The Fey Brand

Chapter One from Book Two: A Black Hand

At last, here is the beginning of book 2 of, The Weirdling Cycle. This chapter and the next are free for all. Chapters after that will be for paying subscribers. The publication date for the book according to Canonball Books is late fall.

Chapter One:

A Black Hand

Deep beneath Superbia there is a cavern as bottomless as your stomach. Railways connect its nooks and crannies, and along them coal-fired steam engines chug along. It is a dark place, and that’s just how the inhabitants like it, because they’re bogeymen—the very ones who inhabit the fairytales you’re told and the nightmares you dream.

The darkest part of that dark place is the bedroom that looks down on it all. But the person who lives there isn’t a bogeyman. Instead, he is a human being—or he used to be—and the bogeys are afraid of him. His name is Lucian.

His bedroom isn’t like yours. For one thing it is much larger; and for another, your bedroom doesn’t look out on a cavern full of bogeymen.

At the time our story begins Lucian is preparing for bed. Do you see him there with your mind’s eye? No, it isn’t lying to you; he sleeps on a bed of ice. The ice is transported at great expense from the frozen north. Each night a line of bogeys passes bags of it up the stairs and then pour the ice into a long, low tub.

Then Lucian slowly eases himself down onto it.

It is the only way he can soothe his enflamed flesh.

Lucian could be called a dreamer; but it is better to say he is a rememberer. And one memory especially burns in his mind.

He had come so close. He had even seen the sacred flame, and his heart had leapt when he reached out to take the fire that burns without consuming.

But then the burning man came and laid hold of him. And his fire did consume. And each time the burning man returns in his dreams, the house shakes, and the servants flee.

Normally he wakes up to an empty room. But not this time. This time, just beyond the foot of his bed, rearing up and monstrously large, a serpent sways. He recognizes it. It is the Striker.

There is always a bigger bully. Sometimes a bigger bully makes a little bully change his ways. Not Lucian. It just gets him thinking how he can get bigger. He wants to kill the snake. But he knows he can’t. Not yet. ‘Someday,’ Lucian tells himself, ‘Someday’.

The thing rises, and unfurls its wings of skin, tongue flicking.

“What do you want this time?” Lucian said.

That was a mistake.

The serpent’s eyes widen and Lucian groans.

Suddenly he’s on the floor, belly down, sliding across it.

“Alright, alright, stop it. What do you want?”

“A boy.”

The words form soundlessly in his mind.

“A boy? I have as many as you could want.”

“Not the needful one. You let him get away.”

“What’s a boy? There are more where he came from.”

“No!” the serpent said. “He is the one of whom the Wheedler spoke—the one with a black hand. Bring him to me.”

Then Lucian was alone.

Somehow images passed through his mind: a vast serpent curled in darkness; a vast tree; a streak of lightning; but above it all, a black hand.

The Wheedler, where had he heard of him? He remembered old books. Baltasar the Obscure, yes—he was called the Wheedler. And a black hand, he remembered that, too—a prophesy of some kind. What was it?

Striker shall be struck. Binding at last, will last. A Weirdling he will be: strong bonds unyielding, a dark Providence bringing, in a black-hand, clinging!

Lucian knew what to do.

A bogey who had stolen back in the silence caught his eye. How much had he seen? No mind, he could be killed later.

“Klinker,” Lucian said composing himself. “Get Gourmand. I have something for him to do.”