Soul of Swords (Book 7)

by Moeller, Jonathan

  “I suppose it makes sense,” said Gerald. “I saw you endure wounds that should have killed you more than once. And no one could ever best you in a fight. But why tell me this now?”

  Mazael shrugged. “Because it’s over. Molly and I are the last of the Demonsouled, and when we die, there will be no more. And you are the Lord of Knightcastle, Gerald. If you are to govern well, you will need to know the truth of what has happened.”

  “Don’t remind me,” said Gerald. “I never wanted to be the Lord of Knightcastle. I thought it would go to Garain, or Tobias, but never to me…”

  “I didn’t want to be liege lord the Grim Marches,” said Mazael, “or even the Lord of Castle Cravenlock, but it came to be nonetheless. You will do fine, Gerald. There will be days when you want to kill all your vassals, or take your horse and ride away and never come back…but you’ll do fine.”

  “Thank you,” said Gerald, and they lapsed into a comfortable silence.

  Then a disturbing thought came to Gerald.

  “Wait,” he said. “Rachel. Is she…”

  Mazael laughed. “Demonsouled? No. She’s only my half-sister, really. You needn’t fear that Aldane or Belifane will grow up to have glowing red eyes and a mad lust to conquer the world.”

  “Or the need to burn a bridge down around our ears?” said Gerald, remembering the day he had met Rachel, rescuing her from Sir Tanam Crowley at the Northwater inn.

  “That only happened once.”

  ###

  The next day Mazael walked to the head of the assembled host of the Grim Marches and the Tervingi nation.

  He passed the ranks of the Tervingi thains, the gathered spearthains and swordthains and skythains, the air heavy with the musk of mammoth. Earnachar sat atop his horse, boasting of his deeds in battle to Arnulf and Toric, who listened with expressions of boredom. Mazael crossed through the waiting footmen, Sir Tanam’s scouts on their horses, Lord Robert’s heavy horsemen, Lord Jonaril’s archers, and Lord Astor’s footmen.

  At last he came to the head of the host, where Sir Aulus and Sir Hagen waited with the Cravenlock banner. Molly and Riothamus sat atop their horses, next to each other.

  Romaria awaited him, and smiled when she saw him.

  Mazael kissed her, and the swung up into his saddle.

  “Let’s go home,” he said.

  Epilogue

  With THE OLD DEMON dead and the runedead of the Great Rising destroyed, a period of peace settled over the lords west of the Great Mountains. For centuries beyond count, the Old Demon had arranged ruinous wars, harvesting the lives of his children in preparation to his ascension to godhood.

  Though, of course, ambitious lords and knights ever had an eye to seizing some of their neighbors’ lands.

  GERALD ROLAND ruled in Knightcastle, laboring to rebuild all the damage that the runedead and his father had wrought. He proved a strong and even-handed lord, and in time his vassals respected him as much, if not more, than they had respected Lord Malden before his descent into folly. Slowly Knightreach began to regain some of its former prosperity.

  RACHEL ROLAND rejoined her husband at Knightcastle after Mazael’s return to the Grim Marches, and was soon pregnant with her third child, a daughter.

  HUGH CHALSAIN returned to Barellion and Lady Adelaide, preparing his vassals for the war against the Aegonar. But the war proved less inevitable than he thought. With the defeat of Skalatan at Knightcastle and the failure of Sepharivaim to appear as prophesied, the faith of the Aegonar nation in the serpent god had been badly shaken, and missionaries from the Amathavian church found ripe pickings among them.

  A few years after the defeat of the Old Demon, Hugh accepted RYNTALD, the High King of the Aegonar, as a vassal, and Greycoast was reunited. Together they worked to rebuild Greycoast, to ensure a prosperous future for their people…though embittered seidjars lurked in the shadows, plotting vengeance on those who had forsaken Sepharivaim.

  As the last commander of the JUSTICIAR ORDER, AIDAN TORMAUD formally dissolved the Order. The remaining Justiciar knights and preceptors seized their Order’s estates, declared themselves lords, and swore loyalty to the nearest liege lord. Swordor itself, the ancient stronghold of the Justiciar knights, swore to Gerald Roland, with Aidan himself as the castle’s lord. The accumulated wealth of the Justiciars helped rebuild Knightreach’s ravaged villages and towns.

  The FIRST DAGGER and the SKULLS of Barellion hid themselves in the city, resuming their disguises. Souther rescinded the contract on Prince Hugh’s life. Mostly because Lord Karlam was dead, and therefore unable to render payment, but partly because Prince Hugh brought stability.

  And given how often the nobles of Greycoast assassinated each other in peacetime, stability was good for business.

  After returning to the Grim Marches, MOLLY CRAVENLOCK found more of the work of governing passing into her hands. The Tervingi headmen and the lords of the Grim Marches remained ever quarrelsome, and to her surprise she found they listened to her. For she was the Lady of the Shadows, the strange woman who had stood with the Tervingi thains as they faced the runedead, and the Tervingi had grown to respect her.

  And it did not hurt that she was the consort of RIOTHAMUS, the Guardian of the Tervingi nation. The Old Demon had been defeated, but the Guardian remained vigilant. Malrag warbands sometimes raided down from the Great Mountains, renegade wizards skulked in ancient ruins, and the San-keth still plotted in the shadows.

  They would not find the Guardian lacking in watchfulness.

  LUCAN MANDRAGON’S body, at the command of Lord Mazael, was taken back to the Grim Marches and buried near the ruins of Swordgrim, near the cenotaph that had been raised in honor of Tymaen Highgate.

  RHODEMAR GREENSHIELD and ARDANNA the High Druid returned to Deepforest Keep, Ardanna eager to separate herself from humans once more, Rhodemar eager to stop listening to the High Druid’s endless criticisms.

  MAZAEL CRAVENLOCK ruled the Grim Marches with a firm hand, ROMARIA at his side, respected by his vassals…but feared, as well. For he was the man who had broken both the Dominiar and the Justiciar Orders, had vanquished the Malrag horde, had slain a dragon in combat, had installed Hugh Chalsain as the Prince of Barellion…and, if the rumors were true, had defeated the Old Demon in single combat. Additionally, two of the most powerful liege lords of the realm, Lord Gerald and Prince Hugh both, heeded Mazael’s judgment, and often the mere threat of the Lord of Castle Cravenlock’s displeasure was enough to bring peace.

  At last Mazael had the chance to bring peace and plenty to the Grim Marches.

  After his defeat at Cythraul Urdvul, SKALATAN disappeared from among the Aegonar. His plan had failed, alas. Still, his oldest enemy, the Old Demon himself, had been destroyed, and no one had seized the power to become a new god. Not a perfect outcome, to be sure, but hardly disastrous.

  And Skalatan was patient.

  A century or two to bring a new plan to fruition, to wait until all his enemies had died of old age, and he could bring the world to order. All that was needed was patience.

  And the San-keth were most patient.

  ###

  In the black heart of ruined Cythraul Urdvul, sealed away from the world of the living, the remaining power of the Demonsouled lay dormant.

  Waiting for one bold enough to claim it.

  THE END

  Thank you for reading SOUL OF SWORDS. If you liked the book, please consider leaving a review at your ebook site of choice. To receive immediate notification of new releases, sign up for my newsletter, or watch for news on my Facebook page.

  In the meantime, turn the page for a look back at the DEMONSOULED series, and for a preview of the FROSTBORN series.

  One Final Author's Note

  I began writing DEMONSOULED sometime in the last week of July 2001.

  But I began thinking about it long before that.

  I had decided in high school that I wanted to be a writer, inspired by the computer games I played as a teenager - BETRAYAL
AT KRONDOR, QUEST FOR GLORY, KING'S QUEST, LEGEND OF ZELDA, CASTLEVANIA, MASTER OF MAGIC, and the like. I began running RPG campaigns for my friends as a gamemaster, and I found that I enjoyed the storytelling aspects far more than the tedious business of recording hit points and memorized spells. (The nice things about computer games is that they do all that work for you.) Mazael Cravenlock began as a non-player character in one of those games. In fact, the name came to me during a high school music class, when the teacher started discussing Johann Maelzel, the musician who invented the metronome. I thought "Maelzel" was a cool-sounding name, but it could be cooler, so I played with the letters until I came up with Mazael.

  In the years after that, I dreamed up the setting, developing the San-keth and the Demonsouled, the Grim Marches and Knightcastle, the Elderborn and the zuvembies. (Originally, in the first draft of the story, I called the Elderborn the natur'eltaren, which was a bloody handful to type, so I wisely switched it to 'Elderborn' instead.)

  Anyway, in July of 2001, I started writing DEMONSOULED, and finished the book right around Christmas of 2001. When I finished the rough draft, I had the oddest premonition, the feeling that I had just started something that was going to change my life.

  It would, though that was a ways down the road yet.

  In 2002, I finished the final draft, and started sending the book to various publishers and agents. After two years of rejections, DEMONSOULED got accepted by John Helfers at Gale/Five Star, back when Gale/Five Star still published fantasy, and the book was scheduled to be published in May of 2005.

  Needless to say, I was ecstatic. Back then, ebooks barely existed, and were the sort of thing crazed, wild-eyed futurists discussed. Real writers Got Published, and I'd wanted to Get Published for the entire time I'd been writing.

  But like so many writers before me, I found that the experience of Getting Published was a lot less pleasant than I had thought it would be.

  For one thing, DEMONSOULED was only released as a $25.95 library hardback, with no discounts available. That made it exceedingly difficult to get anyone to buy the book, and to be honest, trying to convince people to buy the hardback edition of your book is a pretty miserable experience. All told, the hardback edition of DEMONSOULED sold about 425 copies (and I suspect most of those went to various libraries that had standing orders with Gale/Five Star), and then quietly went out of print two years later.

  But in 2005, I was still optimistic, so I started writing a sequel to DEMONSOULED, SOUL OF TYRANTS. I finished SOUL OF TYRANTS in 2005, and tried to sell it to Gale/Five Star, but with no luck, since Gale/Five Star quite reasonably pointed out that since DEMONSOULED had not sold well, it was logical to expect that its sequel would not sell well. Since I still had the mass-market paperback rights to DEMONSOULED, I tried to find a publisher interested in those, but again with no results.

  Eventually, I abandoned DEMONSOULED and moved on to different things. I had some success selling short stories to the SWORD & SORCERESS series of anthologies, which was the genesis for my THE GHOSTS series. I wrote what would become THE THIRD SOUL books, but I consistently failed to get either my THE GHOSTS books or THE THIRD SOUL published. Eventually, I became increasingly disgusted with the entire structure of publishing (what is now called legacy or traditional publishing) and started doing other things. I began writing a technology blog that focused on Ubuntu Linux, I ran "choose your own adventure" games on my main blog, and from time to time I wrote short fiction if I saw a listing or a call for submissions that looked promising. But by 2010, I was pretty sure I was done writing novels.

  This goes to show I'm not good at predicting the future - clearly I should stay away from the stock market.

  Then in November of 2010, I got a third-generation Kindle ereader. I had always been opposed to the idea of ebooks, but with the 3rd-gen Kindle, the price had finally dropped low enough to make the device attractive.

  "There was got," I thought to myself, "to be a way to make money off this thing."

  In March of 2011, I stumbled across a blog post from thriller writer Lee Goldberg, who had written a book called THE WALK with Gale/Five Star. Like DEMONSOULED, THE WALK had gone out of print, but Mr. Goldberg had gotten the rights back, and self-published it as an ebook. At the time of the post, he had hold 12,000 copies of the book.

  I was boggled. 12,000 copies! DEMONSOULED sold a grand total of 425. Heck, if I turned it into an ebook, I'd be delighted if it sold 7 copies. I emailed Mr. Goldberg, who was kind enough to tell me how he had gone about getting the rights back from Gale/Five Star. I got the rights back to DEMONSOULED, and in April of 2011, I turned it into an ebook, with SOUL OF TYRANTS following soon after.

  But only two books in the series. That seemed incomplete, right? I decided I wanted a complete fantasy trilogy. I had no illusions that it would sell well, but I figured then I could talk wistfully about my fantasy trilogy as I focused on my technology blog. So on May 1, 2011, I buckled down and started work on SOUL OF SERPENTS, returning to the DEMONSOULED world after an absence of six years. At the time, I truly thought it would be the last book in the DEMONSOULED series, though I left the ending slightly open if I wanted to return to it.

  I finished SOUL OF SERPENTS in August, and published the book in September. Around that time, I read that writers of series sometimes had good luck by making the first book in their series free. Readers were more willing to take a chance on a free book, and if they liked it, they would go on to purchase additional books in the series. I figured I would give that a try, and so in September of 2011, I made DEMONSOULED a free ebook.

  And...it sort of took off. I was astonished to see over a thousand downloads of DEMONSOULED on the first day, especially since the hardback had sold 425 copies. The sales of SOUL OF TYRANTS and SOUL OF SERPENTS picked up, and in August of 2011, I sold more than a 1,000 ebooks in a month for the first time ever. For a man like me, who was used to making very little money off writing, it was absolutely mind-boggling. It still is, to be honest.

  Needless to say, I had to continue the series at that point. I wrote a rough outline for three more books - SOUL OF DRAGONS, SOUL OF SORCERY, and SOUL OF SHADOWS, and started work on SOUL OF DRAGONS in November of 2011. I was absolutely exhausted for most of the writing - in the second half of 2011, I had a full-time job and a part-time job, and tended to do my writing sessions from 10:30 PM to midnight, before waking up again at 5:30 AM to start all over again. But if you work for yourself, you have the most demanding boss in the world, so I wrote the book and released it in February of 2012.

  Originally, I had planned to do two more books, but I quickly realized that there was too much story to fit into only two books, and if I tried, the last book would be a 300,000 word monster. So I planned for three more books, not two, and started writing SOUL OF SORCERY in June of 2012. SOUL OF SORCERY was fun to write - for years I had wanted to write a fantasy book based on the Gothic War and Battle of Adrianople in the Late Roman Empire, and at last I had the chance. Additionally, I felt like writing the first book of a new trilogy. In many ways, the DEMONSOULED series is two trilogies, with SOUL OF DRAGONS linking them.

  I released SOUL OF SKULLS in January of 2013, and started writing SOUL OF SWORDS in March of 2013. It was a strange experience, writing the end of the DEMONSOULED series after so long. In many ways, it was a jaunt down memory lane, as I recalled where I had thought up the ideas for Mazael Cravenlock and Romaria Greenshield and Lucan Mandragon twelve or more years ago.

  And now, dear reader, the end of the story is in your hands. I'd like to thank you for reading to the end, and I hope it was an enjoyable journey. I started DEMONSOULED twelve years before I wrote these words, and I never thought I would have the chance to finish the story, but here we are at last.

  Will there be more DEMONSOULED books? Mazael Cravenlock's story is done at last, but I do intend to return to the setting of DEMONSOULED someday. What will this new series be about, you ask? Well, there's a clue in this book. There's a word that appears e
xactly once in this book (well, twice, since I mention it below), and that word should give you a hint as to what the next DEMONSOULED series will be about:

  Cenotaph.

  First, though, I would like to try my hand at a new epic fantasy series. Follow this link for a look at the first book of the FROSTBORN series, FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT, released in August of 2013, and turn the page for the first chapter from the book.

  Thank you again, and God bless you.

  -Jonathan Moeller

  May 20th, 2013

  Bonus Chapter from FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT

  A letter to the surviving kings, counts, and knights of Britain:

  I am Malahan Pendragon, the bastard son of Mordred, himself the bastard son of Arthur Pendragon, the High King of all Britain.

  You know the grievous disasters that have befallen our fair isle. My father betrayed my grandfather, and perished upon the bloody field of Camlann, alongside many of the mightiest knights and kings of Britain. Before that came the war of Sir Lancelot’s treachery and the High Queen’s adultery, a war that slew many noble and valiant knights.

  Now there is no High King in Britain, Camelot lies waste, and the pagan Saxons ravage our shores. Every day the Saxons advance further and further, laying waste to our fields and flocks, butchering our fighting men, making slaves of our womenfolk, and desecrating holy churches and monasteries. Soon all of Britain shall lie under their tyranny, just as the barbarians overthrew the Emperor of Rome.

  My lords, I write not to claim the High Kingship of Britain – for Britain is lost to the Saxons – but to offer hope. My grandfather the High King is slain, and his true heir Galahad fell seeking the grail, so therefore this burden has fallen to me, for there is no one else to bear it.