Only One Death: Tales of The Lesser Evil

By Alexander M Crow

If he does not find a way to save them, Dhinal knows his people will die. Every single one of them.

 

The apprentice shaman has travelled for years, searching for the answer, along the way gathering a ragtag band of misfits, each harbouring secrets of their own. The latest member of this group, Strings, is running from something, her dreams haunted by flames and terror.

 

Together, they arrive in the bustling city of Eastsea, seeking a guide to the legendary and lost Amethyst Mountains.

 

Kees is tired of the city. She knows it is slowly killing her and longs to seek solitude in wild places, far away from the noise and stench of others.

 

Dhinal and Kees understand the wilderness does not care about you, it simply exists. Whether you live, or whether you die, is up to you, to your companions and to sheer chance. Winter is whispering in the high places, dangers-unknown abound in the forests, and fractures begin to appear in the group itself.

 

The truth, Dhinal knows, is that there are many ways to die, but only one death. And this journey will test them all, in ways they could not possibly imagine.

 

At its heart, Only One Death takes the well-loved trope of a group of adventurers on a quest, then turns this upside down and inside out, demonstrating how danger, secret motives and hidden desires can swiftly tear apart the strongest of groups — and Dhinal's group is not the strongest. Not by a long way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alexander M Crow
• Release date: Feb 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393157564

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Alexander M Crow

Only One Death

A Tale of The Lesser Evil

Copyright © 2020 by Alexander M Crow

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Alexander M Crow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Alexander M Crow has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Aurélie, who believes.

The Greater the Good, the Lesser the Evil?

All endings are also beginnings, and all beginnings an end.

Contents

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Map of The Northern Isthmus

Map of The Horned Sea

Only One Death

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Acknowledgements

The Lesser Evil

Notes on Appendices

About the Author

Also by Alexander M Crow

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Dust & Death

In a land of dust, there are some things best left buried, secrets that go far beyond fear — testing the very sanity itself.

Dust & Death

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Map of The Northern Isthmus

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Map of The Horned Sea

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Only One Death

Like each of the cities on the Isthmus, it was rumoured Eastsea was built upon the ruins of a far more ancient settlement. Sewer children and tunnellers whispered that the lowest of the barely-accessible levels dated from the time before the Encircling, before the Reversal, even before the Maelstrom. Whether this was true did not really matter; Kees was not even sure she understood what the Reversal was. Eastsea was old and that, as far as she was concerned, was that.

It was the day before the first new moon following the equinox and the city was abuzz with preparations for the start of festivities the following dusk. There would be three days of devotion, or three days of debauchery, depending on your preference. Some enjoyed both.

Kees did not want to stay for the festival. It was the time of the year where she itched to leave behind the Talking Races, head into deeply-wooded hills, hunt and gather, explore ancient ruins, make a sort-of-living. For two months now, she had waited for a caravan heading in the right direction. For two months she had been disappointed.

She was not religious and two months of drinking, smoking, revelry, carousing, and overeating had already taken their toll. She felt slow and bloated and miserable. Every year was the same; the longer she stayed in the cities, the more she longed for the wild; the longer she stayed in the wild, the more she longed for company. It was like one of the rope bridges stretched between floors in the Tower district, one rope to walk upon, one to hold on to. If either snapped you would almost certainly fall.

She was getting too old for this.

A week earlier she had visited the horse market, buying a pair of hardy mountain ponies, now stabled near the Westgate. Every day she delayed was a day she had to pay for their keep and her funds were rapidly dwindling.

Kees needed to leave and leave soon.

‘Too old,’ she muttered to herself, waving at the bar to order another drink with one hand, reaching for a taper to light her pipe with the other.

⁂

Eastsea was like nowhere Dhinal had ever seen. He had been raised on dry steppes where shelter from the wind was at a premium. At times the blown loess dust would cover everything: food, eyes, bedding, clothing, and the inside of your lungs.

Once a port, Dhinal knew Eastsea had commanded trade across the Isthmus, the Great Canal crossing to her sister city, the equally imaginatively named Westsea. The wealth and traffic had been legendary, until civil war, political unrest, plague, and silt almost completely destroyed the canal and Westsea. The once great port was now home to a small whaling fleet and some coastal fishermen, living in vast and crumbling ruins, casting wary eyes to the forests creeping closer every year.

Eastsea was no longer on the coast, the dredgers long ago having failed to keep up with the build-up of silt. She now lay five miles from the deep water. Salt-marsh and, subsequently, reed-beds and swamp-woods had filled the miles between. On this occasion, in this place, the ocean gave and the land received, elsewhere and in different times these roles were reversed. A constant war of many battles, never-ending and with no possible winner.

A causeway wound from floating jetties, fixed piers and a scattering of buildings, themselves built on constantly updated rafts and piles, before twisting across the wetlands to the city itself. No longer would the unloaded cargo be poled and pulled across to the other side of the continent on barges, instead it was strapped onto pack animals and slaves, to be carried onward to the cities of the south or, until recently, the north. Some of the traders would sell their goods in one of the Eastsea’s own markets, or to a syndicated merchant. Others preferred to continue their journey and risk the dangerous overland passage, despite council-levied taxes they would still receive a much higher percentage of the profit. Money and riches talked as loud in Eastsea as the poverty and misery smelled.

To reach the city the traders had their wares packed into a series of carts, owned and run by the Motherhood of Trade. The Guild would charge a flat rate per cart and everyone seemed happy with this situation.

Successive councils talked about stemming the tide of decay, about digging a new channel back to the old docks and even reopening the canal, but it was only ever talk.

The towers dominated the skyline. They were huge, tall and wide, with bridges spanning between them far, far above. Dhinal had never seen a man-made structure so high, and here were eight, still standing despite the passage of time. The city of his own people was perhaps taller in some ways, but it was hewn from living rock, stretching high above the great river which had carved the canyon into the soft stone. It was not imposing like these buildings, the hills around the canyon allowing no hint