![]() The day before he died, he asked me to look after his dog. We lent each other money and we bet on the horses, and the cards, and the dice. We watched each other’s back, and bragged to each other about scores. “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand. Most of my peers wouldn’t think twice about breaking an oath. (c)Īnd I think I should be half a foot taller, and rich as Borkin Breaves. If I had to guess, it was a sentry, making a circuit of the yard. Just seeing the outline of the thing made me want to kill it. ![]() Things that made my head pound and my chest constrict. Terrible truths it was better not to know. Taking a life was, in my experience, a damned sight less complicated than taking jewels from a hidden strongbox. ![]() I was planning a death, not a burglary, but in many ways that just made it easier. It was too late for me to back out, even if I wanted to. From every perspective, all roads could at some point lead to me. And of course some cold-eyed killers would be arriving in the next few days, come to collect their pound of flesh for Corbin’s old man. Heirus, I could safely assume, would still be looking for what he’d been willing to kill for. Kluge and company would be scrambling to find someone to pin his death on, before Corbin’s family came to town with blood on their mind. I’d had a lover for a short time that found it off-putting. (c)Įvery room in my house has easily accessible knives. (c)īut I figured stirring up trouble would help keep eyes off me. Reconnaissance work was a big part of that art, that craft. It would all fall into place soon enough. I had seen what there was to see, and knew better by now than to try and force any sort of plan. I had a drink in their beer garden and watched golden bees do their thing in the late afternoon sunshine. (c) Gee, I could have been living to hear it said in a fiction book. Philosophy, the true Philosophy, is a pen with which to alter, and hopefully correct reality. ![]() Magic is a rusty hammer with which to beat reality into different shapes. One of the privileges of being a mage, I suppose, is that you can be as strange as you like, and nobody dares comment. Join my 3-emails-a-year newsletter #prizesĪ fascinating start to a particularly intriguing series. If you'd like to try a self-published fantasy book, this is a great place to start. I really enjoyed reading this and shouldn't have left it so long. The book reads well as a standalone but there is a series that follows and a clear reason for it. Amra is not the one using it though and we don't get a magic system with a set of rules doled out, so if you're someone who demands that. There's plenty of magic and lots of it is very powerful. McClung is a very good writer with some great turns of phrase and he injects not only excitement and pace but genuine emotion too. There's a vaguely noir feel to the book and plenty of gruesome violence but because the main character, Amra, is an upbeat sort with a good sense of humour it takes the edge off and the book felt quite "light" to me. The world building is done on the hoof and for such a short, action-packed book it's testimony to the author's skill that the world feels real and fleshed out with its own history, geography, and mythology, for all that the tale is told entirely within one city. It's told in the first person by the titular thief and she turns out to have bags of personality, also plenty of troubles. This is a pretty short book that moves swiftly and sucked me right it. In 2015 this book, hereafter named: TTWPOTB, beat out 267 other self-published fantasy books to win the first Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO or Spiffbo to its friends), a contest I set up to discover the best of self-published fantasy.Īnyway TTWPOTB doesn't really need any of that background info to support it because it's an excellent read that I would be reporting on in glowing terms had I just picked it up with no knowledge of it at all.
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