Soul Stealers: The Clockwork Vampire Chronicles, Book 2 - Softcover

Buch 2 von 3: The Clockwork Vampire Chronicles

Remic, Andy

 
9780857660671: Soul Stealers: The Clockwork Vampire Chronicles, Book 2
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0857660675 ISBN 13: 9780857660671
Verlag: Angry Robot, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

THE CLOCKWORK VAMPIRES THIRST FOR BLOOD-OIL. The land of Falanor has fallen. The renegade hero Kell is being hunted by the machine-vampires, the Vachine. On his way to recruit reinforcements to launch the counter-attack, the mighty hero finds himself the prey of two beautiful but deadly vampire assassins. Their bronze fangs are coming for him.

File Under: Epic Fantasy [ A Land Despoiled | A Dangerous Hero | Campire Assassins | Blood-Oil! ]

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andy Remic is a British writer with a love of ancient warfare, mountain climbing and sword fighting. Once a member of the Army of Iron, he has since retired from a savage world of blood-oil magick and gnashing vachines, and works as an underworld smuggler of rare dog-gems in the seedy districts of Falanor. In his spare time, he writes out his fantastical adventures.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

SOUL STEALERS, BY ANDY REMIC
Book 2 of The Clockwork Vampire Chronicles

PROLOGUE
Soul Stealers.
 
It was an ink-dark dream. A razor flashback. A frozen splinter of time piercing his mind like a sterile needle. Nienna, beautiful Nienna, his sweet young granddaughter; they stood by the edge of a wide, sweeping river, spring sunshine warming upturned faces and glinting like diamonds amongst swaying reeds. Kell was teaching her how to fish, and he guided her hands, her long tapered fingers a contrast to his wrinkled, scarred old bear paws, hooking the bait (to which she pulled a screwed up face) then casting out the line. They sat, then, in companionable silence, and Kell realised Nienna was watching him intently. He turned, scratching his grizzled grey beard, eyes meeting her bright gaze, and she smiled, face radiant.

  “Grandfather?”

  “Yes, little monkey?”

  “Isn’t fishing… you know, unfair?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s like a trap, isn’t it? You dangle the worm on a hook, and the fish swims along, unsuspecting, and you whip him out and eat him for supper. It’s not fair on the fish.”

  “Well, how else would I catch him?” said Kell, frowning a little. He chuckled. “I could always throw you in – you could swim after all the little fishes, catch them in your teeth like a pike!” He moved as if to grab her, to toss her into the deep waters, and she squealed backing away fast up the bank and getting mud on her hands and clothes.

  Nienna tutted. “Grandfather!”

  “Ach, it’s only  a little mud. It’ll wash off.”

  What Kell had wanted to say was that all life is a trap, a deceit, a bad con trick from a clever con artist. Life leads you on, life dangles tantalising bait on a dulled hook of iron – the bait being happiness, good health, wealth, joy – and you reach with both hands, mouth gaping like a slack-brained jester in the King’s Court but Life is a bitch and just when you think you’ve found it, found your dream, the line snags and you’re yanked by your balls, guts and brain. Hooked, and slaughtered. That was Life. That was Reality. That was Sobriety. But Kell kept his mouth shut. Kept it shut tight. He didn’t want to spoil the moment, this simple joy of fishing with his talented, optimistic granddaughter beside the Selenau River.  
 
Now, Kell and Saark stood on the high rooftop of the shattered, teetering towerblock in Old Skulkra. This was their trap. The bait had been laid by General Graal, his Army of Iron, his disgusting twisted cankers, and they had been snagged like fools, like naïve hatchlings, cornering themselves in Old Skulkra with an impossible task and a terrible fight.

  Kell clutched his black axe Ilanna to his chest, gore-spattered knuckles white, face iron thunder, and Saark was tense, slim rapier wavering before him, his face a shattered silhouette of half-broken fear.

  Below, in the bowels of the old stone block, something ululated, high-pitched and keening and far too feral to be human. It was followed immediately by a flurry of snarls, and growls, and heavy thuds and a scrabbling of brass claws clattering and booming through velvet black.

  It was the cankers… and they were coming for fresh blood.

  Kell’s face was a thunderstorm filled with bruised clouds. Saark’s face was hard to read, battered from a beating at the hands of Myriam’s men, and his blood seeped through a torn and dirt-smeared shirt from a recent stab wound. Kell took a deep breath, nose twitching at fire from distant funeral pyres in the wake of the recent battle; and he lifted Ilanna, and seemed, for a moment at least, to commune with the battered axe.

  The cankers grew close. The two men could hear the beasts’ heavy breathing on the stairwell.

  Suddenly, a pulse seemed to pound through the ancient, deserted city; through the world. It was subsonic, an esoteric rumble; almost an earthquake. Almost.

  Saark allowed breath to hiss free between clenched teeth. His fear was a tangible thing, a stain, like ink. He glanced at Kell.

  “We’re going to die up here, aren’t we?”

  Kell laughed, and it contained genuine humour, genuine warmth. He slapped Saark on the back, then rubbed thoughtfully at his bloodied beard, and with glittering eyes said, “We all die sometime, laddie,” as the first of the cankers burst from the opening in a flurry of claws and fangs and screwed up faces of pure hate.

  With a roar, Kell leapt to meet them…

  As the first canker leapt, so Kell’s mighty axe slammed down in a savage overhead blow, splitting the head in two right down to the twisted spine-top. Flesh, brain and skull exploded outwards, and mixed in there with muscle and bone shards were tiny, battered clockwork machines, wheels and cogs twisting and turning, clicking and shifting, clockwork gears clacking, and in a blur Kell stepped back, dragging his axe with him as the first canker corpse hit the ground and Kell swayed from a swipe of huge claws from the second snarling beast, Ilanna singing as she hammered left now, butterfly blades horizontal, cutting free the canker’s arm with a jarring thud and shower of flowering blood petals. The beast howled, but a third heaved and shouldered past, huge and bulky, the size of a lion, a disjointed, twisted lion with pale white skin bulging with muscle, like overfull bowels pressing against maggot flesh in an attempt to break free of a pus-filled abdomen. The canker was covered with a plague of grey fur, tufted and irregular, and the canker’s forehead was stretched right back, its huge maw five times the size of the human mouth which had formed its template, skull open like an axe-chopped pumpkin showing huge brass fangs which curled down from rancid gleaming jaws and were decorated with knurled swirls, like fine etchings in copper. The canker’s body was covered in open wounds, and within each wound thrashed clockwork, a myriad of tiny, spinning wheels, gyrating spindles, meshing gears, but whereas the pure vachine was perfect, and noble, and secure in its Engineer-created arrogance, this canker this deviation this corruption showed bent gears and levers and unmeshed cogs and in a blur Kell leapt sideways, Ilanna carving a parting line of muscle across the canker’s neck, like an unzipping of flesh, but despite pain and squirming unreleased muscle its sheer weight and bulk carried it forward across the scattered concrete beams of the tower-block’s flat roof, where it slammed into Saark as his rapier stabbed frantically, slashing open more huge curved wounds. They both staggered back, fell back, and Kell turned from Saark allowing the wounded man to deal with the dying canker in a hiss of steel opening flesh and a gush of severed arteries.

  A fresh flood of cankers burst through the opening, forcing Kell towards a grim-faced Saark, and the two men stood side by side, shoulder to shoulder, faces grim and splattered with gore, weapons flickering skilfully to open savage wounds as the cankers formed an expanding wall of flesh, an arc of solid muscle, as more and more surged through the opening to reinforce their ranks until there were ten, fifteen, twenty of the huge beasts ranged against them hissing and grunting.

  Kell gave a sardonic snarl, teeth grinding, and rubbed his grey beard. At his feet lay five dead...

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Verlag
Angry Robot
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0857660675
ISBN 13 
9780857660671
Einband
Taschenbuch
Zeichner
Smith Adrian
Anzahl der Seiten
416
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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9780857660664: Soul Stealers: The Clockwork Vampire Chronicles, Book II

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ISBN 10:  0857660667 ISBN 13:  9780857660664
Verlag: Angry Robot, 2010
Softcover