Inhaltsangabe
Science fiction adventure in a decaying far future setting in the new tie-in novel from the popular Numenera tabletop and PC roleplaying games.
In the far-future Ninth World, claves of Aeon Priests help their community understand and use the mysterious technologies of the past. But what happens when a group of these priests uses this knowledge and power to exploit the people who depend on them?
In the region of Steremoss, a group of brave individuals are determined to resist this oppression from the shadows. They call themselves the Night Clave.
File Under: Fantasy [ Protect the Clave | Devices & Designs | Death Walkers | World's End ]
Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.
Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Monte Cook has worked as a professional writer for more than 20 years. As a fiction writer, he has published numerous short stories and two novels. As a comic book writer, he has written a limited series for Marvel Comics called Monte Cook’s Ptolus: City by the Spire, as well as some shorter work. As a nonfiction writer, he has published the wry but informative The Skeptic’s Guide to Conspiracies.
His work, however, as a game designer, is likely most notable. Since 1988, he has written hundreds of tabletop roleplaying game books and articles and won numerous awards. Monte is likely best known for Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, which he co-designed with Jonathan Tweet and Skip Williams. In 2001, he started his own game design studio, Malhavoc Press, and published such notable and award-winning products as Ptolus, Arcana Evolved, and the Book of Eldritch Might series. As a freelance game designer, he designed HeroClix and Monte Cook’s World of Darkness, and he has worked on the Pathfinder RPG, the Marvel Comics massively multiplayer online game, and numerous other games and related projects.
He is the designer of Numenera.
montecookgames.com
twitter.com/montejcook
Author hometown: Seattle, WA
Shanna Germain is the creative director for Numenera and The Strange. An award-winning writer and editor, her poems, essays, stories, novellas, and articles have been widely published in places like Apex Magazine, Best American Erotica, Best Bondage Erotica, Best Lesbian Romance, Lightspeed, Salon and more. She has garnered a variety of awards for her work, including a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Rauxa Prize for Erotic Poetry, and the C Hamilton Bailey Poetry Fellowship.
Her most recent books include The Lure of Dangerous Women (Wayzgoose Press, 2012), Leather Bound (HarperCollins, 2013), and As Kinky As You Wanna Be (Cleis Press, 2014).
shannagermain.com
twitter.com/shannagermain
Author hometown: Seattle, WA
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1. Every Death Starts with a Very Good Plan
Kyre had no guiles about their purpose here. They’d come to kill a man – not just a man, an Aeon Priest, a clave leader – and there was no way that he, not even he, with his ability to push things into ornate words and pretty boxes, could find another container to put that in.
What would it be like to see Rillent after all of this time? Not just see him, but…
“Kill,” Aviend said from where she was crouched beside him. They were taking a breather, halfway up the outside slope of the crater. Every step, rubble trembled and threatened to fall, to give away their position. They’d practiced this a hundred, two hundred times. Still, pebbles shifted. Dust clouds rose beneath their feet and threatened to call attention to their movements. Slow and careful. Slow and careful. “The word you’re thinking about is kill.”
“Reading my mind again?” he asked.
Most of Aviend’s form was wrapped in a brown and grey sleeksuit. Even her usually wild hair was tucked beneath the suit’s hood. Only her face showed as she cast a glance at him. Her eyes were a deeper brown than the fabric, flecked with gold. Aviend’s typical smile was a cautionary thing, only one side of her lips curving, as if her mouth was always trapped between joy and worry. The one there now was a full curve, both sides. Not comfort, but a delight to finally be doing something beyond practicing for this day.
“Nothing else to read around here,” she said.
It was an old joke between them, a leftover from a younger, more innocent time. Despite what she’d tried to convince him of when they were kids, Aviend couldn’t actually read his mind. Or anyone else’s. She just had an uncanny knack for knowing what people were thinking. “It’s in the cheekbones,” she’d said once, but that had made no sense and he hadn’t known whether to believe her. It was disconcerting sometimes, the way she could look at him and know what was going on in his head, but it also meant a lot of words he didn’t have to say. Over the years he’d grown to appreciate that about her. Like so many other things.
“Gloaming,” Aviend said, lifting her chin toward the sky spread out above and before them. “Right on time.”
It was, and it was. Night was falling the way it often did over the Stere: slow, as if this was the only place in the world where the coming of the dark did not matter, where its very presence was made unnecessary by the dark-leaved woods, the neverending umbrage continually caught trunk-to-trunk. He knew without turning that behind them the endless forest had already gone to pitch, shadowbacked by its thickness and depth.
From here, clinging to the side of the rise and looking upward, the view was daunting. Day lingered, trying to keep its hold along the edges of the far-off mountains, as night slowly spread its grey and purple over the sky’s pale skin like a fresh bruise. If all went according to plan, the light would stay long enough to see them to the top of the rise and disappear just when they needed it to.
There was a lot riding on the phrase “if all went according to plan”. But it was a good plan, maybe even close to a perfect plan. It was also their only plan. If it succeeded, a man would be dead and they would be safely away before anyone was the wiser. If it failed…
“It won’t,” Aviend said. She didn’t wink – it wasn’t her style – but she did a thing, maybe without even realizing it, where she shifted her lips sideways and lifted a brow. It was, he thought, the same as a wink. A reminder of the secrets between them, the promise of things to come. An acknowledgment of how hard they’d worked for this very moment.
“Time,” he said to her unasked question.
As one, they moved. Together they crawled up the remainder of the slope, low through the rubble, hands and knees, sometimes elbows and thighs. Staying flat. Staying tight.
They didn’t talk. They didn’t have to. They’d been working on this plan long enough that he couldn’t remember when they hadn’t. For so long, their lives – his, Aviend’s, Delgha’s, Thorme’s – had been filled with devices, maps, time plans, and the shared dream of Rillent Boure’s end. Everything – every piece of equipment, every late night of planning in the base, every risk they’d taken to learn a schedule or a secret – it all led to this moment. For good or for ill.
As Kyre climbed, he did a mental equipment check. He’d done it once before they’d left the base, but there was no such thing as too careful. He touched each object with his mind the way others might touch it with their fingers.
Obedient rope coiled at his hip. It would drop him down the inside of the crater they were climbing and then pull him back up when he was ready. He disliked the rope. Its semi-sentience made him wary, but he was not one to disregard a good tool just because its attributes made him uncomfortable.
Polarizer glasses. Lenses off. All he had to do was say the word and they’d come on. At least that’s what Delgha had promised him.
Long-range launcher, strapped to his back. A gift from one of the many people they’d helped escape from Rillent’s trenches.
Corrosion projectile sealed in an organic sheath, and tucked into his pocket. There was no way to keep the projectile’s coating from eating away at the launcher. So the timing of removing it from the sheath, loading it, and firing it was going to be paramount. He’d done it a thousand times with a regular projectile. But they only had one of these.
The piece of equipment he didn’t want, but he checked off his mental list anyway, because he always had it with him and would have it until the day he finally had to use it: a silver and red nodule on a strip of leather that looped his neck. It snagged and pulled as he moved, as if to remind him of its presence, of its purpose. The nodule was last resort. Or whatever came beyond last resort. Putting that cypher in motion meant everything had gone horribly, irrevocably wrong. He’d only come close to using it once. He hoped he’d never have to.
The small things came last. Two shortblades in the sleevesheaths on his arms, med kit, ceramic detonation cypher (because you never knew when you’d need to blow something up), the stronglass-and-steel ring that he never took off.
By the time he finished the list, they were nearly at the top. The sloped side they were climbing, the broken bits of buildings and statues and walls that shifted and tumbled beneath their feet, had once been their home. Before the kubrics. Before Rillent. Before there was even an inkling in his mind that they would plan to take another man’s life in cold blood. That he would plan to take another man’s life in cold blood. That he would become a killer. A killer, like the man he had to kill.
What luxury they’d known, before the ruin. Worrying over ghosts and small affairs and whether Aviend’s mother would approve of him. It was silly and horrible and he missed it with every fiber of his being. That complex simplicity of less dark times.
Not everyone thought of what had happened as the ruin, of course. For Rillent and his pseudo-clave and his believers, everything that had happened was not the end, but the beginning. Rillent had told Kyre more than once that you knew you were on the right side if the people loved you. Rillent’s people loved him, without question. Every night at the drop of dark – just a few minutes from now – they would chant his...
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