Soul of Swords, an excerpt

I’m now over 30,000 words into the rough draft of SOUL OF SWORDS, so it’s time for a brief excerpt:

Skalatan had never understood his people’s obsession with acquiring limbs. According to the doctrine of the San-keth priests, the gods of the Elderborn and the humans had stripped the serpent people of their limbs, condemning them to crawl in the dust for all time.

He stepped from the tent, and a hundred Aegonar warriors fell to their knees, gazing at him with reverence.

Why bother with limbs? It was so easy, so very easy, to turn the humans into willing, even eager, servants, something his brethren had never grasped.

-JM