The Steel Remains (A Land Fit for Heroes Series Book 1)

A dark lord will rise. Such is the prophecy that dogs Ringil Eskiath—Gil, for short—a washed-up mercenary and onetime war hero whose cynicism is surpassed only by the speed of his sword. Gil is estranged from his aristocratic family, but when his mother enlists his help in freeing a cousin sold into slavery, Gil sets out to track her down. But it soon becomes apparent that more is at stake than the fate of one young woman. Grim sorceries are awakening in the land. Some speak in whispers of the return of the Aldrain, a race of widely feared, cruel yet beautiful demons. Now Gil and two old comrades are all that stand in the way of a prophecy whose fulfillment will drown an entire world in blood. But with heroes like these, the cure is likely to be worse than the disease.

From Publishers Weekly

Noir SF author Morgan (Thirteen) delivers a promising but obscenity-laden epic fantasy trilogy opener. As the Yhelteth Empire recovers from a devastating war, embittered veterans Archeth, Egar and Ringil embark on parallel but vastly different journeys. The emperor sends drug-abusing Archeth to gather details about a rumored invasion. Egar becomes a steppes clanmaster, but the other horsemen despise him for seducing teenagers rather than leading. Ringil attempts to locate and free a cousin sold into slavery. All three soon discover the dwenda, a race of magical beings thought long dead. Despite stereotypical plot elements, including a prophecy that states A dark lord will rise, the well-developed characters and realistic battle scenes ring true, as do some gruesomely explicit sex scenes. The intriguing conclusion to the dark, gritty tale will have readers hoping for a more plot-heavy and less visceral sequel. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

After reading his film noir take on the future in his science fiction novels, critics were eager to see how Richard Morgan would handle fantasy. In this respect, reviewers were pleased, noting how Morgan takes plot elements that are as old as those of Lord of the Rings or Conan the Barbarian and gives them a freshness by importing many of the themes that drove his sci-fi work. Several critics were a little disappointed by the pacing of the novel, though they seemed to find it more acceptable when they thought of the book as the first of a series. Every critic also warned readers that while they don't detract from the overall quality of the work, many scenes from The Steel Remains contain an awful lot of explicit sex, violence, and harsh language. Perhaps such scenes are right up your alley ...Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

Morgan doesn't so much twist the clichés of fantasy as take an axe to them."

"Bold, brutal, and making no compromises

Library Journal

"The award-winning author of Altered Carbon and Market Forces brings the same iconoclastic approach to his fantasy debut as he did to his sf technothrillers. . . . [Richard K.] Morgan's storytelling talent and his atmospheric, hard-hitting prose make this a strong addition to mature fantasy collections."

Star-Ledger

"Spellbinding . . . There's so much to like about the adventure."

Times, London

"Morgan has taken traditional sword and sorcery tropes and given them a hard, contemporary kick. The antithesis of the cosy fairytale, this one is for big boys."

Publishers Weekly From the Hardcover edition.

"[A] dark, gritty tale . . . The well-developed characters and realistic battle scenes ring true."

From the Inside Flap

Subterranean Press is proud to present the limited edition of Richard Morgan's groundbreaking new fantasy! Ringil, the hero of the bloody slaughter at Gallows Gap is a legend to all who don't know him and a twisted degenerate to those that do. A veteren of the wars against the lizards he makes a living from telling credulous travellers of his exploits. Until one day he is pulled away from his life and into the depths of the Empire's slave trade. Where he will discover a secret infinitely more frightening than the trade in lives...Archeth - pragmatist, cynic and engineer, the last of her race - is called from her work at the whim of the most powerful man in the Empire and sent to its farthest reaches to investigate a demonic incursion against the Empire's borders.Egar Dragonbane, steppe-nomad, one-time fighter for the Empire finds himself entangled in a small-town battle between common sense and religious fervour. But out in the wider world there is something on the move far more alien than any of his tribe's petty gods.Anti-social, anti-heroic, and decidedly irritated, all three of them are about to be sent unwillingly forth into a vicious, vigorous and thoroughly unsuspecting fantasy world. Called upon by an Empire that owes them everything and gave them nothing.The Subterranean Press edition of The Steel Remains will feature a full-color dust jacket and full-color endsheets by Vincent Chong, and be printed in two colors throughout.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter OneWhen a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse, and check his pupils to see if he's ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him. Ringil had already tried the first course of action with Bashka the Schoolmaster and to no avail, so he put down his pint with an elaborate sigh and went to get his broadsword."Not this again," he was heard to mutter as he pushed through intothe residents' bar.A yard and a half of tempered Kiriath steel, Ringil's broadswordhung above the fireplace in a scabbard woven from alloys that men hadno names for, though any Kiriath child could have identified them fromage five upward. The sword itself also had a name in the Kiriath tongue,as did all Kiriath- forged weapons, but it was an ornate title that lost a lotin translation. "Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengersin the Wake of Warriors" was about as close as Archeth had been able torender it, so Ringil had settled on calling it the Ravensfriend. He didn'tlike the name especially, but it had the sort of ring people expected of afamous sword—and his landlord, a shrewd man with money and thepotential for making it, had renamed the inn the same way, setting aneternal seal on the thing. A local artist had painted a passable image ofRingil wielding the Ravensfriend at Gallows Gap and now it hungoutside for all the passing world to see. In return, Ringil got bed andboard and the opportunity to sell tales of his exploits to tourists in theresidents' bar for whatever was dropped into his cap.All that, Ringil once remarked ironically in a letter to Archeth, and a blind eye turned to certain bedroom practices that would doubtless earn Yours Truly a slow death by impaling in Trelayne or Yhelteth. Heroic status in Gallows Water, it seems, includes a special dispensation not available to the average citizen in these righteous times. Plus, he supposed, you don't go queer baiting when your quarry has a reputation for rendering trained swordsmen into dogmeat at the drop of a gauntlet. Fame, Ringil scribbled, has its uses after all.Mounting the sword over the fireplace had been a nice touch, andalso the landlord's idea. The man was now trying to persuade hisresident celebrity to offer dueling lessons out back in the stable yards.Cross blades with the hero of Gallows Gap for three Empire- mintedelementals the half hour. Ringil didn't know if he felt that hard up yet.He'd seen what teaching had done to Bashka.Anyway, he dragged the Ravensfriend from the scabbard with asingle grating clang, slung it casually over his shoulder, and walked outinto the street, ignoring the stares from the audience he had beenregaling with tales of valor about an hour ago. He guessed they'd followhim at least part of the way to the schoolmaster's house. It couldn't doany harm, if his suspicions about what was going on were correct, butthey'd probably all cut and run at the first sign of trouble. You couldn'tblame them really. They were peasants and merchants, and they had nobond with him. About a third of them he'd never even seen beforetonight.Introductory comment from the treatise on skirmish warfare that the Trelayne Military Academy had politely declined to publish under his name: If you don't know the men at your back by name, don't besurprised if they won't follow you into battle. On the other hand, don't be surprised if they will, either, because there are countless other factors you must take into account. Leadership is a slippery commodity, not easily manufactured or understood. It was simple truth, as gleaned in the bloody forefront of some of the nastiest fighting the free cities had seen in living memory. It was, however, the Lieutenant Editor in Trelayne had written kindly, just too vague for the Academy to consider as viabletraining material. It is this ambivalence as much as any other that leads us to decline your submission. Ringil looked at that last sentence on the parchment and suspected a kindred spirit.It was cold out in the street. Above the waist he wore only a leatherjerkin with loose half- length sailcloth sleeves, and there was an unseasonalearly chill sloping down the spine of the country from theMajak uplands. The peaks of the mountains that the town nestled underwere already capped with snow, and it was reckoned that Gallows Gapwould be impassable before Padrow's Eve. People were talking againabout an Aldrain winter. There had been stories circulating for weeksnow, of high- pasture livestock taken by wolves and other, less naturalpredators, of chilling encounters and sightings in the mountain passes.Not all of them could be put down to fanciful talk. This,Ringil suspected,was going to be the source of the problem. Bashka the Schoolmaster'scottage was at the end of one of the town's cross streets and backed ontothe local graveyard.As by far the most educated man in the tiny townshipof Gallows Water— its resident hero excluded— Bashka had been handedthe role of temple officiator by default, and the house went with thepriest's robes.And in bad weather, graveyards were a fine source of meatfor scavengers.You will be a great hero, a Yhelteth fortune- teller had once read inRingil's spittle. You will carry many battles and best many foes.Nothing about being a municipal exterminator in a border- townsettlement not much bigger than one of Trelayne's estuary slums.There were torches fixed in brackets along the main streets and riverfrontage of Gallows Water but the rest of the town must make do withbandlight, of which there wasn't much on a night this clouded. True toRingil's expectations, the crowd thinned out as soon as he stepped ontoan unlit thoroughfare. When it became apparent where he was headedspecifically, his escort dropped by more than half. He reached the cornerof Bashka's street still trailing a loose group of about six or eight, but bythe time he drew level with the schoolmaster's cottage— the door stillgaping open, the way its owner had left it when he fled in his nightshirt—he was alone. He cocked his head back to where the rubberneckershovered at the far end of the street. A wry grin twitched his lips."Stand well back now," he called.From among the graves, something uttered a low droning cry.Ringil's skin goosefleshed with the sound of it. He unshipped theRavensfriend from his shoulder and, holding it warily before him,stepped around the corner of the little house.The rows of graves marched up the hill where the town petered outagainst outcroppings of mountain granite. Most of the markers weresimple slabs hewn from the self- same stone as the mountain, reflectingthe locals' phlegmatic attitude to the business of dying. But here andthere could be seen the more ornately carved structure of a Yheltethtomb, or one of the cairns the northerners buried their dead under,hung with shamanistic iron talismans and daubed in the colors of thedeceased's clan ancestry. As a rule, Ringil tried not to come out here toooften; he remembered too many of the names on the stones, could putfaces to too many of the foreign- sounding dead. It was a mixed bag thathad died under his command at Gallows Gap that sweltering summerafternoon nine years ago, and few of the outlanders had family with themoney to bring their sons home for burial. The cemeteries up anddown this stretch of the mountains were littered with their lonelytestimony.Ringil advanced into the graveyard, one bent- kneed step at a time.Clouds broke apart overhead, and the Kiriath blade glinted in thesudden smear of bandlight. The cry was not repeated, but now he couldmake out smaller, more furtive sounds. The sounds, he reckonedunenthusiastically, of someone digging.You will be a great hero.Yeah, right.He found Bashka's mother, as it seemed, grubbing around in the dirtat the base of a recent headstone. Her burial shroud was torn and soiled,revealing rotted flesh that he could smell from a dozen paces upwindeven in the cold. Her deathgrown nails made an unpleasant rakingsound as they struggled with the casket she had partially unearthed.Ringil grimaced.In life, this woman had never liked him. As temple officiator andpriest, her son was supposed to despise Ringil for a worthless degenerateand a corruptor of youth. Instead, as a schoolmaster and man of someeducation himself, Bashka turned out to be far too enlightened for hisown good. His easygoing attitude to Ringil and the late- night phil -osophical debates they occasionally got into at the tavern earned himvitriolic reprimands from visiting senior priests. Worse still, his lack ofcondemnatory zeal gave him a reputation in the religious hierarchy thatensured he would always remain a humble teacher in a backwater town.The mother, naturally enough, blamed the degenerate Ringil and hisevil influence for her son's lack of advancement, and he was notwelcome in the schoolmaster's house while she drew breath. This latteractivity had come to an abrupt halt the previous month, following aswift and unquenchable fever, sent presumably by some preoccupiedgod who had overlooked her great righteousness in religious matters.Trying not to breathe through his nose, Ringil tapped the flat of theRavensfriend on a convenient grave to get her attention. At first shedidn't seem to hear the noise it made, but then the body twistedwrenchingly around and he found himself looking into a face whoseeyes had long ago been eate...

About the Author

Richard K. Morgan is the acclaimed author of Thirteen, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Woken Furies, Market Forces, Broken Angels, and Altered Carbon, a New York Times Notable Book that also won the Philip K. Dick Award. Morgan sold the movie rights for Altered Carbon to Joel Silver and Warner Bros. His third book, Market Forces, has also been sold to Warner Bros. and was winner of the John W. Campbell Award. He lives in Scotland.

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