Excerpt from A Hope in Hell
Book Three of Heirs of Cataclysm
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Christopher G. Nuttall
Available on Amazon in eBook and Paperback
All Comments and Reviews Welcome!
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Cover Blurb
They hold the secret that could break the world… again. 
John, Scout, and the rest of Joyce’s crew flee across the deserts and magical wastelands holding the plans to make motivators, devices that provide unlimited magical power to any mage. 
Devices owned only by Greyshade, the man who saved the world after the apocalypse. Devices he blames for bringing the apocalypse in the first place. Devices he’ll do anything to keep secret.
Now instead of bounty hunters, Greyshade is sending armies and magical assassins after them. And if that’s not enough, he’s leading this vast force himself.
Will John and his friends stand up against the greatest wizard in the world? Can they hold off all the assembled armies? Or is releasing the second apocalypse their only hope?
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Excerpt from A Hope in Hell
Chapter One
The air was hot, humid, and deceptive.
John felt his head ache as the small party galloped over the dunes and made their way down to New Hope. They’d broken contact with the bounty hunters—he didn’t want to think about who else was chasing them—weeks ago, but the wildlands were incredibly dangerous even when there were no humans trying to kill them. They’d avoided patches of wild magic, fought their way out of traps set by creatures warped and twisted to the point they’d developed a certain intelligence of their own, and evaded two elementals that had come very close to capturing them. 
He saw things out of the corner of his eye, never quite there when he turned to look at them properly. The ground below the horse’s hooves shifted constantly, veering between sand and ash and earth to the remains of cities destroyed by the storms that had backed over the world. 
He thought he could feel unseen eyes watching them, but when he turned to look, he saw nothing. His senses were useless. There was so much tainted magic in the air, there was no way to pick out anything from the blur.
Scout shifted against him, her arms tightening around his waist. She was half-asleep. John didn’t blame her. Scout was a weirdling, a child of the badlands, but even she found it difficult to endure the desolation. He felt a rush of affection as she tightened her grip. They’d been lovers for the last two years and…
He gritted his teeth as he felt a sudden surge of guilt. It had been nearly three years since he’d carried out the experiment that had nearly killed Katrina and been expelled from the College of Wizards, affectionately known as Greyshade School. 
He’d tried, since his exile into the badlands, to make contact with her and offer what little he could in hopes of setting things right, but there’d been no response. He’d feared her family was intercepting his letters and burning them, yet the truth had been far worse. She’d abandoned her family and entered Headmaster Greyshade’s service…
His head swam. The desert was getting to him. It was hard to think clearly, let alone put together a coherent outline of anything. 
He’d burnt Katrina—body, magic, and soul—and what little had survived had been worthless, at least to her family. He didn’t know precisely what had happened—he’d been sent into exile the very day of the accident—but he could guess. Greyshade, the ruthless old manipulator, had offered to restore some of her powers, in exchange for her service. 
John couldn’t even blame her for taking the deal. He’d hurt her so badly, crippled her, that the best she could hope for from anyone else—even her family—was being exiled to the family’s country estate and left to rot.
He must’ve had something like that in mind from the start, John thought. He’d never really liked the headmaster, although he’d never been able to put his feelings into words. Greyshade was the most powerful man in the world, the effective master of thousands of sorcerers, magicians, and apprentices. He controlled, directly or indirectly, lives, cities, and even entire kingdoms. Did he know there’d come a time when he’d have to track us down?
His heart sank. It had been Greyshade who’d sent him in into exile—and Greyshade who’d pointed him to Captain Joyce and her adventurers. It had been Greyshade who’d hired them for a handful of missions, all of which—John was sure—were completely off the books. And it had been Greyshade who’d sent them to steal an ancient plague box, a deadly weapon from the days before the Cataclysm, before the entire world had been devastated. 
John hadn’t questioned their orders, at least until they’d discovered a colossal bounty had been placed on their heads and an entire army of bounty hunters was after them. And then… they’d discovered the plague box was nothing of the sort. 
John ground his teeth in bitter frustration. Greyshade hadn’t wanted the box stolen to protect the world, but to protect his monopoly on magical motivators, and he’d sent Katrina to kill them.
She came very close to killing all of us, he thought, and next time, she might finish the job.
He cursed under his breath. He’d used a makeshift motivator to trigger a magic storm that should have killed her, but had come very close to killing them both. It was impossible to be certain, but he was positive she was still alive. 
He wasn’t sure how he felt about her survival. He blamed himself—and rightly so—for what had happened to her, but she had tried to kill him, tortured Scout, and Greyshade alone knew what else. If it had been just him, he thought he might’ve walked up to her and invited her to do whatever she wanted… and yet, the stakes were just too high. 
Greyshade had to be stopped.
So all we have to do is defeat a man who has thousands of sorcerers, soldiers, and monarchs under his command, John told himself. Good thing we like a challenge, isn’t it?
He raised his eyes as Joyce, the lead horsewoman, pulled her horse to a stop. The rest of the team cantered up to join her. John hoped she knew where they were going. They’d gone into the badlands before, several times, but they’d never traveled so far from the borderlands. There was no hope, now, of turning around and getting back to the more settled lands before they ran out of food and water. John had picked up a few survival tricks over the last two years, but he knew his limits. Scout was the only one amongst them who might survive long enough to get to safety, if there was any to be had. The bounties on their heads were still waiting to be collected.
“We should be there within the hour,” Joyce said. She was a past master at navigating the badlands, but even she was being pushed to her limits. There was so much tainted magic in the air that normal navigational methods were dangerously unreliable. “Try not to scare them.”
“Perhaps I could sing a song,” Bard said. His voice was raspy and weak. John couldn’t help thinking it would be a long time before Bard managed to sing anything more than a few lines. “Perhaps a rousing chorus of—”
“And then they’ll drive us out of town,” Sergeant Ted growled. He and Bard normally bantered, exchanging insults as casually as lovers exchanged endearments, but his tiredness gave his words a sharp edge. “The moment they hear you try to sing, they’ll start throwing things.”
“I’ll have you know, King Atherton thought my singing was wonderful,” Bard said. “He loved me!”
“Yeah,” Ted agreed. “How could he possibly hope to find a more economical method of torturing prisoners? Five minutes of you murdering The Ballard of Peeping Tom, and the poor bastards will be confessing to everything, even crimes they couldn’t possibly have committed.”
“Ah, you love me, really. Boss Harris said he’d never get another singer like me.”
“No,” Ted said. “He said he never wanted another singer like you.”
John tried not to roll his eyes. Bard was a very enthusiastic singer, but not a particularly good one. He was fond of insisting that he’d moved from court to court, singing for monarchs and their courtiers, yet it was hard to believe he’d been allowed to stay at court after he’d opened his mouth and sung. 
Ted said Bard had moved from place to place because he’d been kicked out repeatedly. John would’ve thought Ted was right, if he hadn’t known Bard was both a skilled fixer and a terrifyingly capable swordsman. Joyce hadn’t hired him for his singing. Bard was easy to underestimate until it was too late.
Bard was a handsome, taller man who normally had his blond hair, mustache, and goatee perfectly tailored, but now he looked as though he’d been through the wars. His tailored outfit—he liked to dress like a cross between a dandy and a traveling minstrel—was practically in rags, even though it had been designed to allow him to move freely. 
Ted was a short, stocky man who looked—always—as though he’d just walked away from a battlefield. John suspected he didn’t look any better. Two weeks hard riding, without washing or even a change of clothes, had taken its toll. Scout was the only one of them who didn’t look any different, and even she was clearly tired.
Joyce glared them both into silence. “As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted, try not to scare them. New Hope is the only settlement for dozens of miles, and there’s literally nowhere else we can go if they don’t want us.”
“They must want us,” John said. It was hard to keep the desperation out of his voice. Scout tightened her grip slightly. “They want—they need—more motivators.”
He glowered at the box—the wretched box that had nearly gotten them killed several times—on Joyce’s back. The knowledge within would change the world, if they got a chance to spread it from one end of the Free States to the other. The motivators alone would make one hell of a difference. He knew the New Hope community wanted them—they’d gone to some trouble to buy up every motivator they could find—but would they take the risk of harboring some of the most wanted fugitives in the world? They wanted their independence from the monarchs, yet…
There’s nowhere else to go, he reminded himself. This is one last throw of the dice.
“We’ll see,” Joyce said. “We should have plenty of time to convince them before any hunters track us down.”
Ted said, “Don’t count on it. We think we broke contact, and we certainly broke the link leading them to us, but a skilled tracker could’ve followed us while remaining out of sight.”
“I doubt it,” John said. He might be the least experienced of the team, but he’d picked up a few things over the last three years. “They’d have to be on horseback to follow us, and we would’ve seen something… wouldn’t we?”
“Perhaps,” Ted said. “Or they might be using charmed beasts to follow us while the hunter himself stays well back, out of sight.”
“Greyshade certainly has magicians who could do it for him,” Bard agreed. “The bastard has virtually unlimited resources.”
John couldn’t disagree. Joyce had worked for Greyshade—and by extension, so had the rest of the team. There was no reason to think they were the only team of adventurers—or bounty hunters—under his control. He had the resources to quietly patronize hundreds of teams without making his involvement obvious, as well as the connections to help people and—in doing so—make them indebted to him. If things had been different, if they’d never discovered their patron had been lying to them, they might have been on the other side. 
John didn’t like the headmaster, but he was—had been—in the man’s debt. And a man always repaid his debts if he wanted to call himself a man.
“Or a weirdling,” Scout said. “There are others out there who are far less human than me.”
“You are human,” John said. He’d punched a man who’d mocked Scout to her face for being a weirdling. The man had been bullying a dragon. Even in broad daylight, Scout could make herself practically invisible. John had seen her walk up behind someone and slit his throat—but he hadn’t wanted her to think he didn’t care enough to defend her. “And anyone who thinks otherwise is a complete idiot.”
Joyce looked east, then shrugged. John followed her gaze. The landscape was a rolling nightmare of desert sands, the air a shimmering haze, and the sky bright blue and clear of anything that might be following them. 
He’d been cautioned visibility was lower than it seemed; the combination of heat and haze distorted one’s eyesight and generated mirages that could be utterly convincing, at least until one tried to touch them. An entire army could be lurking just out of sight, watching them from a safe distance. Cold logic suggested otherwise—it had been hard enough to keep the five of them in hardtack and water over the last few weeks—but logic was powerless against emotion.
And it doesn’t help that the most powerful man in the world is after us, John thought. He has enough magic to smooth out the logistics problems and send an army after us.
Ted’s thoughts were clearly moving in the same direction. “Given time, he can get his forces after us. New Hope came out this far because they thought they couldn’t be followed in a hurry. They had nothing to make the effort worthwhile. But that’ll change”—he pointed to the box—“when their enemies realize what we’ve brought them.”
“If they’re not tracking us,” Bard said, “they’ll have to work out where we’re going.”
Scout leaned forward. “Where else?”
John hated to admit it, but she had a point. There was no way they could dicker with Greyshade and offer to hand over the box in exchange for the bounties being lifted. Greyshade couldn’t be trusted, and even if Joyce felt otherwise, and Greyshade kept his word, some of the hunters wouldn’t get the message until it was far too late. They could go to one of the monarchs, the ones who chafed under Greyshade’s tutelage, and offer to sell the box, or even simply give it to them, but Greyshade had too many clients—including a number who were completely off the books—for any of the monarchs to be sure Greyshade wouldn’t find out until it was too late. What else was there? Destroy the box, change their names, and hope for the best? John doubted they’d ever be safe again. The bounties were just too high.
New Hope is our only hope, he thought. 
The settlement had openly declared itself to be a whole new kind of society, in stark contrast to the hierarchical Free States or the rough and ready settlements along the borderline. There was no one else who might have the nerve to stand up to Greyshade and the monarchs, no one who was far enough away to be reasonably sure of having time to prepare before the enemy armies arrived. And if we can work that out, so can they.
“They couldn’t take it for granted,” Bard said. “I might like to think I’m a very big man, indeed, particularly my enormous—”
“I think we need to have his head inspected,” Ted said, deadpan. He sounded more like his old self. “He’s having delusions of adequacy again.”
Bard made a rude gesture. “We’re five very small people. We’re tiny. The region they have to search, if they want to find us, is immense. Even if they work out just how far we could’ve traveled from the last encounter, they’re still going to have to search a vast area. They may think they know where we’re going—they may, yes—but they couldn’t be sure. I don’t care how big their armies are. They’re not going to be devoting an entire army to New Hope unless they have some reason to believe that’s where we’re going.”
“They do,” John said quietly. “Where else could we use the box?”
“He’s right,” Joyce said. “Greyshade isn’t going to lose sleep over the prospect of us hiding the box somewhere, then splitting up, creating new lives, and vanishing into the borderlands. He’s going to worry about us using the box, for which we need a base of operations that won’t report back to him the moment they see us. New Hope is the only place that fits the bill.”
“Unless we try to set up a settlement of our own,” Bard pointed out, “or we go to one of the hidden settlements in the borderlands.”
Joyce shook her head. John nodded in agreement. There were hundreds—perhaps thousands—of hidden settlements along the borderlands, from towns set up by bandits and refugees to settlements run by weirdlings who couldn’t or wouldn’t pass for human or fit into human society. Most of them, he suspected, were already known to Greyshade and the Grey Men, even if they were officially off the maps. The remainder were just too small and underdeveloped—or hostile—to be helpful. 
The team might be able to hide in one of those towns, particularly if they split up, but they’d never be able to stop watching over their shoulders for possible enemies. And it would take time, time they didn’t have, to set up a town of their own.
“It’s too late to change our minds now,” Joyce said. “Remember what I said. Don’t scare them. Don’t act like bandits. We get to the settlement line, hail them, and ask to speak to the town council. As long as we behave ourselves, they should remember the code.”
John nodded. The code of the borderlands was very clear. If someone needed help, and you could help without compromising your own safety, you helped. Only the very worst bandits ignored the code, and they were considered outlaws to be killed on sight. New Hope should give them a hearing. That was all they could ask for.
Joyce sprung her horse around and dug in her spurs. “Let’s go!”
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