Read Will Power Online

Authors: A. J. Hartley

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Action & Adventure, #Fantasy, #Fantasy fiction, #Adventure fiction, #Adventure and adventurers, #Outlaws, #Space and time, #Goblins

Will Power

WILL POWER

 

 

 

 

 

BOOKS BY A. J. HARTLEY

The Mask of Atreus

On the Fifth Day

What Time Devours

Act of Will

Will Power

WILL POWER

A. J. HARTLEY

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
New York

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TITLE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

SCENE I
:
Unadulterated Hawthorne

SCENE II
:
Who Goes There?

SCENE III
:
The Only Way to Travel

SCENE IV
:
Bird Watching

SCENE V
:
Sorrail

SCENE VI
:
Flight and Refuge

SCENE VII
:
Hawthorne to the Rescue

SCENE VIII
:
Eventor

SCENE IX
:
The White City

SCENE X
:
The King

SCENE XI
:
Words, Words, Words

SCENE XII
:
Holding the Walls

SCENE XIII
:
Stranger Still

SCENE XIV
:
The Plot Thickens

SCENE XV
:
A Long-Awaited Meeting

SCENE XVI
:
A Fly in the Ointment

SCENE XVII
:
The Dead Forest

SCENE XVIII
:
Goblins

SCENE XIX
:
The Halls of the Dead

SCENE XX
:
The Soul of the Arak Drül

SCENE XXI
:
Aftermath

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

WILL POWER

Copyright © 2010 by A. J. Hartley

All rights reserved.

Edited by Liz Gorinsky

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hartley, A. J. (Andrew James)

Will power / A. J. Hartley.—1st ed.

p. cm.

“A Tom Doherty Associates Book.”

ISBN 978-0-7653-2125-1

1. Outlaws–Fiction. 2. Goblins–Fiction. 3. Space and time–Fiction. 4. Adventure and adventurers–Fiction. I. Title.

PR6108.A787W56 2010

823'.92—dc22 2009040643

First Edition: September 2010

Printed in the United States of America

0  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To my parents, who, unexpectedly, liked the first one

—AJH

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank my agent, Stacey Glick; my editor, Liz Gorinsky; and my wife (always my first reader), who helped make this book a reality.

Please visit my website,
www.ajhartley.net
, to pass along comments and see details of other projects, completed or in the works.

Thanks for reading.

A. J. Hartley

 

 

 

 

WILL POWER

BY
W
ILLIAM
H
AWTHORNE

Translated from the Thrusian by

A. J. HARTLEY

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

It is with some trepidation that I present to the world this second installment of the Hawthorne saga. Like the first volume,
Act of Will
, it has been translated from the original Thrusian—as preserved in the now famous Fossington House papers—with the aid of notes left by the Elizabethan translator Sir Thomas Henby. As readers of the first manuscript will quickly see, the second volume is different in key respects from the first, and raises still more vexing questions of provenance, locale, and issues of how much of the narrative—if any—is derived from fact. My initial assumption—for reasons that will become apparent as the story unfolds—is that the work is pure fantasy, though other manuscripts from the Fossington House collection have since emerged that seem to root elements of the narrative in fact. The details of those materials will be published in a series of academic papers in forthcoming issues of
Philological Quarterly
, though I doubt they will hold much interest for the general reader.

Since the history of the manuscript collection is now well known, I will say only that I remain in the debt of Sir Thomas Henby, whose notes from the 1580s and ’90s remain the core of my own translation. The tone, however, is the result of my own efforts to maintain some of the precocious energy of the Thrusian original, as I did with Volume One. Due to the rushed nature of the publishing schedule, I write this before beginning even preliminary work on the other pages seemingly penned in the same language, so I am not in a position to say whether there is more of the Hawthorne Saga to come or whether these two self-contained narratives are the entirety of Mr. Hawthorne’s labors. If more come to light, I will, of course, endeavor to make them available to the public in English so that they may become more than curiosities for ethnographers and linguists.

—A. J. Hartley, 2010

SCENE I

Unadulterated Hawthorne

Far be it from me to blow my own trumpet, but I was about to become a bit of a legend. We had been lying around Stavis mulling over our triumphs in Shale three weeks ago like a family of pythons that had recently gorged on a rather less fortunate family of gazelles, or whatever the hell pythons eat. Now we were going to see a little excitement. I had, I must say, been quite happy doing the python thing, but sleeping late and producing no more than bodily excretions for a whole month had started to wear a bit thin even for me. The others had, of course, tired of it rather earlier.

Garnet and Renthrette, our straight-from-the-shoulder brother and sister warriors, had been spoiling for a fight with anyone who made eye contact for a couple of weeks now. Even the generally placid, if surly, Mithos, the famed rebel and adventurer who had tormented the Empire for close to twenty years, had recently started pacing the Hide’s underground library like the proverbial caged cat. Orgos, our overly noble weapon master, had begun polishing his swords again, barely concealing a mood as black as his skin. I saw little of Lisha, our girlish but revered leader, because she was usually busy poring over maps or gathering news on Empire patrols. Yours truly—Will Hawthorne, former dramatist, actor, and con man, current apprentice adventurer, and damn-near-professional gorged python—couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about. We had solved the riddles of Shale and environs, or most of them, and had come away feeling virtuous, and, more importantly, rich.

Other books

Crusader's Cross by James Lee Burke
Charged by Kerri Ann
Who Made Stevie Crye? by Michael Bishop
The Body in the Lighthouse by Katherine Hall Page
Nowhere Safe by Nancy Bush
The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh
The Disappeared by Kristina Ohlsson


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024