind him, Clergess Morglays gathered her cream robes about her in preparation for clambering down off the large stone that had served as her pulpit.
“What is your assessment, Centurion?”
“A small band, my lord,” murmured Druin in deference, “only eight to our twenty-four. Good fighters. Veterans of the war turned rebels would be my guess. For their leaders to send such seasoned men this far south for an ambush, well, I can only assume they had word of your presence in our ranks this morn. The loss of such battle knowledge will be a blow to their dwindling efforts.”
“I would be careful in branding these brigands as rebels, my good man,” came the lilting voice of Anika Morglays as she materialized from behind the centurion, her birdlike features sharp in the pale light. “That title suggests some shortcoming on the empire’s part. I would suggest you refrain from alluding to the notion that these cutthroats have a moral leg upon which to stand.”
Akrik watched as the man’s face tightened with a mix of fear and indignation at being chided by this woman, as if he were but a child.
“Two dead and three injured from our ranks, my lord,” Druin said, his words carrying a hint of sarcasm.
“Unseasoned legionnaires all. Three prisoners taken for questioning. Thank the God these brigands had no moral will to strengthen their arms or we would have lost more.”
Indignation and pride had won out.
Akrik smiled thinly, quelling the cold rage that swept through him at the man’s lack of piety, his lack of deference to Morglays’ higher authority. He may as well have insulted the prince himself.
“Mount up your men, centurion. We ride for home,” stated Akrik. “And Druin? Report to the Master of the Lash upon your arrival. Your legionnaires will have the pleasure of witnessing you receive a five-stroke for your insubordination.”
A runner forgetting his duty was one thing; a centurion doing so quite another.
Akrik watched as the blood drained from the man’s face. The need for subservience in the rank and file knew no compromise. Another lesson from his dear father. Would he never be rid of the man and his lessons? Druin saluted, the very paradigm of discipline, and walked off to marshal his men.
“You should not mete out justice with such a heavy hand, Akrik,” said Morglays, in her thin, disapproving warble.
“Druin is one of the few from the experienced ranks who still finds solace in prayer.”
She patted his armour-clad shoulder as she spoke, a motion of familiarity that shot bolts of compassion through Akrik’s weary chest as he beheld the face of his closest advisor.
“I know it,” replied Akrik, his voice tinged with regret. “I’ll see to it his commanding officer gives him some rest days after his corrective measures. Come, we must make the fort come mid-morning. My father has sent another of his lackeys to ensure I do not deviate from that which He has determined.”
Morglays cast him a warning gaze, his double meaning not lost on her.
END OF EXCERPT