Jack Chaucer's Blog - Posts Tagged "novella"
Introducing Freeway and the Vin Numbers
I orginally wrote this YA rock ‘n’ roll novella back in 2010. Now it has a real cover and it’s available to the world, fittingly, for free.Also fittingly, it comes out just a few days before Jimi Hendrix’s 73rd birthday. His music was the muse for this story.
Here’s the blurb:
In this novella originally written in 2010, a mobster’s son named Vincent Masoli and a talented guitarist from the projects nicknamed Freeway form a band that channels the late great Jimi Hendrix and wows pop-weary fans. Dozens of original song lyrics.
Smashwords link for free download:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...
Goodreads link:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
A song from my free novella "Freeway and the Vin Numbers"
"Too Quick"
“Raiding red houses
Searching for the key
To unlock Spanish castles
That guard the magic
Of your time and place
Big dreams flying on a little wing
All the songs you never got to sing
The Axman, the Lizard King and Moby Dick
Death came and took y’all too quick
Lives too thin, legacies too thick
Break down the door that stands between us
And let us in
Fill up the shore that stands between us
And let us swim.”
Excerpt From: Jack Chaucer. “Freeway and the Vin Numbers.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/4Pys_.l
Original song lyrics from my free novella Freeway & the Vin Numbers
https://itun.es/us/4Pys_.l
MY PAUL
“You robbed from Peter
So I could play my Paul
The sound is sweeter
And stands 90 feet tall
Cool-hand Luke’s
No hot-hand Duke
My loyal brother
Is like no other
Saints and sinners
Paints and thinners
Got me a fresh new look
With something you took
You got me some more
So I could do it with Les
The fuzz ain’t got no clue
’Bout the magic between me and you
You robbed from Peter
So I could play my Paul
The sound is sweeter
And stands 90 feet tall”
Excerpt From: Jack Chaucer. “Freeway and the Vin Numbers.” iBooks.
MY PAUL
“You robbed from Peter
So I could play my Paul
The sound is sweeter
And stands 90 feet tall
Cool-hand Luke’s
No hot-hand Duke
My loyal brother
Is like no other
Saints and sinners
Paints and thinners
Got me a fresh new look
With something you took
You got me some more
So I could do it with Les
The fuzz ain’t got no clue
’Bout the magic between me and you
You robbed from Peter
So I could play my Paul
The sound is sweeter
And stands 90 feet tall”
Excerpt From: Jack Chaucer. “Freeway and the Vin Numbers.” iBooks.
First chapter excerpt from rock novella Freeway & the Vin Numbers
CHAPTER 1: PAPA WAS A GRAVESTONE
Vincent Masoli
My unexpected adventure toward musical stardom began inharmoniously enough — with a sharp punch in the gut from my Uncle Al.
“What kind of degenerate punk steals money and jewelry from his own helpless, senile grandmother?” Al shouted down at me after assaulting me on the sofa. His booming voice blasted a hole through my beer-soaked brain as I rolled off the couch and onto the floor of my mother’s living room, writhing around in wrenching pain.
Then Al picked me up with his two huge hands by the front of my shirt and tossed me back on the sofa like a rag doll.
“Look at me!” Al screamed.
I glanced up while wheezing and trying to get my breath flowing again. He was a short, stocky, balding bull of a man. And the raging black fury in his eyes at that unforgettable moment in time confirmed in my mind at least what I had always suspected — this is the man who killed my father. That’s right. His own brother.
“Who told you?” I gasped.
“You thought nobody saw you at my sister Marie’s party the other day, didn’t you,” Al bent down and shouted, sticking his fat face in mine. “Sneaking upstairs to your grandmother’s room, coming back down like nothing happened. A relative who shall remain anonymous called me. This person didn’t want to confront you during the birthday party, so I’m confronting you now. You better start talking and giving me some answers while you’re still breathing. Am I making myself clear, Vincent?”
“I got behind betting football,” I mumbled as fast as I could. “I needed money fast to pay the bookie. I know it was wrong. I didn’t know what else to do, Uncle Al.”
“You could’ve called somebody for help instead of robbing your grandmother!” Al barked.
“Who?” I said, trying not to bawl. “My mother? No!”
Even Al shook his head in agreement with me on this option. Mom, aka Danielle (real name), aka Destiny (stage name at the Roxy where she has stripped off and on for as long as I’ve been alive), was more than unstable enough to shoot me after a wretched act such as this — one that threw her 18 years of parenting completely under the bus for the whole world to see.
“No, better off she doesn’t know about this for as long as possible,” Al said.
“Who then? My father?” I continued. “He’s dead!”
Al backed off for a second. His visibly pained reaction made it clear to me that he had let his interrogation go down the wrong road. I wanted to go down that road in theory, but probably not on this morning with Uncle Al ready to add me to his hit list. Dad’s mysterious death happened when I was just 10 months old. My mother told me he drowned on a fishing trip. She also warned me never to ask Uncle Al about what happened. I never did. Of course, posing that question was pretty hard. Uncle Al lived in Miami. He rarely migrated north here to Providence, even during the summer. Apparently stealing from Al’s mother was enough to warrant a personal visit from the prodigal patriarch of the family. All I really knew about him was that he was in his early 40s; he was rich, powerful and dangerous, and had a legendary temper. I guess that knowledge should’ve smacked me upside the head before I pocketed some cash and jewelry belonging to my nana, but when you’ve got to pay the bookie — and Buck’s crazy cronies are a hell of a lot closer to pummeling you than Uncle Al — you let geography make the choice for you. That plan actually worked quite well for several days. Nana never noticed anything. Buck got his money. And I had some leftover pocket cash to buy gas for the truck, two large pizzas and a 30-pack of beer.
But as Sunday morning arrived, let’s just say geography caught up with me, and Uncle Al was here to cleanse me of my sins by beating all the blood out of me — or so I now feared.
“Vincent, do you realize if we weren’t related, you’d already be dead right now?” Al pointed out, turning the conversation back to where he was more comfortable — and where he could ratchet up his anger once again.
I nodded slowly, wondering if Uncle Al said the same thing to my father before doing whatever it was he did to him some 17 years ago.
“You’re 18 for Christ sake!” Al said. “Stop betting on games and start making something of yourself. Your mother told me you’re a good musician. You jam with a band or something. Right?”
“Sort of,” I said.
Al shook his head in disgust and pulled up a chair to grill me at eye level.
“What kind of pussy answer is that?” he said. “Do you jam or not?”
“We do,” I said quickly.
“Good,” Al said, transitioning from potential killer to businessman with ease. “Then here’s what we’re going to do.”
I sat up a little more on the sofa and paid attention. I desperately wanted to get out of my horrible situation. And more importantly, I wanted to live.
“You stole from nana — my own mother — to pay your bookie,” he said. “Some people would prefer to call the police and see you thrown in jail. You sure as hell deserve it, Vin. Am I right?”
I nodded. What else was I going to do with this guy literally breathing down my neck?
“You’re dead wrong!” he shouted into my face, his eyes darkening back to killer black. “You deserve a hell of a lot worse for stealing from your own flesh and blood. Jail is way too fucking good for the likes of you.”
“I know I was wrong, Uncle Al,” I said. “I was going to pay nana back as soon as I got on a hot streak.”
“Bullshit!” he shouted. “You would’ve gambled it right back because that’s what degenerate gamblers do.”
“I …” I tried to interrupt.
“Shut the hell up, Vincent!” Al ordered, sticking his finger in my face. “You fucked up and now you’re going to start making it right. Uncle Al doesn’t call the police. Uncle Al is the police, especially in this case because it’s within the family. He’s your judge, jury and executioner if need be. Understood?”
I nodded for mercy.
“Good,” he said. “Being the wonderful guy that I am, I will cover your debt to your grandmother. I will make restitution to her on your behalf.”
I tried to protest. “But …”
“But nothing, Vin,” Al said. “You’ve got no say in this what-so-fuckin-ever. You lost that right. I’m going to right that wrong for you. But here’s the catch. Now I own you. Not only do you owe me the thousands of dollars you stole from her, but you also owe me for dishonoring my helpless, senile mother. What’s that worth, Vin?”
I shrugged with dread.
“Well, I’ll tell you what it’s worth,” Al continued. “First, you’re gonna stop the gambling. That’s a given, right?”
“Absolutely!” I said, jumping to accept the unexpectedly lenient first salvo.
“Second, you’re gonna take all that musical talent that your mother says you have, and you’re going to do something with it. I know you’re not a college guy, a student and all that. I don’t give a shit. Neither was I. But here’s what I expect you to do.”
Again, I sat up alertly, thinking maybe there was a chance Uncle Al wasn’t so horrible after all. That’s when the pep talk took a bizarre turn.
“Rock and roll is fucking dead,” Al said out of the blue. “And if it ain’t dead, it’s, at the very least, buried alive. I don’t even hear it tapping or trying to bust out of the grave.”
Huh? I tried to listen to Al with the same serious face I had moments ago, but it was hard given the sudden change in subject matter. He went on just the same.
“Led Zeppelin, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Van Halen … now that was rock and roll, Vin. Today, what do we got? Fucking squat, that’s what … a bunch of pansy-ass fag bands with no heart, no soul, no balls. Do you know what I mean?”
“I wasn’t born when …,” I said.
“I know that, Vin,” Al cut me off. “But you’ve heard of these bands and their music, right?”
“Oh yeah, definitely, they’re all great bands,” I quickly replied.
“So the bottom line is this,” Al said. “You and your band are going to bring rock and roll back to life. I want a real rock and roll sound. You better make it and make it big-time … or else. I don’t care how you do it, but you better fucking do it and do it fast. I’m not a very patient man.
And just remember … I’m your judge, jury and executioner,” he added, jabbing his finger at me again. “I will be checking on your progress every so often … kind of like a parole officer.”
I was stunned. How should I respond? I got a stay of execution from a deranged uncle who now demanded that I become a rock star … or else. And not just some run-of-the-mill rock star. A fucking legend. Practically overnight.
“Any questions?” he asked, before standing up and heading for the door.
“How …” I started.
“Good,” Al said, slamming the door behind him.
Seconds later, he opened the door, stuck his head back in and added a parting shot.
“And don’t forget, I get all your profits until your debt is paid,” he said. “After that, I get 25 percent of your share for coming up with this brilliant idea in the first place.”
Al slammed the door again before I even had a chance to process everything he said, much less reply.
Profits? What profits? I didn’t even really have a band at the time. We were in between drummers.
I just sat on the sofa for a few minutes and looked around at all the empty beer cans. I lifted my shirt and gazed at my black-and-blue gut. Then, as I pictured my Fender bass guitar and Peavey amp sitting idle all the way in the bedroom, a lyric suddenly popped into my overtaxed brain: “Papa was a gravestone.”
Excerpt From: Jack Chaucer. “Freeway and the Vin Numbers.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/4Pys_.l
It's a Mammyth tale ... here's a 32-title tease
I have completed the second draft of my mythological novella, “Revenge to the Tennth Power,” starring a girl named Tenn. It checks in at a taut 32,000-plus words over 32 chapters. No blurb or cover yet, but for now, here are the 32 chapter titles as a way of a tease. They look like 32 hit singles/B-sides on a double album, don’t they? Ha, ha …
“REVENGE TO THE TENNTH POWER”
BY JACK CHAUCER
CHAPTER TITLES
1. BLOOD BOIL
2. THE VULTURE
3. DEATH SCREAM
4. ALL MEN ARE EVIL
5. NERA’S COUNSEL
6. ARROWS & ALLIES
7. ROYAL REVEAL
8. GRACELESS, YOUR GRACE
9. TOMB OF THE LIVING
10. MORE OF A MAN
11. THE DYING & THE DEAD
12. CLOSET IN THE WOODS
13. FORTUNE TELLER
14. ONE GOOD REASON
15. RUTT HUTT
16. FIREBALL
17. RAINING BOULDERS
18. CHANNELING THE DEAD
19. WHITE WIDOW
20. A TERRIBLE POET
21. THE HYDRA
22. DOOMED
23. NEAR KISS
24. A SWORD THROUGH THE HEART
25. HER STAGE
26. THE UNDERWORLD
27. VIEW FROM THE NINTH SPIRE
28. THE WAIT
29. NO MORE KINGS & QUEENS
30. YOU BETTER NOT FUXING DIE
31. THE MONUMENT
32. MAMMYTH O
“REVENGE TO THE TENNTH POWER”
BY JACK CHAUCER
CHAPTER TITLES
1. BLOOD BOIL
2. THE VULTURE
3. DEATH SCREAM
4. ALL MEN ARE EVIL
5. NERA’S COUNSEL
6. ARROWS & ALLIES
7. ROYAL REVEAL
8. GRACELESS, YOUR GRACE
9. TOMB OF THE LIVING
10. MORE OF A MAN
11. THE DYING & THE DEAD
12. CLOSET IN THE WOODS
13. FORTUNE TELLER
14. ONE GOOD REASON
15. RUTT HUTT
16. FIREBALL
17. RAINING BOULDERS
18. CHANNELING THE DEAD
19. WHITE WIDOW
20. A TERRIBLE POET
21. THE HYDRA
22. DOOMED
23. NEAR KISS
24. A SWORD THROUGH THE HEART
25. HER STAGE
26. THE UNDERWORLD
27. VIEW FROM THE NINTH SPIRE
28. THE WAIT
29. NO MORE KINGS & QUEENS
30. YOU BETTER NOT FUXING DIE
31. THE MONUMENT
32. MAMMYTH O
Opening sentence from REVENGE TO THE TENNTH POWER ...
"The second time Antero ever laid eyes on Tenn, she appeared far too alone, young and beautiful to sing for the rag-tag regulars of a back-country shit cave like the Tomb of the Living."
-- the first sentence from my upcoming mythological tale, "Revenge to the Tennth Power" (Mammyth #1)
-- the first sentence from my upcoming mythological tale, "Revenge to the Tennth Power" (Mammyth #1)
REVENGE TO THE TENNTH POWER IS DONE! THE 10-HEADED HYDRA IS COMING!
The writing, revisions and editing for my new mythological tale, “Revenge to the Tennth Power,” are complete. Now it’s time to think about a cover concept, and I’ve got an interesting idea. I think Jeanine Henning might be the artist to conjure this one to life. If all goes well, I hope to have an ARC on NetGalley sometime this summer. Shooting for a fall release in paperback and ebooks!For now, here’s the book blurb:
Betrayed by her own royal blood at age 5 and kept prisoner in a temple dungeon for nine years, Tenn sees death as a merciful end. But when the temple priests’ attempt to sacrifice her to The Nine gods backfires, Tenn embraces the unexpected gifts of life and freedom. She desperately tries to elude capture by the king’s soldiers, and searches through Mammyth’s rugged wilderness for low-born allies. Burgeoning friendships with huntress Jett and rock-climbing expert Antero aid Tenn in her healing. One year after her escape, she taps into her exponentially increasing powers over fire, blood and a shape-shifting beast to seek revenge. Her target is the man who ordered her mother’s execution and banished her to be “purified” by perverted priests — her father, King Ryzthar.
New blurb for REVENGE TO THE TENNTH POWER
Book blurbs are always a challenge because you're trying to condense so much action and emotion into just a few riveting sentences. Here's my second crack at REVENGE TO THE TENNTH POWER, which will be out on NetGalley in June and published on August Tennth of this year ...Tenn believes all men are evil after a childhood of betrayal, imprisonment and abuse. When the discarded daughter of a dead queen reveals her pain and anger in a powerful and treasonous song, low-born upstart Antero is drawn to help her despite the danger. Can Antero change her mind about men and win her heart as he and a group of allies help Tenn take back what is hers? Can Tenn learn to harness her growing powers over fire, blood and a shape-shifting beast to deliver justice to those who have wronged her? Ruthless King Ryzthar and mysterious 14,000-foot Mount Mammyth stand in their way.
Zakk's slower than a pregnant ox today ... CHAPTER 2: THE VULTURE and CHAPTER 3: DEATH SCREAM
REVENGE TO THE TENNTH POWER
BY JACK CHAUCER
Official release date on Amazon/Kindle/Apple/B&N: August Tennth
CHAPTER 2 — THE VULTURE
Hagema felt the pull of gold, but not nearly enough pull from her supposedly manly fellow rock climbers.
“Did you two dawdling fux stop to talk again?” she yelled down from the top of Ass Head, the pinnacle of a rocky headwall that apparently looked like the head of an ass to some lackwit shepherd who’d craned his neck from Aron’s Ravine centuries ago.
“Zakk’s slower than a pregnant ox today … and he’s sweating ale again!” Antero’s voice rose up, muffled some by the cliff.
A rope-and-knots expert, Hagema gave the line a tug and made sure it was still secure around the boulder next to her. Then she walked back to the edge of the cliff and barked, “Move it! You know we can’t be up here long.”
Low-born were not permitted this far up Mount Mammyth per orders of the king, and prospecting for gold at 6,000 feet could get a low-born thrown to his or her death. This brazen trio of gold enthusiasts, however, had proved before that the king’s soldiers rarely patrolled the mountain’s steepest routes, preferring to stick to the wider trails that did not require ropes and rock-climbing skills.
Antero and Zakk finally hoisted themselves up and joined Hagema on Ass Head moments later. She gave a mocking clap before helping them unclip from the rope.
“My ancient 40-year-old mother climbs faster than you two,” the stocky 22-year-old redhead said, quickly coiling up the rope.
“The bigger the fux, the harder,” gruff-voiced Zakk replied with a grin, visibly winded as the 18-year-old wrung the sweat out of his long, blond ponytail.
“The hardest,” 17-year-old Antero added, jerking his thumb into his own bare chest before taking a drag from his water skin. He hadn’t bothered to put his long, matted and tangled brown hair into a ponytail, so he looked like a talking mop.
“No time to drink and fux around up here,” Hagema snapped, donning the coil like a garment and charging ahead toward a small stand of pine trees. “Our new stream of gold is this way.”
“She better be right,” Antero told Zakk before following her along the narrow, dirt path.
The three loggers by trade hoped to retire early if they could pillage enough high-altitude gold from the rocky pockets of Mammyth, and by extension, King Ryzthar. With the winds of Aurai blowing favorably on a summer’s day and some low clouds helping to obscure their ascent up the ravine’s rocky rim, Hagema, Antero and Zakk knew it was the right day to try their luck. They had left the backside of the mountain before first light, traversed through the forest to the east side of Mammyth and methodically climbed out of the imposing bowl of rock.
A far less populated kingdom than the flatter Ibelynth across the Sea of Freyr, the untamed vastness of Mammyth offered a certain protection to those bold enough to take risks.
Still, one random royal patrol in the wrong place at the wrong time could lead to a fight to the death. Swords were too cumbersome for Hagema and her younger friends on the demanding climb, so they sheathed daggers around their waists in case of a confrontation. In three previous trips up into forbidden elevations, the trio had come away with zero gold and zero run-ins with the king’s soldiers, so they considered themselves fortunate enough to keep looking at least.
Other prospectors had told stories of finding gold, particularly on the more dangerous east side of the mountain where Ryzthar’s castle and the temple loomed, but no one had actually showed off the gold in the caves Antero, Hagema and Zakk frequented, likely out of fear of getting stabbed and robbed.
Ione’s Stream, named after the goddess of ice, flowed down the alpine ridge and pooled in a flatter, wooded area just to the southwest of Ass Head. That’s where Hagema and her cohorts began chiseling away at the rocks and crevices along the sides of the pool with small iron picks.
The sun goddess Nera, high in the sky now, had begun burning a hole through the cloud layer and adding to the sweat on Antero’s back as he toiled.
“Remind me why we don’t do this in the winter,” he muttered.
“Because this is all ice in the winter, you stone head,” Hagema replied, causing Zakk to crack up.
“I know. I just like to hear you get worked up,” Antero said.
“How about you focus on finding me some gold instead so I can buy me a proper girlfriend,” Hagema said in between scrapes of rock.
The boys laughed. “My sister likes you,” Zakk said, referring to his 15-year-old sister, Toree.
“Not in that way,” Hagema corrected him. “She’s too young anyway, though I do like that red streak in her hair. Red heads are special.”
“You’re special, all right,” Antero ribbed her.
“Speaking of red streaks, do you see what I see flowing down toward us?” Zakk asked, wading through shallow water to get a better look at a more elevated pool. “I’m serious.”
Antero and Hagema joined him next to the small waterfall between pools and cupped the water. Sure enough, there was a reddish tint.
“Red? We want gold!” Hagema said, swatting the water away in disgust.
“I know, but this is fuxing strange,” Zakk said.
“Tastes like blood,” Antero noted after cupping some water with his hands and drinking it.
“Are you crazy? Don’t be drinking it then,” Hagema warned. “Ione probably cursed this stream.”
“Why would she do that?” Antero wondered.
“Because she probably sees what we’re doing up here and goddesses don’t like low-born, cave-carousing, forest-dwelling grubs like us,” Hagema pointed out.
“Um … guys,” Zakk said, gazing and then pointing up toward the sky.
“Holy …
“Mammyth,” Hagema finished Antero’s thought.
“Let’s get the fux out of here,” Zakk huffed, stuffing tools back in his belt.
“This is worse than a royal patrol,” Antero said. “Any ideas?”
“It’s too late,” Hagema spat. “It spotted us.”
Strix, taking the form of a massive black-and-gray vulture with a blood-hued beak, banked left and began swooping toward them. When its orange-yellow eyes fixed on the three targets and blackened, Antero shouted, “Run! Three different directions!”
“There’s basically two!” Hagema shot back. “The third is leaping off Ass Head to our deaths!”
“You two go that way and I’ll lure him up here,” Antero said, pointing and then scrambling up the jagged rocks to a higher elevation.
“That’s suicide!” Hagema screamed at his backside.
Zakk yanked on her arm and dragged her until she reluctantly followed.
The beast shrieked overhead, spinning Hagema and Zakk back around just in time to see it pluck Antero off the ridge with ease.
“No, you fuxing buzzard!” Hagema shouted. “Bring him back here!”
Antero could barely breathe as the vulture’s gnarled claws painfully squeezed his ribs like a vise. Strix circled low one time to show off his trophy to Antero’s cursing friends, and then soared through the air.
Antero felt a paralyzing chill as he got dragged into a cloud. Then he lost consciousness when his compressed lungs seized up.
CHAPTER 3 — DEATH SCREAM
Volz Yth’s hands shook much harder than usual on the slow ride up to Ryzthar’s castle. He tried to convince his mind it was just the vibration of the ox-pulled cart along the stone-carpeted Passage to the Gods.
The views were breathtaking off to his right as Nera chased away the clouds, but the high cleric’s eyes were closed, and his ears still burned from the shriek of that witch-blood girl, followed by the ensuing screams of death — his entire circle of priests claimed by Aron and his death lord, Arus, in the blink of Freyr’s eye.
The sun goddess warmed Volz Yth even now, as the cart crested the ridge and leveled off at about 10,000 feet. The high cleric finally opened his eyes, gasped for air and saw the castle straight ahead. Mounted on a bed of rocks, it soared 200 feet with high stone walls, two watch towers and four balconies on each side that could be closed against the weather. Mammyth Tower rose above all in the center, but even that was dwarfed by the rock-domed summit 4,000 feet up — a holy place reserved only for immortals.
A phalanx of red-plated soldiers nodded in deference to Volz Yth as he stepped down from the cart with the help of his driver, Aco. A loyal servant for more than a decade, the young man bowed and seemed visibly shaken as he handed his master off to the king’s guard.
The high cleric nodded to Aco and shuddered through an exhale before following his silent escort squad up the smooth slab that served as a ramp. They marched through the portal of a rock-wall outer perimeter and beneath a giant marble statue of Mammyth — personified as half man on the right side, half woman on the left and topped by a nine-pointed crown of gold. The statue’s sandaled feet seemed to make the high cleric hunch as he trudged under the ornate outcropping and into the castle’s main entrance.
Waiting up on an east-facing balcony, King Ryzthar stroked his beard and stared beyond his mountains, beyond the Sea of Freyr, all the way to the blurry outline of Ibelynth’s coast. He had been informed of the high cleric’s visit, but not the reason. Volz Yth wanted to deliver the news in person.
Some part of Ryzthar already knew the reason — the same part that tormented him with nightmares of Brinsma gouging out his eyes and chopping off pieces of his body as he watched from above, as if pinned to the ceiling.
He flinched at the memory of seeing his own beating heart — freshly carved out of his chest — splashing into the boiling water. Her laugh, which used to fill him with joy and contentedness when he courted her so long ago, had changed to all the wrong notes, haunting him to the point of screams.
Ola, his current young queen, shook him until he woke, but Ryzthar never really woke. The night always followed him around, as it did now, even as he gazed into the bluest of skies on the sunniest of summer days.
“Your grace, the high cleric, Volz Yth,” announced his most trusted guard, Bazel, stirring the king from his self-induced fog and spinning him around on the balcony.
“Indeed,” Ryzthar replied, nodding as Volz Yth bent the knee. “We’re good.”
Bazel and another guard retreated into the castle proper, and the salt-and-pepper-haired king motioned for the high priest to join him by the balcony’s stone wall, which came up to their waists.
Ryzthar and Volz Yth both stood about six-foot-three, not counting their nine-pointed gold crown and black-cone hat, respectively, but the burdens they carried at this moment seemed to shrink their normally imposing figures.
“I can tell from your dour face the news is …”
“She escaped,” Yth interrupted with a gasp, like he still couldn’t believe it himself. “Your daughter.”
“Former daughter … from a former queen … a very dead queen,” Ryzthar corrected him forcefully, as if trying to drown out the impossible news and cast away his own demons all at once.
The high cleric bowed his head as a strong gust buffeted their lofty perch.
“How?” the king demanded, his unrelenting green eyes fixed on Volz Yth’s tired, somber visage.
“Some kind of black magic, I suspect,” he mumbled.
“Speak up to your king!” Ryzthar shouted.
The high priest straightened, his amber eyes alarmed, his large nostrils flaring on his bulbous nose.
“She killed them all!” he countered sharply, emotionally, with a sweeping hand gesture. “Your former daughter, fresh with menstrual blood, used blood magic to boil the blood of all eight of my priests in the whip of Strix’s tail! The sacrifice you ordered nine years ago has born poison fruit — not the favor of the gods!”
Ryzthar had patiently let him speak his piece. Then he pounced, choking the high priest with both hands at his neck, pushing him against the balcony wall and threatening to shove him over the edge. The jagged rocks waited 150 feet below.
“You blame me for offering a sacrifice to the gods when it was you and your Seers who fuxed it up?! Nine grown men and all of your worthless underlings can’t handle a waif of a girl?!”
The high priest’s eyes turned frantic as his airway continued to be cut off by Ryzthar’s firm grip.
“I should throw you to Aurai right now and let the winds take you to Arus so you can rejoin the rest of your useless priests in the underworld!” the king shouted.
Ryzthar gave him one last hard squeeze and dropped him on his side of the wall. Then he stepped back and watched as Volz Yth gasped and rolled around, pathetically low, pathetically human.
“I’m going up there now!” the king declared, pointing toward the summit. “Fux your rules, cleric!”
He began to step right over Volz Yth, but the high priest reached up with one hand and tripped the king, causing him to stumble and fall to one knee.
Ryzthar screamed and the two guards burst through the door in an instant, their eyes wide at the sight before them.
“Stand him up!” Ryzthar ordered as he slowly stood back up himself.
The guards yanked the cleric up and each held an arm. Ryzthar snarled at Volz Yth and then punched him hard in the gut. The priest doubled over in pain.
“I will go up there or you will go down. Understood?” the king seethed, gesturing toward the rocks below.
Volz Yth slowly got his breath back and tried to respond. The king waited for his answer.
“No mortal … but the high cleric … is permitted … up there,” Volz Yth huffed in between shuddered breaths. “You would curse yourself … and your realm?”
The king laughed and spat at his feet.
“I am already fuxing cursed! The gods bewitched me into falling for Ola, only to have two more daughters and still no male heir! Brinsma has haunted me since the night I had her stoned to death, and now her daughter uses sorcery to escape you and your feeble order of wisdom-less priests. You are no mystical high seer! You are low and unfit to return to the Temple of the Nine. Eight seers are already with Arus. Might as well make it a full set and start over. I wash my hands of his kind, guards. Throw him over the wall!”
Volz Yth hissed and struggled like a cornered animal, but the guards made short work of heaving him off the balcony. The soldiers then stepped aside as Ryzthar surged forward and leaned over the wall to have a look.
The high cleric’s death scream echoed off the rocks long after his face smashed into them.
BY JACK CHAUCER
Official release date on Amazon/Kindle/Apple/B&N: August Tennth
CHAPTER 2 — THE VULTUREHagema felt the pull of gold, but not nearly enough pull from her supposedly manly fellow rock climbers.
“Did you two dawdling fux stop to talk again?” she yelled down from the top of Ass Head, the pinnacle of a rocky headwall that apparently looked like the head of an ass to some lackwit shepherd who’d craned his neck from Aron’s Ravine centuries ago.
“Zakk’s slower than a pregnant ox today … and he’s sweating ale again!” Antero’s voice rose up, muffled some by the cliff.
A rope-and-knots expert, Hagema gave the line a tug and made sure it was still secure around the boulder next to her. Then she walked back to the edge of the cliff and barked, “Move it! You know we can’t be up here long.”
Low-born were not permitted this far up Mount Mammyth per orders of the king, and prospecting for gold at 6,000 feet could get a low-born thrown to his or her death. This brazen trio of gold enthusiasts, however, had proved before that the king’s soldiers rarely patrolled the mountain’s steepest routes, preferring to stick to the wider trails that did not require ropes and rock-climbing skills.
Antero and Zakk finally hoisted themselves up and joined Hagema on Ass Head moments later. She gave a mocking clap before helping them unclip from the rope.
“My ancient 40-year-old mother climbs faster than you two,” the stocky 22-year-old redhead said, quickly coiling up the rope.
“The bigger the fux, the harder,” gruff-voiced Zakk replied with a grin, visibly winded as the 18-year-old wrung the sweat out of his long, blond ponytail.
“The hardest,” 17-year-old Antero added, jerking his thumb into his own bare chest before taking a drag from his water skin. He hadn’t bothered to put his long, matted and tangled brown hair into a ponytail, so he looked like a talking mop.
“No time to drink and fux around up here,” Hagema snapped, donning the coil like a garment and charging ahead toward a small stand of pine trees. “Our new stream of gold is this way.”
“She better be right,” Antero told Zakk before following her along the narrow, dirt path.
The three loggers by trade hoped to retire early if they could pillage enough high-altitude gold from the rocky pockets of Mammyth, and by extension, King Ryzthar. With the winds of Aurai blowing favorably on a summer’s day and some low clouds helping to obscure their ascent up the ravine’s rocky rim, Hagema, Antero and Zakk knew it was the right day to try their luck. They had left the backside of the mountain before first light, traversed through the forest to the east side of Mammyth and methodically climbed out of the imposing bowl of rock.
A far less populated kingdom than the flatter Ibelynth across the Sea of Freyr, the untamed vastness of Mammyth offered a certain protection to those bold enough to take risks.
Still, one random royal patrol in the wrong place at the wrong time could lead to a fight to the death. Swords were too cumbersome for Hagema and her younger friends on the demanding climb, so they sheathed daggers around their waists in case of a confrontation. In three previous trips up into forbidden elevations, the trio had come away with zero gold and zero run-ins with the king’s soldiers, so they considered themselves fortunate enough to keep looking at least.
Other prospectors had told stories of finding gold, particularly on the more dangerous east side of the mountain where Ryzthar’s castle and the temple loomed, but no one had actually showed off the gold in the caves Antero, Hagema and Zakk frequented, likely out of fear of getting stabbed and robbed.
Ione’s Stream, named after the goddess of ice, flowed down the alpine ridge and pooled in a flatter, wooded area just to the southwest of Ass Head. That’s where Hagema and her cohorts began chiseling away at the rocks and crevices along the sides of the pool with small iron picks.
The sun goddess Nera, high in the sky now, had begun burning a hole through the cloud layer and adding to the sweat on Antero’s back as he toiled.
“Remind me why we don’t do this in the winter,” he muttered.
“Because this is all ice in the winter, you stone head,” Hagema replied, causing Zakk to crack up.
“I know. I just like to hear you get worked up,” Antero said.
“How about you focus on finding me some gold instead so I can buy me a proper girlfriend,” Hagema said in between scrapes of rock.
The boys laughed. “My sister likes you,” Zakk said, referring to his 15-year-old sister, Toree.
“Not in that way,” Hagema corrected him. “She’s too young anyway, though I do like that red streak in her hair. Red heads are special.”
“You’re special, all right,” Antero ribbed her.
“Speaking of red streaks, do you see what I see flowing down toward us?” Zakk asked, wading through shallow water to get a better look at a more elevated pool. “I’m serious.”
Antero and Hagema joined him next to the small waterfall between pools and cupped the water. Sure enough, there was a reddish tint.
“Red? We want gold!” Hagema said, swatting the water away in disgust.
“I know, but this is fuxing strange,” Zakk said.
“Tastes like blood,” Antero noted after cupping some water with his hands and drinking it.
“Are you crazy? Don’t be drinking it then,” Hagema warned. “Ione probably cursed this stream.”
“Why would she do that?” Antero wondered.
“Because she probably sees what we’re doing up here and goddesses don’t like low-born, cave-carousing, forest-dwelling grubs like us,” Hagema pointed out.
“Um … guys,” Zakk said, gazing and then pointing up toward the sky.
“Holy …
“Mammyth,” Hagema finished Antero’s thought.
“Let’s get the fux out of here,” Zakk huffed, stuffing tools back in his belt.
“This is worse than a royal patrol,” Antero said. “Any ideas?”
“It’s too late,” Hagema spat. “It spotted us.”
Strix, taking the form of a massive black-and-gray vulture with a blood-hued beak, banked left and began swooping toward them. When its orange-yellow eyes fixed on the three targets and blackened, Antero shouted, “Run! Three different directions!”
“There’s basically two!” Hagema shot back. “The third is leaping off Ass Head to our deaths!”
“You two go that way and I’ll lure him up here,” Antero said, pointing and then scrambling up the jagged rocks to a higher elevation.
“That’s suicide!” Hagema screamed at his backside.
Zakk yanked on her arm and dragged her until she reluctantly followed.
The beast shrieked overhead, spinning Hagema and Zakk back around just in time to see it pluck Antero off the ridge with ease.
“No, you fuxing buzzard!” Hagema shouted. “Bring him back here!”
Antero could barely breathe as the vulture’s gnarled claws painfully squeezed his ribs like a vise. Strix circled low one time to show off his trophy to Antero’s cursing friends, and then soared through the air.
Antero felt a paralyzing chill as he got dragged into a cloud. Then he lost consciousness when his compressed lungs seized up.
CHAPTER 3 — DEATH SCREAM
Volz Yth’s hands shook much harder than usual on the slow ride up to Ryzthar’s castle. He tried to convince his mind it was just the vibration of the ox-pulled cart along the stone-carpeted Passage to the Gods.
The views were breathtaking off to his right as Nera chased away the clouds, but the high cleric’s eyes were closed, and his ears still burned from the shriek of that witch-blood girl, followed by the ensuing screams of death — his entire circle of priests claimed by Aron and his death lord, Arus, in the blink of Freyr’s eye.
The sun goddess warmed Volz Yth even now, as the cart crested the ridge and leveled off at about 10,000 feet. The high cleric finally opened his eyes, gasped for air and saw the castle straight ahead. Mounted on a bed of rocks, it soared 200 feet with high stone walls, two watch towers and four balconies on each side that could be closed against the weather. Mammyth Tower rose above all in the center, but even that was dwarfed by the rock-domed summit 4,000 feet up — a holy place reserved only for immortals.
A phalanx of red-plated soldiers nodded in deference to Volz Yth as he stepped down from the cart with the help of his driver, Aco. A loyal servant for more than a decade, the young man bowed and seemed visibly shaken as he handed his master off to the king’s guard.
The high cleric nodded to Aco and shuddered through an exhale before following his silent escort squad up the smooth slab that served as a ramp. They marched through the portal of a rock-wall outer perimeter and beneath a giant marble statue of Mammyth — personified as half man on the right side, half woman on the left and topped by a nine-pointed crown of gold. The statue’s sandaled feet seemed to make the high cleric hunch as he trudged under the ornate outcropping and into the castle’s main entrance.
Waiting up on an east-facing balcony, King Ryzthar stroked his beard and stared beyond his mountains, beyond the Sea of Freyr, all the way to the blurry outline of Ibelynth’s coast. He had been informed of the high cleric’s visit, but not the reason. Volz Yth wanted to deliver the news in person.
Some part of Ryzthar already knew the reason — the same part that tormented him with nightmares of Brinsma gouging out his eyes and chopping off pieces of his body as he watched from above, as if pinned to the ceiling.
He flinched at the memory of seeing his own beating heart — freshly carved out of his chest — splashing into the boiling water. Her laugh, which used to fill him with joy and contentedness when he courted her so long ago, had changed to all the wrong notes, haunting him to the point of screams.
Ola, his current young queen, shook him until he woke, but Ryzthar never really woke. The night always followed him around, as it did now, even as he gazed into the bluest of skies on the sunniest of summer days.
“Your grace, the high cleric, Volz Yth,” announced his most trusted guard, Bazel, stirring the king from his self-induced fog and spinning him around on the balcony.
“Indeed,” Ryzthar replied, nodding as Volz Yth bent the knee. “We’re good.”
Bazel and another guard retreated into the castle proper, and the salt-and-pepper-haired king motioned for the high priest to join him by the balcony’s stone wall, which came up to their waists.
Ryzthar and Volz Yth both stood about six-foot-three, not counting their nine-pointed gold crown and black-cone hat, respectively, but the burdens they carried at this moment seemed to shrink their normally imposing figures.
“I can tell from your dour face the news is …”
“She escaped,” Yth interrupted with a gasp, like he still couldn’t believe it himself. “Your daughter.”
“Former daughter … from a former queen … a very dead queen,” Ryzthar corrected him forcefully, as if trying to drown out the impossible news and cast away his own demons all at once.
The high cleric bowed his head as a strong gust buffeted their lofty perch.
“How?” the king demanded, his unrelenting green eyes fixed on Volz Yth’s tired, somber visage.
“Some kind of black magic, I suspect,” he mumbled.
“Speak up to your king!” Ryzthar shouted.
The high priest straightened, his amber eyes alarmed, his large nostrils flaring on his bulbous nose.
“She killed them all!” he countered sharply, emotionally, with a sweeping hand gesture. “Your former daughter, fresh with menstrual blood, used blood magic to boil the blood of all eight of my priests in the whip of Strix’s tail! The sacrifice you ordered nine years ago has born poison fruit — not the favor of the gods!”
Ryzthar had patiently let him speak his piece. Then he pounced, choking the high priest with both hands at his neck, pushing him against the balcony wall and threatening to shove him over the edge. The jagged rocks waited 150 feet below.
“You blame me for offering a sacrifice to the gods when it was you and your Seers who fuxed it up?! Nine grown men and all of your worthless underlings can’t handle a waif of a girl?!”
The high priest’s eyes turned frantic as his airway continued to be cut off by Ryzthar’s firm grip.
“I should throw you to Aurai right now and let the winds take you to Arus so you can rejoin the rest of your useless priests in the underworld!” the king shouted.
Ryzthar gave him one last hard squeeze and dropped him on his side of the wall. Then he stepped back and watched as Volz Yth gasped and rolled around, pathetically low, pathetically human.
“I’m going up there now!” the king declared, pointing toward the summit. “Fux your rules, cleric!”
He began to step right over Volz Yth, but the high priest reached up with one hand and tripped the king, causing him to stumble and fall to one knee.
Ryzthar screamed and the two guards burst through the door in an instant, their eyes wide at the sight before them.
“Stand him up!” Ryzthar ordered as he slowly stood back up himself.
The guards yanked the cleric up and each held an arm. Ryzthar snarled at Volz Yth and then punched him hard in the gut. The priest doubled over in pain.
“I will go up there or you will go down. Understood?” the king seethed, gesturing toward the rocks below.
Volz Yth slowly got his breath back and tried to respond. The king waited for his answer.
“No mortal … but the high cleric … is permitted … up there,” Volz Yth huffed in between shuddered breaths. “You would curse yourself … and your realm?”
The king laughed and spat at his feet.
“I am already fuxing cursed! The gods bewitched me into falling for Ola, only to have two more daughters and still no male heir! Brinsma has haunted me since the night I had her stoned to death, and now her daughter uses sorcery to escape you and your feeble order of wisdom-less priests. You are no mystical high seer! You are low and unfit to return to the Temple of the Nine. Eight seers are already with Arus. Might as well make it a full set and start over. I wash my hands of his kind, guards. Throw him over the wall!”
Volz Yth hissed and struggled like a cornered animal, but the guards made short work of heaving him off the balcony. The soldiers then stepped aside as Ryzthar surged forward and leaned over the wall to have a look.
The high cleric’s death scream echoed off the rocks long after his face smashed into them.
Release day sneak peek ... CHAPTER 4: ALL MEN ARE EVIL and CHAPTER 5: NERA'S COUNSEL
REVENGE TO THE TENNTH POWER
BY JACK CHAUCER
OFFICIAL RELEASE DATE ON AMAZON/KINDLE/APPLE/B&N: AUGUST TENNTH (TODAY!)
CHAPTER 4 — ALL MEN ARE EVIL
Her hands, elbows, knees and feet were scraped and bloodied, but Tenn had managed not to fall off the mountain as she descended uneven rocks and thorny shrubs that ripped and shredded her dirty gray shift. Her left nipple and right hip were now exposed to the world, but so far no one had caught her from behind and no one had startled her from below.
Tenn’s pace quickened as the ledges became less scary and the air thickened slightly on a warm afternoon. Though it seemed like she had made good progress, in reality she had only dropped from about 8,000 feet to 7,200 feet over the precarious terrain. There were many trails and preferred routes on this mountain and its sister peaks, but Tenn didn’t know any of them. Regardless, the pains of this journey felt like a rush of adrenaline compared to what she had endured at the temple. Tenn forced her mind to forget about that and focus on being as sure-footed as possible.
Indeed she was so focused on looking down in front of her that she didn’t even notice the beast just twenty yards to the left of her, toying with some prey on a rocky outcropping.
Strix’s vulture head rotated, its right eye fixed on the girl. The sudden screech that erupted from its curved beak froze Tenn’s body and wrenched her neck with a 90-degree pull. She had never heard a sound like that, and the huge and hideous buzzard staring back at her did not seem real.
Until it screeched again.
She trembled as her stare-down with the beast continued, but for some reason, she did not look away. Whatever happened back at the scene of what was supposed to be her death had given her strength — the kind she had never known before. And the ensuing escape, with its intoxicating rush of proper pain and wind-fueled freedom, had nurtured that power even more.
Tenn quickly made up her mind and her legs followed. She didn’t run away. She ran toward the beast, intent on shooing it off the cliff.
“You’re even uglier than the priests!” she shouted as she sprinted toward it.
But then Tenn skidded on some loose stones and stopped completely when Strix morphed before her eyes. Suddenly she was surrounded by nine snarling gray-and-white wolves. The saliva slowly dripped off their fangs and she felt more than a moment of doubt. Had The Nine come back to claim her life after all?
That thought steeled her yet again.
“I will not go back!” she screamed, quivering as her eyes scanned each yellow-eyed wolf in her vision. She could feel the hot breath of the ones behind her and quaked even more. “I’ll leap off that ledge first!”
Of course, she’d have to break through the ring of wolves to even get the chance.
When the wolves growled and all took a step toward her, she crouched and did her best to look menacing just like them. Then she pounced at the two wolves standing most in the way of the ledge, but there was nothing to grab or tackle when she hit the ground hard. Her forearms burned, but her eyes rejoiced when she looked up to see Strix, back in vulture form, shrieking above her and flying away.
Still in shock from the sensory overload of the bizarre encounter, Tenn didn’t trust her eyes at first when she realized there was a man lying still on the edge of the ledge, just ten feet away, clad only in dirty breeches and leather hiking boots.
Warily, she padded across the rocks to stand over him. Long and pale, lifeless and bloodied, he had a nasty gash zigzagging across his bare chest.
Tenn knelt down and, despite her rightful fear of men, slowly reached out to touch his muscular arm. It felt cold and she recoiled. He seemed too young, maybe even too handsome, to be dead. She hesitantly extended her hand a second time, hovering over the bloody wound and then searching for his heart. When she brushed his skin with her palm, the man’s eyelids fluttered and his mouth opened to suck for air.
Tenn sprung backward like she had rousted a snake, and then instinctively covered her exposed breast with her hand.
Her heart raced as the young man with the long, sandy-brown hair tried to sit up and regain normal breathing.
Antero groaned from his injuries and struggled through blurred vision to make sense of the scene around him. He was only a few feet from plummeting to his death, so he rolled away from the edge and his wounds stung from the sudden movement. As he gingerly shifted position, he sensed someone else move away from him. Slowly, he focused on a tall, thin, bloodied young girl, partly covered in rags. She backed away even more as he became aware of how nearly naked she was.
He coughed and tried to speak, but his throat was so dry. He recalled Ione’s Stream and wished for a gulp of cold water, but then he remembered the blood, and Hagema and Zakk, and their shocked faces as the grotesque vulture seized him, squeezed him and stole off with him.
“Who are you?” he finally managed to ask the timid girl with the dazzling sea-green eyes.
She looked so out of place, maybe even lost, this high up Mammyth, but then again, perhaps so did he.
Though she was half-turned to flee, the girl still looked him in the eyes as she tried to form a reply.
“I’m, I’m … I’m in a lot of trouble,” she stammered.
Antero was so incredulous at that answer that he laughed and paid for it with searing pain, causing him to groan again.
The girl shook her head and began walking away.
Antero stood up too fast, felt woozy and dropped back down on one knee.
“Wait,” he pleaded, reaching out to her.
She stopped and turned around once more.
“All men are evil,” Antero heard her say, this time with no stammer. “I must go.”
Stunned, he watched her run back toward the ridge line and disappear into the mountain.
CHAPTER 5 — NERA’S COUNSEL
The Passage to the Gods could only ferry the king so far. At 12,800 feet, Ryzthar had to leave the snorting, laboring oxen behind and climb the summit dome himself, one rock at a time, like any other mortal.
He told his soldiers to stay behind with the cart — only a king could hope to meet with The Nine, and even his presence, he feared, would be taken as a brash and desperate affront to the immortals. High clerics always had forbid monarchs from appealing to the gods directly. That was their role. But Ryzthar had no high cleric or any of his eight immediate possible successors to worry about at the moment. They were all dead. So in the interim, before the temple elected a new top tier of seers, he aimed to seek an audience with The Nine himself and beg for counsel.
With an oak-hewn staff in his right hand and a wineskin latched to the belt around his black-bear robe, the stubborn king ascended into the increasingly brisk gales and thickening clouds. It may be summer down at the lower elevations, but the goddess Ione usually defended the summit with wild or wintry weather. Hurricane-force winds, thunderstorms, ice storms, snow storms, dense fog and even hail the size of human heads — any or all of these could be awaiting the intrepid monarch.
Ryzthar, a husky man but still relatively fit at thirty-five years old in a realm where forty-five was considered knocking on Arus’ gate, stared into the swirling gray and gasped for as much of the thin air as his lungs could hold. Then he took a quick drag of red wine to boost his courage and resumed climbing.
In less than an hour, he stood within 100 feet of the summit, but he could not see it. The gray-and-white howl blasted his face. Even when he did open his eyes, the black spots crowded his vision — his exertion in the high altitude was bringing on a migraine and unrelenting wooziness. The buffeting wind intermittently carried pellets of ice, stinging his face and crystallizing his beard.
The king then stumbled on an uneven rock, dropped his staff and fell, banging his right shoulder into the base of a boulder. As he rubbed the painful bruise, the boulder seemed to give off heat, warming him.
Slowly, he stood back up and placed both hands on the rock, which was as high as his chest. The warmth pleasured his hands, and soon radiated and tingled through the rest of his body.
“What is this?” he asked as the winds of Aurai whipped against him from ever-changing directions.
“Stone,” a young woman’s voice answered.
Ryzthar kept one hand on the boulder as he turned to find the source of the voice, but all he could see were the clouds and the damn black spots eating away at his field of vision.
“Who speaks to me?” the king shouted, again placing both hands on the boulder and rubbing it.
“Nera,” the goddess announced.
The king quickly dropped to both knees, his hands still attached to the boulder.
“Nera … beautiful sun goddess, may I see you?” Ryzthar asked, his voice crackling with anticipation.
“No,” she replied. “Ione has dressed me today and, for once, I am grateful. What brings a troubled king up so far? To catch sight of me naked?”
The king paused to weigh her words, delivered in a saucy, mocking tone that made the monarch shiver.
“Not at all, Nera. You say I am troubled. Why do you speak to me this way, beautiful sun goddess?”
“You sound troubled, King Ryzthar,” she replied. “Do you grieve your queen?”
“My queen is very mu-mu-much alive,” he yammered. “Ola is …”
“Do you take me for a fool? The very goddess who lights your kingdom and your brother’s kingdom across the sea? The goddess who feeds your subjects and feeds you?”
“No, great Nera, I beg your pardon,” the king said, his head bowed by the blasts of wind and his own stupidity in the presence of an all-knowing immortal. “I see now that it is Brinsma of whom you speak.”
“Do you grieve her?” the goddess asked a second time.
Ryzthar again paused, cursing at himself for this high-altitude gamble; this avoidable predicament.
“No, I don’t,” he admitted, not wanting to cross Nera again. “She didn’t revere the gods. She practiced black magic … witchcraft! Surely you don’t take her side, beautiful sun goddess?”
“You called Brinsma beautiful many, many times … and yet you had her stoned to death. Is she still beautiful, King Ryzthar? Beautiful like me?”
The trick questions and the waves of heat now crashing through him from the stone made him sweat underneath his bear robe. He snatched his hands off the rock and wrung them fretfully, unable to stop the burning and itching.
“This was a mistake,” he mumbled.
Nera heard him just fine despite the four-pronged howl of Aurai.
“What was?” she ridiculed him. “Coming up here? Killing your queen over your lust for another? Casting away your first-born daughter, Marinde, so she could be turned into a sexual play toy for the depraved creatures who make a mockery of the beautiful, ancient temple … a temple dedicated to us?”
“Please stop!” Ryzthar shouted into the unrelenting gale.
“Yes, that’s right. That’s what your daughter screamed. When you were cozy in your castle, did you hear her cries from her underworld cell?”
Ryzthar looked down at his fallen staff and cursed himself loudly yet again.
“I want to thank you,” Nera said.
“Why?” he pleaded, gazing up again into the clouds, desperate for hope.
“For killing Volz Yth … he was such a disgrace to Mammyth, to all the gods really,” she said. “Rather, thank your guards for that. They killed him. You couldn’t quite finish the job.”
“I could have,” Ryzthar protested. “I let them finish him off. That’s their job.”
“And what is your job, your grace?” Nera toyed with him.
The king scowled at her tone.
“To rule this pile of rocks and keep you immortals happy,” he shouted at the stone. “A fuxing impossible task.”
“So jaded,” she said. “So ungrateful. So hopelessly incapable.”
Ryzthar shook his head and spat at the ground.
“Oh do fux off then. You think it’s easy being a mere mortal? I don’t need your immortal superiority ox shit!”
Nera laughed, her echo bouncing from boulder to boulder, up and down the summit cone.
The king, rattled by fear and anger, began to twitch.
“Still think I’m beautiful?” she asked. “No … now we’ve arrived at some truth.”
Ryzthar searched his shaken soul for some words, some courage.
“The truth is I should have believed in bloody witchcraft instead of you and your kind, goddess. Then maybe Brinsma would still be alive and I wouldn’t be up here acting like a simpering fool right now.”
“Believe whatever you want to believe and say whatever you want to say to suit your purpose … just like you always do,” the goddess said.
“The truth is betrayal and murder and abandonment of one’s heir, no matter the sex, are some heavy stones. Do take care not to get crushed.”
“Is that a threat?” he snapped.
Nera’s voice suddenly cranked up in speed and force to match the pummeling winds.
“You should be troubled, King Ryzthar. My son, Agan, appeared to your queen before her death and agreed to watch over your daughter. He watched and watched while you forgot and forgot about her, your own royal blood. He could not truly help her until the seers commenced with your sacrifice — we did not accept your sacrifice of her to us. That was another of your mistakes, and a very grave one indeed. Royal blood mixed with witch’s blood pooled with the powers of the blood god himself and backed by his mother, the goddess of the sun — Marinde is someone else now. Someone far more powerful, and she barely knows it yet.
“So if you came up here to ease your troubled mind, you came to the wrong place. And if you came up here for counsel, here it is: best stay out of my light or she will find you sooner.”
BY JACK CHAUCER
OFFICIAL RELEASE DATE ON AMAZON/KINDLE/APPLE/B&N: AUGUST TENNTH (TODAY!)
CHAPTER 4 — ALL MEN ARE EVIL
Her hands, elbows, knees and feet were scraped and bloodied, but Tenn had managed not to fall off the mountain as she descended uneven rocks and thorny shrubs that ripped and shredded her dirty gray shift. Her left nipple and right hip were now exposed to the world, but so far no one had caught her from behind and no one had startled her from below.Tenn’s pace quickened as the ledges became less scary and the air thickened slightly on a warm afternoon. Though it seemed like she had made good progress, in reality she had only dropped from about 8,000 feet to 7,200 feet over the precarious terrain. There were many trails and preferred routes on this mountain and its sister peaks, but Tenn didn’t know any of them. Regardless, the pains of this journey felt like a rush of adrenaline compared to what she had endured at the temple. Tenn forced her mind to forget about that and focus on being as sure-footed as possible.
Indeed she was so focused on looking down in front of her that she didn’t even notice the beast just twenty yards to the left of her, toying with some prey on a rocky outcropping.
Strix’s vulture head rotated, its right eye fixed on the girl. The sudden screech that erupted from its curved beak froze Tenn’s body and wrenched her neck with a 90-degree pull. She had never heard a sound like that, and the huge and hideous buzzard staring back at her did not seem real.
Until it screeched again.
She trembled as her stare-down with the beast continued, but for some reason, she did not look away. Whatever happened back at the scene of what was supposed to be her death had given her strength — the kind she had never known before. And the ensuing escape, with its intoxicating rush of proper pain and wind-fueled freedom, had nurtured that power even more.
Tenn quickly made up her mind and her legs followed. She didn’t run away. She ran toward the beast, intent on shooing it off the cliff.
“You’re even uglier than the priests!” she shouted as she sprinted toward it.
But then Tenn skidded on some loose stones and stopped completely when Strix morphed before her eyes. Suddenly she was surrounded by nine snarling gray-and-white wolves. The saliva slowly dripped off their fangs and she felt more than a moment of doubt. Had The Nine come back to claim her life after all?
That thought steeled her yet again.
“I will not go back!” she screamed, quivering as her eyes scanned each yellow-eyed wolf in her vision. She could feel the hot breath of the ones behind her and quaked even more. “I’ll leap off that ledge first!”
Of course, she’d have to break through the ring of wolves to even get the chance.
When the wolves growled and all took a step toward her, she crouched and did her best to look menacing just like them. Then she pounced at the two wolves standing most in the way of the ledge, but there was nothing to grab or tackle when she hit the ground hard. Her forearms burned, but her eyes rejoiced when she looked up to see Strix, back in vulture form, shrieking above her and flying away.
Still in shock from the sensory overload of the bizarre encounter, Tenn didn’t trust her eyes at first when she realized there was a man lying still on the edge of the ledge, just ten feet away, clad only in dirty breeches and leather hiking boots.
Warily, she padded across the rocks to stand over him. Long and pale, lifeless and bloodied, he had a nasty gash zigzagging across his bare chest.
Tenn knelt down and, despite her rightful fear of men, slowly reached out to touch his muscular arm. It felt cold and she recoiled. He seemed too young, maybe even too handsome, to be dead. She hesitantly extended her hand a second time, hovering over the bloody wound and then searching for his heart. When she brushed his skin with her palm, the man’s eyelids fluttered and his mouth opened to suck for air.
Tenn sprung backward like she had rousted a snake, and then instinctively covered her exposed breast with her hand.
Her heart raced as the young man with the long, sandy-brown hair tried to sit up and regain normal breathing.
Antero groaned from his injuries and struggled through blurred vision to make sense of the scene around him. He was only a few feet from plummeting to his death, so he rolled away from the edge and his wounds stung from the sudden movement. As he gingerly shifted position, he sensed someone else move away from him. Slowly, he focused on a tall, thin, bloodied young girl, partly covered in rags. She backed away even more as he became aware of how nearly naked she was.
He coughed and tried to speak, but his throat was so dry. He recalled Ione’s Stream and wished for a gulp of cold water, but then he remembered the blood, and Hagema and Zakk, and their shocked faces as the grotesque vulture seized him, squeezed him and stole off with him.
“Who are you?” he finally managed to ask the timid girl with the dazzling sea-green eyes.
She looked so out of place, maybe even lost, this high up Mammyth, but then again, perhaps so did he.
Though she was half-turned to flee, the girl still looked him in the eyes as she tried to form a reply.
“I’m, I’m … I’m in a lot of trouble,” she stammered.
Antero was so incredulous at that answer that he laughed and paid for it with searing pain, causing him to groan again.
The girl shook her head and began walking away.
Antero stood up too fast, felt woozy and dropped back down on one knee.
“Wait,” he pleaded, reaching out to her.
She stopped and turned around once more.
“All men are evil,” Antero heard her say, this time with no stammer. “I must go.”
Stunned, he watched her run back toward the ridge line and disappear into the mountain.
CHAPTER 5 — NERA’S COUNSEL
The Passage to the Gods could only ferry the king so far. At 12,800 feet, Ryzthar had to leave the snorting, laboring oxen behind and climb the summit dome himself, one rock at a time, like any other mortal.
He told his soldiers to stay behind with the cart — only a king could hope to meet with The Nine, and even his presence, he feared, would be taken as a brash and desperate affront to the immortals. High clerics always had forbid monarchs from appealing to the gods directly. That was their role. But Ryzthar had no high cleric or any of his eight immediate possible successors to worry about at the moment. They were all dead. So in the interim, before the temple elected a new top tier of seers, he aimed to seek an audience with The Nine himself and beg for counsel.
With an oak-hewn staff in his right hand and a wineskin latched to the belt around his black-bear robe, the stubborn king ascended into the increasingly brisk gales and thickening clouds. It may be summer down at the lower elevations, but the goddess Ione usually defended the summit with wild or wintry weather. Hurricane-force winds, thunderstorms, ice storms, snow storms, dense fog and even hail the size of human heads — any or all of these could be awaiting the intrepid monarch.
Ryzthar, a husky man but still relatively fit at thirty-five years old in a realm where forty-five was considered knocking on Arus’ gate, stared into the swirling gray and gasped for as much of the thin air as his lungs could hold. Then he took a quick drag of red wine to boost his courage and resumed climbing.
In less than an hour, he stood within 100 feet of the summit, but he could not see it. The gray-and-white howl blasted his face. Even when he did open his eyes, the black spots crowded his vision — his exertion in the high altitude was bringing on a migraine and unrelenting wooziness. The buffeting wind intermittently carried pellets of ice, stinging his face and crystallizing his beard.
The king then stumbled on an uneven rock, dropped his staff and fell, banging his right shoulder into the base of a boulder. As he rubbed the painful bruise, the boulder seemed to give off heat, warming him.
Slowly, he stood back up and placed both hands on the rock, which was as high as his chest. The warmth pleasured his hands, and soon radiated and tingled through the rest of his body.
“What is this?” he asked as the winds of Aurai whipped against him from ever-changing directions.
“Stone,” a young woman’s voice answered.
Ryzthar kept one hand on the boulder as he turned to find the source of the voice, but all he could see were the clouds and the damn black spots eating away at his field of vision.
“Who speaks to me?” the king shouted, again placing both hands on the boulder and rubbing it.
“Nera,” the goddess announced.
The king quickly dropped to both knees, his hands still attached to the boulder.
“Nera … beautiful sun goddess, may I see you?” Ryzthar asked, his voice crackling with anticipation.
“No,” she replied. “Ione has dressed me today and, for once, I am grateful. What brings a troubled king up so far? To catch sight of me naked?”
The king paused to weigh her words, delivered in a saucy, mocking tone that made the monarch shiver.
“Not at all, Nera. You say I am troubled. Why do you speak to me this way, beautiful sun goddess?”
“You sound troubled, King Ryzthar,” she replied. “Do you grieve your queen?”
“My queen is very mu-mu-much alive,” he yammered. “Ola is …”
“Do you take me for a fool? The very goddess who lights your kingdom and your brother’s kingdom across the sea? The goddess who feeds your subjects and feeds you?”
“No, great Nera, I beg your pardon,” the king said, his head bowed by the blasts of wind and his own stupidity in the presence of an all-knowing immortal. “I see now that it is Brinsma of whom you speak.”
“Do you grieve her?” the goddess asked a second time.
Ryzthar again paused, cursing at himself for this high-altitude gamble; this avoidable predicament.
“No, I don’t,” he admitted, not wanting to cross Nera again. “She didn’t revere the gods. She practiced black magic … witchcraft! Surely you don’t take her side, beautiful sun goddess?”
“You called Brinsma beautiful many, many times … and yet you had her stoned to death. Is she still beautiful, King Ryzthar? Beautiful like me?”
The trick questions and the waves of heat now crashing through him from the stone made him sweat underneath his bear robe. He snatched his hands off the rock and wrung them fretfully, unable to stop the burning and itching.
“This was a mistake,” he mumbled.
Nera heard him just fine despite the four-pronged howl of Aurai.
“What was?” she ridiculed him. “Coming up here? Killing your queen over your lust for another? Casting away your first-born daughter, Marinde, so she could be turned into a sexual play toy for the depraved creatures who make a mockery of the beautiful, ancient temple … a temple dedicated to us?”
“Please stop!” Ryzthar shouted into the unrelenting gale.
“Yes, that’s right. That’s what your daughter screamed. When you were cozy in your castle, did you hear her cries from her underworld cell?”
Ryzthar looked down at his fallen staff and cursed himself loudly yet again.
“I want to thank you,” Nera said.
“Why?” he pleaded, gazing up again into the clouds, desperate for hope.
“For killing Volz Yth … he was such a disgrace to Mammyth, to all the gods really,” she said. “Rather, thank your guards for that. They killed him. You couldn’t quite finish the job.”
“I could have,” Ryzthar protested. “I let them finish him off. That’s their job.”
“And what is your job, your grace?” Nera toyed with him.
The king scowled at her tone.
“To rule this pile of rocks and keep you immortals happy,” he shouted at the stone. “A fuxing impossible task.”
“So jaded,” she said. “So ungrateful. So hopelessly incapable.”
Ryzthar shook his head and spat at the ground.
“Oh do fux off then. You think it’s easy being a mere mortal? I don’t need your immortal superiority ox shit!”
Nera laughed, her echo bouncing from boulder to boulder, up and down the summit cone.
The king, rattled by fear and anger, began to twitch.
“Still think I’m beautiful?” she asked. “No … now we’ve arrived at some truth.”
Ryzthar searched his shaken soul for some words, some courage.
“The truth is I should have believed in bloody witchcraft instead of you and your kind, goddess. Then maybe Brinsma would still be alive and I wouldn’t be up here acting like a simpering fool right now.”
“Believe whatever you want to believe and say whatever you want to say to suit your purpose … just like you always do,” the goddess said.
“The truth is betrayal and murder and abandonment of one’s heir, no matter the sex, are some heavy stones. Do take care not to get crushed.”
“Is that a threat?” he snapped.
Nera’s voice suddenly cranked up in speed and force to match the pummeling winds.
“You should be troubled, King Ryzthar. My son, Agan, appeared to your queen before her death and agreed to watch over your daughter. He watched and watched while you forgot and forgot about her, your own royal blood. He could not truly help her until the seers commenced with your sacrifice — we did not accept your sacrifice of her to us. That was another of your mistakes, and a very grave one indeed. Royal blood mixed with witch’s blood pooled with the powers of the blood god himself and backed by his mother, the goddess of the sun — Marinde is someone else now. Someone far more powerful, and she barely knows it yet.
“So if you came up here to ease your troubled mind, you came to the wrong place. And if you came up here for counsel, here it is: best stay out of my light or she will find you sooner.”
