Isabel shivers. The water turns cold around her, and a lattice of frost spreads out across the side of the metal tub from Geray’s ghostly hands. She draws her knees up to her chest.
“I didn’t do anything,” she says, and she’s almost sure she’s telling the truth. “You were doing unregulated, experimental black magic in an unstable space, and now you’re surprised something went wrong?”
He sneers. His teeth shine white against the black hole of his mouth. “Fix it.”
(“But don’t you have enough projects?” Yes. Yes, I do. Let’s not talk about that.)
On a rainy morning in 1922, an archaeologist is found dead in a London hotel room. At first, it is assumed his death was a natural one, but questions soon arise:
Who has been following the professor around Oxford?
What happened on his last field expedition, which was cut short and declared a failure?
What became of his crew?
And how did he drown, miles from the harbor and with no other sources of water nearby?
In a world still living under the shadow of the Great War, four intrepid investigators must discover the secret Professor Ragnarsson was murdered to keep, and learn that the world is darker and more terrible than they could ever have imagined–and that they are the only things standing between the earth and its total destruction.
I kicked my legs and held my arms out to steady myself. My body moved slowly, as if I swam through mud instead of the water I saw all around me, as if I swam in a dream. Light filtered down from above and fell upon the gate of bone and upon the fins of a mighty whale that swam in the depths below.
A human hand, the same gray-blue as the whale’s fins and as long from wrist to fingertips as I was tall, emerged from the darkness. An arm, encrusted in barnacles and dappled in white and gray, followed. The figure unfurled its great length, and I found myself face to face with a giantess, her upper body bare and mottled with coral, and her waist tapering down to the tail of a mighty whale. Her hair was long sea-grass, and colorful fish darted between the fronds. Her face, angular and sharp-toothed, held a whale’s huge dark eyes. She studied me with one, and I saw myself reflected in it, tiny and distorted. Unhurried, she turned her head to fix me with the other.
I could not move. Distantly, I was aware of my body breathing, though I remained submerged in the otherworldly sea. A terrible deep note sounded through the water, shaking the bones of the gate and stilling my heart for a terrifying moment. There was a question in that note, and in the wide-set eyes of the giant. At last, I understood: I swam before Nashurru, goddess of the deep and the places between, and she wanted to know why I had come to her.
Half an hour later, the constables pull Isabel out of the ruins of Arden Geray’s house. They take Berend and the professor away—to a hospital, she hopes, but her ears still ring and she can’t make out what they’re saying. Beside her, the earth churns and settles as the dead writhe in mindless rage. She can do nothing to quiet them.
The constables don’t notice the subterranean movement in the dark. They place Isabel in an uncovered carriage to take her back to the chapel on the blue field. Geray’s ghost follows.
Here is the tale that the grandmothers told me, as well as I can recall it.
The island was called Mau, and the fairest maiden upon it was named Noa. When she was a girl, and her three small siblings were but infants, their parents were both lost at sea in a terrible storm. From this storm came Soroena, an eel as large as the mountain of Ewandar. In the springtime, a single bright blue star rises above the horizon at sunset, and a serpentine trail of white stars follows it; this is the eel approaching the island, demanding a sacrifice as it did every third year at the end of the rainy season.
“Is this eel like the great lind-worm of the North,” I asked, “scaled and finned, with teeth like sabers?”
“Hush,” Luana said.
The next constellation to clear the horizon was a human figure, arms spread wide. This was Noa, chained to a volcanic rock a short distance from the shore of her island. She had grown to womanhood caring for her siblings, while others fed the slow but inexorable appetite of the eel, but this time she was not so fortunate. At sunset, her fellow islanders secured her to the sacrificial stone, and there she would wait. Soroena would arrive at midnight, and devour her whole, leaving only her hands and feet in the iron shackles—and, more importantly, leaving the waters surrounding the island safe for another three years.
I leapt up and stumbled backward. The embers of my campfire flared as my feet kicked into them, and heat seared through the soles of my boots. I stepped clear and reached for my weapon.
The snake hissed, sounding as surprised as I was. Though its fang-lined maw did not move, it was clearly the source of the strange voice. “No, hold still,” it muttered.
“You can talk?” I asked aloud. My hand found my spear in the darkness, and I levered the point between the snake’s eyes. In the fading light of the remains of my fire, I could see the scar on its neck where I had injured it earlier in the day. The scales there had already begun to knit together. It was healing, and fast—too quickly to be anything but magic. This was no ordinary beast.
After losing everything in a foolhardy quest to slay a sea serpent, Eske of the Bear Clan journeys across the world to the holy city of Phyreios. There, he meets warriors from faraway lands, a rebel leader with the courage to defy the gods, and a gentle healer whose dreams foretell a great calamity.
While at first Eske seeks only an opportunity to test his strength and a distraction from his grief, he soon becomes entangled in a clash of gods and monsters that will change the fate of Phyreios-and the world-forever.
Inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian and Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea novels, Beyond the Frost-Cold Sea is an epic tale of love, loyalty, rebellion, and ruin.
If you want to order the paperback directly from me (good for bulk orders, and you’ll get a significant discount), please fill out this form, and I’ll be in contact with you within the next 24 hours:
I will tell you of my journey, from the ocean at the other edge of the world to the mountain of iron, beneath which slept a horror of an age long past.
I will tell you of the daughter of the stargazer, who found me on the northern wastes at the end of my long winter.
I will tell you of those who dared to defy the seven gods of the citadel.
And I will tell you of the barefoot prophet, for the man who now sits on the throne of Phyreios is not the same as the one who walked among its people in the days before the cataclysm.
My first tasks were menial ones: mending a roof, hauling water from a spring in the forest, and helping Kala reset her fish traps. The work was no great effort, though my eyes wandered every moment to the stone edifice behind the huts. I assumed, with no stretch of the imagination, that this was the temple, and when my work was done, I would enter it, and perhaps catch a glimpse of my beloved for the first time since he was stolen from me.
His god had promised me he would be safe. I would only believe it once I saw him—I had lost my faith in gods. I hoped that the god of this island, to whom the grandmothers paid homage, would prove more worthy of trust.
The girl led me through a forest unlike any I had ever seen. Bright golden fruit peered out between leaves of deepest emerald green, and birds with cerulean feathers called out to each other from the tops of tall trees. A scarlet lizard, a tiny cousin of the fire-breathing salamander I had fought in the arena of Phyreios, skittered across the narrow footpath.
I asked the girl her name, and between bites of the pastry with which the captain had bribed her, she told me it was Kala. She was handmaiden to the grandmothers—a position of great honor, I inferred, especially for one so young.
Our path sloped upward, toward the mountain at the island’s center. The only clouds on that bright blue morning ringed the black peak like a crown. Though the earth did not tremble and the mountain was still, it was a volcano, no less mighty than the ones that sprang forth in fire and steam from the sea in my homeland.
Space Whales Press 