Another sword and sorcery tale finished

 

Just finished what I hope are the final touches to a new sword and sorcery tale, tentatively titled Lies and Treachery.

It's quite a long story (11,100 words) and is my third involving a northern mercenary called Horbeck. He first appears in an as yet unpublished tale called The Unhappy Inquisitor, in which he is a secondary character. The second is in The Demon from Another World, in which this time he is the main character. This is to be published at the end of October in Anthology of the Damned: Necromoirrium from Treeshaker Books. 

From the opening paragraph of Lies and Treachery:

"It was less than a day since the four mercenaries on their stolen camels reached the end of the Great Desert. Scorched by the sun, they were a desperate-looking band of men. Horbeck, their erstwhile leader, was a huge Northerner, fully a head taller than any of the others, his plaited beard and long hair bleached almost white and filled with dust. The scarred mail beneath his leather jerkin showed through rents in the badly worn garment. Like all the others he wore a plain, much dented steel helmet. The other northerner, Brud, was slightly shorter but built to the same hardy proportions, with a notched battle-axe swinging from his saddle. Back in his homeland he would usually have had the severed heads of those he had vanquished hung alongside it but in more civilised lands he had been persuaded to forgo this touch of vanity. Asnar, a Josanian archer with a sharply-pointed blue-black beard in need of a trim, wore lacquered leather armour, though its colours had been dulled and the bright designs on his broad breastplate were barely discernible. A scimitar hung in a gaudy sheath across his back. Completing their disreputable quartet, Bolbo, a balding Kossanian with a savage scar on one cheek, was the oldest of their group - and a poor rider of camels. Even after weeks of travel across the desert he clung onto his mount with steely desperation, his teeth gritted. His scarlet tunic had been drained of all but the faintest hint of colour by the sun while the old steel breastplate beneath was scored and dented from all the blows inflicted on it over the years."