She went to the idol-shop in Moleshill Street, where the old man mumbles, and said: “I want a god to worship when it is wet.”
The old man reminded her of the heavy penalties that rightly attach to idolatry and, when he had enumerated all, she answered him as was meet: “Give me a god to worship when it is wet.”
Rated R: Contains violence. And Conan.
Featuring Conan the Barbarian!
Across the red drifts and mail-clad forms, two figures glared at each other. In that utter desolation only they moved. The frosty sky was over them, the white illimitable plain around them, the dead men at their feet. Slowly through the corpses they came, as ghosts might come to a tryst through the shambles of a dead world. In the brooding silence they stood face to face.
Both were tall men, built like tigers. Their shields were gone, their corselets battered and dinted. Blood dried on their mail; their swords were stained red. Their horned helmets showed the marks of fierce strokes. One was beardless and black maned. The locks and beard of the other were red as the blood on the sunlit snow.
“Man,” said he, “tell me your name, so that my brothers in Vanaheim may know who was the last of Wulfhere’s band to fall before the sword of Heimdul.”
“Not in Vanaheim,” growled the black-haired warrior, “but in Valhalla will you tell your brothers that you met Conan of Cimmeria.”
Rated PG
She moved outside, making her way through the yard, blades of wet grass poking at her bare ankles. The air smelled sweet, almost musty. It was early October, cold and breezy, and the night sky was clear. Mrs. Peña could just make out the rough silhouettes of her neighbors as they stood at their windows and in their front lawns, holding candles, watching, waiting. She overheard bits and pieces of their conversations:
“Phones aren’t working.”
“Cars aren’t running.”
“Radios and flashlights won’t even turn on.”
“No electricity anywhere in town.”
“There’s something in the park.”
The park.
Mrs. Peña hurried across the street. As she entered the park, the ground dipped before her and she tripped. She tried to catch herself, but instead she fell against a wall — a moist wall of flesh.
Rated R for violence and adult themes.
The Tsar abdicates in February. The Provisional Government gets around to letting Fyodor out of prison in March. In April, he meets his Uncle Grigor at a Petrograd cafe. They talk about magic, death and revolution.
“I don’t care, Fyodka. Romans or Visagoths, Christians or Mohammedans, Tsars or…” The old man waves his hand, making a show of remembering the word. “…Bolsheviks… They’re all just different acts in the same circus.”
by Tim Pratt, Jenn Reese, Heather Shaw, and Greg van Eekhout
Featuring:
“D is for De Gustibus,” read by Norm Sherman (of The Drabblecast).
“F is for Flotsam,” read by Dave Thompson.
“L is for Luminous,” read by Rish Outfield (of The Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine)
“N is for Nevermore Nevermore Land,” read by Mur Lafferty (the Mighty, MIGHTY)
Be sure and check out Escape Pod and Pseudopod for other free Alphabet Quartet stories. While your at it, visit Daily Science Fiction, where you can read the all the original Alphabet Quartet stories, and get free SF/F stories delivered to your email, um, daily.
See you all July 1st!
Rated PG: Contains flash grenades
Rated PG
Layla bas Layla’s breath came raggedly and her blue silks were soaked with sweat, but she was pleased with her performance. Ten beheaded in threescore water-drops. She lowered her forked sword.
The clay-and-rag dummy skulls littered the packed-dirt training yard of the Lodge of God. Boulder-faced Shaykh Saif kicked one aside. He wore the same habit of silk blouse and breeches as she – he had been a member of the Order for thirty years longer than she — but even smiling, his craggy features somehow made the bright blue garments seem muted.
“Only seven-and-ten years old, and you’re better with the forked
sword than I was as a Dervish in my prime. And I was the best, God
forgive me my boasts!”
Welcome to a new feature we’re doing here at PodCastle: Spotlights! They’re not reviews, and not interviews. Rather, we’re inviting authors who have written for PodCastle to shine a spotlight on their books.
To kick things off, we’ve invited Daniel Abraham, author of “The Curandero and the Swede: A Tale from the 1001 American Nights,” “Balfour and Meriwether in the Adventure of the Emperor’s Vengeance”, and “The Cambist and Lord Iron” to talk to us about his new book The Dragon’s Path.
Enjoy!
Rated R: Contains some funky language, Daddy-O.
He remembers Priscilla in the surf with her sisters. That image will never leave him no matter how many miles she runs, Prissy wearing not a stitch, gold hair plastered to her back as she paddled the surfboard out far enough to catch the big waves, and then the turn of her head and the silent laugh at something one of her sisters said and Moon Doggie could just make out the silver glint of her eyes and that was it, done deal, he was in love and there was no turning back.
Six leather jackets lay sunning on the rocks. Moon Doggie braved the crashing waves and found the one he knew was hers. Still couldn’t say how he knew but he knew. Snatched it up, took it back to his T-Bird. It smelled like the earth and the sky. The leather was cracked and ancient.
Moon Doggie watched them throughout the afternoon. He felt a shiver and a sudden queasiness when they finally started swimming for shore, surfboards abandoned to the sea. They saw him, all of those silver eyes, but kept their distance. Wet arms slipped into jacket sleeves. An eruption of euphoric smiles and then they were airborne, lifted up in a sudden storm of feathers.
Moon Doggie wasn’t the least bit surprised.
Up at the shimmering edge of the sky, where the water met the air, Son spread his tentacles out beneath the terrible shadow of his father. They were waiting for the ships. Son felt the approaching heart-thrum bouncing off the coral-crusted hulls below as the ships crested the painwall.
Are you sure you should do this, Father? Son thought. He twisted his mantle around to gaze at the scarred stumps of his father’s tentacles. You’ve trained me well. There’d be no shame in letting me take this harvest.
My name, thought Two-Father, his beak clacking shut with the finality of a ship’s hull crunching into stone, is Two, formerly One. It is a name I earned, one murder at a time. And I will carry out the harvest until Dysmas decides I am no longer worthy. He flexed his tentacles experimentally, then added: Perhaps He already has.
This here’s ghost country, just like you said. Can’t imagine a more
haunted place on all Athanore, no, nor at the bottom of the nine seas
where the nine old cities fell. Frontier, we call it. Makes it sound
like it’d never been lived on, never been worked. But you look hard
enough, you see signs everywhere.
Ten years is long enough for the wild to grab back at the dirt, but
the bones of the old Kilquut settlements still show through.