You may know of my love for everything Malazan by now. I wrote a
love letter to Steve (in a way) and it's become the highest-viewed post on the blog. In fact, it continues to be a top view each week.
After completing the main, ten volume series I even declared it's better than George R.R. Martin's
A Song of Ice and Fire series, and that's saying something (not that one NEEDS to be better than the other - friends forever hug!).
Then of course I can't be more excited that not only is Erikson writing two more Malazan trilogies, one that he's already started with Forge of Darkness, and not only is Ian Cameron Esslemont just about to finish off his six book series, but Erikson continues to write these ridiculously awesome novellas surrounding Bauchalain and Korbal Broach.
These novellas are probably the most accessible of all of Erikson's work, so they're not a terrible place to start though the action is quite a bit different from his main series. Just a few days ago, the fifth novella came out,
The Wurms of Blearmouth, and I have an excerpt to share in just a bit.
First, the giveaway.
Tor has offered to give
three copies of
The Wurms of Blearmouth to three random entrants.
If you would like to enter, please follow the exceedingly simple instructions below:
- Email your name and address to: onlythebestsff@[remove this]gmail.com
- As the subject, write
"Wurms? What's a wurm? Oh a Wurm..."
- Snarky comments get you extra entries for future giveaways (and make reading entries much more entertaining on my end)
- US only **ducks rotten fruit**
- This giveaway ends a week from today
The excerpt:
The Wurms of Blearmouth
By
Steven Erikson
Tor
Books
Hardcover:
978-0-7653-2426-9
$24.99
U.S. | 208 Pages
Excerpt: Pages 7-16
“Behold!” Arms spread wide and braced against the wind, Lord Fangatooth Claw
the Render paused and glanced back at Scribe Coingood. “See how this bold perch
incites me to declamation, Scribe?” His narrow, hawkish features darkened. “Why
are you not writing?”
Scribe Coingood wiped a drip from his nose, worked his numb fingers for a
moment, and then scratched out the one word onto the tablet. Here atop the high
tower, it was so cold that the wax on the tablet had chipped and flaked beneath
the polished bone point of his scribe. He could barely make out the word he had
just written, and the biting ice in his eyes didn’t help matters. Squinting
against the buffeting wind, he hunched down, pulling tighter his furs, but that
did nothing to ease his shivering.
He cursed his own madness that had brought him to West Elingarth’s Forgotten
Holding. He also cursed this insane sorcerer for whom he now worked. He cursed
this rotting keep and its swaying tower. He cursed the town below: Spendrugle
of Blearmouth was a hovel, its population cowering under the tyranny of its new
lord. He cursed the abominable weather of this jutting spur of land, thrashed
by the wild ocean on three sides on most days, barring those times when the
wind swung round to howl its way down from the north, cutting across the
treeless blight that stretched inland all the way to yet another storm-wracked
ocean, six days distant. He cursed his mother, and the time when he was seven
and looked in on his sister’s room and saw things—oh, what was the point? There
were plenty of reasons a man had to curse, and with infernal intimacy he knew
most of them.
His dreams of wealth and privilege had suffered the fate of a lame hare on
the Plain of Wolves, chewed up and torn to bits; and the wind had long since taken
away those tattered remnants: the tufts of blood-matted fur, the wisps of white
throat-down, and the well-gnawed splinters of bone. All of it gone, scattered
across the blasted landscape of his future.
Chewing on the end of his graver, Coingood considered setting that
description down in his secret diaries.
A lame hare on the Plain of Wolves.
Yes, that’s me all right … was that me or my dreams, that hare? Never
mind, it’s not like there’s a difference. Not when he was huddled here atop
the tower, miserably subject to his lord’s whim, and Hood knew, a manic,
eye-gleaming whim it was.
“Have you written it down now, Scribe? Gods below, if I’d known you were so
slow I would never have hired you! Tell me, what did I say? I’ve forgotten.
Read it back, damn you!”
“M-m-master, y’said … er … ‘Behold!’”
“Is that it? Didn’t I say anything more?”
“S-s-something ’bout a bold p-p-perch, M-m-milord.”
Lord Fangatooth waved one long-fingered, skeletal hand. “Never mind that.
I’ve told you about my asides. They’re just that. Asides. Where was I?”
“‘Behold!’”
The lord faced outward again, defiant against the roaring seas, and struck a
pose looming ominously over the town. “Behold! Oh, and note my widespread arms
as I face this wild, whore-whipped sea. Oh, and that wretched town directly
below, and how it kneels quivering like an abject slave. Note, too, the grey
skies, and that fierce colour of … grey. What else? Fill the scene, fool!”
Coingood started scratching furiously on the tablet.
Watching him, Fangatooth made circular, tumbling motions with one hand.
“More! Details! We are in the throes of creativity here!”
“I b-b-beg you, m-m-milord, I’m j-j-just a s-s-scribe, n-n-not a poet!”
“Anyone who can write has all the qualifications necessary for artistic
genius! Now, where was I? Oh, right. Behold!” He fell silent, and after a long,
quivering moment, he slowly lowered his arms. “Well,” he said. “That will do
for now. Go below, Scribe, and stoke up the fires and the implements of
torture. I feel in need of a visit to my beloved brother.”
Coingood hobbled his way to the trapdoor.
“Next time I say ‘Behold!’,” Fangatooth said behind him, “don’t interrupt!”
“I w-w-won’t, M-m-milord. P-p-promise!”
* * *
“There he was again!” Felittle hissed through chattering teeth. “You seen him
too, didn’t you? Say you did! It wasn’t just me! Up on that tower, arms out to
the sides, like a … like a … like a mad sorcerer!”
Spilgit Purrble, deposed Factor of the Forgotten Holding yet still trapped
in the town of Spendrugle of Blearmouth, at least until winter’s end, peered
across at the young woman now struggling to close the door to his closet-sized
office. Snow had melted and then refrozen across the threshold. He’d need to
take a sword to that at least one more time, so that he could officially close
up for the season and retreat back to the King’s Heel. As it was, his last day
maintaining any kind of office for the backstabbing mob ruling the distant
capital and, ostensibly, all of Elingarth, promised to be a cold one.
Even the arrival of Felittle, here in these crowded confines, with her soft
red cheeks and the overdone carmine paint on her full lips, and those huge eyes
so expansive in their blessed idiocy, could do little to defeat the insipid icy
draught pouring in past her from around the mostly useless door. Spilgit sighed
and reached for his tankard. “I’ve warmed rum in that kettle, mixed with some
wine and crushed blackgem berries. Would you like some?”
“Ooh!” She edged forward, her quilted coat smelling of smoke, ale and her
mother’s eye-watering perfume that Spilgit privately called
Whore Sweat—not
that he’d ever utter that out loud. Not if he wanted to get what he wanted from
this blissful child in a woman’s body. And most certainly never to that vicious
hag’s face. While Felittle’s mother already despised him, she’d not yet refused
his coin and he needed to keep it that way for a few more months, assuming he
could find a way of stretching his fast-diminishing resources. After
that …
Felittle was breathing fast as Spilgit collected the kettle from its hook
above the brazier and poured out a dollop into the cup she’d taken down from
the shelf beside the door. He considered again the delicious absence of guilt
that accompanied his thoughts of stealing Felittle away from her tyrant of a mother;
away from this miserable village that stank of fish all summer and stank of the
people eating that fish all winter; away from her mother’s whores and the
sordid creatures that crawled into the King’s Heel every day eager for more of
the old wick-dipping from that gaggle of girls only a blind man would find
attractive, at least until the poor fool’s probing fingers broke through the
powdery sludge hiding their pocked faces. Away, then, and away most of all,
from that deranged sorcerer who’d usurped his own brother to carve out, in
broken bones, spilled blood and the screaming of endless victims, his private
version of paradise.
Oh, there was no end to the horrors of this place, but Lord Fangatooth Claw
sat atop them all like a king on a throne. How Spilgit hated sorcerers!
“You’re still shivering, darling,” he said to Felittle. “Drink that down and
have another, and come closer. Now, with only this one chair, well, sit on my
lap again, will you. That’s surely one way to get warm.”
She giggled, swinging her not-ungenerous backside onto him and then leaning
back with one arm snaking round the back of his neck. “If Mother saw this,
she’d hack off your mast and roast it on a fire till it was burnt crisp!”
“But my sweetheart, are we not dressed? Is this not entirely proper, given
the cold and the cramped conditions of this office?”
“Oh, and who else do you do this with?”
“No one, of course, since you are the only person to ever visit me.”
She eyed him suspiciously, but he knew it to be an act, since she well knew
that he entertained only her. Felittle missed nothing in this village. She was
its eyes and ears and, most of all, its mouth, and it was remarkable to Spilgit
that such a mouth could find fuel to race without surcease day after day, night
upon night. There were barely two hundred people in Spendrugle, and not one of
them could be said to be leading exciting lives. Perhaps there was a sort of
cleverness in Felittle, after all, in the manner of her soaking in everything
that it was possible to know in Spendrugle, and then spewing it all back out
with impressive accuracy.
Indeed, she might well possess the wit to match
a … a …
“Blackgem berries make me squirt, you know.”
“Excuse me?”
“Squirt water, of course! What else would I squirt? What a dirty mind you have!”
… sea-sponge? “Well, I didn’t know that. I mean, how could I, since
it’s such a … well, a private thing.”
“Not for much longer,” she said, taking another mouthful.
Spilgit frowned, only now feeling the unusual warmth in his lap. “You call
that a squirt?”
“Well,” she said, “it’s just that it got me all excited!”
“Really? Oh, then should we—”
“Not you, silly! Fangatooth! On the tower, with his arms spread wide like I
said!”
“Alas, I didn’t see any of that, Felittle. Busy as I was in here, putting
things in order and all. Even so, for the life of me I can’t see what it was
that excited you about such a scene. He does that most mornings, after all.”
“I know that, but this morning it was different. Or at least I thought it
was.”
“Why?”
“Well,” she paused to drink down the rum, gusted out a sweet sigh, and then
made a small sound. “Oop, it’s all going now, isn’t it?”
Spilgit felt the heat spreading in his crotch, and then his thighs as it
pooled in the chair. “Ah, yes…”
“Anyway,” she continued, “I thought he was looking at the wreck, you see?
But I don’t think he was. I mean—”
“Hold on, darling. A moment. What wreck?”
“Why, the one in the bay, of course! Arrived last night! You don’t know
anything!”
“Survivors?”
She shrugged. “Nobody’s been down to look yet. Too cold.”
“Gods below!” Spilgit pushed her from his lap. He rose. “I need to change.”
“You look like you peed yourself! Hah hah!”
He studied her for a moment, and then said, “We’re heading down, darling. To
that wreck.”
“Really? But we’ll freeze!”
“I want to see it. You can come with me, Felittle, or you can run back to
your ma.”
“I don’t know why you two hate each other. She only wants what’s best for
me. But I want to do what her girls do, and why not? It’s a living, isn’t it?”
“You’re far too beautiful for that,” Spilgit said.
“That’s what she says!”
“And she’s right, on that we’re agreed. The thing we don’t agree on is what
your future is going to look like. You deserve better than this horrible little
village, Felittle. She’d as much as chain you down if she thought she could get
away with it. It’s all about her, what she wants you to do for her. Your ma’s
getting old, right? Needing someone to take care of her, and she’ll make you a
spinster if you let her.”
Her eyes were wide, her breaths coming fast. “Then you’ll do it?”
“What?”
“Steal me away!”
“I’m a man of my word. Come the spring, darling, we’ll swirl the sands,
flatten the high grasses and flee like the wind.”
“Okay, I’ll go with you!”
“I know.”
“No, down to the wreck, silly!”
“Right, my little sea-sponge. Wait here, then. I need go back to the Heel
and change … unless you need to do the same?”
“No, I’m fine! If I go back Ma will see me and find something for me to do.
I’ll wait here. I wasn’t wearing knickers anyway.”
Well, that explains it, doesn’t it. Oh darling, you’re my kind of woman.
Except for the peeing bit, that is.
Copyright © 2012 by Steven Erikson
If you would like to enter, please follow the exceedingly simple instructions below:
- Email your name and address to: onlythebestsff@[remove this]gmail.com
- Write "Magician's Don't Kit " in the subject line (or something that lets me know what you're entering)
- Remember, this is NOT the book, The Magician's Land, only a teaser package
- Snarky comments get you extra entries for future giveaways (and make reading entries much more entertaining)
- US only (don't hate the messenger!)
- This giveaway ends a week from today
- See more at: http://onlythebestscifi.blogspot.com/2014/05/giveaway-magicians-kit-in-preparation.html#sthash.hzj2wfT0.dpuf
If you would like to enter, please follow the exceedingly simple instructions below:
- Email your name and address to: onlythebestsff@[remove this]gmail.com
- Write "Magician's Don't Kit " in the subject line (or something that lets me know what you're entering)
- Remember, this is NOT the book, The Magician's Land, only a teaser package
- Snarky comments get you extra entries for future giveaways (and make reading entries much more entertaining)
- US only (don't hate the messenger!)
- This giveaway ends a week from today
- See more at: http://onlythebestscifi.blogspot.com/2014/05/giveaway-magicians-kit-in-preparation.html#sthash.hzj2wfT0.dpuf
If you would like to enter, please follow the exceedingly simple instructions below:
- Email your name and address to: onlythebestsff@[remove this]gmail.com
- Write "Magician's Don't Kit " in the subject line (or something that lets me know what you're entering)
- Remember, this is NOT the book, The Magician's Land, only a teaser package
- Snarky comments get you extra entries for future giveaways (and make reading entries much more entertaining)
- US only (don't hate the messenger!)
- This giveaway ends a week from today
- See more at: http://onlythebestscifi.blogspot.com/2014/05/giveaway-magicians-kit-in-preparation.html#sthash.hzj2wfT0.dpuf
If you would like to enter, please follow the exceedingly simple instructions below:
- Email your name and address to: onlythebestsff@[remove this]gmail.com
- Write "Magician's Don't Kit " in the subject line (or something that lets me know what you're entering)
- Remember, this is NOT the book, The Magician's Land, only a teaser package
- Snarky comments get you extra entries for future giveaways (and make reading entries much more entertaining)
- US only (don't hate the messenger!)
- This giveaway ends a week from today
- See more at: http://onlythebestscifi.blogspot.com/2014/05/giveaway-magicians-kit-in-preparation.html#sthash.hzj2wfT0.dpuf
If you would like to enter, please follow the exceedingly simple instructions below:
- Email your name and address to: onlythebestsff@[remove this]gmail.com
- Write "Magician's Don't Kit " in the subject line (or something that lets me know what you're entering)
- Remember, this is NOT the book, The Magician's Land, only a teaser package
- Snarky comments get you extra entries for future giveaways (and make reading entries much more entertaining)
- US only (don't hate the messenger!)
- This giveaway ends a week from today
- See more at: http://onlythebestscifi.blogspot.com/2014/05/giveaway-magicians-kit-in-preparation.html#sthash.hzj2wfT0.dpuf
was probably my least favorite of Esslemont's books and Esslemont's are generally lower on the totem pole than Erikson's main Malazan series, so I guess what I'm saying is this might make for my least favorite Malazan book. Luckily for this book, the Malazan series is arguably my all-time favorite series so this book still rates higher than almost all books ever.
There are few books you put down and immediately want to reread. Gardens of the Moon[US] [UK] is one of those books for two reasons. One, it's that good. Two, it's that confusing.
I started reading The Malazan Book of the Fallen just over four years ago, so finishing the final book of this ten volume epic is kind of a big deal for me. It's been a big part of my life in fact and it's odd to be at the end even though I know there are plenty more to go.
