GHOST IN THE RAZOR Questions & Answers

Note that this post CONTAINS SPOILERS for GHOST IN THE RAZOR and numerous other GHOSTS books.

A reader has several questions about GHOST IN THE RAZOR.

“I wanted to ask when is your next book coming out. Can you betray something that will happen in it?”

The next GHOST EXILE book I’m writing is GHOST IN THE INFERNO, which I hope to start writing in March (when FROSTBORN: THE GORGON SPIRIT is finished). So if all goes well I’ll have GHOST IN THE INFERNO out sometime around Memorial Day.

In GHOST IN THE INFERNO, Caina and her allies will try to break into the Inferno, the hellish fortress where the Immortals are made and trained.

“I can’t wait and I really, really, really want to know what will happen with Kylon.  I don’t know why, but when I read your books, I keep thinking he will get killed around every corner!”

Thanks! I was quite surprised at how popular he has been. When I wrote GHOST IN THE STORM (Kylon’s first appearance) back in 2012, I intended him to be a one-off character. But then I got a lot of emails asking “when is Kylon coming back?” So I brought him back for GHOST IN THE FORGE, got even more emails about Kylon, so then I brought him back in GHOST IN THE MASK…and here we are three years later and I’m still writing about Kylon. 🙂

“1. What are daevagoths?”

Normal humans twisted into insane monsters by alchemical sorcery, equipped with absolutely lethal venom in their stingers. The Alchemists typically use them as guard dogs.

“2. How are they made?”

Alchemical sorcery. Think a lot of vats and vile elixirs and madness-inducing transformations, that kind of thing.

“3. What do they look like?”

Dog-sized spiders with human heads and scorpion tails. Their heads are hairless and gray, and their eyes and blood glow with a pale blue light.

“4. How do you spell the word? daevegoths? deavagoths?”

Daevagoth.

“5. What is Ulvan? (master trader, sorcerer…I know WHAT he is I just don’t know how it’s called)…(Ulvan and the others, in what category are they in? Did I say guess right? Master sorcerers or traders or else?)”

Ulvan is a Master Slaver of the Brotherhood of Slavers of Istarinmul. The Master Slavers wear cowls of black leather as formal, ceremonial garb (similar to how certain legal officials in Britain wear black robes and white wigs when in court), and so the Master Slavers are informally known as the “cowled masters”.

The Brotherhood of Slavers is the only organization that has the legal right to sell slaves in Istarinmul. (Even when people sell slaves to each other, the Brotherhood is technically supposed to record the sale and receive a cut, though transactions often happen under the table.) Because of that, the Brotherhood is richer and more powerful than many nobles, the way a modern international corporation is sometimes richer than smaller national governments. Callatas hired the Brotherhood to supply him with the thousands of slaves he needed to murder to create wraithblood, so they became even wealthier and more powerful.

That said, by the time of GHOST IN THE RAZOR Caina has spent a year and a half harassing the Brotherhood and disrupting their operations, and the Brotherhood is in a lot of political and financial trouble. They are having a very difficult time finding new slaves, and so the price of slaves have skyrocketed. This in turn is disrupting Istarinmul’s economy and ticked off Grand Master Callatas, which has made the Brotherhood desperate. They’re legally forbidden from kidnapping Istarish citizens to sell as slaves, but the Brotherhood has been kidnapping Istarish peasants to meet the demand for slaves. That in turn has seriously angered a lot of powerful rural Istarish nobles.

So Caina hasn’t fully realized it yet (Morgant and Nasser have, though), but she has been pushing Istarinmul towards a major civil war…and there is your hint for what might happen in GHOST IN THE INFERNO. 🙂

-JM