Servant: The Dark God Book 1 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  MAP

  1. The Hunt

  2. King’s Collar

  3. The Courage of Women

  4. Prey

  5. Thieves

  6. Stag Home

  7. Chase

  8. Bounty

  9. Hatchling

  10. Battle

  11. Hunters

  12. The Mother

  13. Snare

  14. Fugitives

  15. Purity

  16. In Darkness

  17. Soul Meat

  18. A Cold Kiss

  19. Summons

  20. Snake Games

  21. The Divine

  22. Riders

  23. Scent

  24. Trees

  25. A Shortness of Breath

  26. Baker’s Herbs

  27. The Glass Master’s Daughters

  28. Alliances

  29. Fright

  30. Secrets

  31. A Broken Wing

  32. Spoor

  33. Body and Soul

  34. Sacrifice

  35. Crossroad

  36. Pursuit

  37. Sleth

  38. Traps

  39. Koramite

  40. The Thrall of Mokad

  41. Muster

  42. Like a Spider

  43. Hag’s Teeth

  44. The Monster’s Lair

  45. The Grove

  46. Mantle and Crown

  47. Master of the Harvest

  48. Shim

  49. Purity’s Choice

  50. Raveler

  Dear Reader

  Terms & People

  Acknowledgements

  BY JOHN D BROWN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Servant

  John Brown

  A spirited blacksmith's daughter accused of using the dark and terrifying sleth magic.

  The young man who hunts her.

  And the ferocious monster who only wants to be free.

  Trapped in a web of lies and ancient secrets, of right becoming wrong, the three must struggle not only against each other, but also a being of irresistible powers, a creature who is gathering her servants to usher in the impending human harvest.

  Praise for Servant

  “[An] engrossing debut . . . breakneck paced and action packed. Patient readers will be rewarded with a thoroughly enjoyable fantasy adventure.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “Servant delivers solid pacing, a great setting, and a smart story that breaks away from genre conventions.”

  — Brandon Sanderson,

  New York Times best-selling author

  “Brown’s first novel, the opener in a new fantasy series, creates an elaborate new world, with a rich and deep spiritual and political background . . . Reminiscent of L. E. Modesitt Jr.’s Recluce novels and David Drake’s Lord of the Isles series and David Farland’s Runelords books, this well-wrought tale of families in conflict against both politics and religion represents a welcome addition to large-scale fantasy.”

  — Library Journal (starred review!)

  “Akin to Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen or R. Scott Bakker’s The Prince of Nothing . . . There is the sense right from the start that Servant is a tale being told by a first-rate storyteller. It maybe be his first novel, but . . . John Brown knows how to grab a reader’s attention and hold it all the way through the book. That’s a talent that works well in any genre and bodes especially well for the next two volumes in what promises to be an engrossing fantasy trilogy.”

  — New York Review of Science Fiction

  “In Servant, John Brown has created a complex and intricate world, filled with all the permutations of human good and evil, as well as evil that goes beyond the human, where neither heroes nor villains are quite what they seem at first, and where the cost of virtue is high indeed, yet where, in the end, the tenacity of such virtue is what is required to triumph.”

  L. E. Modesitt, Jr,

  author of the Recluce and Imager series

  “In his debut novel, Servant, John Brown adds his voice to epic fantasy with a world I can see and smell and taste and believe in . . . and characters I can cheer for, travel with, and want to see again.”

  — Ken Scholes,

  author of Lamentation

  “A classic heroic saga, dealing with the bedrock issues of good and evil and identity. These are classic themes because they matter, and Brown makes them matter both to his young protagonist and the reader. It promises to continue for quite a distance, and I hope it does.”

  — Kage Baker,

  author of House of the Stag

  “A complex, powerful story of a youth trying to learn who he is and what he is, with no allies he can trust in a world stalked by a monster. A book that copies nothing I have read before and which goes its own way brilliantly.”

  David Drake,

  author of the Lord of the Isles series

  “This was deeper than a hack and slash adventure, but it was still really fun. It was surprisingly deep when it came to things like family, trust, and truth. That said, I was still engrossed enough to pound through this novel in a couple of sittings.”

  — Larry Correia,

  New York Times best-selling author

  “I will say, in utter candor, that Servant is a work that truly stands out from other fantasy books on the market. What makes this book work so well is that it’s a story about family first, and a fantasy adventure second.”

  — Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show

  “In Servant, John Brown has created a dark and detailed world that has us salivating (literally) for more.”

  — Elitist Book Reviews

  “Thoroughly engrossing from the first page to the last! John Brown shows himself to be a writer with remarkable depth and power. I haven’t seen a debut novel this good in years!”

  — David Farland,

  New York Times best-selling author

  “This intricate story buries the truth under layers of corrupt history, forgotten legends, and deliberate lies . . . A provocative, suspenseful beginning of a new series.”

  — Booklist

  Copyright

  SERVANT: The Dark God Book One

  Copyright © 2013 by John Brown

  All rights reserved

  Published by Blacksword Enterprises, LLC

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from John Brown. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

  A previous version of this novel was published by Tor Books as Servant of a Dark God.

  Illustration copyright © 2013 Victor Minguez

  Map copyright © 2008 Isaac Stewart

  Book and cover design copyright © 2013 Blacksword Books

  ISBN 13: 978-1-940427-03-4

  ISBN 10: 1940427037

  First edition: November, 2013

  Revised June, 2014

  Electronic Edition by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  Author’s Note

  SOME READERS WILL be familiar with a previous version of this book published by Tor Books as
Servant of a Dark God and wonder what the differences are between that obsolete version and this one.

  This version is the result of a significant edit that includes line edits, copy edits, section resequencing, and one important adjustment and addition.

  Line edits include changes to make individual sentences or paragraphs read more clearly. I made line edits to almost every page. I think most readers won’t notice these. But then that’s the point.

  Copy edits catch small things like typos and misspellings. There were a number of maddening copy issues that weren’t caught in the first version and still others that were introduced as the manuscript moved through production. No book is perfect, and so I’m sure there are still some gremlins lurking in the text. But in this edit we caught and killed a host of the little fiends.

  Resequencing involves moving chapters or sections around and does affect the experience. The biggest resequence was switching the first eight chapters back to the original order I intended. This is an important change and will have a large effect on the reader for the first quarter of the book. Then there were three other smaller sections inside the story that needed to be moved around to make the chronology clearer and improve the suspense.

  The line, copy, and resequencing edits make up the bulk of the edits. But I did adjust and add a short section to the ending immediately after the climax to clarify a few things that should have been revealed in the first version and that lead into book two.

  What does this all mean?

  It means that while this is a superior version of the tale, the base story remains the same. I care about the characters of Sugar, Talen, Argoth, Hunger, and the others, and the dilemmas they face. So I did not change their tale. I did significantly change the experience for the reader.

  I am stoked about this version. I can’t wait for readers to dig in.

  Dedication

  For Nellie

  Epigraph

  The Goat King danced the crags by day,

  At night he came to feed,

  And dupe the foolish farmer’s wives

  To hold his monstrous breed.

  The husbands sought to hunt him down

  And take him as he lay,

  But the wily King, with a wicked touch,

  Stole their souls away.

  1

  The Hunt

  BARG, THE HARVEST MASTER and butcher of the village of Plum, stood in the crisp light of early morning with a number of men, waiting to murder his friend the smith, the smith’s wife, and their two children.

  Oh, none of them called it murder, but all knew that’s where this would lead. And what choice did they have?

  The villagers had been joined by others in the district and divided into groups positioned around the smith’s. One group hid behind the miller’s. Another, the one lead by Barg, kept itself behind Galson’s barn. The third waited in small grove on the outskirts of the village.

  The men with Barg stood for an hour, checking the buckles of what armor they had, wrestling with the shock of the matter, and waiting for the signal in silence. At first, a handful of the outsiders had boasted of what they’d do. “Mark me,” said a Mokaddian wearing the turquoise of the Vargon clan. His Vargon accent was plain, rolling his r’s much too long. “I will land one of the first five strokes.”

  Barg cut off a handful of his hair with a knife to show his mourning for what was about to occur. “You’ll be one of the first five he guts.” He grasped another handful of hair and sawed through it.

  “What do you know?” the Vargon said.

  “I know that today I will help kill a man who saved my life.” He cast another clump of shorn hair to the ground. “The smith is a roaring lion. You had best beware.”

  The Vargon said nothing in return, but what could he say? He was only trying to cover his fears. Sparrow the smith was a formidable warrior, and if the accusations against him were true, then it was certain some of those who had gathered today would die.

  The approaching dawn silvered the fields and thatched roofs about the village and set the roosters to crowing. The cattle in the paddocks began to low. A stray dog outside the ale-wife’s barked at a snake trying to get to the tall grass. And down in the south field, a few straggling deer decided it was now time to leave the fields and find cover. The men knew their signal was only minutes away.

  * * *

  On the side of the village closest to the forest and Galson’s, the smith’s daughter, Sugar, stood in her barn feeding the family’s two horses and heard the jingle of a trap bell in the garden. The sound was followed by the panicked cry of a hare.

  Nothing ever got away from one of Sugar’s traps. And from the sound of the ringing, this creature was big. All that commotion was sure to bring Midnight and Sky, her family’s dogs. She’d trained them to leave her game alone, but these two liked to bend the rules whenever they could. So Sugar put down the hay fork, and told Fancy, their mare, she’d return later. Sot, their draft horse, had already had his fill and had moved out to the watering trough. Then she picked up her smothering sack and stepped out of the barn and into the yard with her bare feet.

  The village homes looked like fat ships floating amidst a sea of grain. But it was not a quiet sea. Da had flung both doors to the smithy open and stood at the forge hammering away at his work. Farmer Galson’s cattle bellowed. They were the noisiest bunch of cattle in the whole district. Sugar saw them bunched up at the far end of their paddock waiting for one of Galson’s grandsons to open the gate so they could go to the watering pond. But that was odd . . . someone should have led them out long ago.

  Beyond the paddock gate stood the thatch-roofed homes for farmer Galson, his children, and his adult grandchildren. Almost a village all by itself. The soft yellow light of hearth fires still shone in many of the windows. Outside, one of the wives made her way back from the privy in a pale nightgown. She held a wailing babe on her hip.

  The woman looked up, and Sugar waved across the field at her, but the woman did not wave back; instead, she dashed for her house. Maybe she hadn’t seen Sugar. But then again, maybe she had. Some of the Galsons thought they rode a lord’s high horse. And that included the boys who had begun to court her.

  Sugar walked to the garden, opened the gate, and stepped under the arch of climbing rose. The lemony scent from its pink blooms lay heavy in the air. She walked along the shadowed rows of vegetables until she came to the peas and salad greens.

  There she found a large hare, a black-tail that was going to make a fine breakfast.

  It was easiest just to brain them with a stout stick, but she didn’t want to chance ruining the fur about the throat, so she readied the smothering sack and approached the animal. This part of the garden was still wet with yesterday’s watering and the soil stuck to the bottoms of her bare feet. When she got close, the hare began to kick in earnest.

  It was a monster. Twelve pounds at least.

  She threw the sack over it to protect her from its kicking and clawing and quickly held its hind and head quarters in place. It cried out in distress, but she kneeled on its side and pushed the air out of its lungs. She pushed until she knew she’d start breaking its ribs, then waited for it to suffocate.

  The giant hare struggled underneath her for a minute or so and then lay very still. Sugar removed the snare noose from its leg. The hare felt dead, but she’d been tricked before. A number of years ago, before her moon cycles had come upon her, she’d picked up a hare and carried it into the house and laid it on the cutting stone. The whole time it had lain in her hands like a limp rag, but the second she began to cut, it jumped up, knocked the knife right out of her hand, flew off the table, and bolted out the open door, all to her father’s delight. She didn’t want a repeat, and so she continued to press this hare.

  Across the paddocks the Galson’s dogs began to bark. They were joined by another group down by the Miller’s. The dogs would often bark this way when travelers passed through. Sugar looked up to see what was causin
g the commotion.

  A wide line of men on the far side of Galson’s paddocks marched out from behind the barn. They marched in battle order with bows and spears, their helmets gleaming in the early morning light. Those with spears also carried shields painted with a grotesque boar’s head circled by a ring of orange. It was the mark of the Fir-Noy clan of Mokad.

  It was not uncommon to see such things. All men, Mokaddian and Koramite, were required to regularly attend their clan musters. But something about this was not right.

  She turned and saw another line coming up from the Miller’s.

  Then she realized: these men were converging, but not on the practice field. No, they seemed on a direct course for her house.

  2

  King’s Collar

  FEAR RAN UP Sugar’s back. Not only were these men converging, but none of them wore the armbands that distinguished friend from foe during the practice musters.

  Sugar stood, trying to get a better view.

  The hare that had lain beneath her bucked free of the smothering sack. It bolted down the row of peas, pushed through a hole she’d missed in their fence, and fled to the short hedgerow that grew along a portion of Galson’s paddock.

  The men continued to march toward the house. She could see the intricate Mokaddian tattoos around their wrists and forearms. She could see beards and naked chins under their helmets, but they were too far away for their eyes to be anything but dark pits.

  She ran to the back door and flung it open.

  Mother bent at the hearth building up a cooking fire. She startled when Sugar rushed in. “Goh, you do that just to set my heart leaping in my throat, don’t you.”

  “There are men dressed for battle in Galson’s field,” said Sugar. “Others down by the miller’s. Was there a muster today?”