Today, we’re delighted to bring you an excerpt from Herald of the Black Moon by Stephen Deas, which is due to be released 25th April 2023 from Angry Robot.

This is the much-anticipated final instalment in his Black Moon trilogy. The Black Moon trilogy is all hijinks, shenanigans and high adventure, following the loveable Seth, Myla and Fings as they get themselves in and out of sticky situation. In this final book, the trio work to untangle a web of secrets and uncover the truth in a world balancing on the brink of destruction.

Here’s the official blurb:

The Wraiths have raised an army of the dead. An army of the living is marching on the throne. Caught in the middle, Myla is supposed to be spying on a sorceress who can read minds. Things are not going well.

Far away, Seth and Fings are trying their hardest to have nothing to do with any of this. All Fings has to do is not steal anything. All Seth has to do is not meddle with Forbidden Magics. All they have to do is lie low. And for once, it’s all going swimmingly. Until, that is, Fings sees a face he thought they’d left behind in the ashes of Deephaven.

As Seth’s past catches up with him and Myla unravels the true nature of the Empire’s new Princess-Regent, the trio converge on the dead city of Valladrune. Armed with sinister secret behind an old war, they once more hold the fate of the Empire in their reluctant hands.

If only they knew what the heck to do with it.

Herald of the Black Moon is due for release 25th April and is available for pre-order from Angry Robot

PROLOGUE

The One-Eyed God

The song rattled through Seth’s head as he crashed through worlds. He shot over mountains and rivers and seas. Faces loomed, sudden and random. An angry god, a vengeful goddess. Once, he thought he saw Myla reaching for him, quickly lost in the storm. His head was a tornado, blistered by fever. And that song, over and over. He’d heard it in Deephaven. A group of children, holding hands, dancing in a circle, falling to the ground as it ended, laughing, and then doing it again.

Deephaven…

You did that. All you.

No! No, I didn’t!

The Avenue of Emperors. The abandoned wagons. Animals, wounded and exhausted, trapped in harnesses, resigned, waiting to die. He’d felt the same. Having to stop. Catch his breath. His skin burning in salted wind. A glimpse of Myla, on the waterfront, on the back of a horse. She’d come too late or else the ship hadn’t waited. Watching Deephaven float away while sailors heaved on giant oars, pushing the ship out to sea.

Myla on her horse fighting Dead Men as they poured across the dock. Wishing he could help; but he’d thought he was dead so what could he do? She was probably dead too by now. He was sorry about that. Hoped he was wrong; but he’d seen what was waiting for her. He’d seen the Wraith.

Prophet…

Why had it called him that?

People running. A flurry of lowering of boats. His head flopping and lolling. Sick, so very sick, his organs like fractured glass, grinding and tearing one another. Then Deephaven far behind, only the harbour towers and a pall of smoke where some part of it burned.

His face! A voice stricken with fear. His face!

His face?

An awful blackness. A void closing around him. The one-eyed God in his head, laughing and wagging a finger. I told you so! You know what you are! You know exactly what you are!

The walls between worlds crumbling and tumbling. The dead pouring from the dark heart of the underworld. Xibaiya, the One-Eyed God named it. The One-Eyed God who kept popping up in the maelstrom of his mind. The One-Eyed God who always laughed when Seth asked who he was.

I’m you. Don’t you see?

A man on a black horse carrying something precious from a dying city. A giant in plated metal bringing two people together in a room of blank white stone. Each bowing to a sigil-emblazoned archway, and then gone. Ice and snow where three great towers impale the ground and rake the sky; a hole in the earth, a bright column of spirits spiralling into infinite depths; the Cathedral of Light in Torpreah, a thousand priests bowing before him. Seth the Autarch! The skin of his face melting into crawling ants and wasps and beetles and the world smells of fish and of salt water…

Fever dreams. Between them, an eternity of nothing except the One-Eyed God, telling him how it was all his fault. How what he’d done in the House of Cats and Gulls was the last crack in a dam waiting sixteen years to break.

All this ruin and more to come.

He baulked at the idea that the Silver Kings had appeared out of myth to murder an entire city simply because he’d happened to be there. A deranged notion. The sigil he’d seen reflected at the bottom of the well in the House of Cats and Gulls clearly had nothing to do with it. Nor the way it hadn’t come back after he’d dropped a stone into the water, mostly to see whether it would. Couldn’t have been his fault. What idiot wrote a warding sigil in water?

That smell again. Brine and fish. His thoughts kept snagging on it. You’ll find yourself in Valladrune, like it or not. The cracking of the seal. The return of That Which Came Before. The Black Moon rising into the sky. The end of one cycle and the start of the next. You’ve tripped it all into motion. You.

How about you fuck off? Fever dreams, or was he possessed?

The One-Eyed God told him then how he’d lose a hand to Myla’s sword. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.

Then, for another eternity, nothing.

Salt water and fish. A wall of planks swaying back and forth before his eyes. It took what felt like several years to work out why.

I’m on a ship.

The thought delighted him, mostly for how mundane it was. He opened his eyes and looked about. Discovered he was in a nice cabin with a mirror on one wall – nice except for how the One-Eyed God with the Ruined Face was in the mirror staring back at him. Seth tried telling him to fuck off, which didn’t work. After a few depressing experiments, Seth reckoned he understood why.

The face was his own. He was the One-Eyed God. Just as the annoying fucker kept telling him.

I’ve gone mad. Was he still feverish?

No. I’m what you become.

“No, thanks.” Seth had seen the future once before, or what he’d supposed had been meant to be the future, some version of it. He’d been at the top of the Moonspire at the time, a place where visions were supposed to happen, unlike ship cabins. That future had looked a bit shit, frankly.

You can’t change it. You can’t run from what you’ve done.

Sure of that? Seth fumbled in his pockets until he found a stick of charcoal. He rolled back a sleeve and started to draw a sigil. Because I rather think I can. He grinned at his reflection in the mirror, fairly certain he was at least a little bit mad. I can forget, you see. Discovering that the One-Eyed God was in fact himself, a lot of things made sense, mostly concerning how irritating the smug fucker was.

Go murder some more priests. Set fire to villages. Drown some kittens, maybe? Whatever lights your fire. You can’t stop it, so you might as well have some fun.

Seth looked at the almost-finished sigil inked into the crook of his arm. Strange things, memories. Some were anchors of identity: the white stone vault under the Circus of Dead Emperors in Varr and the dead rat in the temple kitchen the next morning; sitting on the steps of a temple as boy, another boy coming up and offering him a peach. Others were chains and tethers: Lightbringer Suaresh pissing in his face, and the day they’d thrown him down the temple steps. Memories could be beacons of hope or splinters that never healed, like what he’d done to the priest in Deephaven, like putting a candle in Myla’s window so the men hunting her would know where to find her, and why did that one haunt him so?

I can forget.

The effort of moving was almost too much to bear. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so empty. He raised a hand and brought it to his face and stared. Half the skin was one great scab. He could barely move his fingers. Pain scorched his arm.

A last look in the mirror. The One-Eyed God with the Ruined Face. His face. It had always been his own face. His face. His words. His future. A future the One-Eyed God had shown him in his fever. No triumphant return to the faith that rejected him; instead, he was going to open a door, raise the Black Moon and bring the end of everything.

He was, was he? No. Fuck that.

He wished Myla was here. She’d tell him what to do; although what she might tell him was to dig a deep pit, climb inside, then pull the earth down on top of himself.

You used a sigil to make an old man walk into a temple and set himself on fire.

By fucking accident!

All he’d ever wanted was the truth. Hadn’t meant for it to end the way it had.

Could say that about a lot of things.

You can’t undo what you’ve done.

Except… when the monks had caught him in Varr, he’d used a sigil to make himself forget… Well… it had worked, so he didn’t know what exactly it was that he couldn’t remember. Something to do with how come Lightbringer Suaresh had shown up dead in Tombland in his night clothes, he reckoned, but never mind… Point was, the monks had asked their questions and Seth had told them he didn’t remember. They hadn’t liked that, but he wasn’t lying – he really didn’t know what he’d done – and so what could they do? He remembered making himself forget, so it obviously hadn’t been nothing.

He couldn’t undo what had happened in Deephaven. But he could forget. Almost everyone else in Deephaven was surely dead. If everyone forgot something, wasn’t that the same as if it had never happened at all?

Where to start?

The Moonspire and his vision of the future, the woman in red and black and white and gold whom he’d thought was the Princess-Regent? He’d seen her in the flesh once. At the Hanging Tree in the Circus of Dead Emperors, when Seth had been on his way to…

No. Don’t think about that.

Back further? Back to Varr? Forget it all? Forget Myla? Forget Blackhand? Forget that he wasn’t a priest?

Not that far.

No, and not the Moonspire either. In his vision, Myla had told him to use a sigil on her. Hadn’t bothered saying what sigil, mind, which had left Seth thinking that if Gods wanted to drop hints to mortals, they could maybe try being a bit fucking clearer about things.

No, the Moonspire could stay. No one was going to murder him for having a vision there, crappy or otherwise. Was sort of the point of the place.

After he and Fings reached Deephaven, then? When he’d started looking for the warlock who’d once lived there, although that thought had been with him long before… Or when he’d first met the Taiytakei mage? The popinjay who’d known the warlock Saffran Kuy, who’d had taken Seth to the House of Cats and Gulls. Start there? Wipe the rest clean?

Careful…

What would he remember? That he’d gone to Deephaven, visited a Taiytakei sorcerer about an old warlock, then woken up, days later, on a ship, on the way to a city he didn’t know without the first idea how he’d got there.

Dumb. He’d think the Taiytakei sorcerer had done something to him and then made him forget. The last thing he needed was future-Seth running around like a demented chicken, frantically asking questions, digging up the exact same shit he was trying to bury. No, he was going to have to let himself remember more. If he didn’t, he’d never let it go.

You can’t stop it.

I’m going to scrub you out. Every vestige of you. Every memory of the one-eyed fucker. Too late to avoid the ruined face but he still had both hands, thanks. No, he was not becoming that twisted vision of himself. Visions in the night? No different from dreams, really; and people forgot their dreams all the time. He wouldn’t even know the memories were missing…

That was the trick to forgetting, learned the hard way in Varr. Had to make himself forget so he’d never even know that anything was gone.

He closed his eyes, sighed, then opened them again. There was a good chance he was going to bollocks this up. He’d been doing a lot of that, this last year.

You murdered a priest. Made the man set himself on fire.

That could go, too.

He wondered about erasing the night he’d betrayed Myla, the night he’d set the lighted candle in her window as a sign to the Spicers waiting outside. But no; she was gone, and maybe having that little splinter in his head would do him some good one day. She’d deserved better.

We both did, he thought, and finished the sigil.