The Ezran Chronicles — Book One
Ezran has spent a thousand years hiding. For the last three years, he has been in Gilt, copying shipping manifests above a chandler’s shop and losing a slow war to a leaky roof. It beats the alternative.
His opposite, Finis the End, has been hunting him ever since the world came apart. Broken and diminished, squeezed into one unremarkable human body with a bad back and ink under the fingernails, Ezran has kept his head down and waited for a miracle.
But the seals are breaking. The fourteen great powers of the cosmos are stirring — and Ezran is not the only one looking for them. Staying invisible was the plan. It is no longer an option.
Book One begins in Gilt, where Ezran has made himself easy to overlook — and follows him out onto a road he did not plan to take, through cities that reward a clever tongue and punish a careless one.
Where the road takes him, and what his lies will cost him along the way, is for the reader to discover.
It starts in Gilt, in a room above a chandler’s shop, with a leaky roof and a ledger full of other people’s cargo.
Where the road goes from there is for you to discover.
Fourteen great powers, scattered and changed by what broke the world. Some are hiding. Some are hunting.
Ezran knows better than to trust any of them — including himself.
Chapter One · Rain on the Roof, Blood on the Floor
I should confess something about the manifests.
A scribe copies what the merchants give him. Weights, measures, duties, ports. My hand is good, my letters are clean, and nine hundred and ninety-nine lines out of a thousand, I copy exactly what’s put in front of me.
The thousandth line is mine.
About a year ago, on a slow afternoon, in the middle of a Brass Court cargo ledger — between forty bales of undyed wool and a consignment of salt pork with ambitions — I wrote the following, in my best official hand: Item: three hundred barrels of pickled moonlight, duty unpaid, it being priceless.
I have no excuse. There was no plan. Nobody was watching, nobody was oppressed, nobody needed rescuing, and the moonlight didn’t exist. I did it because the ledger was boring, my hand was steady, and the sentence wanted to exist. That’s the whole confession.
Here’s the thing nobody warns you about, when you forge a line in an official ledger of the Brass Court of Gilt: the next clerk copies it. Faithfully. Clerks copy what’s in front of them; it’s the entire religion of the profession. So the moonlight went into the quarterly summary. And the audit. And the tariff schedule, where a committee of serious men in serious collars spent — Tobin swears this on his mother’s grave, and I believe him, because Tobin only lies about food — the better part of an afternoon arguing whether pickled moonlight should be taxed as a luxury or a foodstuff.
They settled it, in the end, the way Gilt settles everything. It’s taxed as both.
To this day, four times a year, in a ledger nobody questions, the Brass Court of Gilt records three hundred barrels of a cargo that has never existed, and the duty column balances because of a joke I made on a slow afternoon when I was supposed to be nobody at all.
Tobin suspects. Tobin has never proved a thing.
Excerpt from the opening chapter, in Ezran’s own voice. The rest of the chapter is where the blood and the running start.
The Trickster’s Mask is not yet on sale. Check back here for the publication date and where to buy it.
When it arrives, it arrives with the winking eye over Gilt — and a trickster who has been waiting a thousand years to be believed.