I really wanted to say something here today, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. Haven't been feeling all that well. So, I decided to use this space and time to put out a little excerpt from my novel, Winter's Heart. This is the opening scene of the first chapter:


It was said that the Old Folk controlled the power of fire, among other things, but that was in the Long an Long Ago. Before that, the fathers of the Old Folk caught a spark with flint and steel and their own desire to live. It was also said that the world was a great wheel, and everything came round to what it once had been, and so Steven Boughmount knelt in the snow with rocks in his hands, trying to catch a flame. He was having little luck. Just over the low hills, beyond this scrub of forest, the village was warm and sleeping behind its wall.
That’s where I should be, Steven thought as he scraped the edge of one rock against the other. Not in bed, not yet, but stretched out in my chair with my feet up, a pipe smoking just right in my hand and Heather curled up beside me. The boys are all asleep, but maybe we’ll stay up for a while. Maybe we’ll move to the bedroom, maybe not. That’s where I should be, not up to my ass in snow trying to light a fire.
“C’mon, bastard,” he said, and drug the sharp edge of the rock in his right hand against the flat of the one in his left. A white spark flew, then died before it could reach the stripped branches and dried moss he had laid out on the frozen ground.
Snow crunched somewhere off to the left of him. Steven heard soft, bare footsteps. They were coming, all right. And they were in a hurry, running toward a village protected by two drunks on either side of a leaning gate. That was why Steven sat in the snow. When the Guards slept, the Hunters went to work. And what sounded like a whole clan of goblins was passing him by because he couldn’t get a damn fire lit.
Steven drew his sword. It was called Fangodoom, given to him by his mother just before she died. Fangodoom was a dwarf blade, of steel mined and forged deep within the Lyme Mountains centuries ago. Goblins near, the blade all but gleamed though there wasn’t any moon. Again he wondered if this would be the last time, and again he knew that if it was, it was. His hand turned into a fist on the hilt of his weapon, and he prayed.
“Lord, make me Your hammer.”
He heard the goblins stop short at the sound of his voice. He could hear their ragged breathing. They must have been running for a long time. He couldn’t help but wonder where they came from and why they were here outside Deadbuck, back end of the In-Betweens. What brought them here didn’t matter. They had come, and nothing stood between them and a sleeping village of good people but a stiff, frozen man with an antique blade, a man who couldn’t even light a fire. The beasts spoke words he couldn’t understand; arguing, it would seem. Then they broke cover and charged.
Fifteen of them, at least, but it was hard to count as they came, some on two legs and some running on all fours like wild dogs. A breed this small could be mistaken for a pack of dogs from a distance, and that had led to the extinction of more than one prairie village over the years. Their ragged, dirty coats were braided. Some had shaved part of the fur from their heads and had sideburns and mohawks. Their green eyes shimmered in the moonless night, each set locked on the human.
“That’s right,” Steven said through his teeth, switching Fangodoom from hand to hand as they closed on him. “Come on, then.” The goblins closed the distance and the leader struck at him with a stone blade. Steven broke left and rolled away from them as the night filled with thunder. From the tree above him, flares of fiery light perforated the darkness. Each flash illuminated a goblin falling dead to the forest floor, some part of his body disintegrating into a cloud of bloody mist and hairy gristle. They tried to break and flee, too late. It was over in seconds, as combat always was. The last gunshot echoed off into the hills and Steven walked the pack, finishing off any that were still alive with his blade.
“Gods curse a tree stand,” a voice said. Steven turned to watch a dark figure suspend himself from the branch of a bare old oak tree and drop into the snow. “My ass is killin me!” The man sprawled out in the snow and made an angel, then stood and dusted himself off.
“Good shooting, Glen,” Steven said.
“Aye, it was at that,” Glen Tillson said, crossing his arms and appraising their work. “An it’s a good thing, isn’t it, or where would you be? Fifteen goblins. Berds, from the look of ‘em. Aukwine’s silver nipples! What would you do without me?”
Steven was about to answer, but then he saw Glen’s eyes widen in the darkness. He fumbled with his rifle, but the barrel was caught up in the leather shoulder strap. Steven turned, sword raised by instinct, and met the long, curved blade of a goblin. The sound of their weapons locking resounded in the night. Before the monster could recover and deliver another blow, Steven thrust Fangodoom into his throat and he went gurgling into the Void where his kind slept with their foul gods.
“Sixteen,” Steven said, and squeezed his friend’s shoulder before he knelt in the snow to clean his blade.
“You an that damn butter knife of yours are gonna be the death of us both,” Glen said. “Now. Let’s see what kind of pay we got for our trouble.”
They gathered the bodies together and laid them out in a row on the snow. Each one would have to be inspected; whatever they carried would become the Hunters’ pay. If they didn’t have anything the Guild would give Steven and Glen a small sum for their services, but that amounted to nothing.
“It’s a shame they don’t make good meat,” Steven said, rolling away the body of a goblin who had left the world the same way he came in, naked and slick with blood. “If they did I’d have half as much to worry about.”
“Aye,” Glen said. “Old Clanhead once told me that if the meat was dried an cured into a jerky it was bearable, but you know how he is.”
Steven nodded. Old Clanhead was actually Robert Mills, a gentleman who claimed to be ninety and considered himself something of a village elder. He presided over Deadbuck from a stool in the Green Wheel, and by the best calculations of the men in town only about two out of every hundred things he said was worth listening to. Goblin jerky, they’d found out, was not one of the two.
“Berds,” Glen said, looking down on them. “It’s strange, isn’t it?”
“What?” Steven asked.
“Sir Tristan’s says Berds aren’t really far travelers, an they make their homes in the mountains,” Glen said. “I mean, we see plenty of Bungers an Nobbs round here, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Berd but the stuffed one in the Hall.”
Steven nodded. He knew Sir Tristan’s Bestiary as well as any other Hunter, and Glen was right. Berds were not known for extensive migrations, like some of the other goblin breeds. They were territorial, and very clan-driven. Home was home, and that was where they stayed, and the Carpenter help anyone who fell on them in their own backyard.
“Doesn’t matter, I suppose,” Glen said, dragging a body over to himself. This one was dressed, in a pair of shredded pants and a leather vest. Glen inspected the belt the goblin had carried his weapon in, discarded it, and on rolling him over discovered he also had a leather purse. “All right, here we go,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Come on, Phabos, daddy needs a new pair of... well, everything.”
Steven shook his head. It was because of scenes like this that the Guards and others referred to the Hunters as “Turr’s Vultures”, and looked down on them. Even though there was no one around to see it, he wished Glen would be a little more serious about his work.
Glen pulled the purse string, and at first he looked disappointed. Steven imagined the purse must hold nothing more than the usual gob-stuffs- jewelry wrought from bone, crow feathers, other worthless charms. But then he took hold of something, and the breath caught in his throat. He pulled it out.
“By all the gods,” Glen said, turning the object over in his hands.
Steven started to ask what it was, but then he saw and the words evaporated from his mouth. It was a small item, a kind of cylinder made of metal, colored red and blue. In white letters, the great letters of the Old Folk which men could still read if not understand, it said PIP-SEE.
From time to time Hunters like Steven and Glen came across artifacts like this one, things that came from the last Age and survived in the forgotten places of the world. Some were worthless, like the strange Plastik boxes that the Tecks said had once come alive and told stories, and some were priceless. This PIP-SEE cylinder, which was thought to contain a powerful elixir concocted by the Old Folk, fell into the latter category. Glen tossed it to Steven, who snatched it out of the air. It had a little weight to it.
“You keep that,” Glen said, and then held up his hands when Steven started to protest. “I never have any luck tryin to unload shit like that. You take it. I’m better off with cold, hard coin.”
Steven didn’t argue. He put the cylinder in his own bag. How did I get so lucky, he thought, to wind up with a friend like him? They both knew how much something like this was worth, and Glen just let him have it. Of course their Guildmaster knew how much something like this was worth as well, and he would most likely take it. That was his right. As the head of the Hunter’s Guild in Deadbuck, he oversaw everything; paying out money to the widows of men killed on a hunt, housing new members of the Guild until they could afford a place of their own, dolling out pensions to the old men (there were a few)who managed the great feat of retiring from the Guild.
“Steven,” Glen said, pulling him away from his thoughts. “Look here.” He pulled another purse out of the goblin’s bag, and something inside chinked in his hand as he hefted it. Not daring to speak, they looked at each other with naked hope in their eyes. Glen pulled the strings and the purse fell open, spilling gold coins out onto the snow. “By Phabos!” he said, scattering the coins out so he could count them. “Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty... thirty-one gold! Steven! Thirty-one gold!”
“I see it, Glen.”
Glen rushed over to another one of the bodies, one that was dressed, and pulled a purse from that corpse as well. Not bothering to open it, he tossed it over by the small pile of gold coins. It landed with a musical thud, crunching into the hard crust of the snow. Soon there was a whole stack of leather purses laying there. Each of the Berds that was dressed was carrying one; nine in all. The two men stared down at them, not daring to imagine that each of them held what the first one had. But when they pulled them open each one let out its own small flood of coins.
“Phabos,” Glen said again. “Do we even dare count it up, Steven?”
“There’s no point,” Steven said. “Let’s just gather it up an let Mister Ashley worry about the counting. In the end we might end up with the first thirty-one that you found.”
Mister Ashley was their Guildmaster. He would tally up their bounty and take the Guild Dues from it, and then pay them. Fair was fair and right was right, after all. Steven and Glen had both lived off the Guild for a time, when they were young and starting out. Some other Hunter had given of his earnings that they might eat back then. Now it was their turn.
But Steven looked at his friend’s face and saw that he had something else in mind.
“We can’t just give it up,” Glen said.
“What?”
Glen looked over at him, and there was a glint in his eye that Steven knew all too well. When they were children, that look usually resulted in one of them breaking a limb or taking a beating from his da when he got home. A sense of dread (and excitement, yes- there’s no fool like an old fool) settled over Steven. “We can’t just give it up,” Glen said again. “This is the biggest bounty we’ve ever seen. Maybe even the biggest in any village in all of the In-Betweens. Do ya get? An you wanna just take all this in to Ashley an let him have it? Shit on that, Steven. This is too big.”
“The Carpenter says it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven,” Steven said. “I don’t know what a camel was, but I get His words nonetheless.”
“Shit on your Jesus man, too,” Glen said. “Phabos says take what you can in this life, for it comes a high price to be seated at my table. We’re takin this. Ashley can have his Dues outta one of these purses. The rest is for us.”
“Have you lost your damn mind?” Steven said. He couldn’t even begin to believe what his old friend was suggesting. Glen opened his mouth to say something, but Steven rushed on. “You want to try an pull somethin over on Mister Ashley. That’s what you’re sayin, right? You an me are gonna fool the Master of the Hunter’s Guild. Wake up, Glen. Better men than us have tried.”
“He’s an old shit an he don’t see everything,” Glen said, but there was little conviction in his voice now.
“I know how you feel,” Steven said. “I saw all that gold, and it crossed my mind too. But remember Palmer, Glen. Fat Palmer got himself wheeled out of Deadbuck with two shattered legs, an counted himself lucky at that. Do you wanna end up that way? I know I don’t.”
“It was you I was thinkin about,” Glen said. Steven cocked his head, looking at Glen in the dark. “You’ve got a family, after all. An Year End is comin soon.”
A flash, a memory like a falling star, shot through Steven’s mind. Him standing in the dark aisle between the pews in the church his father had built, a church dedicated to a god no one believed in. Kurt Boughmount died without giving his family the thing Steven now wanted for his; Christmas. It was a celebration of the birth of Jesus, coinciding with the relatively newer feasting day of Year End. As Kurt told it to his son, there was a great feast of turkey and stuffing and all the trimmings, and an evergreen tree trimmed in silver and gold, and gifts wrapped in satin paper. All of that was a lot more than a simple carpenter could afford, even after the best year he ever had. Steven remembered standing there in the empty church, his father just buried in the wet spring earth. He remembered making a promise to give his family the Christmas his father always dreamed of.
As it turned out, Christmas was also a lot more than a Hunter could afford, even during an exceptional year. But now it’s possible, Steven thought, looking down at all that gold. If we split that right down the middle my share would be more than I brought home in the last two years together.
“No one else knew they were comin, Steven,” Glen said. “I wouldn’t have known about it either if I hadn’t been upland to visit Gilbert yesterday.”
Steven gave his friend a withering look. Gilbert wasn’t a member of any Guild. He claimed to make his living brewing ale and stilling whiskey, but villages were small places and everyone knew he made his money selling pipe weed.
“All right,” Glen said. “I was up there drinkin his ‘shine with him, okay? I saw the goblins camped out in the grasslands. Hard to miss ‘em in all that snow. So I came an got you, an here we are. Standin on top of a gold mine!”
Steven looked at the purses of gold coins.
“Ashley doesn’t know shit about this,” Glen said. “I’ll go in to the Guild in the morning an report the hunt, bring him out to inspect the bodies. Everything proper. He’ll ask about the bounty an I’ll give him a purse. He’ll probably take more than half of it, an think himself very well off from the deal. We keep the rest. We don’t say anything. An that will be that. All I ask is that you let me have a drumstick at Christmas dinner. Deal?”
A long moment of silence passed. What Glen suggested was dangerous. Dangerous and stupid. But there was a whole heap of good money laying in the snow at his feet, and when he thought of the things he could with it-
“Deal,” Steven said.
Glen clapped him on the shoulder.
They gathered up their spoils.