WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES by Benjamin C. Kinney

 

 

The East Wind blew in across the harbor and cut through Agnella’s fur-trimmed cloak. She faced the squall and loosened her cloak. This was no mortal wind, and all the more pathetic for it. She would let no bitter local god drag her into its games of hunter and hunted. In her presence, the Trader’s rules held. She drew a silver coin from her pouch, measured out a prayer, and threw the coin over the gunwale. The chill subsided.

She let herself smile. If the East Wind or his priests thought they could harm a prelate of the Trader, they thought wrongly. No upstart breeze would trouble her god.

The longshoremen lashed down the gangplank, and Agnella swept past them as they stared at the sight of a middle-aged foreigner with a cloak embroidered in gold. She paid the men no more mind than she would copper slivers in a donation plate.

She scanned the dockside crowd. Where was the local priest? A month ago, his letter had reported the theft of the oldest ledger in her jurisdiction. The book chronicled fifteen generations of debts and payments: the embodiment of the Trader’s presence in this land, a fragment of the god’s power. The ledger could be a dangerous tool in the wrong person’s hands. But whomever had tried to threaten her by summoning the East Wind’s chill, their magic showed only enough craft and faith to annoy her.

Agnella quickened her steps. If she could sweep away this problem before it grew beyond an inconvenience, she could return home to Verazza before her bones froze.

A girl in her late teens emerged from the crowd, wearing a silver sash over layers of leather and wool. She had the same pale skin as the other locals, but the edges of her fur hat revealed the short-cropped hair of a novice.

The girl bowed and recited, “Trade’s blessings, Prelate, and welcome to Senvosk. Our shrine has not had an envoy from the Mother Church in many years, and never one so eminent as you. We will take on any debt to ensure you a comfortable stay.” Her voice faltered. “Or I will, at least. Father Jorun has paid his last price.”

“May his debts be paid, his ledger clean.” The priest had a good excuse to miss her arrival, at least. A pity. His loss would complicate her task. She set aside her questions about the East Wind’s magic and asked, “What happened?”

The girl lowered her eyes, but her mittened hands curled into fists. “They found his body in the harbor last week. Two days before your letter arrived.”

Is that how this novice thought she could speak to a prelate? Blame the church’s representative, when she was the one who’d let her priest and creditor die?

“You’ve accrued quite a balance these last months.” Kind words, cold tone, and a smile that wouldn’t reach her eyes. The girl stiffened as she ought. “If any debts need settling, I’m here to tidy them. What’s your name, novice?”

The girl shook her head. “I just finished my novitiate. Father Jorun helped me sell my name to the Trader before he went after the thieves.” She lifted her eyes, fierce and defensive, and curled one hand atop the other in the sign of the scales. “I tried to stop him, ma’am. This I swear and certify.”

Agnella opened her senses to the nameless girl’s debts. The simplicity of youth, the reciprocal ties of initiate and church. No gaping mark from any just-broken contract.

“Sister, then. I accept your oath. And congratulations, you’re very young to reach such an honor. You’ll find profit in the trade, I promise.” When had she last spent time with a newly-minted sister? “Hopefully faster than I did. It took me almost four years to earn a new name. I was so afraid to give up my birth name, but I’d already gotten so much in return, hadn’t I? So many debts deferred.”

“You came in with debts, ma’am?”

Agnella reined in her expression. Those debts belonged to her alone, a reminder of the Trader’s abeyance and grace. “I trust you’ll have someone bring my chests from the ship?”

“I already paid Greger and Kelle to bring up your things. They’ll take the long way up, but they’re reliable.” She led Agnella up into the town, among its slope-roofed houses squeezed between mountains and sea. “Is there something you need?”

“Knowledge.” Particularly about the local deity and its faithful. Had the harbor’s cold wind also slowed her sails? But she knew better than to ask until she had walls and windows to block the East Wind’s ears.

Until then, knowledge about her willful little hostess. “You know this town well. I assume you grew up here in Senvosk?”

“In Senvosk, and in the Trader’s church. One winter morning about sixteen years ago, Father Jorun found a baby girl on the steps of the shrine.”

“So you don’t know who your parents are?”

The sister’s feet crunched once more against the half-frozen earth, and then she turned to face Agnella. “There are three thousand people in this town. I know exactly who my parents are.”

Agnella met the girl’s gaze and waited to see how she would fill the silence.

The girl turned away and resumed walking. Her spine drew straighter. “They were poor miners once, digging iron and spelter ores on Lillsylen Mountain. About fifteen years ago now, they found a vein of silver. They’re not wealthy, but they live well.”

Agnella nodded. The Counter of Costs always made good his debts, in one way or another. “The Trader watches over we who serve at the fulcrum.”

The girl glanced back at Agnella, this time with a bittersweet smile. The sister had eyes as green as the Verazzan sea, far too green for cold oceans like this. Her smile soured, and she turned her face away. “Thank you, ma’am. I–As you say. I have faith that he does.”

***

The shrine had walls of smooth ashlar stone, interrupted by shuttered windows and simple glyphs of wealth, justice, and trade. Promises inscribed for the illiterate, but they stopped Agnella with a jolt of homesickness, as surely as any marble pillar or vaulted ceiling.

The sister unlocked the door and beckoned Agnella inside. The windows stayed shuttered and barred, but sunlight swept through the door to illuminate the nave. Offerings of metalwork, tapestries, and scrimshaw decorated the walls and altar. Agnella bit back an uncharitable comment. She could forgive a lack of gold and silver, given the recent theft.

The sister led them through to a private room with an oak table, bear-hide rugs, and a banked fire in a stone-hemmed hearth. A proper feather bed occupied one corner of the room, but only the woolen mattress on the other side showed signs of recent use.

The sister took Agnella’s cloak and hung it beside the empty bed. “Would you like supper, ma’am?”

“Why don’t we get straight to business instead.” She didn’t phrase it as a question. “First piece of advice for you: keep your eye on goals. When you know what you value, you know what to acquire, and what you can offer.”

The girl swallowed a reply. No doubt her Jorun had given her that advice a hundred times over. But she’d disrespected the prelate come to help her, she clearly needed the lesson again.

Agnella had planned to ask about the East Wind, but her own words chided her to focus. She was responsible for a quarter of the Vasiran continent, and tangles arose faster than she could unknot them.

The Trader deserved better than inefficiency and wasted hours. Why waste time discussing local customs, when she could buy the answers she truly needed?

“If the thieves killed Jorun, he was on the right track. You don’t have any magical training, do you?”

The girl shook her head, wide-eyed. “Just a little bit of theory. Does that mean you can…?”

Of course the sister didn’t. How could she have learned, here in the hinterlands? “I’m here to recover the ledger, not to teach. But I still need your assistance, if you can follow my instructions. Bring a pan of coals from the fire, and the scales from the shrine, then sit directly across from me.”

Agnella prepared the tools of her craft. A pouch of coins, a pouch of rubies; a lifetime of prayers, an edifice of oaths. The sister returned with the other instruments, and Agnella positioned the delicate wrought-iron scales so the pans stood crosswise to the chairs.

The Trader’s magic could accomplish nearly anything, for the right price. Other gods had no way to reach beyond their narrow domains, but wealth was a power with myriad lines of payment and pressure. But wealth, too, was her magic’s constraint. She could only perform what she could afford, and effects beyond the Trader’s core domain could grow expensive indeed.

Invaluable things, life and death and time, had no price in gems or gold. Truth, on the other hand, was merely expensive.

Agnella placed her hand above one end of the balance, her fingers touching without weight. The nameless sister mirrored her position over the other end of the scales, and Agnella nodded. At least the girl caught on quickly. Agnella closed her eyes and began to clean her mind with the steady sweep of prayer.

She brought a pouch toward the scales. “Envision the Senvosk Ledger. The history of this city: every debt and payment, every sin and virtue, every act of generosity and need.” She knew it only from dead Jorun’s letter, but the girl had seen it, touched it, read it. “Feel the vellum beneath your fingers. See the ornaments on the spine. Know the weight of its records. Hold those memories, and together we shall find the hands that stole our god’s treasure.”

The sister grabbed Agnella’s wrist. Her prayer cracked, and the ritual’s nascent power vanished like a spark without a wick. A single ruby clattered onto the tabletop.

Agnella’s head reeled as if she had leapt too swiftly from bed. She yanked her wrist from the sister’s grasp. “Sister! Explain yourself.”

The girl cringed. “I–I’ve never participated in a ritual, but Jorun told me–I thought I had to stop you before you paid.” She set her jaw. “I already know who has the ledger.”

Agnella took a deep breath, and then two. She said nothing, even after the dizziness faded, no matter how badly she wanted to snap at the girl for failing to tell her.

“I found out a week and a half ago. That’s why Jorun went after the ledger.” The sister twisted her hands together. “I shouldn’t have told him. It was this gang, the Skinners. Five boys, mean ones, sworn to the East Wind. The trappers pay the Skinners to stop anyone else from horning in on their business.”

Agnella leaned forward. “The East Wind. I felt his power when my ship came into port.” If a gang of children still held the ledger, she had nothing to fear. Magic required craft as well as faith. God-sworn or no, youths couldn’t have enough skill to siphon the book’s power and debts. “Could the Skinners have passed the ledger on to their priest?”

“The Antlered Priest isn’t involved. I’ve talked to him. He wouldn’t do this. And they couldn’t have sold it onward.” The sister ticked off the options on her fingers. “Everyone in town knows it’s stolen. Any merchant captain would recognize it as the Trader’s. And nobody’s come through the pass in the last two weeks, not in this weather.”

“Well. Good work, sister. But you should have told me this earlier.”

“You didn’t–” The girl swallowed her words, but frustration chewed behind her lips. “Yes, ma’am.”

You didn’t ask. Agnella held her breath, wondering whether the sister would have the temerity to finish her sentence. Whether her courage would outweigh her sense, all alone here on the world’s northern edge.

The nameless girl folded her hands, knuckles tight, and said nothing.

“Quick thinking,” Agnella said. “But if you ever lay hands on me again, there will be consequences.”

She returned the fallen ruby to her pouch. The other prelates on the Council of Nine would have laughed, if they knew she had nearly paid for goods she already owned.

“Of course, ma’am,” the girl said, her voice brittle with respect.

“Do you know where we can find these Skinners?”

A snarl flicked across the girl’s face. The memory of a wolf; and in its tracks, disappointment. “That’s what Jorun did.”

“May his debts be paid,” Agnella recited. “But I’m not Jorun.”

The sister shook her head, twitch-sharp. “It wasn’t just him.”  

Agnella folded her fingers in front of her chest, as if that would help check the disquiet in her stomach. “What do you mean?”

“After Jorun, priests from the other shrines all came to visit. Everyone except the Antlered Priest had a story about one of their own who turned up dead. A cleric who got in a fight, who slipped on the ice, or who just went out one day and never returned. Most of the stories were years or decades old, but they matched some things I read in the ledger.” She turned her gaze toward a shuttered window. “You don’t have the East Wind down in Verazza, do you? He’s not just the cold, he’s the patient hunter. And if you don’t honor him, you’re the prey.”

Agnella forced her hands to relax. “I appreciate the warning, sister. But I am a prelate of the Church of the Trader, member of the Council of Nine, Director of the Northeast Lanes. I am equal to the task.” Yet the knot remained in her stomach. If the East Wind held such cunning and power, why did a handful of young thugs cling to a stolen treasure they couldn’t use? Could the ledger’s theft be part of some deeper scheme?

Ridiculous. As if some boys and their brutish ice-god could threaten the Trader’s interests. Without a skilled priest to misuse the ledger’s power, Senvosk held nothing she should fear. The sooner she recovered the Trader’s stolen treasure, the sooner she could return to Verazza’s warmth.

“So. Do you know where we can find the Skinners?”

She pulled her lips against her teeth. “Greger said they’ve started using the shed behind the tannery, east edge of town. I can take you in the morning. If that’s your decision.”

Agnella studied the girl. Still bitter, like an old tool swept aside to rust.

Clever underlings worked harder for loyalty than obedience. Agnella smiled, and let it reach her eyes. “You’re as brave as you are clever. You remind me of my sister. My birth sister, Norata, she died before I became a novice. Her eyes were a lot like yours.” But with brown layered beneath the green, like the waters of a Verazzan canal.

The sister’s expression softened. “I’m sorry. How did she die?”

“She drowned. That was one of the reasons I joined the Trader’s service. I couldn’t keep living like I had been, not after that. I needed a life that made sense.” Agnella almost kept talking, almost mentioned the guilt that drove her weeping to the temple that might suspend her debt. But she was no longer that fearful and fragile child; she was the fulcrum, the unmoved center. She shook her head. “Listen to me babbling on. I think I need that supper, and a night’s sleep on solid ground.”

***

Breakfast was oat porridge sweetened with condensed tree-sap. A pauper’s food, but Agnella could hardly blame the shrine for thrifty habits. Uncertainty furrowed the nameless sister’s brow, so Agnella kept her peace, but the girl never voiced whatever question bothered her.

The two of them donned their furred cloaks and hats, and then headed out into the grey morning light. Fluffy snowflakes speckled their clothes like costume jewelry as the sister led them the long way through town, avoiding the markets where they could get stuck all day blessing weights and measures.

The back-street traffic surprised Agnella, until she remembered this was the largest city for a hundred miles. They passed a man in a sealskin cloak who stared at Agnella’s skin and made a hand-sign she could not identify. A blanket-wrapped beggar huddled under the eaves of a house, and the two women each gave him a handful of copper coins. Hearth smoke suffused the air with the scent of some unfamiliar wood, crisp and almost spicy. It made her feel more foreign than a sea of pale-skinned faces.

Everywhere they walked, the wind seemed to snake through the angled streets to cut through Agnella’s layers. She loosened her gloves and drew her fingers out of their sheathes to curl them into her palms. She considered a trade to protect herself, as she had done on the ship. But not this time, no matter how small the price. Better if the girl thought the cold couldn’t bother her.

They reached the east edge of town, and the smell of smoke could no longer hold back the rising stench. The tannery looked like the rest of Senvosk’s poorest buildings, raw stone walls half-buried in dirt, built to a larger scale than the other hovels. Despite the northern architecture, she recognized the reek: urine, dung, and rot. She hadn’t set foot anywhere near a tannery since the days when she and Norata ran barefoot alongside Verazza’s noisome canals.

The girl halted. “They should be in the shed out back. But you’re just going to go and trade with them, aren’t you?” Anger flickered across her face. “These people robbed our shrine–they killed Jorun! And there’s no one else in this town who can give him justice!”

“The Counter of Costs will give Jorun’s killers what they have earned. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but I have faith their debts will come due. I came here to recover the ledger, you know that.” The words burnt her tongue like vinegar, a taste of unexpected guilt. But if she valued her god and her mission, she could not let her heart ache for a distraction like the girl’s loss.

Agnella brought back her motherly smile. “Trading is what we do, sister. We deal fairly, even if others do not.”

The sister’s gloves tightened into fists by her sides. “Prelate, please. Whether or not it’s right, it won’t work! If the Skinners want your money, they’re willing to kill for it.”

“The Trader watches over we who serve at the fulcrum. I have faith in my safety, sister.”

The sister clenched her teeth. “The Trader didn’t watch over Jorun.”

A weight settled in Agnella’s gut, and for a moment she feared she’d let it show. If the Trader’s power were absolute, the world would need no other gods. She could afford to hire every mercenary and thug on this side of the mountains. It would add another layer of safety, at the cost of coin and time. She might even need to figure out what lord or government ruled Senvosk. Immense work for dubious gain. Violence and threats weren’t the Trader’s way.

Why skimp on her principles, when it would only delay her return to Verazza? Coins and jewels offered all the protection she could need.

“You know this town better than I. If you think I’m in such danger, I’ll prepare myself.”

She drew a gold vera into her gloved palm. A snowflake landed on the coin’s embossed crowns-and-balance face. The Trader was no war-god to turn away blades, but good fortune and successful bargains were at the heart of his power.

The Trader measured the truth of human souls, and knew the cost of all things. She belonged to him, in love and oaths and debts without number. With his grace, she could buy a finger on the scales of fortune.

She hurled the coin into a distant snowbank. Not even a spring snowmelt would return it to human hands.

The sister’s shoulders unwound. “Thank you, ma’am.” She hesitated. “But you keep saying me. We’re going in there together, aren’t we?”

Agnella pressed her lips together and assembled an excuse. Her negligence had killed a sister once, and she would not let it happen again. “No. You have to live here, you don’t want a reputation for opposing your town’s patron.”

“Other way around, ma’am–I live here, that’s why you need me. People know me. And I’m not letting you go alone, not you too.”

“Very well, sister. You’re worth another bit of gold.” The girl needed to feel a victory, and Agnella knew better than to give an order she couldn’t enforce. She repeated her spell for the girl’s fortune and said, “When we go inside, stay behind me and follow my lead.”

The two of them circled the tannery until they found a ramshackle shed attached to the building’s rear. The sister knocked once, then pulled the door open and stepped aside to let Agnella enter first. Mud and straw squished beneath her feet.

Agnella could barely see in the shed’s speckled darkness, lit by silver-bright needles of sunlight. “I am Mother Agnella, Prelate of the Church of the Trader, and I am looking for the men who call themselves the Skinners.” Behind her, the sister shut the door, and Agnella’s eyes began to adjust to the gloom.

“Heard you were looking for us.” The voice was a boy’s, sour and proud but past its breaking.  “And who’s that with you, gold lady?”

Agnella said, “Do you have my book?”

Shapes moved in the dimness. Two lanky forms, a glint of steel; two boys in leather and rabbit fur. Each of them wore a piece of antler-tine on a thong around their neck, and a long-bladed knife at their belt.

Knives for skinning, or knives for killing. Now that Agnella could see them, she wished she’d paid more than a few gold vera to stop the Skinners from drawing them. The Trader’s power was wide, the East Wind’s narrow. 

The boy in front opened a rucksack and pulled out a leather-bound codex. He flipped through the pages to reveal densely-packed columns of names and numbers, and one last swathe of blank parchment at the end.

The other skinner dropped the book back into the rucksack and slung it onto his shoulders. “Nothing less than the real thing, to tempt a lady like you. And here you are with your holy old self. Whose eye do you think we could catch, with you and the book together for bait?” His teeth flashed in the shadows. “We’re hunting bigger game this time.”

Agnella froze. The theft was a move against the Trader after all, and she’d ignored all the signs. Gods lay outside the world of humans, but could one deity hunt another? Could one trap, or hunt, or kill–

“Corin, stop it!” The sister stepped out from behind Agnella, voice pitched like a child to a whining pet. “The Trader offers everyone a fair deal, even you. We can all leave here richer.”

In the space of the girl’s interruption, Agnella drew in her breath. She could set her fear aside for another day’s accounting. She shifted a hand beneath her cloak and cradled the weight of her rubies.

If these Skinner boys were half-trained priests as she’d thought, she could bend them to her fortune. But the Skinners weren’t priests at all. They had the East Wind himself at their back. All the wealth in Agnella’s pouch meant nothing, unless she could find a purchase that would free them from the snare. 

She’d walked in here with the blessing of fortune, but her magic would not stop an East Wind set on hunting. All the wealth in Agnella’s pouch meant nothing, unless she could find a purchase that would bring her and the sister through.

Cor sneered. “You and your southern god! You think everything comes down to money. But the East Wind hunts rich and poor, man and beast. You know that, Sesilie.”

“Respect my sacrifice, Corin.” The girl’s words dropped into the air like ice against ice.

He grumbled. “Wish you hadn’t come, Sesilie. You’ve got the wind in your blood, no matter whose house you live in.” He gestured to his companion, and the other Skinner loped forward.

Agnella tried to step into the second Skinner’s path. She said, “Forget her. This is between you and–” She halted as Cor’s knife rose to her breast.

She pinned Cor with her gaze. The other Skinner moved behind her. A push, a scuff, and then silence. The Skinner drew back into view, his knife at the sister’s throat. The girl gripped his arm, her lips tight with fury.

Cor frowned. “That’s right, gold lady: between you and us and the gods. But Sesilie never could keep her mouth shut.”

A weight shifted in Agnella’s chest. Was this the trade she needed to make? If she invested this moment with the Trader’s power, the god would surely count the sister as a worthy exchange for the ledger. The Council of Nine would call that a success, a bargain painful but fair. Trading is what we do.

Shame curdled in her throat. She had come here to recover the ledger and protect her god, but only three kinds of people would accept the first deal they saw. Had she grown foolish, or lazy, or greedy? Or had she always been the kind of woman who valued her pride and comfort over a sister’s life?

“I give you one last chance.” Agnella held her voice cold and steady beneath the lever of her anger. “I do not begrudge the East Wind his city or his hunts, but in my presence the Trader’s rules hold. My companion is under his protection and mine. Release her, and I will buy the book for as many rubies as you can carry in three fingers.”

Cor wet his lips. His knife drew back. “Show me those rubies.”

The Skinners might still trade. If they did, good and done. If they refused, she would need to use the Trader’s power to make a costlier deal. It could still save both book and sister, and it might even let her honor an older debt. Some things had no price in gems or gold, but the rubies would be a start.

If the East Wind backed Cor and the Skinners in full hunt, no magic would dissuade it. This was no meager breeze for her to quell. But there were other ways to escape a hunter.

Agnella opened her cloak and brought out a handful of gems. She raised them to a shaft of sunlight, and they gleamed like coals beneath a fire. Cor’s eyes widened. Agnella knew that expression. He was seeing the price of a ship, of a mansion, of an entire life lived without need.

He lowered his blade. Succumbing to temptation, and the finger of fortune on his scales.

A chill breeze blew through the cracks in the walls. Cor shivered, and returned his knife to Agnella’s chest.

“You can’t tempt me.” He set his shoulders. “Easy life makes you weak. No, we’ve got better plans for you and yours. A hunt like the world has never seen!”

A prelate of the Trader knew what she valued, and what she would pay. She envisioned the four lives in this room, measured out a prayer, and linked the four scales together. She knew so little about these Skinner boys, but her own scale held weight enough: a jealous shove, a sister who had never learned to swim. Agnella formed the invocation in her mind, and she moved the Trader’s hand across the scales. Her palm tipped, and she poured out the rubies onto the straw.

Cor said, “What are you doing, lady? Pick those up!” He winced, and pressed his free hand against his heart.

The other boy shouted a word, slurred and unintelligible. One side of his face drooped. His knife fell from his hand, and the sister shoved him away.

Cor lurched toward Agnella, his blade outstretched. The sister slammed her knee between his thighs. He crumpled without a sound, his hands clenched around his ribs rather than his groin. The two boys writhed on the floor, their movements slowing as their bodies buried the rubies into the mud.

Agnella tugged the rucksack from Cor’s nerveless arms and offered it to the girl. “Sister, have you ever wanted to see Verazza?”

The girl stared like a baby bird getting her first glimpse of open sky. Her fingers closed around the pack’s straps. “You want me to come back with you, ma’am?”

Agnella forced a smile. If the girl didn’t yet understand the price to be paid, all the better. “Of course. But there’s one more thing I need to take care of here, so I’m trusting the ledger to you. Take this pack straight to the docks, and stay on the ship until it sets sail, no matter what. If anyone doubts you, give them these.” She fished four more rubies from her pouch. Agnella met the girl’s eyes, and their memory of the Verazzan sea. “If I should be delayed, don’t wait for me. Now go! Hurry!”

The sister frowned, but she slung the pack onto her shoulders. She glanced back one last time, then slipped out and left Agnella alone in the shed.

She sat down in the straw. The shed smelled no worse for the addition of two corpses, and at least she’d managed to save one life. It might, perhaps, settle a debt from a lifetime ago. The ledger was safe as well, and her god with it. But she needed to finish paying for the power she’d spent to kill the Skinners.

Invaluable things, life and death and time, had no equal in gems or gold. Only one account remained, with only one coin worth the deaths on her conscience.

A gust of wind rattled the walls. Voices drifted through on the breeze, the cocky idle tones of three young men. She thought of their knives, and her heart raced with animal terror. She took a deep breath and filled her mind with the tally of prayer. All the numbers of her life, about to balance at last. Her debts paid, her ledger clean. She had stepped off of the fulcrum, onto the scales, and she knew the Counter of Costs would be fair.

 

________________________________________

Benjamin C. Kinney is a neuroscientist, SFF writer, and assistant editor of the science fiction magazine Escape Pod. He no longer creates cyborg monkeys, after too many nights delivering them Prozac. He lives in St. Louis with three cats and a Martian wife. His short stories are published or forthcoming in Analog, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and elsewhere. You can find him on line at benjaminckinney.com or follow him on Twitter @BenCKinney.

He swears this is all true, even the monkeys and the Martians.

 

Gary McCluskey has been a professional artist for more than 15 years. He’s done book covers for every genre imaginable (such as the memoir of a coma survivor’s trip through the afterlife), as well artwork for comic books, children’s books and RPG games. Recently he completed 5 ebook covers for Roger Zelazny’s Amber series and several interior illustrations for a new hardcover version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ‘The Oakdale Affair’. He’s currently working on a comic book about a vampire-shark.

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