Inside This Issue
From The Editor
By Adrian Collins
Shadow Hunter
A Shadows of the Apt Story
By Adrian Tchaikovsky
Grimdark: It’s Here to Stay
Article by Layla Cummins
The Neutral
Written by Mike Gelpin. Translation by Anatoly Belilovsky
Interview with Joe Abercrombie
Review: Half a King
By Kyle Massa
The Woman I Used To Be
By Gerri Leen
Book review: Prince of Fools
By Kyle Massa
The Red Wraith
By Nicholas Wisseman
Interview with Graham McNeill
Bad Seed
A Broken Empire Story
By Mark Lawrence
From the Editor
Welcome to the first edition of Grimdark Magazine, the culmination of almost a year’s work.
Grimdark Magazine started out as the identification of a gap in the niche ezine market coupled with an obsession with grim stories told in a dark world by morally ambiguous protagonists. Many of my favourite authors have really put their hands up to get involved, and some of their work is included within these pages as either fiction or interviews. More will show up later. There is also a wealth of talent out there, hiding in the shadows, waiting to strike. I want to find that talent and publish it.
Nearly a year down the track and here is issue #1 for your grimdark pleasure. I’d really like to hear your thoughts on our first issue and what you’d like to see more (or less) of. Connect with the Grimdark Magazine team at:
www.facebook.com/grimdarkmagazine
www.twitter.com/AdrianGdMag
www.grimdarkmagazine.com
Thank you for buying Grimdark Magazine’s first issue. I hope you enjoy reading it as much Cheresse, Layla, Kyle and I enjoyed putting it together for you.
Adrian Collins
Founder
Shadow Hunter
A Shadows of the Apt Story
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
To each of the Insect-kinden, a totem: source of their power, shaper of their nature. Beetle-kinden were tough men and women, able to endure and prosper anywhere; Flies were small and swift and skittish; the people of the Spider were elegant and clever and not to be trusted. Moths, the mystics, claimed to know all the secrets of the old darkness, while the Dragonfly-kinden claimed the light, and claimed to be better than everyone else as well. And the Wasps?
The Wasp-kinden were savage and angry. Their totem gave them wings, and their hands flashed with gold fire as they slaughtered each other, generation on generation. And while that ferocity was turned inward, tribe against tribe, family against family, nobody much cared. Nobody even noticed, when one chieftain beat and bribed and challenged until all the people of the Wasp were facing in the same direction, under the same rule. When all that boundless energy and ambition was abruptly turned outwards, all the armies and walls of the world could not stand before it.
The Empire, they called it, and it swept across all the little city states, the Ant and Bee and Beetle-kinden, enslaved their people and called them the Empire too. And then the Wasps went looking for bigger game. For a decade now they had been swallowing great chunks of the ancient Dragonfly Commonweal, teaching those high-minded people just who was better than who. The Dragonflies were a people of many talents: farmers, artists, swordsmen, archers, mystics. They were Inapt and they fought in the old way—honour duels and massed peasant levy. The Wasps were soldiers, every single man of them—they had slaves to do the rest for them. Being Apt—mechanically-minded—they fought with crossbows and siege engines and primitive war automotives, ripping up the history of a thousand years and sending the loot home to the Emperor.
What happened, then, to a man of the Wasp-kinden who no longer wanted to be a soldier? What happened to a man who, by dint of extreme conniving, effort and brute luck, was released from the adamant bonds of military service to make his own way in the world?
***
Should never have taken this job, was Gaved’s thought on seeing the forest. He was a man who preferred to trust his instincts, but he also preferred to eat. Being a freelance Wasp-kinden in an occupied land where every other man of your people wore the uniform made it hard to find work. Patrons were scarce when you were hated by the locals and despised by the invaders.
Then he had met the Moth, tucked quietly in the corner of an army drinking tent: raucous, full of off-duty soldiers and half of them still in their black and gold armour. That one corner had been an oasis of stillness and quiet, and there the Moth had been. They were a relic of another land’s mystical past, the Moth-kinden, eking out a living on the edges of the Apt world. Like all the Inapt—like the Dragonfly-kinden that the Wasp army had recently bludgeoned into surrender—the Moths were a people who could not grasp the principles of machines, of logistics, of the modern world. They were the last tattered scraps of the past.
This man of the Moth: grey skin, blank white eyes, slender enough that a burly Wasp like Gaved could have broken him in half, yet somehow his soft voice had slid past all the rowdy jabber of the drinkers. ‘I have work for you.’
And here Gaved was, following the only employment he had been able to find, doing the bidding of one Moth by hunting down another. Somewhere in this tangle of thorn-barked trees there was a second man of that grey kinden, and Gaved was tasked with bringing him out.
Or kill him, the instructions had gone. Tell him it is better to be dead, than to be what he is.
He had trawled for rumours about the forest his quarry had holed up in. A dark place, he was told; a bad place. The locals had never gone there, the army had not needed to fight there. Probably it was somewhere the Dragonflies thought was magic, not that a Wasp would care about that. More recently it was a haunt of bandits, because the war had left a lot of armed men with nothing to do.
Gaved didn’t mind bandits. He preferred them to soldiers, most of the time.
They ran into him at the same time he ran into them, both sides freezing in surprise. Gaved had his hands out instantly, his palms warming with the Wasp Art. A thought from him and golden fire would be spitting from between his fingers, showing these locals just why his people were feared.
He saw a man and a woman, both Dragonflies, lean and golden-skinned. The woman wore a few pieces of iridescent armour, no doubt prised from a dead noble’s body. She had a sword, and perched on one wrist was the hunting insect of her kinden, a dragonfly two feet long with a carapace of glittering metallic blue, huge eyes regarding him and all the world impartially.
The man wore a ragged greatcoat and he had a short bow in his hands, which concerned Gaved far more than the sword or the insect.
‘Good day, fellow travellers,’ he said, one hand covering each of them. He tried a smile, but his smiles were seldom reassuring. He was one of the dreaded invaders, after all: a big, pale man with the red weal of a burn-scar about his neck and chin, from when he had finally decided to leave the army and go freelance.
‘What do you want here, Wasp?’ the woman demanded.
‘I’ve come looking for someone.’ Better not to say hunting. It had so many negative connotations.
Gaved saw the archer’s hands twitch, saw a moment’s glance pass between them, and then the Dragonfly man said, ‘He’s after the Moth.’
It was plain that “the Moth” was no friend of theirs. The tension leached out of the moment.
The woman’s name was Eriss; the man was Kael. They never used the word “bandit” but that was plainly what they were. More, they’d another dozen friends who plied the
same trade. Or they had, before coming to this forest.
‘Because your army wouldn’t come here,’ Kael grumbled. ‘Even your Empire can’t make the trees pay taxes.’
‘But he was here already,’ Eriss added. ‘We didn’t realize at first. We’d made camp. But there was something…’
‘Nobody slept,’ Kael took up the story. ‘Not well. We started to see… shadows, ghosts. Then he came to our fire. A Moth. A magician.’
Gaved raised a doubting eyebrow.
‘Scoff all you want, Wasp; what do your people know?’ Eriss snapped. ‘He walked in and told us we were his, and our chief couldn’t speak, not one word. Kael and me, we got out, just slipped away. We thought the others’d follow us when they could. Nobody did.’
‘This is a place of evil magic from the old days,’ Kael added. ‘A death-place. We should never have come here. Your people wouldn’t understand.’
They were going back to find their friends. Gaved was going to face down their enemy. Common cause was made.
The Art of the insect-kinden gave many gifts. It let the Ant-kinden speak to each other, mind to mind and allowed the Wasps to sting, to each race its own blessings. Gaved could fly a little, too, the shimmer of wings materialising from his back when called on. The Dragonflies were better, born to the air.
The forest was dense, the interlaced branches of the canopy a fortress that even the Imperial army had not fancied bringing down. The bandits’ preferred road was the high one, from bough to bough, making short hops through the uppermost fingers of the trees.
Eriss had sent her dragonfly ahead to scout, the agile insect hovering and darting over the dense foliage. When it returned to her, she would speak with it, gleaning what it had seen from its simple mind.
The first two times she sent it out, it found traces of the other bandits’ progress through the woods, heading for the very heart of the place. The third time it was on its way back when the canopy came alive and reached for it. In sight of its mistress, what seemed just green leaves and branches unfurled toothed arms and clawed for the insect. Gaved saw a triangular head with bulbous, gleaming orbs for eyes and mandibles beneath like scissor blades: a mantis, one of the great forest mantids, and this one surely fifteen feet long.
For a long moment they stared at one another: the three humans and the monstrous insect, with the dragonfly waiting on above. Then the mantis cocked its head at them and let itself drop, vanishing into the gloom of the forest below.
They thought like men, he had heard it said. They hunted and planned and held grudges. And sometimes, said the old tales, they served magicians.
Soon after, they found the rest of the bandits.
They were in a clearing, sat in a circle, as though they had decided to stop for some conference of thieves. Except they were dead. Except they were splinted up, propped on bloody, jagged shards of cane and wood. Some even had arms spiked out as though caught mid-gesture. Some had open mouths, and Gaved could see the splinters that had been driven in, to keep their jaws in place. It was a ghoulish tableau, and what was worse was the empty place. All those dead eyes, all that arrested body language, led the eye to one spot about the circle, as though some chairman of the damned had only that moment stepped away.
Kael and Eriss were frozen, staring. Gaved himself was watching for the Moth, because a man with this sense of showmanship would not miss his entrance.
And sure enough, there he was: stepping in to take his place at the circle, the grey-faced man of slender build, bundled in a threadbare robe. His blind-looking eyes took in his visitors and he smiled.
The Moth. The same Moth. The same man that had sent Gaved here; there was no mistaking.
Then Kael had his bowstring back with a shout of fury, and Gaved was already moving, running around that grisly circle, hands out, but holding off—
His forbearance made Kael the target, so that when the mantis’s strike lashed out of the shadows it was the archer who was snatched away, gone in a heartbeat and a cry. The huge insect loomed above them, from shadow to killer like a trick of the light. Its razor mouthparts were working busily as it chewed at the stump of Kael’s neck.
Eriss should have run, then, but she shrieked and hacked at its nearest leg, her dragonfly spiralling up and away overhead. Gaved saw her blade smash one of the mantis’s stilt-like limbs, and it raised its killing arms in threat, Kael’s remains still dangling.
Gaved’s hands flashed, his sting searing across the clearing. One bolt charred across the creature’s thorax, another crackled past the creature’s head, even as Eriss lunged forwards and sunk her blade up to the crosspiece into the insect’s abdomen.
And it was shadows; it had only been shadows. Gaved stared, seeing the patterns between the trees that had looked as though a monstrous mantis was there, wondering how he could have been fooled by it. And yet Kael was dead and dismembered, and Eriss’s sword was gone…
Gaved saw the Moth was already beside her, reaching out. One thin grey hand caught her collar and the other drew a dagger across her throat with a butcher’s economic skill.
Then those white eyes turned to Gaved, who unleashed his sting.
Or he had meant to. There had been no other thought than that, before the burning gaze caught him. Moths had their own Art, and abruptly this one was in Gaved’s mind, holding him rigid, trapping his will as the thin figure picked its way towards him, bloody blade held reverently.
‘Why have you come to this place of power, little Wasp-kinden?’
He could not be sure whether the voice was in his ears, or just in his head.
‘This place of magic—and there are so few left anymore. The iron armies of your people trample and trample, with your machines and your progress; with the brightness of your lamps. A poor scholar must travel a long way to find somewhere that has even a vestige of the old days about it. And who can say what the quality of such a place might be?’ The Moth was right before him now, the wet coldness of the blade resting on his cheek. ‘And yet we must make accommodations. We magicians cannot be choosy, in this latter age…’
The Moth turned the blade, so that the thin, hard line of its edge was against Gaved’s burn-scarred throat.
Then the dragonfly stooped, glittering wings battering madly at the grey face as it tried to avenge its fallen mistress. The magician staggered away, clutching at it, shielding his eyes, and abruptly Gaved could move again.
He sent a sting-shot at the robed figure, only catching the Moth a glancing blow, even as the man snatched the dragonfly from the air, crushing its delicate wings between his fingers and tearing them from the insect’s body.
Those white eyes were on him again, and although he had a hand out, he could not loose his sting. But the Moth’s hold was imperfect: he could speak.
‘You sent me!’ he got out. ‘You came to me and sent me here! You told me, “Tell him it is better to be dead, than to be what he is.”’
The words struck the Moth hard. For a brief moment there was realization on that grey face. Those blank eyes took in the scene around them: the gruesome parliament, the utter bloody madness of what had been done under the forest’s influence. No wonder some part of him had rebelled, seeking what little help could be found in this occupied land.
Then Gaved’s hands blazed again, and this time he struck true, and just in time. He had seen the twist of cruelty coming back to the man’s face, the moment of truth already passing.
Standing there, with nothing but that conclave of the dead for company, he felt a tired emptiness inside him.
With a wary eye out, in case that mantis had been real, and not just shadows, he set about relieving the corpses of their valuables. One thing was certain: he wasn’t getting paid for this job. [GdM]
Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed Shadows of the Apt fantasy series, from the first volume, Empire In Black and Gold in 2008 to the final book, Seal of the Worm, in 2014, with a new series and a standalone science fiction novel scheduled for 2
015. He has been nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award and a British Fantasy Society Award. In civilian life he is a lawyer, gamer and amateur entomologist.
Grimdark: It’s Here To Stay
LAYLA CUMMINS
Grimdark is well on its way to becoming a staple subgenre in fantasy literature. But where did it come from? And what exactly is grimdark?
‘It's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot—often as an accusation,’ writes Mark Lawrence, author of the Broken Empire trilogy. ‘I've seen lots of articles describe the terrible properties of grimdark and then fail to name any book that has those properties.’
Grimdark is shorthand for ‘grim darkness’, a description first used in the tagline of popular 80s Games Workshop table top game, Warhammer 40,000: ‘In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war’. Gaming enthusiasts borrowed the term to describe like-minded fan-fiction but outside of these circles grimdark was flung across online forums with utter contempt, an insult to authors filling their books with darkness, grit, and moral ambiguity.
As a result, fans of dark fantasy were reluctant to use grimdark when describing one of their favourite genres, fearing finger pointing from fantasy and sci-fi purists. Yet, over time, grimdark has come to mean something different. Authors and fans now see it as a fitting title for stories that evolved from heroic ‘happily ever after’ tales of yesteryear into the modern gritty sagas we know and love today.
Joe Abercrombie, author of the First Law trilogy and one of the biggest names in gritty fantasy today, adopted the term with his tongue firmly in cheek, using the moniker @LordGrimdark as his Twitter handle. He commented on the changing nature of Grimdark in his blog post The Value of Grit: ‘There was a time grimdark was a purely negative term for stuff that was laughably over-cynical, gritty and violent to no purpose whatsoever. These days people are using it in a positive light to describe a whole style of fantasy.’
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