QSFer E. M. Epps has a new MM epic fantasy out: Complete with Shipwreck.
Four friends: A warrior. A warlord. A teacher. And a villain. How far will heroes go to protect their hard-won peace?
As the leader of a small, forested valley territory, magician-warrior Nuho Kadza has three goals:
First, protect his people from bandits and starvation.
Second, avoid his little sister – who’s the new warlord in charge.
Third, figure out how to have friends.
The dust has scarcely settled from the last battle, which left tens of thousands dead. But there’s a new, subtle enemy on the rise.
To keep his people safe, Nuho and his fellow hero Hoje Efukhur will be forced to face a demon from the past…because their only hope for peace may be the help of the last villain. Who used to be Hoje’s best friend.
Brimming with action, adventure, political intrigue, magic, love, and treachery, COMPLETE WITH SHIPWRECK is a standalone high fantasy set in a richly-imagined, immersive ancient world that draws inspiration from East Asia and the Iroquois Confederacy. It’s a single-volume epic with likable, complex characters not easily forgotten.
Warnings: violence, death, emotional abuse, off-screen kidnapping and child death, mentions of torture
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Excerpt
Excerpt (1000 words max) Of course, thought Nuho bitterly, there were bandits on the way to the conference.
The landscape around Vautdei was a place of abrupt and dramatic peaks: vertical planes of white limestone reaching into the sky, near-vertical slopes lushly furred with plants. It was God-scale, not human-scale; wild and profoundly beautiful.
On better days, Nuho would walk along the tops of peaks and look out in awe across an endless jagged ocean of green. Today, when he had to travel down the narrow road to civilization, he was tense. Steep hills draped in dense forest jutted up on either side of his small entourage, providing perfect cover and rapid escape for bandits.
When he was alone, he was less concerned. But today he had his old family retainer Eyana with him, and the two chests of Khei Ismatlas’s medicinal herbs which they couldn’t afford to lose. He trusted the loyalty of his six guards—they were Vautdei men and he’d grown up with them. But they felt more like an added responsibility, something else he had to protect, rather than an asset. He looked from side to side as he rode, watching everything.
His sister—his ex-sister—called him Nuho of the Perpetual Scowl. He had a wide mouth—good for scowling with—and large dark eyes that were more expressive than he liked. A strong jaw and ears that stuck out. People he wasn’t related to called him hand-some, despite the ears, and he was vain about it.
The hoofbeats of ten horses in the finely-packed gravel, the groan of wagon wheels, and the raucous clamor of birds almost disguised the shouts from around the next bend…almost.
He swore, and looked over his shoulder to the outriders.
“Four of you, with me. Eyana! Get under the wagon.”
Almost before the words were out of his mouth, a covered carriage thundered around the bend, its four horses driven hard by a lashing whip. One of them cried shrilly as the whip cracked.
With a thrill of satisfaction, excitement, and warranted fear, Nuho recognized the man driving. In Vautdei they’d taken to calling him the bandit king: “king” being a pure insult, a word borrowed from some less civilized part of the world.
Nuho drew his sword.
The bandit king knew him, too. He hauled on the reins, steering the horses maliciously in Nuho’s direction.
Not thinking, only moving, Nuho swung off his horse, put his feet on the naked air, and ran at a mad dash up above the ears of the carriage horses as they came at him. Six leaps—and he misjudged the last.
He’d meant to drop down onto the bandit king. Instead, he landed on the carriage roof. Inertia carried him onward. He dropped to his knees hard, losing his sword over the side. He grabbed the edge of the roof and twisted around. Without hesitation, he kicked the bandit king in the back of the head.
The bandit sprawled sideways off the driver’s seat. Nuho couldn’t see where he fell. He leapt down onto the seat, looked back and saw him sprawled in the road. He jumped down after him.
Where was his sword? He didn’t see it anywhere. Well, he’d probably need magic against this particular bandit anyway.
Nuho kept walking forward, feeling good. The skirt of his ochre-and-white cotton robe swung around his legs. He wasn’t a big man, but he was strong and broad-shouldered, with a splay-footed, sprung-kneed swagger acquired from balancing on tree branches, fences, house ridgepoles, and anything else he could find. It had been a while since he’d been in a fight and he was enjoying himself.
The masked bandit king had gotten to his feet. He drew his weapon and took a fighter’s stance. He began to mutter the beginning of a spell, which Nuho recognized as an attempt to smack him off his feet with a rush of air.
“Hey!” he yelled, continuing to walk forward. “Today, I have to deal with you and my sister. And you I can kill. So ask yourself this. Is this how you want to die?”
The man hesitated.
Nuho began to shout his own spell, with unabashed vicious-ness.
The bandit king turned tail and fled toward the forest.
Nuho almost chased him, sword or no sword. But the sen-sible part of his brain said, That’s a dumb way to die. Vautdei would never forgive him if he spent six months recovering from the Battle of Atuim and then got killed by a bandit.
Nuho stood in the road and watched him go. The bandit dashed up through the air, up one of the hills—touching his foot upon an outcrop of stone, a leaf, a tree, using a silent and shifting magic to boost himself each time higher than a simple leap would take him. He traversed the steep face of the hill rapidly, with flawless technique.
Nuho already regretted not chasing him. This particular bandit had been a plague on the road for months.
But he couldn’t face missing his first real Council as Housemaster Kadza. And he didn’t much want to show up injured, either. He needed to be able to dodge quickly if Siche tried to give him a hug.
He walked back to his men, sizing up what had happened. Someone had caught the driverless carriage and brought it back. An armored stranger was holding the reins. Another stranger was standing on the driver’s seat checking for damage.
The carriage was beautifully painted—red with turquoise trim—but the man was plainly dressed; so this was certainly a pilgrimage to the temple of Kheulu Vautdei.
A soft-faced woman in her forties approached him and bowed deeply. She, too, wore dark clothes without ornament, but he could tell that her robe was silk by its sheen and audible rustle.
“I’ve been told that you are Housemaster Nuho Kadza of Vautdei. You have the gratitude of House Kumush of Dalbache.”
Nuho bowed in return. “There’s no debt. In fact, the fault’s mine. The safety of the road is my responsibility. And as you can see, I’ve been failing at it.”
The stiffness of his answer wasn’t lost on his own ear: he had no charm with strangers even at the best of times.
Politeness, Siche had once said in a bad mood, is the refuge of the unoriginal.
“Did you suffer any loss?” he asked, politely.
Author Bio
E. M. Epps is a bookseller and author from Seattle, WA.
| Author Website | http://www.emepps.com/ |