the all-new series, coming soon
Thrilled to make it official: my latest series, The Spider’s Friend, will release August 19th! The trilogy is a tale of unlikely friendship in a setting with science-fantasy vibes. Below, an exclusive excerpt from book one.
As promised, a look inside:
Jaalen imagined him swallowing anxiously, although it wasn’t audible over the moaning of the wind. “Could it be the people hunting me?”
He squatted, casting the younger man a single glance as he cleared a patch of yellowed soil with one hand. That shouldn’t be the case, because said people had been his own invention. A threat both dire and immediate, which would force the monks to let go their ward without Jaalen having to answer all their questions, let alone await confirmation from the capital. If it turned out to be true anyway, it was a pain in the ass, and only later would he have the leisure to be amused by the undeniable humor of it.
“What will we do?” His voice was hushed but didn’t convey the fear you might expect from so sheltered a youth. He seemed to assume there was a plan and was ready to do his part to contribute to it.
“Well first things first, let’s find out if I’m right or just have a case of the megrims.”
“How will we do that?”
Jaalen drew a circle in the sand, using the length of string he had retrieved from his bags to make it perfectly round. He crossed it at the cardinal points, the poles north and south to which iron pulled, the horizons at which the sun set and rose. He bisected each quadrant, northeast, southeast, southwest, northwest. Then he settled back on his haunches, picking up a pebble from the soil and rolling it idly between his fingers.
It was easy to think your way past fecund nature, to say nothing of the human ephemera painted on top, but it could be difficult to find your way in an area rich with geological processes. The moment he let his consciousness drift, it invaded, deafening him. The skin of the planet buckled beneath the mountains’ weight, resting uneasily on a bed made molten by sheer depth. He could feel the agonized groaning of the rock. Here and there, superheated plumes clawed for the surface, seeking an avenue of escape.
The mountains’ bass complaints made his bones shake and his teeth ache, popping occasionally so his heart skipped beats. The lava plumes fizzled and sizzled with a menacing hiss like a vat of frying-hot oil the size of the sea, and the sensation of heat and pressure made it difficult to breathe. But there: running at a curious angle that seemed to have no bearing on the landscape, straight as a rule, a streak of pure white light. Although it was not light and was not white, Jaalen had never found a better way to describe the sensation, unless it was simply: possibility. A leyline, the power conduits left behind by the giants that built worlds.
Reaching between his knees with his free hand, he rested the tips of his splayed fingers on the ground to steady himself. He touched the leyline with the edge of his will, not inviting it inside where it would consume him instantly but channeling a filament into his web. The moment he felt his soil-sketch flush with power, he stuck the rock in his mouth and spat it out.
Then he let the power go and opened his eyes, not allowing himself to feel regret, not allowing himself to wonder what else he might have done with it. The rock had landed in the compass’s south-southwest slice, which was puzzling. He might have hoped it would have come to rest totally off to one side, proving his fears hollow, but he was more surprised by the tangent of the threat than the proof that it was real.
“You’re a magician,” Marusepha breathed.
For some reason, Jaalen found the awe in his voice irritating. “A witch,” he said curtly. Not giving him time to ask what the difference was, he thrust himself to his feet. “I can’t figure out the trajectory: there are people in these mountains who mean us ill, but they’re coming from a direction that makes no sense. Last I knew, Rasasiva was returning to the capital. From Aeron.” And didn’t have the first clue how to find his father’s rumored, hidden, illegitimate son, but he kept that thought to himself. “Anyway they’re behind us, all we have to do is keep ahead.”
“You can tell where they are?”
“Only in the haziest sense,” Jaalen replied as he returned to his horse. “And within a modest geography. To cast a net across the whole of the world…” Even if it were possible, he couldn’t see what the point would be. If you focused on a smaller region, you could guess precisely where the people in question were and so hopefully their identities. Could Jaalen see at a single glance the location of every person in the world who wished him dead, this would be such a wealth of information it would paradoxically become meaningless.
from The Spider’s Friend, M.C. Burnell 2022
Comments are closed