Mist and Mirrors
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
The fog appears to be lifting now, spreading upwards and outwards. There is blood on the cobbles, splattered about. There is always blood, but no body. The fog is like a vast blanket above them, an upturned river of grey from which something tumbles and comes clattering down upon the street. The pike men approach it warily, uncertain now, the urge to run only countered by the equal and opposite fear of those they must run to - the terrible masters.
The one with the lantern holds it high with an unsteady arm, illuminating the bloodied hilt of a sword; of the blade there is no sign. They look upwards as if searching the receding fog for an answer, but they are too late, for it has already broken up into cloudlets and drifted away in the night. Anguished stars stare back at them between rows and rows of mansion houses, like so many pairs of eyes.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
In Kalishandra, the city of lost travellers, the city in the abyss, darkness has form. In the mist that rises periodically from cracks between the cobblestones, it has life. Melt-mist, the shaper, drifts along empty streets, welling into deep, choking pools in forgotten courtyards. It breaks in ephemeral smoke waves upon the stark stone walls of towers, which protrude above its curling tendrils like strangely envisioned nightmares. These bleak, inhospitable eyries are the lairs of dark and terrible wizards, beneath whose hard and stony glare Kalishandra shifts. Streets change. Walls stand where before there was but empty space. Courtyards once remembered fade into obscurity. Old things disappear, are misplaced; here a statue, there an ornamental fish pond. Even older things return. The smell of a river long thought lost - blood upon the cobbles. It continues. . .
About the Author
John T Stolarczyk is a writer from Hervey Bay in Queensland, Australia. This is his first published book.