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
A. J. HARTLEY
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
New York
SCENE I
:
Unadulterated Hawthorne
SCENE III
:
The Only Way to Travel
SCENE VII
:
Hawthorne to the Rescue
SCENE XV
:
A Long-Awaited Meeting
SCENE XVI
:
A Fly in the Ointment
SCENE XIX
:
The Halls of the Dead
SCENE XX
:
The Soul of the Arak Drül
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
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
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
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
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.