Circle in the Deep
The Outcast Royal™ Series Book 01
Aaron D. Schneider
Michael Anderle
This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2021 LMBPN Publishing
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
Version 1.00, July 2021
ebook ISBN: 978-1-64971-923-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64971-924-9
The Circle in the Deep Team
Thanks to our Beta Team:
Kelly O’Donnell, John Ashmore, Rachel Beckford
Thanks to our JIT Team:
Dorothy Lloyd
Angel LaVey
Jackey Hankard-Brodie
Peter Manis
Zacc Pelter
Paul Westman
If we’ve missed anyone, please let us know!
Editor
SkyHunter Editing Team
Are you ugly?
A liar like me?
A user, a lost soul?
Someone you don’t know
-Ugly, The Exies
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said, —“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . .
-Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Underface
Underneath my outside face
There’s a face that none can see.
A little less smiley,
A little less sure,
But a whole lot more like me.
-Everything on It, Shel Silverstein
Dedication: This book is dedicated to my eldest, fierce as a storm, soft as new fallen snow. From the moment I had the honor to hold you in my arms, you’ve humbled and inspired me, my warrior-princess, my peacekeeping Valkyrie. Steel strong and tender hearted, I could not be more proud of you, and I hope in some way, some day, to make you proud of your ol’ Poppa Bear.
— Aaron
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
to Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
to Live the Life We Are
Called.
— Michael
Acknowledgments
This book would not be here without the patient and steady efforts of several people, many of whom I’ve thanked in previous books, and while their efforts are still appreciated incredibly, I’d thought I’d take a second to acknowledge some other people without whom this book and indeed this entire series would never be possible.
I’m referring to the giants on whose shoulders I now perch so precariously. Lewis and Tolkien, Howard and Lovecraft, King and Butcher, these inspiring titans of the written word who shaped and encouraged me without ever having seen my face or spoken to me (well all but one of you - though I imagine you’ve forgotten). You are the constellations I chase across the horizon, and without you creating your art and laying it before the hungry, ungracious world I might never have found my way here.
Thank you many times over. May God humor me enough that maybe one day we meet on fairer shores.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
Author Notes - Aaron Schneider
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
Connect with The Authors
Other Books by Aaron D. Schneider
Books By Michael Anderle
Prologue
Khardalis, the Iron Maiden and crown jewel of the Behemon Mountains, lay stripped and broken before her enemies.
The armies of Hasriim the Great already flowed through her streets and the first screams of the harrowed population were soon joined by the ravenous crackle of fire. In the waning night, the mingled voices of victims and flames would rise like an apocalyptic choir to echo across the mountainside.
The city had stood defiant for too long against Hasriim and as such, her humbling would be the subject of dread legends for years to come. Tales would be whispered of how rapine, slaughter, and plunder had left her a shell only fit for vultures and jackals. In cities as far as the fabled courts of Xhulth across the Caged Sea or even far Verenvan, dire stories would be told of the noble houses down to the last babe in arms butchered and hung from the palace Citadel.
Not every word would be true but the message would be clear. Khardalis was broken as was fitting for all who stood against Hasriim the Great.
Yet not one word would be spoken about how it was not Hasriim, however great he might be, who accomplished the fall of the proud city.
That dubious honor lay with a band that skulked around the gutted barbican of the Goat’s Gate.
The fortified gatehouse squatted upon the junction of the city’s outer wall. A branch of the interior wall provided, like yawning jaws, access to a rough mountain track into the Behemon Mountains.
The gate’s name had been a matter of some debate amongst the learned antiquarians of the city. Some had postulated that it was so named because this was where mountain shepherds used to drive their flocks into the city in antiquity. Others said that anyone exiting from said portal had best be as surefooted as a goat if they planned to travel the treacherous slopes beyond.
A few truly innovative and progressive academics proposed that the appellation of goat was derived as a derogatory term resulting from early conflicts between nomadic and agrarian peoples, but academics often say many silly things and their fellow civilized men indulge such foolishness.
Regardless, those scholars would soon never argue again as they died amongst other civilized men, while the Goat Gate was held by a small detachment of those distinctly less civil.
Moments earlier, they had ensured rapid ingress into the city. Now, they were determined to halt any egress. That is, of course, assuming one couldn’t pay.
“That’s everything we have,” a woman sobbed and clutched a silken shawl around her with one hand while the other pressed a small boy to her hip. The child shivered in the night air and the thin nightgown trembled against his spare frame.
&n
bsp; “Not everything, me thinkz,” a tall, barrel-chested man rumbled in a basso voice thick with a northern accent. He looked up from perusing the pack he held open with one hand while the other hand rested on the pommel of a sword in a battered scabbard. Seeming all the larger in the coat of scales and gorget worn across his broad body, he loomed over them both.
With thick, scarred fingers, he’d already plucked out the bag of coins and a wineskin that lay at his feet but he now squinted at the woman in the light of the burning city. His pale eyes glimmered in a gaunt face. He sucked his teeth and turned his visage to a skull’s rictus grin before he nodded.
“What do you me—” She began to weep but saw the heavy fingers stretched toward her. Fearing the worst, she cried out and tried to draw back but the brute’s fingers snagged the opal necklace around her throat.
“You are having theze.” The big man chuckled as the child at her side began to cry. “Give me theze and onez in you earz, then it be everything, me thinkz.”
“Please…please!” the woman croaked and her eyes bulged as her fingers struggled with the necklace. “Take it, please, but don’t hurt us.”
After another agonizing moment of fumbling, the necklace came free.
“Hurt?” the brigand asked with a bemused chuckle as he admired the necklace in his fist before he winked at the bawling child. “Why think me do that, eh?”
“Because your face looks like the celestial end of a hell-bound demon,” drawled a man from under the gate’s shadow. “And that’s when you’re in a good mood.”
The speaker emerged from the belly of the barbican. Bandy limbed and wiry with a horn bow slung over one shoulder, he wore a padded tunic crisscrossed with a leather harness from which hung a long-knife and a quiver of arrows. His voice was even and calm but something in his flinty gaze made mother and child shrink away.
The bowman’s black-eyed gaze played across the woman and lingered at every place where her thin nightgown shifted and clung to the soft body beneath. His expression didn’t change but his shoulders seemed to roll forward while his advancing steps took on a distinctly predatory gait.
“Perhaps the lady is looking for a guide, hmmm?” he all but purred in the back of his throat. “Someone to see her and her dear son to safety?”
“I can’t pay,” the woman said with a shiver and hugged herself. “He has everything.”
His lips curled to form a cold smile.
“Oh, I’m sure we’ll find a way to balance the scales.”
“Weren’t you—” The big man began to turn to the newcomer but fell silent at the wicked light in his companion’s eyes. The shadows on the gaunt face deepened as he looked at the beset mother with a shrug. The necklace fell amongst the other plunder at his feet and he refused to look at the sniffling little boy.
“Earringz first, me thinkz,” he grunted flatly and moved his hand to rest it on the pommel of his sword again.
Desperation and fear warred on the woman’s face as she struggled to remove the earrings, but a keening scream from deeper within the burning city held her attention for a moment. Something grew hard and remote in her eyes. She handed the earrings over, turned to the “guide,” and nodded stiffly, but she held her head high as she met his merciless gaze.
“Very well,” she said, her throat so tight she almost whispered. “Get us to safety and you can…can have whatever you want.”
As if to illustrate the point, she loosened her grasp on the shawl and straightened to draw her shoulders back. His smile broadened and it was his turn to nod.
“This way, my lady,” he said in a throaty invitation as he gestured toward the dark passage leading out of the city.
The big man would not look at either woman or child as they began to shuffle past him. Without turning, he raised his voice to address his companion, his gaze fixed beyond the bloody streets and fire-spattered buildings.
“Be quick about it, Norlen,” he called in an ashen voice. “Ax-Wed won’t like, me thinkz.”
Before the man could respond, a third figure emerged from under the gatehouse and her icy tones froze both men like an arctic gale.
“What won’t I like, Brekah?”
He stiffened while Norlen turned jerkily to regard the speaker who stepped from the dark. Their reaction was muted, however, compared to the beleaguered woman who gaped openly.
Had she ever seen such a creature?
The figure that strode forward, in spite of the armor and mail-curtained helm she wore, was ferociously female, but she was a lioness to the domestic feline cowering of the two men. She stood eye to eye with Brekah and her every movement betrayed a strength and agility that pushed beyond mere sinew. One gauntleted hand clutched a flaccid wineskin while the other rested upon the head of an ax on her belt.
Norlen was the quickest to recover and strode quickly to scoop up the wineskin pilfered from the woman’s pack.
“We’re merely dealing with things,” he said with an unctuous smile as he held the wineskin up as an offering. “Nothing you need to worry about.”
Eyes like forge-heated copper flashed within the shadow of the helm’s sockets as Ax-Wed looked past the wine to where the mother and son gawked at her. She looked at Brekah, who still refused to face her, and glared at Norlen.
“No.”
The words were as cold and hard as the grinning edge of the weapon at her belt.
His face spasmed with hatred but he mastered his expression and proffered the wineskin again.
“I don’t know what you mean.” He chuckled, an almost clucking sound in his dry mouth. “Take the skin and let us get back to it. The others will be back soon and they will probably have many more chickens that need to be plucked.”
Her gaze wandered to the wineskin for a moment and her fingers tightened on the limp sack in her hand. With a low sigh that slithered through the metal links that veiled her face, she let the empty skin fall from her grasp as she stepped forward.
“That a girl,” Norlen said encouragingly and a genuine grin crept across his face. “There you go. Climb right back—argh!”
His words ended in a choking gag as Ax-Wed stepped past the outheld liquor and seized him by the throat. With an ease that even the larger man would have struggled to display, she dragged the gasping, gargling bowman to one side. His eyes bulging, he clawed feebly at the armored limb that held him in a grasp as hard as the steel it was clad in.
“Brekah,” she said without an ounce of strain in her voice. “The pack.”
With a grumbling grunt, Brekah ambled around and held the pack out to the woman who stood moon-eyed with her child pressed against her hip.
“Take it,” Ax-Wed instructed in a calm, unhurried voice.
The woman hesitated for a moment and her fingers trembled when they stretched toward the pack. Then, with a lurch of resolve, she snatched it from him.
“Go.”
Again, the voice was untroubled despite the fact that Norlen now groped with one hand for the blade at his belt.
“Don’t,” she said and turned a chilling glare upon the bowman, who stilled although one hand still clenched around the arm holding him.
“Go,” she repeated and kicked the plundered wineskin toward the woman without turning her gaze from her captive. “Save as much of that as you can. In three days, you should reach a lodge on the north face. If it is empty, fine, but if not, use that wine to barter for assistance. They don’t get good wine up there very often.”
The woman slung the pack over her shoulder and scuttled forward with the child in tow. She hooked the carrying cords of the vessel with unsteady fingers but her voice was clear as she straightened to address the towering warrior.
“Thank you,” she whispered as she began to edge toward the portal. “May the gods bless you.”
“Go.”
She needed no more encouragement and turned from the ruins of her old life, dragging her son beside her. Before she vanished down the tunnel-like portal, the lad looked over his shou
lder long enough to wave a hand in farewell.
Ax-Wed waved in return but something like a shiver passed over her.
When they had moved far enough to satisfy her, she returned her gaze to Norlen, who wheezed through her constricting fingers as he glared at her with undisguised hatred.
With no more effort than if he were the little boy who had fled, she threw him aside. He lost his footing and landed on his backside with a wounded grunt.
“Not a zmart thing, me thinkz.” Brekah groaned and rubbed the back of his neck as though he experienced a sudden ache.
“Maybe.” She shrugged and let her shoulders sag before she rolled them. “But right isn’t always smart.”
“Truth.” The large man nodded and gestured with his chin at the recovering Norlen. “But him not having zuch ideaz, me thinkz.”
The bowman found his feet and snarled obscenities and blasphemies in three different tongues as he unlimbered his bow.
“Don’t ever touch me again.” He growled belligerently as his fingers brushed the fletching of the arrows at his hip, his bow already freed from his shoulder. “Ever.”
Circle In The Deep (The Outcast Royal Book 1) Page 1
