Alturiak 15

“The Valdas killed my parents.”

“OK. For some reason I’d been thinking it was a vampire. You said it was a vampire.”

“It was a vampire wearing the sign of the Valdas.”

“Ah.”

Not sure if Wolfgirl is mad, delusional or simply immensely unlucky. My parents were killed in much more normal ways, involving swords, rape and burning, I imagine. Rather I was here and able to speculate than had been there to say for sure but only to a cleric with that still-conspicuously-absent-from-our-repertoire power to Speak With Dead.

The Monk drags us off to some diviner to try and find out something about the Valdas. She’s way too expensive for any of us to afford, but The Dwarf sort of lost his purse last night after I choked him out and so I buy a question from her anyway. Easy come, easy go. I ask here where the creature that killed Wolfgirl’s parents can be found. Bleedin’ miles away, that’s where. “Upon the earth of his home he rests, by a river that runs bright red.” Well the only river I know that runs bright red is the Crimson River and that’s over the other side of the mountains, not to mention all the orcs and the slimies and whatever else is crawling around the borders of Osmuld. So in short, bugger that.

Ah well. At least I get a good night out of the diviner’s receptionist and what’s left of the dwarf’s gold.

NEXT WEEK: WELL, IT WAS ABOUT TIME WE HAD SOME PIRATES IN THIS STORY

When I think of chainsaws in films, for some reason I always end up with the iconic Medieval Dead image and that scene in Smokin’ Aces where one of the neo-nazi hitmen ends up sitting on his own chainsaw. What WAS that film on? However, after various things I’ve said about dragons being emasculated in fantasy literature, the following kinda caught my eye: “We’ve decided to spread the word that in amongst the shelves of angsty, pale and love-lorn undead and eco-friendly lycanthropes there is blood, there is dread, there is fear.” And “it’s time that monsters got back to doing what they do best, being MONSTROUS.”

Well quite.

The Chainsaw Gang is setting out to be “the new wave of writers delivering old school horror,” and while I’m not a horror writer and never will be, I’m all for monsters being properly monstrous. Hence the Chainsaw Gang has become the new wave of horror writers with a fantasy author tacked on. Or something like that.

Put another way, Alex Bell invited me in and you don’t say no to Alex.

Now and then, therefore, there will be posts about Chainsaw Gang events and schedules of where and when the various members will be doing signings and so-forth. For now, let’s start with the who’s who:

Alex Bell. Author of The Ninth Circle, Jasmyn and most recently, Lex Trent vs. The Gods

The Gang’s founder and grand master, Sarwat Chadda, author of the Devil’s Kiss and Dark Goddess. I shall be reviewing Devil’s Kiss in a week or so along with a short interview with Sarwat, during which he will reveal which of the gang he would most like to fall upon and devour.

Sam Enthoven. Demons, death and destruction. Innocent people turned into mind-controlled psycho-killers, like the good Lord intended.

Steve Feasey. You can never, ever, have enough werewolves (eh, Mark?)

David Gatward: The Dead, The Dark and The Damned.

William Hussey. Modern science and ancient horrors.

Jon Mayhew. Spooks. Demons. Knife-throwing heroines. Enter dark, fog-bound Victorian London and the awesome Mortlock.

Alex Milway. Yetis: Seriously under-represented in modern genre literature, but Alex is putting that right.

Sarah Pinborough (aka Sarah Silverwood): Whose stories have a way of burrowing under your skin and then eating you from the inside, rather like those Scarab beetles in The Mummy.

Alexander Gordon Smith. Author of the Furnace series which is about a prison built miles underground and run by demons.

On Saturday 23rd October, most of the Chainsaw Gang (but not me) will be at the Crystal Palace Children’s Book Festival so you’ll have Alex Milway, Alex Bell, Alexander Gordon Smith, Sam Enthoven, Jon Mayhew, Steve Feasey and Sarwat. Other events will apparently follow in Norwich and Richmond. However…  In the next couple of weeks there’ll be a lot of activity and a BIG competition being run across the many blogs of the members of the gang, kicking off on Sarwat’s blog on Monday.

Waterstones in Haywards Heath, 11am, Saturday 16th October.

Yes, I know that’s not much of a post. Oooh look – a spider.

About the size of my hand and living outside my front door for the last week

Alturiak 14: Thus, Diamond Cascade engaged the most noble of the North Coast, those few who had not sunk into the depravity around them, to his cause…

Look, in the big scheme of things, in the grand world-spanning story of Diamond Cascade, greatest troubadour of the land, hero of the people, saviour of kings and crap like that, the whole sordid business of a visit to the North Coast will be a footnote. Diamond Cascade helped deliver a letter. Whooo-hooo. All the thieving and the drinking and the whoring and the less we talk about any of that the better, no one wants to know about that. Sure, there might be a little twinkle in the eye as I sing my made-up tale, but no one wants to know that what Diamond Cascade actually did was spend a month and a half so drunk he could barely remember what colour the sea was, routinely woke up in a pool of his own vomit, contracted several diseases and only left to seek his fortune again because he couldn’t afford to pay for a cleric to make them better on account of having spent half his money on strong drink and loose women and lost the rest playing dice. Even if that’s pretty much what I’m aiming for here. I don’t know why. I just want to forget the whole shitty business with Stalker and Holli. Wipe it all clean and start again. Gods know, I’ve done that enough times.

Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have been a problem. Stalker would have done the same and so would The Gnome, only with more sex and less drinking. But sometimes, when I don’t pay attention, when I least expect or, frankly, want it, my erstwhile comrades actually manage to achieve something. Maybe it comes down to having all this new blood around us. By the time I emerge the following afternoon, bandy-legged and a little sore around the edges, they’ve been up, had breakfast, tied their shoelaces all on their own and then gone to see someone who’s something to do with the ships about some of the stuff we’re supposed to be interested in and now, apparently, we’re looking for some pirate bloke called Serious who sails around on a ship named after a musical instrument and stole some treasure off the something-to-do-with-ships bloke, who will, in return for the return of said treasure, tell us some stuff that apparently we want to know. Or someone that we know wants to know. Or something. It’s all a bit confusing, and mostly what I pick up is the the Caleb, Knight Of Something doesn’t like the something-to-do-with-ships bloke one little bit on general principle. Can’t see pirates working out much better for him, but we don’t have time to get into that question, because by then it’s getting dark and (yes, look, I had a good night) we’re off to some place that has a name but which we’ll call Seedy Dive because that’s what it was. Seedy, loud, full of smoke and noise and the smell of beer and sex. And more naked people than you might have imagined.

My kind of place, if a little low-brow. I’m all for settling in and seeing whether I can score for free, but no, Wolfgirl has to go asking questions and find herself a pirate to talk to (given the track record of my companions, I make a big and generous assumption about the talking bit) and the next thing I know there’s half a dozen men moving in on her and Mad Dwarf is hurling himself at them like a rabid gerbil with an axe the size of a church and The Monk is right behind him, and I still haven’t got around to having the conversation with any of them that until one of them learns to Talk With Dead, launching into a homicidal mania at the first sign of… well, anything at all really, isn’t going to help us find things out.

So I try to stop them. As does Caleb, Knight Of Something and the wizard. Three against three. Admittedly with some pirates in the middle who are nominally in the fray too, but their role in this turns out largely to involve tripping over each other and getting serially stabbed and thumped, oft as not by accident, until they fall down.

It’s only later that I begin to wonder whether jumping on the back of a frenzied berserker dwarf and choking him out in the middle of a fight was such a good idea. At the time I’m too distracted by Caleb, Knight Of Something realising that the Wolfgirl he’s grappled to the ground is called Wolfgirl for a reason (two, actually), and Wizard Daftboy trying to stop the amazingly fast and agile Mad Elf by rolling an amazingly slow and cumbersome ball of fire about the place. And setting fire to the Seedy Dive.

Unfortunately, my dream outcome, in which Wizard Daftboy and Mad Elf have at each other, Caleb, Knight Of Something tried to separate them, ends up killing them both and retires to a life of sorrowful penitence somewhere far away, fails to happen.

NEXT WEEK: WOLFGIRL SAYS SOMETHING