Black Gate

We published three stories from John R. Fultz’s baroque and fascinating sword & sorcery Zang Cycle in the print version of Black Gate: “Oblivion Is the Sweetest Wine,” featuring the famous thief Taizo and his daring heist in spider-haunted Ghoth (BG 12); “Return of the Quill,” in which Artifice’s long-simmering plan to bring revolution to the city of Narr finally unfolds (BG 13); and the prequel story “The Vintages of Dream” (BG 15). Next, John took us back in time to Artifice’s first year as a member of the travelling Glimmer Faire in “When the Glimmer Faire Came to the City of the Lonely Eye,” which appeared as part of the Black Gate Online Fiction line here in January.

Those four tales triggered an intense interest among our readers, and over the years John returned to Zang many times. He elaborated on the evolution of the saga in a recent post here on the BG blog:

Once Upon a Time in Zang… a fugitive author and a devious cutthroat began a revolt against the nine Sorcerer Kings whose power displaced the gods themselves. Like the revolt, which began in far-flung places, the Zang Cycle of stories would grow slowly and cover a lot of ground…

It all started with “The Persecution of Artifice the Quill,” in the pages of Weird Tales #340 (2006). The cover of that issue featured a horde of the faceless warlocks known as Vizarchs, who drag Artifice the Quill away in the story’s opening scene, a scene painted by the talented Les Edwards.

The story was a turning point for me: The fulfillment of a long-standing dream (getting published in Weird Tales) and the introduction of two characters I would return to many times: Artifice the Quill and Taizo the Thief.

I wrote eleven more Zang Tales and moved the series to the welcoming pages of Black Gate, where it flourished for many issues.

Now, seven years after the first story appeared in Weird Tales, the complete Zang Cycle has been collected in a new volume, The Revelations of Zang: Twelve Tales of the Continent, released by 01Publishing this summer.

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As we reported just last month, James Enge’s latest Morlock novel, Wrath-Bearing Tree, the second volume of A Tournament of Shadows, arrives this week.

I received my copy a few days ago and the final version is gorgeous. A Tournament of Shadows is Morlock’s origin story, and it began in A Guile of Dragons — which Grasping for the Wind described as “What Tolkien might have written, had he lived in this postmodern age.”

The masked powers of Fate and Chaos are killing gods in Kaen. The Graith of Guardians sends the vocates Morlock Ambrosius and Aloe Oaij to determine precisely what is behind the threat. However, Morlock is secretly in love with Aloe, and this complicates their mission in unexpected ways. In his own sneaky way, Enge has described Wrath-Bearing Tree as “a love story with sword and sorcery interruptions.”

Exactly what is a wrath-bearing tree, you ask? It has to do with the tricky and deceptive power of history, as described by poet T.S. Eliot, in his poem “Gerontion” in 1920:

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities…
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

And that’s all the clues we’re going to give you.

Wrath-Bearing Tree was published on August 20 by Pyr. It is 377 pages, priced at $18 for the trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition. For a limited time, print copies are only $6.29 at Amazon.com — that’s 65% off one of the most anticipated fantasy novels of the year. Act quickly so you’re not disappointed.