Black Gate Zeppelin to Dragon*Con Update 6: Collateral Damage
Adrift over the Great Black Swamp, the wingless flying car Caeruleum probed earth water and the night-dark sky with the sightless fingers of sensor beams.
“The principle is simple enough,” explained Rapunzel McNally, the mad philologist’s beautiful daughter, her clear-cut features lit an eerie green from readouts on the air-car’s control panel. “The cicadas and crickets of the swamp, responding to ancient magnetic rhythms in the earth, spell out messages from the timeless times from before time. My father explained it to me.”
“I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you,” I said, “that your father is the one who’s simple?”
Her father, the mad philologist Gabriel McNally, was in the back seat of the aircar, wearing his most stylish straightjacket. After his denial of tenure by the University of Mackinac he had spent a month drinking absinthe, and had disappeared for another month into the swamp. He returned babbling about a convention of dragons and messages from the Old Ones.
On the whole, I’m not opposed to traveling with boys. Generally speaking they are amusing companions particularly when refusing to ask directions, thereby winding you through mildly interesting places while attempting to locate the desired destination sans MapQuest. Along the route, in an effort to distract their hapless passengers from all the pointless meandering, they can generally be counted on for lively and revealing conversation about former girlfriends, prior arrests and entirely icky things done in frat houses; all of which become prime blackmail fodder for later use.
There’s a temporary lull in operations and the skies are clear over Oklahoma, so I thought I’d take the time to set the record straight about our expedition to Dragon*Con via the Black Gate zeppelin, the Harold Lamb. John described the 
I arrived at our building this morning to find people milling around in the street, pointing into the air. A fat, smoke-shrouded zeppelin was moored to the Black Gate rooftop headquarters.
Howard Andrew Jones’ Dabir and Asim stories are some of the most popular we’ve published in Black Gate. His first novel featuring his 9th Century adventurers, The Desert of Souls, is now available 
Locus Online reports that James Enge’s first novel Blood of Ambrose, part of his Morlock series, has been nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel of the Year.
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