Author: Col Buchanan
Date: 2023-09-18T00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Wild Cosmos

The Good King

After a thousand years of secret conflict, the Neverwar - the war that never was - has finally ended with the fall of the Star King and his remaining forces. Now the New Order reigns supreme across the worlds.

Loyal to the bitter end, a defeated House Brightmorning is forced into exile on the remote moon of Gale, where the winds never stop howling, and from where Lord Brightmorning vows to carry on the fight.

Rooster Quinn is the bored blademaster to the House Brightmorning in their exile. As bodyguard and House Blade, his job is to protect the Lord Brightmorning’s son Brilliant with is life.

Unfortunately, events on the blowy moon of Gale are about to take a turn for the worse. The Ultras are coming to town, and with them a Soul Hunter on the trail of a Star King supposedly long dead.

With the past finally catching up with the present, keeping the young heir alive may not prove so simple after all ...

Also By The Author

The Heart of the World Series:

Farlander

Stands A Shadow

The Black Dream

Fierce Gods

The High Wild Series:

Neverwar

Praise for the Author's Works

'One of the most refreshing fantasies out there.'

- SFX MAGAZINE

'Completely absorbing ... I just couldn't put it down.'

- GLENN COOK, AUTHOR OF THE BLACK COMPANY NOVELS

'A truly exceptional book.'

- DAVID DRAKE, AUTHOR OF THE LEGIONS OF FIRE

'A fast-moving novel that, for all its fantasy elements, explosively addresses the universal questions facing any society.'

- L.E. MODESITT, JR, AUTHOR OF IMAGER'S INTRIGUE

'Farlander turns out to be something special ... The story grips from the astonishing opening sequence to the unexpected conclusion.'

- THE TIMES (UK)

'A searing new fantasy series that gets the blood pumping ... Bold, fearless in execution, exhilaratingly new and with a steely intensity ... this is a series to be reckoned with. Everyone take note.'

- THE TRUTH ABOUT BOOKS

'Col Buchanan's debut novel is gripping ... Delightfully undermines expectations.'

- SFX MAGAZINE

'The story will sneak up on you - yes, like an assassin - and before you realise it, it'll be early in the morning, your eyes will be bloodshot, and tears will be running down your face. I absolutely adored the unconventional hero Ash.'

- BARNES & NOBLE

'The novel is nigh-impossible to put down ... even better than the author's debut. Engaging and addictive, Stands a Shadow is one of the best novels I've read this year ... I love this series.'

- CIVILIANREADER.COM

'Like its predecessor, this is fantasy of the highest order - reminiscent of George R.R. Martin. Compelling writing and a pulsing plot.'

- BOOK GEEKS

'He has a powerful style that made me deeply connect with the story.'

- BETWEEN TWO BOOKS

'Digs deep ... Draws upon the harsh truths that history has taught us to create stories that feel epic in scale.'

- ED FORTUNE

'Resonates long after the final page.'

- STRANGE HORIZONS

TAKEN FROM THE GOOD KING
SERIALISED GAMEBOOK

Wild Cosmos Edition
Copyright (c) 2023 Col Buchanan

FROM THE BOOK OF SAMUEL
(an Original Earth edition):

... One day, the people demanded they have a king. So when Samuel, prophet and judge, told all their words to Almighty Jih, this is what Jih told him to say:

“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves."

But the people refused to listen to Samuel. They said, “No! But there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”

And when Samuel had heard all the words of the people, he repeated them before Jih.

And Jih said to Samuel, “Obey their voice, and make them a king.”

Prologue

That night, a hard shake of the shoulder woke the young boy in the heat of his bed. He was so startled that he reached for the bone knife his father told him to always keep beneath his pillow for protection.

‘Hush, it’s only me,’ breathed Quinn, his father’s Humani House Blade, holding a glowstick aloft that tinged the air blue like an underwater dream. In the wane light his skin appeared even paler than usual - so unhealthy-looking when you were used to the rich golden skin of your own people.

At the scarred blademaster’s instructions, Bril dressed quickly for travel in the cold of night, though Quinn steadfastly refused to answer his questions about where they were going, or why. Indeed, the Humani would only look at him in glances, as though he did not wish to be doing whatever this was they were doing, and did not agree with it, whatever it might be - which was unnerving, to say the least. Bril had known this man his entire life. For all that Rooster Quinn remained a living rock-face of non-emotion, Bril was a particularly perceptive boy for his age – he’d never seen the blademaster so anxious before, with his shifting eyes and voice drawn tight with tension.

‘Let’s go,’ said the man in a hush.

Outside the manor house, the winds that blew eternally around this tiny moonworld of Gale whipped at their fur-lined cloaks and transparent windhoods like a horde of raging ghosts. It was early Autumn, and the night air bit into any exposed skin with a chill that already hinted at the coming cold months. Bril blinked rapidly, surprised for a moment at how bright it was out here, with the Particle Falls hanging overhead and a particularly long string of plump full moons of varying colours casting enough light to read by. In the gravel yard at the back of the house his father stood alone, waiting with a glowstick held aloft, observing the boy's approach from within his own deep windhood with eyes lost in shadow. He was armed. Rheaf Brightmorning the Second wore a Lightsword in his belt, counter-weighted on the other side by the long-nosed shock pistol he liked to use for chasing the varls away from the wilderberry vines.

‘No questions,’ his father ordered, and Bril snapped his mouth shut. Rheaf Brightmorning turned and walked away from the house, crunching along the lava rock path that lead towards the stables; a tall lean figure within his snapping cloak, erect despite the gusts trying to bend him. With the merest of hesitations Quinn followed after his lord, and only reluctantly did Bril join them from behind, already annoyed at all the silence and intrigue.

Windstrings hummed and whirred their strange keening songs along the path while others rattled with pieces of varl bone, their multicoloured threads twisting and untwisting from the canes that held them in place. Inside his windhood, Bril turned his head to look back at the stone heap of their manor house, his breath forming little blooms of mist against the clear material of the hood. For a moment, he thought he saw a figure watching from an upstairs bedroom window, a thin womanly figure set against the soft light of a lantern, but then it was gone.

Bril swallowed hard.

Around them in the dimness, the wilderberry vines stood like a silent army of broken-backed soldiers across the slopes of the vineyard, which on a fine clear day stretched as far as the eye could see. The wilderberries were still fattening at this time of year, preparing to sweeten slowly over the cooler months of autumn and winter; they looked like a particularly heavy crop this year, his father had said to someone, anyone, other than Bril, just the other day. Tonight under the Particle Falls, they shined as they trembled in the winds; each amber berry gleaming so it was like a million candles flickering across the land.

The horses whinnied at their approach, but his father surprised Bril by turning away from the stables and instead vaulting up the steps of the flight tower, with Quinn close behind. So they would be flying tonight, wherever they were going.

Maybe it’s a night hunt, considered Bril. Maybe we’re going to hunt for some Holloweyes up on the Boneyard.

At the top of the steps on the blowy stone roof of the tower, Quinn opened one of the storage lockers and took out a flight mat and unfurled it using the wind to spread it out before him. Lying flat on the stonework, the mat resembled little more than an average-sized rug with some intricate patterning around the borders. Its edges were even fringed with tassels.

‘Bril,’ said his father without looking at him, then stepped onto the front of the mat and sat down with crossed legs. Quinn took up the middle position, where the heaviest person always sat, then looked up at Bril through his windhood, waiting. The boy hesitated, vaguely enjoying the sensation of being taller than these two men for once. But then, finally, he squatted down at the tail.

When his father settled his palms onto the mat, it came to life with a sudden fur of static that instantly flowed over them all, so that the hairs on their heads would have stood on end if not for the heaviness of their dreadlocks. With a command of thought, and drawing on electro-magnetic energies in the atmosphere, the silver-threaded mat lifted effortlessly into the air as though it weighed nothing, sagging only slightly against Bril’s hands so that he swayed for balance before it finally stiffened for flight.

Westwards they flew, over the vines and windwalls and watery swales and then the rows of turbines capping the nearest low hills, with the Particle Falls reflecting from the visors of their windhoods, looming overhead in cascades of amber luminescence that electrified the very sky with its charge. Behind the translucent Falls hung Thrull, the super-massive giant which the Falls wrapped around: a world so insanely huge that if you stood on its surface you’d be squished flat by its tidal waves of gravity, and so electrically attractive it drew all the solar system’s plasma streams towards it, creating the falling halo-ring effect that was the Falls.

Bril often counted the moons of Thrull to see how many were visible on a given night. Tonight, the long string of orbs matched the most he had ever seen at once. He had never counted all seventy. From his astro lessons he knew that most were liveable worlds, and many had their own orbiting moonlets too. Indeed, the closest moon to Thrull – Edos, which hung so close to the Particle Falls it garnered tourists and pilgrims from all over the system - itself possessed the moonlet of Gale, a cold and tiny world where the winds never stopped howling. A world that was not Bril's home, though he could barely remember another, having been brought here when still an infant. Gale was in fact the nearest of all bodies to the Particle Falls - even drifting through its falling curtains at times - and so had become known as the finest place for growing wilderberries and making the golden elixir known as Angel Falls Wine, a substance that not only imbued joy or melancholy in the drinker, depending on their mood, but also insights of truth they would rather not know about. Drink at your own risk.

With the sky-show overhead, they flew higher onto the wild scrublands of the Boneyard on their flapping flying carpet, and after a time young Bril turned his attention downwards, scanning the two-toned landscape as he trembled with the cold. Almost immediately he spotted a herd of black-and-white-striped zels galloping in the moonlight, and tumblebrushes rolling and bouncing after them as though giving chase.

Only once did the blademaster Quinn look back over his shoulder at him; a hooded silhouette staring at Bril for long seconds as they tilted over the Sink Gorges leading deeper into wilderness of the Boneyard.

He’s truly frightened for me, Bril considered. Where is it that we’re going that has our House Blade so scared for the safety of his charge?

---

Around the northern pole of Gale, a plateau of scablands known as the High Fold rises high into the thinning atmosphere. One of the lower regions of this plateau is called the Boneyard, with ridges of exposed black basalt and depression filled with paler grit, along with lines of badly-eroded salt crags which stand like the ancient ruins of walls. At a point that could roughly be considered the centre of the Boneyard, a gnarly stake of ironwood stands as tall as a man, rooted deeply in the compacted dust. A replacement for an earlier post, which itself replaced an ancient withered tree now long-gone, it is perhaps a few decades old, though it looked to be as old as the world.

It was here where his father commanded Rooster to strip Bril of all his clothing, and to chain him to the post, and to blindfold him.

'Remember always that you are a true blood,' was all his father said into his ear, and then he and Rooster abandoned Bril to his fate by flying away.

Some hours later, the boy came back to his senses with a snort and found that he was still swaying on his feet, and still naked, in the icy blasts of wind. He had almost nodded off again, and Bril grimaced and shook some heat into himself, trying to straighten a little, trying to waken from his dulled stupor. To fall asleep on this night was to die.

Even now the boy clutched the stick in his numb right hand, a thorny strip of wood that his father had snapped from a nearby tumblebrush and thrust into his grasp before marching away. It was all that Bril had to defend himself now that his father and Rooster were gone, vanished into the freezing night air leaving his startled son to fend for himself.

Blindfolded and alone.

Bril's fear of his worsening situation had long ago been replaced by a sustained and nearly overwhelming sense of panic, much like an ocean raging against the lip of a dam - though this dam was made from nothing firmer than the boy's conviction that he was better than a coward, if only by choice of will. Still, with bare arms wrapped around himself against the gusts flaying his exposed skin, it took everything Bril had not to break down and weep like the ten-year-old that he was, and not to curl up on the ground for protection where he would most certainly fall asleep if he wasn't eaten first. There was no way out of this nightmare, no way to make it stop. Just then it all seemed to be hopeless.

‘Father!’ the boy screamed again. ‘Father, where are you?’

As before, Bril’s voice echoed weakly against the high salt crags that ranged before him, though this time his shouts also provoked a mooncat to growl from one of the lower ridges so that the boy shut up quickly, seized by a surging dread.

Bril hated mooncats. He had seen what they did to weakened zels and even to people. No bigger than normal house cats, and striped black and white to blend in with the two-tone volcanic landscape of this small world, a lone mooncat was no threat to a solitary person. Only when the animals gathered in packs to hunt did they become a dangerous threat to humans, and that didn't happen all that often - only on nights precisely like this one, with a string of full moons in the sky and a golden Particle Falls to light their prey.

Unable to see anything through the blindfold, except for a sliver of a gap at the bottom where it curved over his nose, Bril held his breath for a long moment, feeling sick in his stomach as he imagined a whole tribe of the creatures gathering on the nearby salt crags. If they came at him in numbers, what would he do?

But no, thankfully nothing answered the lone mooncat’s cry, and Bril spat the dust from his mouth nervously and gripped himself and his pathetic stick and tried to calm down by swiping it a few times through the turbulent air; not that it helped much, but it was better than nothing, and even warmed him a little.

There was little point in yelling angrily anyway, even if he was utterly displeased with his father and the plight he had placed him in . Bril wasn’t a child any longer. Nothing was going to change the situation now no matter how much he cried about it.

He knew what this was now. Clearly, it was nothing more than his first initiation rite into manhood, the first of a series of tests to be held over the next four years of his upraising. Brill had known for a long time this night was coming some time during his tenth year. He just hadn’t known exactly when, or where, it would happen. Surprise was the nature of this initial rite of passage, the Long Night. Undertaken by Shal youths all across the system of Shalos - a long night staked and blindfolded in the wilds alone - it marked the beginning of their spiritual path in this life. Or so the rap went. In the unceasingly bitter winds of Gale, Bril was fairly certain that come morning, the only thing this rite was going to mark was his death.

Hopping up and down to generate some warmth, he took a step too far from the post he was chained to and almost tripped as the manacle snapped tight around his ankle. Bril swore and yanked at the chain in some hope of breaking it in his mounting rage. But all it did was rattle in the gale, a near-unbreakable length of ironwood links carved from a single length of wood.

‘Aaaarrhhh!’ he hollered. ‘Aaaarrhhh! Aaaarrhhh! Aaaarrhhh!'

The boy felt better for his exertions, standing there panting and slobbering in the gritty winds with his heart clattering away like the heat pump that it was. So good that he did it again.

‘Aaaarrhhh!’

Calmer now, his will focused into a dagger of vengeful intent, young Bril cursed his father with every swear word he had ever heard in his short life, even the Humani ones he'd overheard from Quinn, their House Blade, and wished with all his heart that the old man was dead.

---

Several million hours later, Bril was still shivering uncontrollably from the cold with only the loincloth and blindfold to shelter him, wiping snot from his nose and trying to keep his thoughts on anything that would take his mind from the pains of his body. At least his shivering muscles showed that he wasn't quite freezing to death just yet.

If only his mind would cooperate, rather than turning to the darkest of thoughts and outcome. Sometimes, it really did seem as though your own head was set firmly against you. Even against your own survival. How did that work, Bril wondered – were Shadows really running amok behind your thoughts and desires, like the Sky Prophets of Jih sometimes claimed?

As though by way of an example, right at that moment an old conversation came to his mind that he’d once had with Helee - his tutor and wily mentor. Helee had just returned from a neighbouring farmstead where he was trying to court one of the daughters without much success, and where one of the farmhands had just been found dead up in the surrounding hills, after being hunted down and slain by a pack of mooncats. Heelee made a big deal about certain choice parts of his body having been eaten away.

But that was the very last thing Bril wanted to be thinking of right now, standing there naked save for a loin cloth barely big enough to wipe his nose.

The boy focused hard, mentally forcing his thoughts onto another track entirely.

He recalled the figure at the window of their manor house when they had been leaving earlier, standing there watching them go. Bril knew it must have been Sheya, Lady Jemmar, his father’s long-standing House Mistress. A kindly woman, and sharper than most, for all that Bril should have disapproved of her for taking the place of his mother. But then, Jemmar had never really done that anyway; his mother had died giving birth to Bril, and Jemmar, his mother’s oldest friend, had stepped in to raise him. Standing there at that window, knowing where he was being lead to, Jemmar would have been watching out for Bril fearfully, for she loved him as a mother, and he her.

If I ever make it through this, Bril thought, I must tell her what she means to me.

And if I don’t, if I freeze to death out here or get my dick eaten off by a pack of mooncats, then may she spit in my father’s eye for me ...

It was a sharp lesson to wish upon your own father, and Bril might have felt something of shame at his thoughts if only Rheaf his father had ever shown him anything but a cold and distant detachment through all the years they had known each other. Sometimes, his father acted as though he could barely even look at Bril, and to such a degree that even Quinn would notice it, and Sheya would be heard whispering to his father harshly, saying it wasn’t Bril’s fault that his mother had died giving birth to his only son ...

Suddenly the cry of a mooncat caused Bril to stop in his thoughts, and his blood to freeze like icy water. The cry was close, even closer than the first one. He could only pray that it was the same animal as before.

He had dropped the thorny branch hours ago, but now he stooped and fumbled through the dust until he found it again. By the time he straightened another mooncat cried out from his left, answering the first one, and Bril gagged with fear.

Two does not make a hunting pack, he reminded himself.

Even further to his left, a third cat called to the others. Then a fourth answered.

In his terror, he started babbling a prayer to Jih.

Surely there were easier Virtgio rites on other worlds than this one? How difficult could it be to survive a single night on one of the tame sub-tropical Garden worlds of Cheechi, for instance, instead of a frigid wildmoon like this one? This all seemed blatantly tilted against him, but then maybe that was the real point of it, after all. Life in this fallen cosmos was hardly fair, after all - a boy who had lost his own mother at birth was born knowing this truth most of all. Sensing the mooncats gathering around him, Bril was sorely tempted to remove the blindfold from his eyes - but the blindfold was a badge of courage that he must wear until morning, or so Rooster had instructed him. He already knew it was a large part of the initiation, and that to remove it prematurely would mark him as a coward, and even if no-one raised the matter again to his face, that mark of shame would last him for the rest of his life. Better to die, Bril told himself, than give his father the satisfaction of that.

Young Bril heard them coming at him in a pack as their claws scrabbled over some sheet rock. With the terror squirting through his guts, he finally grew angry at himself and his own timidity. To hell with it, he thought - he'd been raised to be of sterner stuff than this! And so Bril brandished his thorny stick and backed up against the ironwood post - his only companion - with a hard thump, where he assumed a defensive position, and growled.

'Come on then,' the boy hollered through the winds. 'I am Brilliant Brightmorning, son of Rheaf Brightmorning the Second, and I shall not fear you. Come on then you little bastards, bring it on!'

---

In the first rays of dawn, still alive though feeling closer to death from exposure than not, young Brill finally removed the blindfold from his eyes and blinked, squinting, in the early daylight, barely believing he had made it.

Tracks covered the dusty ground all about him, signs of the brief skirmishes throughout the Long Night. The cats had been driven away after enough thrashing and yelling, but for some reason they’d kept returning for more of the same, hour after hour. Maybe they had been truly starving and desperate. It had taken a miracle - and at some unacknowledged level, he sensed as much - that they had never once bit or cut him, never once drawn blood, in all that time. If they had, they would have been on him in a feeding frenzy.

Praise Jih, he thought with more meaning than ever before.

At least the winds had diminished somewhat with the growing heat of dawn. Bril inhaled a relatively clear breath of air and turned about slowly, taking in the scene, the dusty floor and the surrounding salt crags rimmed by a lightening sky. And then he stopped dead, and made the strangest noise in his throat.

Behind him, well beyond the wooden post, ran a flat bluff of salt for several dozen yards. On top of the bluff, watching him in his tightly fastened cloak and windhood, sat his father.

In the man’s lap rested his long-nose stun pistol, ready to be used if necessary, whilst beside him he had staked a few prayer canes with silent windstrings blowing towards Bril. The side of his cloak was caked with a layer of dust, relaying the fact that he must have been sitting there all night long.

With the sun rising behind him, Rheaf Brightmorning raised a hand to the boy, to his son, his only child, and smiled.

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Wild Cosmos

For my son, Sky.