A Taste of Vengeance
Ten years ago, two children witnessed a murder that
still haunts them as adults.
Tali, a slave girl in subterranean Cython, saw a
mysterious object ripped from her dead mother. Rix, boy heir to the biggest
fortune in Hightspall, watched in horror as two shrouded but troublingly
familiar figures committed the murder.
Tali has sworn to bring her mother's killers to
justice, but now she’s hunted by a sorcerer who can only be beaten by magic –
Tali's magic that she does not understand.
That’s how my new epic fantasy novel, Vengeance, Book 1 of The Tainted Realm, begins.
Why Vengeance?
Loyal readers may ask why I’m writing a brand new epic
fantasy series when they’re constantly asking for the next episode in the Three Worlds saga. Here’s
why.
At the end of each big fantasy series I write
something completely different, to freshen and rejuvenate my work. The problem
with writing such vast sagas (the Three Worlds sequence runs to 2.3 million words thus
far), is that I’ve used up an enormous number of different characters, settings
and plots, and I don’t want to repeat myself. Not that this is necessarily a
problem – a number of writers have made a lucrative career out of writing the
same book over and over, lol. But I want each book to be different. And better.
By the end of The Destiny of the Dead, in
2008, I was exhausted and desperately needed a rest from the Three Worlds. Having spent two-thirds
of my writing time since 1987 on that vast saga, I wasn’t ready to go back to
it. I didn’t want to grind out the next book or trilogy to meet a deadline and
let readers down with a story that wasn’t good enough. I wanted to be
overflowing with white-hot enthusiasm for the next episode – the one that
finally tells what fate befell Karan, Llian and the children after the end of
The Way Between the Worlds.
For a complete change, I wrote Grim and Grimmer, a humorous fantasy quartet for younger readers,
and these wild and wacky books were the most fun I’ve ever had writing.
Also, being small, they could be written and edited in
intense bursts.
Then I turned to The Tainted Realm, a new
epic fantasy series set in an entirely new fantasy world. Or at least, a small
part of a new world. Most of it is covered in ice and the ice sheets are
steadily closing around the last place where people still survive, the land of
Hightspall which is ice free because it’s so incredibly volcanic. Though the
eruptions are getting worse …
Hightspall was stolen from the Cythians 2,000 years
ago, but now the nation is struggling under one natural disaster after another,
and both Hightspall’s power and magery are failing. The very land seems to be
rising up to defeat them, as if Hightspall is cursed – a tainted realm. Then
the last of the Solaces appears in the underground realm of Cython, the iron
book called The Consolation of Vengeance, and the Cythians know
that it is time to take back their land.
What
about Tali the slave girl and Rix the nobleman?
Tali’s escape from Cython results in war, and Tali and
Rix flee through a land in turmoil, hunted by enemies and allies alike. Before
they can solve the crime, and save the realm, Tali and Rix must learn to trust
each other. But when Rix uncovers the shattering truth about the murder, he’s tormented by sickening premonitions that he’s destined to
repeat the killing – on Tali herself.
Soon,
Hightspall is close to defeat. The only way to save the realm is to
unmask and defeat the mastermind behind the murder. But how can Tali avenge
herself on a sorcerer who died two thousand years ago?
The Fate of the Children
That’s all very well, I hear readers say, but what
about the Three Worlds? What about the story you’ve been
promising to write for more than a decade, the follow-on from The View
from the Mirror to be called The Fate of the Children?
It’s next, I promise you. Honest! I’ll finish The
Tainted Realm around the end of 2012, and begin The Fate of the Children straight after that. At this stage I don’t
know whether it’ll be a single book, a pair, a trilogy, or longer. That will
depend on what comes up when I reread The View from the Mirror, which I
haven’t opened since the series was finished back in 1999. I’m looking forward
to seeing how it reads after so long.
Book 1, Vengeance, has just been published
in Australia, and will be published in the US and UK early next year.
If you are interested in finding out more, then head over to Ian's website here
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