Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Story Copyrights
Also by Bradley P. Beaulieu
Praise for Bradley P. Beaulieu
Dedication
Author's Note
Quinta Essentia
In the Stars I’ll Find You
Chasing Humanity
Bloom
Cirque de la Lumière
Foretold
Flashed Forward
And a Girl Named Rose
Compartmentalized
Upon the Point of a Knife
No Viviremos Como Presos
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Twelve Kings in Sharakhai
The Winds of Khalakovo
The Straits of Galahesh
The Flames of Shadam Khoreh
Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten
Strata
Copyright © 2016 by Bradley P. Beaulieu
Cover art Copyright © 2015 by Donato Giancola
Cover design by Bradley P. Beaulieu
Author photo courtesy of Al Bogdan
All rights reserved.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-93964-918-8 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978-1-93964-916-4 (epub)
ISBN: 978-1-93964-917-1 (Kindle)
Please visit me on the web at
http://www.quillings.com
“Quinta Essentia” © 2014 by Bradley P. Beaulieu. First published in Steampunk vs. Aliens, edited by Patricia Bray and Joshua Palmatier, Zombies Need Brains, 2014.
“In the Stars I’ll Find You” © 2016 by Bradley P. Beaulieu. Previously unpublished.
“Chasing Humanity” © 2006 by Bradley P. Beaulieu. First published in Man vs. Machine, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, DAW Books, 2006.
“Bloom” © 2014 by Bradley P. Beaulieu. First published in HEROES!, edited by Kelly Swails, Silence in the Library Publishing, 2014.
“Cirque de la Lumière” (as by Brad Beaulieu) © 2008 by Bradley P. Beaulieu. First published as “Cirque du Lumière” in Fellowship Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes, DAW Books, 2008.
“Foretold” © 2010 by Bradley P. Beaulieu. First published in Steampunk’d, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jean Rabe, DAW Books, 2010.
“Flashed Forward”, © 2014 by Bradley P. Beaulieu. First published in HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!!, July 2014.
“And a Girl Named Rose” © 2016 by Bradley P. Beaulieu. Previously unpublished.
“Compartmentalized” © 2016 by Bradley P. Beaulieu. Previously unpublished.
“Upon the Point of a Knife” © 2013 by Bradley P. Beaulieu. First published in The Crimson Pact, Volume V, edited by Paul Genesse, 2013.
“No Viviremos Como Presos” © 2007 by Bradley P. Beaulieu. First published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, October 2007.
These stories were first published in slightly different form and appear here in the author’s preferred texts.
Also by Bradley P. Beaulieu
The Song of the Shattered Sands
Of Sand and Malice Made
Twelve Kings in Sharakhai
With Blood Upon the Sand
A Veil of Spears
The Lays of Anuskaya
The Winds of Khalakovo
The Straits of Galahesh
The Flames of Shadam Khoreh
Short Story Collections
Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories
Novellas
Strata (with Stephen Gaskell)
The Burning Light (with Rob Zeigler)
Praise for Twelve Kings in Sharakhai
“Fantasy and horror, catacombs and sarcophagi, resurrections and revelations: The book has them all, and Beaulieu wraps it up in a package that’s as graceful and contemplative as it is action-packed and pulse-pounding.”
—NPR Books
“Wise readers will hop on this train now, as the journey promises to be breathtaking.”
—Robin Hobb, author of The Assassin’s Apprentice
“This is an impressive performance.”
—Publishers Weekly
“I am impressed… An exceedingly inventive story in a lushly realized dark setting that is not your uncle’s Medieval Europe. I’ll be looking forward to the next installment.”
—Glen Cook, author of The Black Company
“Bradley P. Beaulieu’s new fantasy epic is filled with memorable characters, enticing mysteries, and a world so rich in sensory detail that you can feel the desert breeze in your hair as you read. Çeda is hands-down one of the best heroines in the genre—strong, resourceful, and fiercely loyal to friends and family. Fantasy doesn’t get better than this!”
—C. S. Friedman, author of The Coldfire Trilogy
“A memorable heroine, a poetically told tale of revenge, and superb world-building make Twelve Kings in Sharakhai a splendid read.”
—John Marco, author of The Jackal of Nar and The Eyes of God
“Bradley Beaulieu has crafted a rich, fascinating world, filled it with compelling characters, and blended them into an epic tale that grabbed my attention on the first page and refused to let go. I look forward to more stories of Sharakhai.”
—David B. Coe/D. B. Jackson, author of Rules of Ascension and Thieftaker
“Exotic, sumptuous and incredibly entertaining, Beaulieu has created memorable characters in a richly imagined world.”
—Michael J. Sullivan, author of The Riyria Chronicles
“Beaulieu’s intricate world-building and complex characters are quickly becoming the hallmarks of his writing, and if this opening volume is any indication, The Song of the Shattered Sands promises to be one of the next great fantasy epics.”
—Jim Kellen, Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Buyer for Barnes & Noble
“Pit fighting smugglers high on steroid-like flower petals alongside immortal plutocrats, who will do anything to keep on living, make this blood and sand fueled epic fantasy something to behold.”
—Justin Landon, Tor.com
“Beaulieu’s fantasy worlds are well-imagined and richly drawn…the kind you want to keep visiting.”
—Kirkus Speculative Reading List for September 2015
“Betrayal. Love. Revenge. Political upheaval. Compelling characters twisting and turning their way through a fast-paced plot set against a realer than real desert backdrop—how can readers of Twelve Kings not be impressed?”
—Sarah Chorn, Bookworm Blues
Praise for The Winds of Khalakovo
“Well worth exploring… Beaulieu [depicts] a strange culture [with] a remarkable fantasy/magical reality feel.”
—Glen Cook, bestselling author of The Black Company
“Overlaid with the rich feel of Cyrillic culture, Beaulieu’s debut introduces a fascinating world of archipelagic realms and shamanic magic worked primarily by women. Verdict: Strong characters and a plot filled with tension and difficult choices make this a good option for fantasy fans.”
—Library Journal
“Sailing ships of the sky! Bradley P. Beaulieu’s The Winds of Khalakovo is an energetic, swashbuckling novel with a distinctive flavor, a lush setting, and a plot filled with adventure, interesting charac
ters, and intrigue. Exactly the kind of fantasy I like to read.”
—Kevin J. Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of The Saga of Seven Suns
“Elegantly crafted, refreshingly creative, The Winds of Khalakovo offers a compelling tale of men and women fighting to protect their world. Politics, faith, betrayal, sacrifice, and of course supernatural mystery—it’s all there, seamlessly combined in a tale driven by intelligent and passionate characters whose relationships and goals a reader can really care about. A great read!”
—C. S. Friedman, bestselling author of the Coldfire and Magister trilogies
“A page-turner with twists, turns and palpable danger…”
—Paul Genesse, author of The Golden Cord
“In The Winds of Khalakovo Beaulieu navigates through a web of complex characters… dukes, duchesses, lovers, and more, while building a rich and intricate world thick with intrigue. He plots the course of Nikandr Iaroslov Khalakovo, a prince laden with disease and courtly responsibilities, and deftly brings the tale to a satisfying end that leaves the reader hungry for the next installment. Beaulieu is a writer that bears watching. I look forward to his next novel.”
—Jean Rabe, USA Today bestselling fantasy author
“Bradley P. Beaulieu is a welcome addition to the roster of new fantasy novelists. The Winds of Khalakovo is a sharp and original fantasy full of action, intrigue, romance, politics, mystery and magick, tons of magick. The boldly imagined new world and sharply drawn characters will pull you into The Winds of Khalakovo and won’t let you go until the last page.”
—Michael A. Stackpole, bestselling author of I, Jedi and At the Queen’s Command
For my good friend, Paul Genesse, who has read many of these stories
and shared this journey of becoming a writer with me.
Author’s Note
This short story collection represents the second I’ve published, following the release of Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories in 2013. In Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten, I chose those short stories that had a largely fantastic feel to them. In this collection, I chose those that were more science fictional in nature. However, there are some few stories that blur the line between fantasy and science fiction. I therefore included two stories in both collections: “Cirque de la Lumière” and “Foretold”.
I hope those that have purchased both collections will forgive the repetition.
Quinta Essentia
On the day they finally came, Sean Brannon tossed and turned in his bed, his ligature exoskeleton whirring while assisting his movements. The sound of the ligature was nearly, though not quite, masking the childlike whine that escaped him with each turn of his broken body. He rolled and lay in a fetal position, and found Therese an arm’s length away—a measure of space that in their early days had always seemed so tenderly close but now felt unbridgeable. He knew she felt his movements, heard every minute manifestation of his pain no matter how hard he tried to mask it, but she tried to remain asleep while he in turn tried to remain as quiet as he could manage.
Dawn was still a distant dream, but Sean knew he would never get back to sleep now, so he threw off his thin blanket and pivoted himself up, joints howling from the attention the levering of a ninety-pound frame to a semi-upright position required. Placing hands on knees and gritting his teeth, he pushed himself up to a trembling stand. It was worse than normal today. The humidity—he could feel it in the air already—and something else, something more arcane than precipitation.
He was sweating by the time he managed to coax his body into a fully upright position.
“Come back to bed,” Therese said, reaching over the ruffled bedcovers with an arm that was well shaped. A woman that was well shaped. A woman that had helped him every day since this endless nightmare had begun.
“Go back to sleep,” Sean said.
She woke more fully then, raised herself up, arms and shoulders angling unnaturally as she propped herself on one elbow. By the light of gas lamps filtering in through the nearby window, she watched him with pity-filled eyes. This was the worst time of day for both of them. It reminded them how frail he was, and he suspected it reminded Therese how frail she was—how frail they all were in light of the ways the world had changed—and Therese was a woman who had never liked being reminded of her own mortality. She seemed ready to argue with him, to coax him back to bed, but then she relented and lay back, turning over with the leaden movements of the deeply fatigued, and fell back to sleep.
As she lay there, snoring softly, Sean forced the suit to work his body. As much as he’d learned to ignore pain, he couldn’t stand so much of it at once. He started in increments: toes, then feet, then calves and thighs. Sweat gathered on his brow as he continued with his back and stomach and chest and back. Then neck and jaw and mouth. His arms and hands were the least painful, but he was careful to move them properly—flexing, then releasing, flexing and releasing—lest he strain something before he’d warmed up.
Every gradient in movement pained him, as if his muscles were being ripped apart. Even his bones felt like millstones, grinding themselves into dust. But he worked through it all. He couldn’t give in to the pain, not even a little. Do that, and he would return to bed. He would lie there, crying as the pain consumed him, and Therese would be forced to take him to the University hospital and they’d work his muscles for him until he’d gotten past it. If that happened, it would be infinitely worse than what he was feeling now.
By the time he pulled his clothes on—clothes made overly large to fit his ligature—the sun was burning blue along the eastern horizon, across the River Wear, and in the distance, the towering haulms the Jovians had seeded twelve years before waved gently in the wind. Jovians, they’d been called, even though no one truly believed the haulms had come from Jupiter.
Like candles on a grand cake, the tips of the haulms were lit by brilliant orange from the sun. The rest of their length was dark, like mottled ochre earth. Bits of flake fell away from each, twinkling in the light as they were blown by the wind. The skin of the haulms had been doing this ever since they’d emerged from the earth. The flake was like the bark of the eucalyptus, shedding as it grew, but the haulms were so large now that if the wind came from the north, the streets of Durham would be covered with layer upon layer of it—thin, chalky flakes building until the plows came to clear the streets or the rain dissolved it into a thick yellow slurry that eventually washed away.
A hundred men, hands clasped, would be needed to circle the base of one of the haulms. Their roots dug deep, some said as deep below the earth as they towered above. Sean doubted this, though. Some few scientists from the British Society of Engineers had commissioned a dig to determine for certain, but gave up after excavating five hundred feet down. They’d run calculations based on how quickly the roots had narrowed, and determined they could go no further than half a mile down.
No one knew why the Jovians had sent the stalks. No person or government had been contacted in any way. The haulms had simply started to grow—all over the Earth—at an unimaginable rate, reaching up and up until they towered over every territory in the world where vegetation grew.
Sean reached the rail yard just as the sun’s first rays were gleaming against the horizon in the east. He headed to a red train that in an hour would carry dozens of workers from Durham up to the fluorite mines, one of the city’s major exports, especially since the discovery of quinta essentia some thirty years ago. Standing next to it on a second set of rails was a new train, or more accurately a train with a new power plant, fueled by an ingenious mix of quinta incendia, terra, and unda. It was shiny and bright and green with red trim, a recent prototype granted to the mining company from Morgan College—the University’s newest college dedicated to the study of elemental science. The gift made sense. The college, after all, benefited greatly from the fluorite mines. It was the primary doping agent in the lenses they made, the ones that focused the five elements into viable and useful
applications.
Sean went to the first of the coal cars sitting next to the steam train and, after rolling back the tarpaulin covering the coal, gritted his teeth and began shoveling the coal into the tender. Pain ran through his arms and legs and back, but the truth of it was it felt good, no matter how much pain there was, for it was loosening his muscles even further, the first of many steps in a long and careful process of physical exertion that would, if he was careful, carry him through the entire day. Even his ligature—the exoskeleton drilled into every major bone used in typical human locomotion—whirred more enthusiastically, providing more than half the effort needed.
“Ah, now,” came a voice from behind Sean, “please, Mister Brannon, won’t you let me help?”
Sean turned and found Thomison, the old rail yard foreman, standing some paces away wearing his characteristic engineer’s cap and blue denim overalls.
“Good morning, Thomison.”
“I’d say the same to you,” Thomison said, wiping his hands on a greasy rag, “but I can see it’s going poorly enough already.”
“I told you, the activity does me good.”
“As you say, but you also said it would make you healthier. Just looking at you, begging your pardon, sir, but it’s been seven weeks and you’re looking worse’n ever.”
“Why, thank you, Thomison. You’re looking well yourself.”
Thomison bowed his head apologetically. “My father told me never to mince words, not when it might do someone some good. I can’t have the men late for work. I’ll be speaking to the Master Hunt later today. I think it might be best if you went to see the doctor, spent a bit of time at home.”
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