At the Court of the Crow

Some decades ago, Tanith Lee was asked to write a novel with a steampunk ambience, and this book is the result of her writing the first three chapters. Unfortunately, the book was never finished. However, the chapters she did write form a neat novella, and for this reason her husband, John Kaiine, has asked Immanion Press to publish it. It's something Tanith fans will love and deserves to see the light of day, if only because we won't be getting any new stories from Tanith now.

Twenty years ago, something horrible happened - something so unspeakable that it never is spoken of. But it filled the sky with strangeness and peril, and the landscape with bleak mutated danger. The idea of God was banished and forbidden. To pray became a hanging offence.

In the house on the Plain, the nameless young woman exists with her Uncle's family, to which she was brought at the age of six, an orphaned refugee from some disaster she does not remember. For her there is no kindness in the grim house either. She is despised, patronised and mistreated by both her relatives and their servants. Her days are drab and meaningless.

But an evening comes when her Aunt and Cousinesses are late returning from the town. Once the sun has set no one who can avoid it is out on the Plain, for after dark appalling creatures scavenge and hunt there. Then the carriage is sighted - running at full stretch and wreathed in flames. What emerges from that fire, the family's sinister rescuer, has the appearance of an old man, an itinerant decrepit, dirty and hump-backed, who calls himself Olon. But he has the voice of a young god, and abnormal powers that soon become apparent.

As Olon begins to corrupt and metamorphose the entire household, the nameless heroine retains her so-far eternal role of outsider and watcher. But already she too is being drawn into Olon's game, already her inner thoughts and desires are found out. Olon, who in certain lights and shadows may appear young, handsome and supernaturally different, must become her fixation. But what will she learn by her study of him - by her recruitment to his service? As the house, and later the town, the city, the outer earth, succumb to his fantastic and insidious whims, surely she must see he is the harbinger of nothing good... Maybe even he is the ultimate expression of an ancient Evil, returned into a ruined world - to end it.