Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery

by Bryn Hammond, Dariel R. A. Quiogue

Two novellas, bound in one book. Mongol-inspired Sword & Sorcery. A claustrophobic, pressure-cooker siege, and a caravan striking out under an open desert sky. Orhan the Snow Leopard and Goatskin the nomad.

WALLS OF SHIRA YULUN by Dariel R.A. Quiogue.
Feat. cover art by Artyom Trakhanov, and interior illustration by Simon Underwood.
Driven to keep an old promise, whatever the cost … trapped in a besieged city, hunted by foes within and without … tormented by a dark shaman using the spirits of those he has slain … Orhan Timur, the Snow Leopard, is brought to bay! Can he escape the imprisoning Walls of Shira Yulun?

&

WASTE FLOWERS by Bryn Hammond.
Feat. cover art by Goran Gligović, and interior illustration by Linnea Sterte.
Goatskin the goat nomad and her bandit love Sister Chaos guide merchants from Samarkand across the Gobi desert to the Mongols. But their caravan veers from one weird assault to weirder and worse. Who is behind this grotesquerie? Will they lose their way, or even their very minds?

Genres: Fantasy, Sword and Sorcery

190 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2025

About the author

Bryn Hammond lives in a coastal town in Australia, where she likes to write while walking in the sea. She grew up on ancient and medieval epics, the Arthur cycle original and modern, nineteenth-century novelists, particularly Russian and French, and out-of-fashion poets, namely Algernon Swinburne.

Always a writer – to the neglect of other paths in life that might have been more sensible – she found the perfect story in The Secret History of the Mongols, a thirteenth-century prose and verse account of Chinggis Khan. Her Amgalant series is a version and interpretation of this original. Voices from the Twelfth-Century Steppe is her craft essay, a case study of creative engagement with a primary source.

Other work in The Knot Wound Round Your Finger (Bell Press), Ergot., Queer Weird West Tales (LIBRAtiger), New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine.

Reviews

[Nathan Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a wondrous object.

Physically it's handsome and clever, with colorful covers on both sides, one for each story, so that, when you've finished one, you flip it over to read the other. What makes it wondrous is the selection of stories, and what, with their selection, publisher Oliver Brackenbury is saying about the depth and breadth of what can be considered Sword and Sorcery. For, despite using a very similar setting, and featuring characters inspired by the same historical figures, these are two very different tales–one a sword, the other sorcery.

Walls of Shira Yulun by Dariel R.A. Quioque is a story as hard and sharp as a sword, and direct as a stab in the gut. Tightly plotted and swiftly paced, with a tough hero pushed to his limits by blackest sorcery, physical exhaustion, and the conflicting demands of personal honor, it is told with the bracing two-fisted style of the revered masters of the genre. It promises thrills, mayhem, and valor, and delivers with heart, wit, and style.

Waste Flowers by Bryn Hammond is an incantation, a hypnotizing poem of hard people finding ways to survive and make joy for themselves in a harder world, filled with sentences like treasure chests–sometimes challenging to open, but always with jewels inside. Its story is a meander, with stops for action and battle, yes, but also for story telling, flirting, and philosophizing. Its heroes are tough, but sweetly human, and a delight to sit around a campfire with, and when you finish the book and wake from its spell, all you want is to go back.

Together, these two delicious stories tell us that the genre of Sword and Sorcery is as deep and wide as the endless trackless steppe, and just as exciting to explore.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two sword and sorcery novellas bound in one book, inspired by the old Ace Doubles format. In this case, both stories use Mongolian settings.

I read Bryn Hammond's contribution Waste Flowers in advance and thought it was amazing. I interviewed the author here.

I haven't yet read Dariel Quiogue's Walls of Shira Yulun, but I've heard good things, enjoyed this author's short fiction elsewhere, and am quite looking forward to it.

[Luana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Styled after the Ace Doubles of yore, this two-novella bundle consists of Dariel Quiogue's Walls of Shira Yulun and Bryn Hammond's Waste Flowers, a stylistically disparate duo of alt-history visions of the Great Khan, Chingis born Temujin.

In Quiogue's story, we follow the Chingis equivalent Orhan Timur, the Snow Leopard, hunted by his treacherous blood brother and many others beside as he races to save an old ally in a city beset by forces - darkest of ironies - with the same goals as Orhan's own.

This is the longest Quiogue work I've read, and he continues in the muscular Robert E. Howard style of direct, meat and potatoes prose with a focus on speed, impact and whatever the next bloody complication turns out to be. I would be remiss not to mention Charles R. Saunders here as well, since I've not read any sword & sorcery since the Imaro series that gave me such absolutely gross shithead wizards I couldn't wait to get got.

No Chingis analogue in Waste Flowers, Bryn Hammond's tale of a caravan beset by strange and deadly forces. The alt-history here is in the world, not the man, as ghouls, ghosts and animated dinosaur bones menace our heroic duo Goatskin and Qi Miao. While Chingis is not the physical main character of this story, his actions and presence loom large over every action taken, every conversation had. Where Quiogue's prose is direct and brutal, Hammond's indulges in asides and curlicues befitting the wide-sprawling steppe the heroines travel and the elaborate rituals in which they engage. Hope Mirrlees, horse archer, if you will. Hammond is somewhat of a Mongol scholar and I must say that, beyond the topless post coital zombie-fighting I was treated to, "Waste Flowers" probably taught me more of the steppe than I ever knew in my life before this. A spoonful of sugar for the historical medicine, indeed...

Though the shift in styles made for a slightly awkward transition (not unlike starting a new game after having spent 100 hours acclimating to the controls of a previous one), Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery is what I hope to be the first of a successful line of tête-bêche publications for Brackenbury Books.

[Albert Marsden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two books for the price of one

[Nicholas Perez]

I personally take credit for suggesting the purple sprayed edges of this. Oliver, if you see this credit me.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review is for the Dariel R.A. Quiogue half. Walls of Shira Yulun. This is a tale of Orhan Timur, and by the four winds, it may be the best one yet. If you are familiar with the character, we know The Snow Leopard can sack a city, but is his battle craft honed enough to defend one? Read this gem to figure out the answer. P.s the physical book itself is absolutely beautiful.

[Julie Bozza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waste Flowers = sheer bloody poetry! Ninety astonishments, and again ninety more!

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two long-form stories of swords and sorcery, with vividly drawn characters, and strongly flavored by Chinese and Mongol history and myth.

The Snow Leopard story, The Walls of Shira Yulun was my favorite, and I’m definitely going to check out more of Dariel R. A. Quiogue’s otger works.

The Waste Flowers had some great world building, and I enjoyed the characters of Goatskin and Qi Miao, but for some reason the tale didn’t grab me as hard. Still good, and fun, but not as compelling.

I will echo other reviewers comments on the physical production - this is a well made book that definitely feels like an artifact from the 1970s, down to the purple dyed edges of the pages. The cover art is also good, especially the Walls of Shira Yulun cover (I’m a sucker for historically themed art).

[E.M. White · Rating 5 out of 5]

Any friends and readers who are familiar with my tastes probably aren't surprised I gave five stars to this dual novella of two stories set in (or inspired by) the Mongolian steppe during Chinggis Khan's early rise to power. I'm not unfamiliar with the authors' stories nor with their chosen subject matter, as my recent interview with both Bryn Hammond and Dariel R.A. Quiogue likely suggests, nor is this even the first time I've interviewed Bryn Hammond. I think this is all worth mentioning because as clear as it is that these authors already have my buy-in as a reader, I think I also have something new to say about their work here. What really struck me about these novellas is that the authors, beyond writing riveting stories in settings that are quite fascinating to me, have succeeded at writing marginalized characters with a dignity that's rarely been afforded to them in either mainstream histories or popular historical fiction.

Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery is billed as two sword & sorcery novellas bound in one volume, suggesting readers are in two stories that draw upon historical inspiration but mainly give us fast-paced action and high-if-largely-personal stakes. And this is true to an extent. Once Orhan Timur has spent enough time behind the besieged city's walls in Quiogue's (The Walls of Shira Yulun), we do to experience the "pressure-cooker siege" playing out as advertised. And while the title of Hammond's (Waste Flowers) seems to suggest a gentler tale, its party of protagonists meets plenty of perils, realistic and fantastic, as they cross the Gobi Desert.

Still, as much as the sword & sorcery genre has its reputation for sabre-rattling action, these novellas both depart from that convention with considerably more dialogue than average and sometimes lengthy asides. Orhan, before his pressure-cooking experience comes to a boil (sorry), ponders for a good while the steppe politics that have put him in his situation and led to so much suffering for others. Hammond's tale takes even more liberties of the sort, with her band of nomads (ragtag even by their context's standards) exchanging sometimes voluminous knowledge of the empires that oppress and marginalize them, and of the histories of steppe tribes who have either resisted subjugation by these empires or reluctantly accepted their terms. I like history and exposition considerably better than the average sword & sorcery reader does, and even I was surprised by these writing decisions at times. I spent a good while wondering whether these novellas are effectively genre-blending experiments in marrying historical fiction with adventure fantasy tales—until I realized there was something else going on here.

Partway through Waste Flowers (I chose to read this one second), the protagonists—ones with rather humble origins, for the most part—were discussing the Tang Dynasty's historical descent from a cosmopolitan state into a xenophobic one (especially towards their region's nomadic tribes). I was surprised at first; but then it hit me: These steppe nomads are historically and politically conscious.

This shouldn't have surprised me, I realized. I'd caught myself wondering how the protagonists of Waste Flowers were storing so much detailed historical information in their heads without the benefit of writing (or at least having regular access to writing implements). But there's something chauvinistic in this view, isn't it? It's popularly thought that literacy is what enables a people to accumulate historical memory, and writing on the steppe had been minimal by Chinggis Khan's time. Yet oral histories do exist and are robust. I recalled my readings from anthropology courses, electives I dabbled in here and there. In that field, it's been well documented by now how "pre-literate" communities can and do transmit and retain extensive information over the generations, in large part through storytelling. Information communicated narratively is better remembered. Narrative, plus music and lyrics, are humanity's oldest information-encoding technologies. The Iliad was once recited in full, not coincidentally in verse, at a time when the ancient Greeks had largely fallen out of the practice of writing.

If this is a little hard to believe, it's likely because we (here in "civilization") have enjoyed writing as an information-recording tool for so long that we've forgotten what it's like not to offload our capacities for storing and recalling information. But "pre-literate" people—including many in the Central Asian steppe of Chinggis Khan's time—didn't have the luxury of having written documents store their memories for them. They had to do their remembering, their recalling, their storytelling actively in whatever downtime they had while hunting, gathering, and herding. And they would've had this downtime. A large part of managing herds is watching the herds; a large part of guiding herds and clans to new pasture is traveling. Having this downtime and lacking modern-day distractions to fill it with, what would these steppe people have done if not tell stories, sometimes in song and poetry?

I think a good argument can be made, too, that these people's storytelling would've frequently been political. David Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (even with its flaws), and other recent historical scholarship highlights how the Mongols and their contemporaries, though popularly thought of as rapacious conquerors, were for the most part the underdogs of their day. In the best of times, they got to function as intermediary merchants and caravaneers (and sell their animal products) for the settled empires surrounding them; at worst, they were treated as a border menace or pestilence that had to be managed. The Mongols, immediately prior to Chinggis Khan's rise, were marginalized even compared to other steppe tribes. I mention all of this because people tell stories for the times they're living in.

With all of this context, I can readily imagine the subjects of Hammond and Quiogue's stories extensively storytelling and reflecting on their political situations, remembering conflict and repression through oral tradition across generations. Hammond and Quiogue seem to agree, having written politically and historically conscious rather than violent brutes (though their protagonists are not unfamiliar with violence—such was the time and place they were living in). Despite the biases of mainstream histories in favour of literate, settled societies, then, Hammond and Quiogue's work reminds readers (somewhat patient readers, at least) that there no single lifestyle or form of civilization is a prerequisite to living with dignity and intelligence. It's on this basis, most of all, that I recommend these paired novellas—though readers seeking adventure stories tinged with history and fantasy will certainly get something out of them, too.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I backed the crowdfunding of this book.

This is a new (2025) book with an old-school aesthetic. A double novella complete with inked page edges. The production of the paperback copy triggered a nostalgia for an era that largely pre-dates even me, but that I experienced some from used book stores. I'm reviewing the two novellas in the order I read them followed by a few comments on the book as a whole:


Waste Flowers by Bryn Hammond

This Novella of Goatskin, and her lover Qi Miao aka Sister Chaos, takes place in the time of Tchingis Khan, and this tale revolves around a quest to visit his court. There’s plenty of fantastical obstacles along the way to be dealt with in this sword & sorcery adventure that mixes history and fantasy.


Walls of Shira Yulun by Dariel R. A. Quiogue

Another tale around Temujin aka Chinggis Khan aka Genghis Khan, except that in the Snow Leopard stories he is the protagonist, has lost a power struggle to his blood brother, and is now an exile known as Orhan Timur aka the Snow Leopard. Here he sets off to fulfill an oath he made as the Khan that leads to a tale of military conflict and a confrontation with an old foe.


Both stories feature a mix of sword & sorcery action and were quite enjoyable. Bryn Hammond’s writing style has taken a while to grow on me, but this novella length tale was what I needed for it to finally click with me. So much so that I went back and re-read the couple of Goatskin short stories that I have. Dariel R. A. Quiogue remains one of my current favorite authors with this novella.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A little gimmicky - like one of those old sci-fi/fantasy books with two stories that you have to flip over in order to read the other one - but still pretty cool. Two Mongol-inspired fantasies - "Waste Flowers" by Bryn Hammond and "The Walls of Shira Yulun" by Dariel R.A. Quiogue. The first tells the story of a trip across steppe in search of Tchingis Khan, with a protagonist named Goatskin (after her jacket), facing undead monsters and such along the way. There is a level of erudition about Mongol history that is impressive, though it sometimes slightly impeded enjoyment of the story (a lesson for me in my own writing!). The second, a story of Orhan Timur, "the Snow Leopard," tells the story of a person trapped in a besieged town that he would actually like to see fall, but he's trapped inside and trying to save loved ones in the town. There is an evil shaman trying to kill him with some really vile sorcery, and its pretty cool. I'd definitely like to read more stories of both characters, but especially the Snow Leopard, I think, which was a bit more approachable. Awesome stuff!

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book (2 novellas by separate authors, like an old Ace Double) in advance, last year.

The Walls of Shira Yulun by Dariel Quiogue follows Orhan Timur, a character inspired by Genghis Khan. An oath has him facing impossible odds against an army and a shaman. Victory and defeat meld in this gripping yarn of the steppe, inspired by ancient Mongolia but enchanted with dark sorcery. Fans of Robert E. Howard and Harold Lamb will enjoy!

The other novella, Waste Flowers by Bryn Hammond, is more lyrical. This follows Goatskin as she goes with a caravan across the Gobi Desert to see Tchingis Khan. Goatskin is a great outsider, and here she approaches a liminal space rife with strangeness. Quite a journey, physically, sliritually, and emotionally.