Excerpts - Dragon Path and Crippled God

Two excerpts from some eagerly awaited books surfaced this week.

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First off is Daniel Abraham who posted the first chapter of The Dragon Path, book one of The Dagger and the Coin coming up in April 2011. Full excerpt here. Here's a glimpse :

Marcus rubbed his chin with a callused palm.

“Yardem?”

“Sir?” rumbled the Tralgu looming at his side.

“The day you throw me in a ditch and take command of the company?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It wouldn’t be today, would it?”

The Tralgu crossed his thick arms and flicked a jingling ear.

“No, sir,” he said at last. “Not today.”

“Pity.”

The public gaol of Vanai had once been a menagerie. In ancient days, the dragons themselves had stalked the wide square and bathed in the great fountain at its center. At the perimeter, a deep pit, and then great cages rising three stories high. The dragon’s jade facades were carved with figures of the beasts that had once paced behind the iron bars: lions, gryphons, great six-headed serpents, wolves, bears, great birds with breasts like women.

Between them, pillars in the shapes of the thirteen races of mankind: tall-eared Tralgu, chitinous Timzinae, tusked Yemmu and on and on. The Dartinae even had small braziers hidden in its eyeholes to mimic the glow of their gaze, though no one lit them anymore. The figures were unworn by time and rain, marred only by the black, weeping streaks where the bars had rusted away – nothing eroded dragon’s jade and nothing broke it. But the animals themselves were gone, and in their place, people.

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Next up is The Crippled God by Steven Erikson, set for release this month. The extract is posted on Tor.com but you have to create an account. Here you go.

A woman with no gifts of magic, deemed plain and unprepossessing, Tavore Paran of House Paran means to challenge the gods—if it is in her power, if her alliances hold, and if her own troops don't kill her first.

Awaiting Tavore and her allies are the Forkrul Assail, the final arbiters of humanity. Drawing upon an alien power terrible in its magnitude, they seek to cleanse the world, to annihilate every human, every civilization, in order to begin anew. Elsewhere, the three Elder Gods work to shatter the chains binding Korabas, the Otataral Dragon, and release her from her eternal prison. And so, in a far away land and beneath indifferent skies, the final cataclysmic chapter in the extraordinary 'Malazan Book of the Fallen' begins.

Enjoy!