Immortals Arrive

The latest issue of Dark Worlds has hit the newsstands, so to speak, and you can pick up an electronic or hard copy here!

This issue contains Immortals of the Cannibal Coast a swashbuckling fantasy tale by me and Martin Edward Stephenson. It also features a host of other pulp-style tales, which I've listed below:

The Tomb of the Amazon Queen by Michael Ehart
Roadblock, a space opera adventure by Jack Mackenzie
The Storming of Big Spree, an historical adventure by David A. Hardy
Bayou Mirage a Dark Fantasy by E. P. Berglund
Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, a detective Mystery by Nick Andreychuk
Laocoon, a Weird Western by G. W. Thomas
Communications Delay, SF by Lee Beavington

...and an interview the inestimable Joshua Reynolds, a fellow Pulpwork Press author. In celebration of this interview Pulpwork has Josh's short story horror collection, Bury Me Deep on sale for half price! This sale is limited to the quantity on hand, so get your order in now.

Excerpt from Immortals of the Cannibal Coast:

Chapter 1: Damnation's Chest

Tarajel clutched the riggings of the pirate caravel as it reeled, dwarfed in the raging waves. Water engulfed her, tearing at her body so that she lost her footing as the entire ship plunged beneath the salty waters of the Southern Sea. She kept a death grip on the lines of the aft sail, her body locked in the cold depths and her lungs crying for oxygen. The spent air within her gushed away into the midnight blackness, and her fingers began to slip, drawn away from the hemp fibers of her lifeline by the inexorable pull of the ocean. Then suddenly, the ship was granted a momentary reprieve from its salty grave and bobbed to the surface, shedding long ropes of black seawater from its decks.

For a moment the dark clouds gusted away from the face of the moon, and Tarajel saw the tattered sails hanging useless from the broken masts. The savage wind howled in her ears, biting at her lithe form, and whipping out across the spume-tossed seas. Long brown hair whipped about her face, her sloe eyes scrying the rain swept night for some sign of salvation. From foot to neck she was clad in dark leather, a cuirass of tortoiseshell mail bound around her chest and back. For a brief moment she dared loosen one hand from the rope. It went to her side, and she felt calmer when she found the hilt of her curved sabre still firm in its scabbard, right alongside the oiled leather pouch that contained carefully measured doses of poisons from every known corner of the world.

A voice cried out to her through the howl of the wind, and she turned to see the almond-skinned face of Krat, one of the slaves she had freed from the slaver ship Damnation while relieving its merchant master of a chest full of ill-gotten loot. Less than six hours ago Tarajel and the crew of the pirate caravel had put the Damnation to torch and sent it to the bottom of the sea. The Damnation had become separated from its escort of Thraxian warships by the high winds of the impending storm, and when the pirates discovered the defenseless ship the fever of greed burned hot in their minds. They chose to ignore good sense and the foul weather on the horizon in favor of looting the slave ship.

“Are we going to make it?” asked Krat, his narrow eyes squinted against the spray carried on the storm.

Tarajel shook her head, water dripping from her tangled locks. “I’ve been raiding slave ships for two years now and I’ve never seen anything like this. You’d best start praying to your god, because this ship is going down.”

All about the deck of the ship pirates of every size and race clung to the ropes, looking, for all the gold in Shardia, like drowned rats. Captain Bronnit stood lashed to the wheel, his dripping beard a tangled mat, and water running from the empty socket of one missing eye. He roared out curses at his crew.

“Man the bilge pumps you scurvy runts! Will you die like men or like simpering women?”
Tarajel ignored the unintended insult and glanced over the side of the ship, noticing the stoven planks and the water that gushed in. “Blood from my guts!” she swore. “You’d have us pump the entire Southern Sea dry!”

Captain Bronnit was not accustomed to having his orders questioned, and he’d run his sword through more than one of his own men for less than an evil eye cast in his direction. “I’ll cut the head off any man—or woman—who lags. Now to the bilge pumps!”

Several pirates scurried to the pumps, but others eyed the mountainous waves that rolled about them, tossing the caravel like a cork, and threatening to fall on them at any moment. Tarajel and the short, but stoutly built Krat, didn’t move.

As the massive swells tossed the pirate caravel aloft, Tarajel thought she glimpsed something through the sheets of rain and wind. “I’ll be a Shardian camel herder,” she breathed.
Krat saw them, too. “The sea folk!”

They frolicked in the tossing seas, scaled tails flipping them aloft before they dove back beneath the surging brine. They were half men and half fish; torsos lean and sleek, naked to the bracing Southern Sea. The males were narrow-faced and handsome, with aquiline features and piercing blue eyes like the waters of the daytime sea. The women were long-lashed and full-lipped, and their merry laughs came tinkling to the ears of the pirates, carried on the howl of the wind.

“Sea nagas!” hissed Tarajel.

“How do you know they be nagas and not mermen and maids?” asked Krat, his blue-knuckled fingers wrapped around the rail.

Tarajel bit back a sharp retort as she remembered that Krat was not an experienced sailor—only a slave recently chained to the oars of the Damnation and not privy to the lore of the sea. “The mermen dive deep during the storms, but the nagas love the winds, because they know that the gales drive ships into reefs.”

“Is it true that the nagas eat human flesh?”

The warrior didn’t reply, but the steel in her eyes answered Krat’s question as eloquently as any verbal response. Another question came to the former slave’s lips, but before he put it to voice the ship lurched, the hull grinding against a coral reef hidden by the fury of the lashing waves.

Pick up a copy of Dark Worlds #3 here.