The Order of the Scales officially became published on Thursday last week. Since there were no ARCs or review copies sent out, much nail-biting continues; but if covers sell books, this one should be a winner. Have I mentioned how good the cover is? Have I mentioned it enough yet? The online pictures simply don’t do it justice. Foil! Flames! Dragons! Complete lack of anything obvious to say it’s the third book in a trilogy… oh, wait, maybe that’s not so great. Ah well.

So apart from the nail-biting, that’s that.I’d post an excerpt, except I already did that. So here’s a tiny tiny snippet of the next book to come out instead: The Warlock’s Shadow.

Sailors swaggered back and forth, some of them bleary-eyed from a sleepless night in one of the drinking holes that filled the darker alleys beyond. A line of burly men had formed a human chain, picking up sacks and crates from boats drawn up against the edge of the harbour and passing them along to a milling cluster of carts. Further along the waterfront, another chain was passing supplies across the dockside from a warehouse out onto a cluster of jetties. A party of black-skinned Taiytakei traders in their rainbow robes and their bright feathers walked serenely out from the Avenue of Emperors, discretely escorted by half a dozen snuffers to keep the worst of the riff-raff at bay. A squad of imperial soldiers lounged around a covered wagon. Yellow and silver robed priests of the sun and the moon walked side by side, the faithful and the desperate following in their wake like the tail of a comet. Gangs of rough men, press-gangs, lurked by the dockside flophouses like sand-spiders waiting to pounce. Boys ran weaving between them all, carrying news and messages, or else simply mischief. Berren smiled to himself. He could never quite shake the feeling of coming home whenever he visited the docks.