Protect your people. Fight for your family. Destroy your enemies.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from the new paperback edition of The Gauntlet and the Fist Beneath by Ian Green, out from Head of Zeus on May 1st.
The endless rotstorm rages over the ruins of the Ferron Empire. Floré would never let the slavers of the Empire rise again. As a warrior of the Stormguard Commandos, she wrought horrors in the rotstorm to protect her people. She did her duty and left the bloodshed behind.
Floré’s peace is shattered when blazing orbs of light cut through the night sky and descend on her village. Her daughter is abducted and Floré is forced into a chase across a land of twisted monsters and ancient gods. She must pursue the mysterious orbs, whose presence could herald the return of the Empire she spent her entire life fighting.
Now, Floré must take up the role she had sworn to put aside and become the weapon the Stormguard trained her to be, to save not only her daughter, but her people…
Floré and Janos crouched in the shadow of the dead god and watched the demons. The whipping winds of the rotstorm pulled at their armour and tunics, and the mists burned at their eyes and soaked the scarves around their mouths. Above, the bones of the god-wolf Lothal loomed, black ribs thicker than tree trunks curving out of the ground; a skull the size of a barn half buried in the peat. The ground was wet, stumps and hillocks of dark earth cut through by rivulets of ferrous water, all of it entwined and enmeshed by carnivorous rotvine. The rotvine creepers probed and sought sinuously for life they could feed on. Sporadic lightning cutting through roiling cloud cast light over the skeleton, and the mire below.
Floré pressed her gauntleted hand down onto a rotvine creeper that was snaking for the back of Janos’s leg, and it crunched and squished between her armoured fingers. The remnant of the vine hastily withdrew into darkness as she wiped the residue onto some limp grass and glanced upward again. The bones drew her eye, again and again, and she remembered children’s tales of a great wolf at the head of an army bearing chains and woe.
‘I didn’t think it was real,’ Janos said, his voice struggling against the wind. ‘Not truly.’
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The Gauntlet and the Fist Beneath
Floré pushed his shoulder and raised a hand to her mouth, hidden as it was by her scarf.
Janos nodded and fell silent, and they continued to watch the demons.
There were three of them, lanky men or women whose legs and arms had too many joints, taller than the tallest human by a head at least, robed in black and hooded against the burning winds. High above them the rotstorm surged, clouds of jet black infused with streaks of gleaming purple lightning that cast a pulsing glow over the rolling landscape. It was enough light that Floré could see her prey silhouetted against the night beyond.
Crow-men: once human, corrupted by the deep rotstorm to monsters with arcane power and horrifying appetites. Aberrations in the skein. The three hooded demons were floating four feet from the ground, circling around a chunk of amethyst crystal hovering between them that gleamed with black and violet light. On the ground past them, perhaps a dozen squat goblins with rough grey skin and black orb eyes were arguing in a guttural tongue, fighting over scraps of what might have been meat, with stone knives and wooden spears in their hands, chittering and growling in turn. They had no sentries. Most of the goblins were pawing over the meat, but a few were arguing over scraps of metal they had salvaged from a skeletal soldier nearby, hissing past row after row of serrated teeth as they tugged dull bronze back and forth between them.
The ground under Lothal’s bones was scattered with dead soldiers three centuries old, most gone to dust but some preserved by the waters, the peat, or some aura emanating from the dark architecture of the dead god. Floré wasn’t sure which.
Past the demons and the goblins, a rottroll twice the size of a bullock snored as it slept, half submerged in a deeper stream of rust-red water, grey pebbled skin cast over an immensity of muscle and bone. Past that again, a single human sentry with a guttering torch, her body bundled against the acid mist as she gazed into the night. Behind the sentry there were maybe twenty or so more rust-folk hunkered into crude animal-skin tents. Floré took all of this in and breathed out through her nose, rolled her shoulders. Twenty rust-folk, a dozen goblins, a rottroll, three crow-men… The rest of her squad would even then be snaking their way through swamp and hell, led by Benazir, heading back towards the safety of the Stormcastle, mission abandoned. Floré rested her hand on Benazir’s silver dagger, tucked in her belt, and bit her lip. All she could rely on was the mage, that he was truly as powerful as he believed. Floré pointed at Janos and then the rottroll, and the rust-folk beyond, and then pointed at herself and the crow-men hovering around the amethyst, and the goblins.
Janos took one gauntleted hand and grabbed her by the shoulder and leaned in close to her ear.
‘Keep the crow-men away from me, and the rest I can handle. If we die,’ he said, his breath hot against her skin even through his mask, ‘I owe you a drink.’
Floré turned her gaze to his and looked long into his eyes, dark in the strange light of the rotstorm, and overhead thunder rolled and then rain began in earnest. She pulled her scarf down and turned her face upward: a scarf wouldn’t do any good against the downpour, and the rain might even wash some of the residue of the acrid mists from her skin. She felt the rain’s icy tendrils cover her in moments, through cropped-short curls of ashen hair to her scalp, through the stained red cotton of her tunic and her armour, down to her core. The rain beat down and the furthest of Lothal’s ribs was already lost to sight. She turned back to Janos and licked her lips. The rain tasted like copper.
‘How about we kill everyone,’ she said, feeling her mouth twitching with the shadow of a smile, feeling the thrill of it all filling her every nerve, her heart a war drum in her chest, ‘and then we do some jokes.’
Floré didn’t wait for a reply, rising smoothly to her feet and taking a few halting steps in the mire before breaking into a loping jog even as Janos behind her started to laugh and pulled off his own scarf. He has a good laugh, she thought, deep and honest. Another roll of thunder above as she headed down the final hillock towards the demons, crow-men, and her leather boots splashed through the bog and peat and dragging vines as from her belt she pulled Benazir’s dagger. She was only twenty yards away when there was a shout from a goblin, and the crow-men stopped circling the amethyst shard and turned outward, still floating eerily above the ground, unconcerned by the pulling wind, the driving rain.
The dagger spun fast, the heavy blade coated in silver and etched in runes, the handle of worn antler with a weighted core of lead lending weight to the blow. A flash of intricate fractal lightning split across the sky, purple and red light pouring over the scene as the dagger sank into the chest of the first demon and it flew back and crumpled to the wet floor of the swamp below. Floré stopped running and unsheathed her sword, even as the rune in the dagger caught on flesh and started to burn and the demon on the ground wailed as it turned to a pyre, orange and red tongues of flame casting light over the goblins and the rottroll. The rottroll grunted something, rolling as it tried to pull itself to its feet, and the goblins chittered and shrieked. The other two crow-men circled closer around the amethyst, wailing or screaming orders. Floré could not tell. Flexing her knuckles, she raised her sword to her shoulder, throwing herself forward even as the goblins raced to meet her. She did not look at the rust- folk, the twenty seasoned warriors who would surely kill them both if Janos lost his nerve.
There was a cacophonous crack and the world went white for a moment as lightning shot not from the sky, but from the hands of Janos. The bolt of pure white had no branches, no tendrils seeking outward for a path of least resistance. It was a spear of white light and heat, passing over the heads of the charging goblins and into the chest of the rottroll that had just reared up to its full height. A feral grin pulled at Floré’s mouth and as the goblins wailed and clawed at their eyes she remembered their positions and took three more steps and with two hands swung her heavy grey blade in sweeping arcs, planting her feet strong, feeling the resistance as goblin after goblin was cleft or thrown aside.
She blinked thrice and when she could see again the rottroll was collapsed in the bog, only so much charnel. As she dispatched another goblin with a cleaving strike of her sword, one of the crow-men flew at her, gouts of roiling fire rushing from its crooked hands in a sputtering cone of black and red. Floré rolled, and when she came up crunched a goblin’s skull with the hilt of her sword and elbowed another trying to get at her ribs. Back on her feet she kept moving, and saw Janos standing alone, the rust-folk shooting arrow and spear at him. They were out of their tents now, screaming and yelling into the storm, arrows flying wild in the wind, heavy spears cutting through the storm with deadly accuracy. Janos stood resolute in his red tunic, unarmed, and waved his metal-clad hands gently as the arrows and spears that edged too close to him simply fell from the air.
Floré had rolled and punched and cut her way through the throng of goblins, the crow-man in close pursuit, and then she felt a numbing spark in her leg and glanced down and then up at the sky in horror. She skidded to a stop in the mulch and peat and the goblins caught up to her, circling and surrounding and jabbing crude stone weapons at her with frail arms. Snarling and accepting hit after hit from the surrounding goblins, sharp knapped edges cutting through her armour and biting at her legs and arms, Floré spun, casting her eyes over the scene, and then plunged her grey steel longsword into the ground. A moment later she felt the spark in her leg again, stronger, and she leapt through a throng of goblins, away and down into the stream where the rottroll had slept.
Behind her, the world exploded as a crash of thunder exulted from above, from all around, and the purple lightning of the rotstorm sought a path to ground. The branching bolt cut through rain and sky and found her sword, and from there the goblins surrounding it and the crow-man looming over them. Floré pulled herself out of the stinking water, its acid taint burning at her eyes, to see a circle of blackened gore surrounding her blade. Forty yards away the final crow-man, the robed demon, snatched the amethyst shard from the air. The light stopped pulsing and it was just a lump of crystal, and the crow-man yelled something, but she couldn’t hear any words, only noise. She wiped black peat from her mouth and glancing over her shoulder she saw Janos.
Across the mire, he cast his hands in an intricate pattern, weaving armoured fingers and hands in traces that left a glowing pattern of red light in the air. Through his tattered sleeves she saw his rune tattoos flare with red light as he called on the patterns remembered in each, the pattern in each tattoo calling to a pattern below that, within him, patterns he had sought and memorised and wrought over endless hours of meditation and study, days and months of energy reinforcing the design.
The two-dozen rust-folk surrounding him lunged forward as one at a yelled command of their leader, and by the light of their sentry’s brand Floré watched them all die. Janos called on the skein, found the pattern that linked all things, and changed it. The charge faltered, and in a moment she knew what he had done. Janos had made salt. She had never seen it on this scale before, this change in the pattern. He said it was easy, the salt. The structure of the crystals was a pattern, and one he always seemed to be able to find. Even as she watched he fell to his knees, weeping and retching, and the grasses and reeds covering the ground at his feet wilted in an ever-expanding circle. He had taken from them, rather than be taken from.
Some of the surrounding attackers were consumed utterly, rust-folk turned to salt pillars that crumbled in moments in the whipping winds and driving rain. Others were not so wholly ensorcelled, single limbs or organs altered, the rest of them remaining the same. They died slower, but they fell as one. Screams cut through storm; twenty hardened warriors dead in as many heartbeats.
Floré turned back to the crow-man in front of her, and even as it turned to flee she was leaping forward. Surrounded by the dead and dying, she wrenched her burning sword from the ground. The simple red sword- knot from her hilt was charred away, and as she pulled at the hilt the blade broke off halfway down and the pulsing purple lightning lingering in the broken blade and hilt encompassed her gauntlet and then her hand, her arm, and she screamed and stumbled, but ahead of her the crow- man was fleeing, beginning to rise into the air. If it escapes, she thought, picturing her comrades dead in the swamp behind, it was all for naught.
Floré took three sharp steps and hurled the broken sword. It still sparked with the puissant light of the rotstorm lightning and the shard of blade was glowing white hot as it spun through the air and scored into the spine of the fleeing demon, who fell unceremoniously down, crashing to the fetid water of the swamp below the skull of the dead god. The eye socket of Lothal the Just that had not yet sunk into the mire stared down at her, empty and cavernous and dark.
Floré looked back towards Janos. His attackers had stopped moaning and fallen still, and he was on his knees in the mud, body shuddering as he sobbed. She felt the burning up her right arm, could feel where the lightning had traced her veins and ligaments and tendons and nerves and charred its way along them. Floré clenched her fists to stop her arm shaking and walked forward.
In the shadow of Lothal’s bones Floré found the final demon. It was still trying to crawl away, dragging useless legs along behind it, one hand clutching the amethyst. Floré reached for Benazir’s dagger at her belt and realised it was buried in a corpse thirty yards back, and when she glanced down at her broken sword in the bog, she couldn’t bring herself to pick it up again. Reaching into a belt pouch she pulled out a silver coin stamped with the broken-chain crest of the Undal Protectorate and slotted it into the metalwork on the knuckle of her gauntlet, a notch made for just this purpose: fire and silver and silver and fire, to kill a demon. The demon’s hood had fallen away revealing a face, a human face, a young man’s face. His red hair was plastered to his forehead with rain, his skin pale, his eyes blue. He opened his mouth to say something and raised a hand but Floré didn’t give him any chance to warp the skein or plead for mercy. Commander Starbeck’s words whispered in her mind: no trial for rust-folk. She grabbed his slowly raising arm with her left hand and punched him with her right, turning his attempt at speech into a cry of pain.
The rain cascaded over her as she beat the demon to death, the silver raising burning welts wherever it found flesh, her fist crashing down again and again and again until she was gasping for air. The demon fell still. The rain washed the black blood from her armoured hands as she pulled her prize free, breathing heavily, slick with gore, trembling. The amethyst shard: the rotbud.
Floré returned to Janos with her broken sword and Benazir’s silver dagger in her belt, her tunic torn, her thin chain mail shirt broken in a dozen places. They were still days from the Stormcastle, miles and miles of acid water and monsters, goblins and rottrolls, white crocodiles with a taste for human flesh, biting kelp and creeping vine, marauding rust-folk.
‘Janos,’ she said, shaking him until he turned to face her. The whites of his eyes were red, his rain-soaked face failing to hide his tears. Floré pulled him to his feet and embraced him, holding him close. Above, thunder rolled again and Floré flinched. She cast an eye around at the piles of slowly dissolving salt, and the bodies mixed between. At least twenty of them, dead at his will in a moment. It was a feat that should have shrivelled him to a husk as the skein drew from him to change the pattern, and yet he was hale, flush with health even as he wept. She looked at him again, up and down, the soft poet, her friend.
‘No trial for rust-folk,’ he said, his voice barely a whisper, and Floré shook her head at him.
‘You owe me a joke,’ she said, but Janos only fell back to his knees and wept. Floré blew out a breath through her nose, checked the straps on her gauntlets, and took a final look at the colossal bones, the ribs of the dead god reaching up into the sky just at the edge of her vision through the storm. She turned her gaze out to the mire beyond and the horrors to come. It was time to go to work.
Excerpted from The Gauntlet and the Fist Beneath, copyright © 2022 by Ian Green.
