Excerpt

The slow trek of a snow camel took him there. He never looked where he was going. He just went. The course through the mountains was a brace—all tangled. Everything was savage about it: humping ground personified to viciousness, roaring wind unwilling to give any answers. Things crawled at him from the edge of his eye, dissolved when he looked closer. He was a wreck. He felt a wreck. Further still, the horizon ran out of time. The beast he rode on let out a gushy fart as Novic slid off the saddleback. He slapped its rump as the handler said he should, and the camel chewed cud and batted long lashes at him before it turned.

He trusted it would make its own way back down to the cameleer farm he loaned it from. He'd bobbed in weirdness, gently moving his body back, forth, lumbering side to side between its two humps, and the only bother he felt was not from the stiffness of its woolly fur beneath the skinny saddle but rather from the musky odor of it. There was also the sour pungency of the camel's breath, emphasized at intervals with rancid burps. In essence, it was darn good riddance to let the beast go—he was done holding his breath.

The Temple of Kripps in the Land of Praeyer at a place below zero was off a cut stone path that led up, up to the sky. A sense of doom hovered about it and he didn't think it was anything to do with the close of daylight. Novic strode on the cobblestones until he reached the imposition of a two-meter door. He hunted for a bell, and nothing remotely resembled one within his spectrum of visibility.

In the non-appearance of a doorbell, he lifted the giant steel knocker that seemed there for a reason, and rapped the tall, thick wood engraved with death masks.

Whose faces? He couldn't tell.

A woman opened the grand entrance and stood framed under its arc.

"Hi, I'm Brad," she said.

[continues…]