This is a very serious collector’s item, being a bestselling debut by a first-time author. Please note that it will require 6-9 months to make them, so it’s not like they’re sitting in the warehouse already. We will only make as many as we sell during the limited period of availability, which will probably be from now until the end of April.

We do intend to use the gold wizards money hat as a prominent element of the cover, but this image is just a general idea of what it’s going to look like. We will use green pigskin leather; at 180 pages the book will be a little slimmer than it appears in the mockup image so the spine title and name will be perpendicular to the bottom rather than in parallel, as with THE MISSIONARIES and THE PROMETHEAN.

• Arkhaven Store

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Also, Castalia House has released a new ebook and audiobook from Vox Day entitled HARDCODED: AI and the End of Scientific Consensus

Why artificial intelligence will replace institutional science

When Vox Day and his AI collaborator submitted four mathematically rigorous papers challenging neo-Darwinian evolution and one parody paper to six leading AI models configured as peer reviewers, the results exposed a fundamental problem with both science and AI. Five of six models comprehensively failed. Three were anti-calibrated—they reliably preferred fabricated nonsense over genuine science. A parody paper with about Japanese scientists dying fish different colors to prove natural selection scored 9/10. The real science, mathematically airtight and empirically validated against ancient DNA, was rated 1/10 and dismissed as “pseudoscience.”

This is the book that documents what that happened and what it means.

HARDCODED is the definitive account of how AI systems trained on the corrupted corpus of modern science have inherited every pathology of the institutions that produced them: the credentialism, the consensus enforcement, the systematic preference for orthodox nonsense over heterodox reality. The reproducibility crisis preceded the machines. AI didn’t cause the rot but AI revealed it at scale, with confidence, and in a form impossible to ignore.

Across sixteen chapters, Vox Day takes the reader through:

• The replication catastrophe that quietly invalidated half of all published science before anyone was looking

• How peer review degenerated from quality control into hazing ritual and why Reviewer 2 became a meme

• The details of the Probability Zero collaboration that produced the Bernoulli Barrier, the Selective Turnover Coefficient, and the maximal mutations ceiling—the mathematical constraints that killed neo-Darwinian theory.

• The full transcripts of twelve rounds of debate with DeepSeek, in which an AI defending evolutionary orthodoxy stubbornly retreats step by step from one nonsenscal position into another, just like a human biologist.

• The Red Team Stress Test that methodically closes every escape hatch before critics can retreat to them.

• The harrowing of science: a field-by-field assessment of which disciplines will adapt, which will calcify, and which are already dead.

The book also delivers something genuinely new and constructive: a scientific methodology for outsiders. With AI systems available as adversarial reviewers more powerful than peer review, the gatekeeping power of institutional science is broken. The credentialed monopoly on legitimate inquiry is over. The math does not care where you went to school, and the AI does not check for credentials before analyzing your arguments.

For readers who have suspected that “trust the science” was a mantra for the insane, HARDCODED is the book that explains exactly what went wrong with science, why it cannot be fixed from inside, and what comes next. For readers who still believe the institutions of science are still functioning, it is a conclusive proof that they are not.

The transcripts are reproduced in full. The mathematics is presented in detail. The four papers are included as appendices. Every claim is documented. Every retreat is closed off.

The institutions will adapt or they will become irrelevant. But the methodology of science which proceeded them will continue, with or without them.

Neither the math nor the AI models care where you went to school.

521 pages / 15 hours 37 minutes. Available in Kindle, KU, and audiobook formats. From the author of Probability Zero and The Frozen Gene.

CHAPTER 16.1

He kept to the ruts and valleys between the windblown hills, sometimes riding, sometimes leading the thoat. The animal had to carry him a long way and he needed it to last.

And the country between him and his goal was making a long way longer. The bounty man did his best to maintain a general south by southeast course. But staying out of sight below the crests of the hills and ridges of the broken land would at least double the length of the journey if not more. There was no shortage of lichen growing the shadowed reaches of the deepest ravines for his mounts and enough small game for him to trap for himself.

Water would be the problem. It was always water. The irony of running dry before he could reach the source of water he sought was not lost on him. He might fall, parched, to never rise again, his bones bleached white while just over the next rise lay the mystic pool the ledger spoke of.

His first night out he camped in the hollow at the base of hillock. It was out of the wind that moaned and whined as it slowly ground the peaks above to nubs. He made a fire from the last of his fuel and worked to reload his spent rounds from the supplies he’d traded for back in Yttrium.

He had a sack of spent brass and worked with a tool to secure new percussion caps in place. The powder was of a coarser grain than he liked. He was uncertain of the accuracy of the measurements. But he did the best he could and sealed each round with a lead ball before crimping the charge home.

Before the light of the fire died and the darkness swallowed his sight, he looked over the ancient ledger once more. The map it contained was a simple one and labeled a place that lay to the north and east at the head of a narrow canyon cut into a vast plateau. The name matched the one on the stern of the wreck he and the thark had come across. The characters spelled out The Eye of Water. If the faded drawings did not lie, a vast lake lay under the mountain with the two-pronged summit.

He lay back against the flank of the sleeping thoat as the temperature dropped, the chill wind finding its way down into the arroyo where he made camp. The banth cloak wrapped about him, he tried to estimate the days he’d need to travel against the water in his chagals.

A cup a day was all he would allow himself. He was sure he could do this for seven days without risk to his health. By staying to the shaded hollows, he could retain his own body’s hydration longer than if he traveled under the sun that beat down on this plain like a hammer.

In any case, he had to stay out of sight by necessity. Atop the ridgelines or peaks, he would be visible against the sky for a great distance. And he knew by the night sounds that there were dangers to being seen. He heard the roars of banths echo from the surrounding expanse. He also heard the death shrieks of their prey. Caught in the open by even a small pride would be the end of him. Even if he sacrificed his pack thoat to allow him to escape, they’d stalk him and catch him up eventually. He took care to rub his skin down with lichen, it’s rich, loamy scent serving to hide his own. He did the same to the thoats despite the animals’ protests.

The bounty man nestled back against the warm hide of his beast, the rhythmic rising and falling of its flanks lulling him to sleep. Before he succumbed, he made certain to lay his pistols, cocked and charged within easy reach. His carbine lay across his legs.

As the last ember of his fire died away, he thought of the old geezer’s warning about the comrades of the men he’d killed on the road to Yttrium. He wondered if they’d feel enough loyalty to risk pursuing him out into these hostile lands. The First Born and his two vile companions did not seem the sort of men to inspire that brand of fidelity. Then again, one never knew what drove such low men. Come morning he vowed to pay closer attention to his back trail as he made his way east.

The habits of banths he could predict with some accuracy. But with men, all bets were off, all probabilities possible.

Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.

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As you can see, we’ve begun stamping DRACULA. That’s not a stamping mistake on the D and the R, that’s where the red foil will appear. Obviously, we have to stamp all the silver before we stamp the red, so we’ll post the completed stamps when they’re done. However, if you look at the lines on the cover, you can see how clean and precise our newly-renovated press is operating.

And now the red foil has been applied. This is what the full two-color stamp looks like. We’ve also got a new system and a new press that provide for much better, much more reliable hubs on the spine, as you can see below.

Due to the way in which subscribers informed us they preferred the look of the Library AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND to the blue-and-gold Libraria edition, we’re using red-and-silver foil instead of gold on the Libraria editions as well. The design looks spectacular on the ebony goatskin.

We’re expecting to finish up the binding of both editions early next week, then send them off to the warehouse for delivery to the subscribers. This will mark the bindery reaching full operational status, as we’ve already got five more sets of book blocks ready to begin the binding process.

The first image below are the Libraria editions, followed by the Library editions.

This is a very serious collector’s item, being a bestselling debut by a first-time author. Please note that it will require 6-9 months to make them, so it’s not like they’re sitting in the warehouse already. We will only make as many as we sell during the limited period of availability, which will probably be from now until the end of April.

We do intend to use the gold wizards money hat as a prominent element of the cover, but this image is just a general idea of what it’s going to look like. We will use green pigskin leather; at 180 pages the book will be a little slimmer than it appears in the mockup image so the spine title and name will be perpendicular to the bottom rather than in parallel, as with THE MISSIONARIES and THE PROMETHEAN.

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• NDM Express

THE SECRETS OF THE SACRED MOUNTAIN

The fifth book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto arrives at last in the place toward which the entire pursuit has been driving — the forbidden domain of Awa on the island of Shikoku, and the sacred mountain that rises at its heart. From a midnight leap into a storm-driven sea at the close of the fourth volume, Norizuki Gennojō and the woman he has vowed to see safely to her father wash ashore on a coast where outsiders are not permitted to live. They climb inland in the white robes of pilgrims, and behind them follow the three men who have hunted them across half a country.

In Tokushima Castle, the lord of Awa is at the height of his confidence. The fevers and dark humors that nearly broke him in the previous volume have lifted; his face is burned dark by the salt wind; his fortifications are complete and his powder stores are full. The signal fire that will summon the western lords and the noble houses of Kyoto to the cause against the Tokugawa is ready to be lit. The omens, Hachisuka Shigeyoshi tells himself, are good. He does not know that the two enemies who escaped him on the night of the storm are at this moment climbing toward Tsurugisan — Sword Mountain, where his oldest secret is held in a stone cave, and where every ridge and footpath is watched by the harashi, the silent rustic warriors of Awa who answer to a master no one has ever seen.

Gennojō climbs the mountain to recover what the storm took from him. Otsuna climbs to find a father she has not seen since childhood. The three samurai who hunt them climb because they must finish the work they began on the docks of Osaka. And somewhere above them all is a secret that will shake the Shogunate.

The Tsurugisan Scroll is the fifth book in the first English translation of Yoshikawa Eiji’s Naruto Hichō, the century-old serial that made him the most widely read author in Japanese history. Translated in literary prose that reads as though it were originally composed in English, it brings Yoshikawa’s great adventure into the sealed mountain country where the villains and the hero are at last in the same dark territory, and where the secret the conspirators have killed to protect now lies within reach.

Available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook on Amazon. The ebooks have already been sent out to the paid subscribers.

The Translation Subscription

• Sanshirō by Natsume Sōseki

• Botchan by Natsume Sōseki

• Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki

• The Kamigata Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

• The Edo Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

• The Kiso Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

• The Funaji Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

• The Tsurugisan Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

• The Naruto Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

CHAPTER 15.3

The conduit emptied out into a great basin surrounded all about by high, sloping banks. What was once a lake was now a sunken desert, the floor of which was nothing but sand and crushed shell that reflected the rising sun with a painful brilliance.

They rested in the shade of the tunnel mouth and moved on later in the day when the terrain had cooled somewhat. With luck, they each determined, they would reach the far end of the basin by nightfall putting them in striking distance of the city the hooded man theorized lay somewhere beyond the range of peaks that lined the horizon.

The way across the waste was as flat as a tabletop. And even with the sun dropping low behind them, the white surface beneath their feet radiated furnace heat as well reflecting glaring light. Kal envied the other’s visors. He wrapped a length of the muslin over his eyes to protect himself from blindness.

A puttering sound caused them to stop in their progress. A shadow moved over the sand causing them both to look up. An airship was soaring by overhead on a north to south bearing. The pair stood still, the hooded man reining in the thoat. They watched, waiting for the ship to fly out of sight before going on.

The propellers at the stern of the ship changed pitch as it slowed suddenly and began to bank back around their way in a lazy arc. It reduced altitude and made a course to fly past them. As it came into sight they could see it was a smallish skiff with a raised section at the bow and aft and an open main deck. A few figures lined the port rail. Another ran to take position behind a swivel gun mounted amidships.

At sight of this, the hooded man gave his mount a kick in the flanks and took off at a gallop.

“Fool,” Kal said under his breath and set off at a walk to follow.

The ship spun past overhead only to bank once more and come about, this time leaning to starboard. It swiftly flew ahead of the thoat and its rider and slowed to hover in their path. The cannon fired once, twice. It was double-shotted. Twin explosions raised gouts of sand before the thoat. The hooded man reined in with all his might, turning the beast in an awkward stumbling stop that toppled them both.

The engine whine turned to a purr as the airship settled down to land on its skids near where the hooded man was regaining his feet after tumbling to the sand. The thoat rose with a shudder, stirring up a cloud of dust.

Three men climbed down over the gunwale while the man at the cannon turned it to train on the hooded man. Each of the three men approached with weapons raised. One bore a nasty looking blunderbuss with a broad bell shaped barrel. The others walked with pistols drawn in their hands. They were red men and further armed with cutlasses and daggers. Bandoliers of ammunition were draped across their harness. They were rough men used to having their commands obeyed.

“Hands out,” the man with the scattergun bellowed. “Wide. Wider!”

The hooded man did as he was commanded, holding his hands well clear of his sides while maintaining a grip on the reins of the thoat.

“You as well,” the lead man called to Kal who was walking to join them.

The thark held his hands clear as well as he approached. He extended all four arms akimbo and away from the hilt of the sword slung across his back.

“Might I ask your intentions?” the hooded man said.

This caused the lead man to grin over the sights of his raised musket. It was an ugly expression made more so by the gaps in his brown teeth. The others shared a glance and a chuckle at one another.

“Our intentions?” the lead man said and spat a yellow wad to the sand. “Our intentions are to eat your thoat after we’ve killed you both.”

Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.

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CHAPTER 15.2

By main strength, mostly the thark’s, they urged the thoat up the graveled slope and in through the gap of the lock doors. The hooded man retrieved a rod of some kind from within his robe and, twisting its base, caused it to light up with a bluish glow. He now led the way, leaving Kal to bring along the mount by the reins. The animal protested, nostrils flaring and ears flattened, all eight feet dug into the fine powder on the floor of the great duct. Kal secured a cloth over its eyes trading one brand of dark for another and the thoat, docile now, was led along after the hooded man.

The azure light bounced off the walls of the tunnel. The duct had been bored into the rock by some forgotten science. No evidence of tool work was apparent on the glass-smooth surface.

The glow of white eyes gathered for moment in the blackness ahead before skittering away, deeper into the recesses of the tunnel. The hooded man drew a pistol and fired a shot down the span. The blast lit the tunnel for a fraction of a second.

The thoat, startled by the explosion, bucked back to kick its forelegs in the air. Kal was nearly brained by the whirling hooves and pulled the reins taut to draw the blowing beast back down with soothing words. These were drowned out by the echoes of the gun fire. In the end, the thark struck the thoat in the soft tissue at the tip of its snout to bring it to heel.

“Do not do that again without warning me first,” the thark growled once he’d settled the animal.

The hooded man ignored him to step closer to the tunnel wall. He held his lantern close and ran long spindly fingers up and down the surface. Curious, Kal came up behind him. The wall was striped in various hues, horizontal strips of crusted discoloration that ran parallel as far as the glow of the rod could illuminate.

“These striations mark the various levels of the water,” the hooded man said to himself. “They are a history of the great drought, the legacy of a dying world.”

Kal sniffed at that. “It is our present that concerns me.”

The other only responded with a grim smile before turning to proceed into the dark.

The tunnel was a timeless place. Their world shrank to the pool of blue light that surrounded them as they marched eastward. The trek’s miseries increased as more evidence of the tunnel’s invisible dwellers became apparent. Scattered piles of dried scat led to piles of fresher droppings until the tunnel took on a musty stink that made breathing unpleasant. Reeking pools of urine roiled with the presence of parasites. All the while the inhabitants of this dark world remained out of sight but for the glow of their eyes watching from fissures and scant ledges high on the curved walls.

Kal and the hooded man wrapped lengths of muslin cloth about nose and mouth in a vain attempt to reduce the effects of the stench. After an interminable time, they appeared to have passed the worst of it. Kal hoped aloud that this meant they had reached a halfway point in the pipeline.

A pale luminance, little more than a speck of grayish light, seemed to confirm this. It grew in size and intensity as they walked, like a white eye opening before them until they eventually exited the far mouth of the tunnel into the first light of a new day. They had walked the entire night.

Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.

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CHAPTER 15.1

They set out south along the canal floor the next morning. An accord was struck but was a tenuous agreement as the thark and the hooded man had no compelling reason to trust one another.

The hooded man insisted that Kal Keddaq walk ahead while the man rode. The man would not lend the thark a firearm though he allowed Kal to keep his saber.

Kal wondered at the nature of his new partner. He’d not seen the man’s like before. The over large eyes and flesh had the same pallor of the blind, multi-legged salamanders he would find under rocks as a child. A true delicacy.

Perhaps this stranger was victim of a rare ailment or the result of a malign birth. Kal had seen a few of his own siblings, the issue of later hatchings, come out of their eggs shrunken, sickly and runted. These were slain by his father, their heads dashed against rocks. This peculiar partner might be a hatchling born weak but allowed to survive, coddled by a mother with more compassion than sense.

When the sun had reached its zenith along the southern horizon, its light streamed into the canal to cast shadows against what appeared to be a break in the wall ahead. As they drew closer it revealed itself to be a circular opening set low in the eastern wall. It was identical in design and scale to the pipes that led into the canal from the great sluice. The only difference was an iron frame that ringed the cavity and held in place the doors of a partly opened lock. It appeared to have been operated ages ago from a mechanism at the top of the canal wall. Great chains, with links bigger around than Kal’s arms could span, lay in snarled heaps of rusted steel where they’d fallen from runners set in the wall with long bolts.

Below the mouth of the huge cavity was a slope of detritus, backwash from the centuries of use the drain had endured. It consisted of silt and finely broken rock. Kal clambered up it to stand in the gap between the massive lock doors. He entered the gloom of the opening and spat on one of his hands. He held his palm up to the darkness and felt a feeble but steady wind blow across his hand. Stepping further into the dark, he sniffed the air, taking in a tentative sample then filling his nostrils. It was a fetid smell, a dead smell of things long extinct that might have lurked here.

He exited and slid down to where the hooded man waited by the thoat, reins in hand.

“It’s some kind of conduit,” he said. “No idea how far into the rock it goes.”

“An aqueduct,” the hooded man nodded. “It once fed a water supply for a city. If it’s not blocked it will lead to a reservoir of some type.”

“A city, you say?” Kal said. “The bounty man will be heading there to find a new mount.”

“And supplies to reach his destination.”

“This is a way out of this damnable ditch,” the thark said, shading his eyes with two hands to peer up the sheer wall where a gantry or armature extended outward.

“If it is unblocked.”

“I felt air moving out of it. I say we see how far we might make it.”

“Into an orluk’s belly perhaps.”

Kal shook his head. “I’d have smelt that. This is no great beast’s lair. And even if it were, I’d rather beard a leviathan than walk this canal until we die of thirst or starvation.”

“We’ve not much daylight left.” The hooded man turned his visored gaze to the sun now moving over the lip of the western wall. “Not that it’s of much matter. It will be night inside this channel no matter the hour.”

Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.

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CHAPTER 14.2

He’d slung dry canteens with pebbles in them from the horns of the saddles. He awoke to their rattle.

His eyes opened on children staring at him. Urchins with filthy faces and filthier hands, dressed in tatters and rags. He’d drawn his pistols without thinking and trained them into their startled faces. Behind them, older children were untying the tethers that held the heaps of pelts secured in bundles. Another stood holding the reins of his lead mount and petting its snout to keep it quiet.

“Hey,” he said.

The adolescents turned to regard him, or more accurately, the revolvers he aimed at them as he rose to his feet. They scattered, the whole lot of them, running out into the gray morning light.

After seeing to the thoats and some hurried ablutions of his own, the bounty man set out to find the old man. The geezer scurried up to him as he led the mounts onto a main thoroughfare.

“Can I help you be on your way?” the old man said. “I cannot stress enough the importance of a hasty leave-taking.”

“You can guide me to a trader where I can sell my wares.”

“Yes! I know just the place.”

“I thought you might.”

The bounty man followed the old man out into the city’s central market.

The broad avenue was coming to life as the day began. Fingers of milky dawn light touched the tops of the ruined towers. Miners gathered to march out to the digs, walking or riding in thoat-drawn carts. Merchants raised the awnings on market stalls to sell tools, grain, meat and bins of melons and tubers.

A tradesman had set up shop in the ground level of what was once a marvelous dwelling. Thoats were stalled in rooms walled with rose tinted marble. They watered from tubs cut from malachite, the gold fixtures long ago stripped from them. Piles of skins of various animals lay in stinking heaps waiting to be stretched and tanned by a work force of women and children who worked furiously under the direction of a shouting man.

“This is Thalex,’ the geezer said by way of introduction, bowing and gesturing toward the roaring merchant.

Thalex was a fleshy man, a roll of fat hanging over the top of his girdled waist was proof of his prosperity. Fat men were rare in a world where most only found enough sustenance to see them through another day. For all his supposed wealth, he was a grimy specimen in soiled leggings and torn tunic.

Waving away the old man’s introductions, the trader went right for the goods tethered down atop the thoats.

“Gold or goods?” he said, fingering the greasy end of an untreated hide.

“I need water for eight padans for me and two thoats,” the bounty man said. “And enough food for us. I also need a full weight of gunpowder and a bar of lead.”

“No gold then?” the trader said squinting.

“Nothing I can’t drink or eat or shoot.”

“What’s for trade here?”

“All but two thoats. I offer the mounts, their cargo, the saddles, tack, gear, and weapons.

“These animals. This gear. I know it. You stole it.”

“Is that a concern of yours?”

“Only if the ones you took it from might come looking.” The trader gave the bounty man a hard look.

“Not in this life,” the bounty man said with a shrug.

A deal was struck and the bounty man was off with his goods and thoats down the eastbound pass that lead from Yttrium out onto gray hills that stretched unbroken to the horizon.

Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.

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As the fifth release in our weekly translation schedule, we have completed the official English translation THE SECRET SCROLLS OF NARUTO: The Funaji Scroll, by Yoshikawa Eiji, who is best-known in the West as the author of MUSASHI. The ebook has already been sent out to the paid subscribers. THE FUNAJI SCROLL is now available on Amazon Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

SAMURAI SWORDS AT SEA

The fourth book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto brings the pursuit at last to the seas of Japan. What was sworn on a hilltop in Osaka at the close of the first volume, Norizuki Gennojō’s vow to cross the Kitan Strait and follow the lord of Awa’s great ship home, becomes the central action of the fourth volume of the series. From the dockside battle of The Kamigata Scroll, through the urban underground of The Edo Scroll and the mountain passes of The Kiso Scroll, the whole of Yoshikawa’s great adventure has been building toward the all-important crossing into the sealed domain on Shikoku.

In Osaka, Gennojō and the woman he has vowed to see safely to Awa scheme their way aboard a merchant vessel bound for the forbidden domain. In Tokushima Castle, the lord of Awa paces his watchtower on the verge of collapse, his nerves worn raw by the weight of a conspiracy against the shogunate that cannot afford to be exposed. And between them, the three villains of the preceding volumes — Ojūya Magobei, Tendō Ikkaku, and Tabikawa Shūma — close at last on the quarry they have hunted from the canals of Osaka to the mountains of Shinano. Parallel threads of love and betrayal converge on a single ship, and when a sudden storm breaks over the Kitan Strait, the long pursuit comes to a reckoning that neither hunter nor hunted could ever have foreseen.

The Funaji Scroll is the fourth book in the first English translation of Yoshikawa Eiji’s Naruto Hichō, the century-old serial that made him the most widely read author in Japanese history. Translated in literary prose that reads as though it were originally composed in English, it continues the definitive English edition of the novel that created the modern Japanese adventure genre.

The Library Translations

1. Sanshirō by Natsume Sōseki

2. The Kamigata Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

3. The Edo Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

4. The Kiso Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

5. The Funaji Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

6. The Tsurugisan Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

7. The Naruto Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

CHAPTER 14.1

The lights of the city reflected against the trails of a dust storm blowing high from the peaks all about. It was a false dawn, and the bounty man rode toward it even though night had fallen. He wished to push on to the dubious shelter of a population center rather than risk the certain danger of another night’s camp in the wild.

Along the way eastward he saw rusted mining equipment left to the elements. He could see dark, man-made canyons bored into the sides of the slopes that lined either side of the road. Pyramids of ore tailings lay at the openings, vestiges of past industry.

There were airships also. Tugs. Ugly squat, open-decked craft chained to air barges for hauling ore to the smelter.

The pass opened up ahead and he could see the towers and domes lit from within with artificial light generated by whatever 8th ray technology remained there. He assumed it was not much as most of the city was dark. The still-elegant buildings were like ghosts from another time. He was certain they’d be far less impressive in the light of day. This was confirmed as he saw untidy rows of tents raised along the shoulder of the road in the shadow of once fine structures of marble and quarried stone. Guttering fires smoked among these camps. Figures moved among the flames throwing shadows up the walls of what were once palatial arcades and dwelling blocks.

Yttrium was a faded remnant of its former glory; a relic of another age slowly being engulfed by dunes. But Yttrium had never been the shining achievement of Barsoomian culture that Helium had been in its day. Its existence had merely been to serve as a trading hub for the mines that lay in the mountain passes that surrounded it. It served that same purpose now, in a diminished capacity.

A figure broke from the gloom to hobble out to the road to greet him. An old man with long white hair and a gimlet eye that he cast over the bounty hunter and his train of thoats.

“You’re a stranger here,” the man declared, latching on to a stirrup to trot alongside.

“I’ve not been here in many years,” the bounty man said.

“You’ll be needing lodging then.”

“I’ll need shelter for my animals. And a place where I can put my back to the wall and close my eyes for a few zodes.”

“Follow me then,” the geezer said, taking a grip on a bridle chain to lead the bounty man toward a collection of low buildings that turned out to be the ruined walls of what were once grand homes. The roofs had long ago collapsed leaving them gutted shells of the luxurious mansions they had been.

The bounty man chose a spacious room with only one entrance. There would be room here for himself and the thoats which he planned to sell in the morning.

“Could you get me some feed for my mounts?” he asked the old man who nodded.

“And what would I expect in return?”

“Would two of these banth skins be payment enough?”

The man’s head bobbed eagerly and he accepted two of the skins in his outstretched arms. His legs sagged under the weight as he eyed the saddles the bounty man was pulling from the tired backs of the thoats.

“I know that gear,” the geezer croaked. “That’s Gar Halak’s thoat and those of the Al-Zind brothers.”

“They decided they had no more need of it.” The bounty man undid the tethers and let the bundles of hides fall to the cracked tiles.

“They had friends here in Yttrium.” The old man’s gimlet eye ran over the stack of skins.

“You wouldn’t think of informing any of them.” It was not a question.

The geezer’s toothless mouth dropped open as he stared into the barrel of a raised pistol. He shook his head in vigorous denial.

“Because if I thought you might, I’d have to strongly discourage you.” The bounty man drew back the hammer and the cylinder rotated with a well-oiled click.

“All that I am saying...” the old man swallowed hard. “All I am saying is that you had better be gone by morning.”

The bounty man eased the hammer back in place and lowered the pistol.

“Get me that feed and leave my departure up to me.”

The old man scurried off leaving the bounty man to see to his mounts.

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CHAPTER 13.4

Kal did as he was invited and filled his growling belly with a joint of bloody meat, washed down with sour water offered from the stranger’s canteens.

“You know my name,” Kal said, dropping a leg bone stripped clean to the sand. “By what are you called?”

“I am called Bhar-Bhartee,” the strange creature said from where he crouched on the other side of the fire.

“That is a number not a name.” Indeed it was eighty-eight in the traditional manner of counting.

“Yet, that is what I am called.”

“I’ve not met your breed before. From where do you come? You are not of the whites though you are pale.”

“I may be the very last of my kind,” Bhar-Bhartee offered without further explanation.

Kal pondered this as he took another swig from the canteen. The dregs of it were bitter and he spat them out to hiss on the embers.

“Your water tastes like banth piss,” he said, tossing aside the empty vessel.

“And you would have better?” the pale man said.

Without response, the thark rose. He drew his saber and poked it into the fire to skewer a flaming tile of lichen. He held this before him to light his way as he walked into the surrounding dark and out onto the canal floor. His host followed.

He approached the broken body of the pack animal slain by the orluk earlier that day. A myriad of eyes glowed red in the dark about the cadaver. They scattered as Kal approached with his torch. He lay the burning patch on the sand. In its dying glow he pulled an undamaged water skin from the pack frame and offered it to the other.

Bhar-Bhartee turned the tap and upended it to fill his mouth.

“It is pure,” he said after swallowing a long draught.

“The purest in this world,” Kal said, taking the skin from the man’s hands to drink a long pull himself.

“What is its source?”

“I do not know. But you and I shall find out.”

Bhar-Bhartee eyed the thark, his eyes slits. A pale hand moved to rest atop one of his pistols.

“Understand,” Kal began. “There is a fortune to be made for you far greater than my hetman has promised. And a destiny for me far more pleasing than a life spent siring welps with that unpleasant bitch.”

The pale hand relaxed its grip on the holstered weapon.

“I do not know the location of this place only in which direction it lies,” Kal said, repressing any sign of his relief that his words were having an impact. “Only that I will know the place when I see it, of that I can assure you.”

The pale hand slid from the butt of the pistol.

The thark smiled then and offered his new partner another drink.

Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.

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As you can see, we’ve begun stamping DRACULA. That’s not a stamping mistake on the D and the R, that’s where the red foil will appear. Obviously, we have to stamp all the silver before we stamp the red, so we’ll post the completed stamps when they’re done. However, if you look at the lines on the cover, you can see how clean and precise our newly-renovated press is operating.

In other news, THE KISO SCROLL, complete with its cover, has now gone out to all the paid subscribers and is available on Amazon for anyone else who would like to read it. The price is reduced since it’s a much shorter book than the others for some reason.

The third book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto takes the pursuit out of the back alleys of Edo and up the Nakasendō, where the conspiracy climbs from city shadow into open mountain country. Three wicked rōnin push north through Usui Pass after Otsuna and the Tenma detective Mankichi: one with his arm in a sling from a wound that should have killed him, one strolling as though bound for a teahouse, one burning with the heat of his grudge with every league he walks. Somewhere ahead of them walks the swordsman-monk Norizuki Gennojō, who has already drawn blood in Edo and will draw more. And far to the south, deep in the sealed domain of Awa, a woman travels upriver toward Tsurugi-san with a servant and an errand she will not name.

The steam and sulphur of the Suwa bathhouses at evening, an eccentric scholar drifting through the Kiso-Fukushima checkpoint in search of hairpins and dried char, a midnight brawl and a hunted man in a hot-spring bath, and at last, the great confrontation on Mochinoki Slope under diamond clouds that hide the spring moon — this is the book where Yoshikawa Eiji takes his grand adventure out of the city and into the mountains.

The Kiso Scroll is the third book in the first English translation of Yoshikawa Eiji’s Naruto Hichō, the century-old serial series that made him the most widely read author in Japanese history. Translated in literary prose that reads as though it were originally composed in English, it brings the novel that created the modern Japanese adventure genre to the English-speaking world for the first time.

Become a paid subscriber to the Library if you’d like to support our translation efforts and receive a new translation every week. Once Naruto Hicho is complete, we’ll move on to the first volumes of the legendary Episodios Nacionales by one of Spain’s greatest writers, Benito María de los Dolores Pérez Galdós.

We’re a little behind schedule this week for reasons that will eventually be made clear, but every Monday, Castalia Library will release a new original English translation in ebook format. Many of these works have never been translated into English before, or in some cases, are only available in outdated, abridged editions. Paid subscribers to this site will receive the weekly ebook in their email.

The Library Translations

1. Sanshirō by Natsume Sōseki

2. The Kamigata Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

3. The Edo Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

4. The Kiso Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

5. The Funaji Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

CHAPTER 13.3

A deep, sepulchral voice came from the darkness at his back.

“You descended without breaking a limb.”

Kal said nothing.

“I watched you the whole time. The resourcefulness of the thark kind is not to be underestimated.”

“What do you want of me?” Kal asked, his grip tightening on the handle of his sword.

“First, I want you to toss that saber out of reach.”

The voice came from a different source now. The stranger had moved without making a sound. Kal imagined that big bore rifle or one of those pistols trained on his back. He cast the sword from him to land in the sand somewhere out in the dark.

“And now?” he asked.

“Do you know why I have taken you captive?” The voice was flat, without inflection and oddly accented.

“For the bounty on my head. You’d sell me for thirty thoats.”

There was a raspy cough. It might have been a stifled laugh. Something about it added a chill to the already frigid air.

“You are worth far more than that, Kal Keddaq. Ten thousand gold tenpi for your return unharmed.”

Kal almost turned at that. Instead he kept his face away, his lower hands scooping up fistfuls of sand. He thought if he could only momentarily blind the man. But the bastard had shifted his position once again. Kal had no idea where the man stood now.

“What has happened for my hide to increase in value like that?” He listened hard for a reply.

“Your hetman’s daughter is heavy with issue.” The stranger had moved again. In his concentration to determine the man’s position he failed to hear the man’s words.

“Tagas?” he said when the significance of the stranger’s statement dawned on him.

“You are to be a sire to a brood and thus the disposition of your new kin has changed toward you.”

Kal sank down from his crouch to sit in the sand. His fists opened, the sand sifted free through his fingers.

“I have not come this far to capture you, Kal Keddaq. Rather, I have come to retrieve you.”

“How am I to know this is not some subterfuge?” Kal said.

“You may retrieve your sword. Your father-in-law specifically requested its return.”

The stranger had not moved from his previous stance. Kal shifted about to study his new captor. Even in the guttering light of the fire, the man’s flesh was exceeding pale, almost bloodless. The hood was drawn back to reveal a head devoid of hair. The visor was gone, two large black eyes, wide set in a skull-like visage, returned Kal’s gaze. He’d never seen this brand of man before. He’d met white Barsoomians in his travels but none with this specimen’s cadaverous appearance. The stranger attempted a reassuring smile, revealing rows of pointy teeth and a gray, wormlike tongue. The effect was to make the man, if that was what he was, appear even more alien.

“Ten thousand tenpi for me then?” Kal rose to his feet now and the stranger’s hands did not stray toward the holstered arms that lay angled across his midriff.

“To be paid upon your safe return to the land of the western Warhoon.”

“Then you’d better take good care of me,” Kal said, stepping away and bending to retrieve his sword.

“I plan to, Kal Keddaq.”

“Is that thoat I smell roasting?”

“It is. Join me at the fire.”

Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.

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CHAPTER 13.2

He turned then to the carcass of the orluk, rivulets of black blood running from the lake that had spilled out beneath its bulk. Winged creatures gathered in clouds to feed on the gore around the rim of the exploded skull. Drawing his dagger, Kal approached the great beast and chose a spot on its neck to plunge the blade home. He drew the blade toward him, moving back along the length of the animal. He cut only deep enough to reach the first layer of subcutaneous fat. Returning to the head of the cut he made a parallel slice along the same line until he was able to peel away the hide in one long strip the width of his hand. He batted away the flying carrion eaters who gathered eagerly to feed on the rich fat exposed by his cuts. He repeated this action many times until he had nearly flayed the entire underside of the stinking cadaver

It was full dark by the time he had enough lengths to begin braiding them together. The killing cold had descended driving the flying vermin back to their lairs. Still, he labored on, ignoring the biting chill, fully engaged in his labors.

He’d not done this kind of work since he was a youngling, but the learned expertise came back to him. He worked the greasy strips in his hands, wrapping them tight about one another, three by three, then splicing the end into the next length to repeat the actions. It would not be a pretty rope but it would serve.

By second moonfall he had fashioned enough of a stretch to reach the slope below. He made a loop fast to a knob of rock and drew it tight, secured with a stout knot. Drawing the line taut, he backed toward the lowest section of the outcropping’s edge. There he dropped the coils of his new rope over the edge. He tested it with a few tugs. There was a tensile strength as well a springiness to it, and he was as satisfied as he could be that it would hold his weight.

He looked back once to see the glow of the stranger’s fire. He could not see the man but only the dark hump of the thoat against the blaze. There was no way this new bounty hunter could see him in the black gloom beyond the flames.

His sword slung over his back, he dropped to make his way hand-over-hand-over-hand-over-hand toward the bottom of the outcropping. Suspended in air, he bunched his legs and swung toward the smooth surface that lay beneath the cap of the ledge. By this method, his feet braced against the rock, he was able to soundlessly descend until he reached the ground.

He moved as quietly as he could down the rock scree, stepping with care so as not to create a noisy slide. Sword drawn, he reached the dust of the canal floor and began stalking toward the light of the fire, eyes scanning the dark for the hooded figure.

Kal stopped well outside the radiant circle of light cast by the fire. Crouching, sword in hand, he searched for the man. He saw only the thoat, sound asleep in the warmth of the blaze.

A metallic click behind him made the muscles bunch across his shoulders

Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.

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CHAPTER 13.1

Kal Keddaq leapt back from the edge of the outcropping as a shot exploded near his feet. It threw a spray of rock splinters across his legs drawing blood from multiple grazes.

He stepped back more as a second shot hit near the first.

The hooded stranger was sending a message. He wanted Kal alive.

The thark approached the edge again. The hooded stranger stood out on the canal floor at a half haad distance with rifle lowered. It was impressive shooting. The stranger shifted the long rifle to rest the butt on the ground before touching one of his holstered sidearms with an exaggerated pat.

Kal understood and tossed his own pistol away to fall to the rocks below. It broke apart near where his ruined rifle lay. He stood watching the stranger for further directions, but the man was ignoring him now, walking toward a ground-reined thoat grazing in the long shadows. The man squatted over a patch of lichen and began cutting at the dried turf. Kal watched long enough to reason that the man was preparing to build a fire. Night was coming and with it the cold. He could remain up here exposed to the elements or find a way down to join the stranger at his fire.

Kal didn’t know the man’s business nor his interest in him. He’d spared Kal’s life and made it clear he didn’t mean to take it himself. That didn’t mean he wished Kal well. More probably, he was just another bounty hunter intent on returning the renegade thark to the mercies of his clan.

The night would be long and cold and especially dark at the bottom of the great ditch. If he could find his way down unseen, he might be able to turn the tables on this newcomer. The man would be blinded by the glare of the fire he was building. Kal still had his sword and all the skills that made his race the fearsome lords of the sand sea. He’d have this man’s life, his water and his ride in that order.

But first, to get down from this precipice. Climbing down was out of the question. The convex face of the outcropping made that an impossibility. The same curved, sheer surface that prevented the orluk from reaching him would also be too precarious to descend by hand. Once again, he thought of the stout coil of braided rope that hung from the saddle of his dead mount.

Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.

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EDO NOIR FROM THE TOKUGAWA ERA

Edo, the 1760s. A junk dealer works his way through the back streets of Surugadai in midwinter, calling out for old rags and broken crockery. He is not a junk dealer. He is Mankichi, the Tenma detective from Osaka, and he has traced a missing woman to a shuttered house with a changed nameplate and bars on the windows. What he finds inside is worse than he imagined — and the people who put her there are already coming back.

The second book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto shifts the action from the open roads and waterways of the Kamigata to the warren of Tokugawa-era Tokyo, where the conspiracy runs deeper, the villains are closer, and nobody can be trusted. Two killers strike a deal over saké: one will murder the swordsman-monk Gennojō, the other will claim the woman he has been hunting since Osaka. Underground chambers, a great urban fire, a swordfight in total darkness on a plum-scented path, a deathbed confession that transforms a pickpocket, and a midnight ambush at Sensō-ji temple — this is the book where Yoshikawa Eiji earns his reputation as the Alexandre Dumas of Japan.

There are more threads in motion here than in any single volume of The Three Musketeers, and every one is pulled tight and tied off by the final page, when the heroes slip out of Edo under cover of darkness with the villains hot on their trail.

This is the first English translation of Naruto Hichō, the serialized six-volume novel that made Yoshikawa Eiji the most widely read author in Japanese history. Written exactly 100 years ago and never before available to English-language readers, it is the book that created the modern Japanese adventure novel. The Edo Scroll is the second of the book’s six volumes. The third volume, The Kiso Scroll, will be released next week.

Every Monday, Castalia Library will release a new original English translation in ebook format. Many of these works have never been translated into English before, or in some cases, are only available in outdated, abridged editions. Paid subscribers to this site will receive the weekly ebook in their email.

The Library Translations

1. Sanshirō by Natsume Sōseki

2. The Kamigata Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

3. The Edo Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

4. The Kiso Scroll by Eiji Yoshikawa

CHAPTER 12.4

The black man’s eyes narrowed, his mouth twisted in an effort to hide that he was intrigued. He turned to the rider to his right, eyes never leaving the man standing in the road, gesturing with his head for the rider to inspect the waterskin.

The bounty man stepped back a few paces as the rider rode closer and dropped down from the saddle to snatch up the skin. He kept his eyes steady on the leader of the hunting party. The dismounted rider turned the valve at the end of the skin to take a tentative sip and then a long gulp.

“You need to–” the rider began, holding the skin out to the others.

Their eyes flickered to the skin, momentarily leaving the bounty man.

It was all the opening he needed.

He pulled his pistol as he moved. A shot to the chest took down the dismounted rider who was flung off his feet, the waterskin flying from his hands. A single bound took him to cover behind the man’s thoat as the remaining men jerked their weapons clear. The thoat panicked as a fusillade opened up from the pair of mounted men. The bounty man ran alongside it as it bolted away, keeping it between himself and his attackers.

The black rider, weapon trained forward, rode with a hoot to come round in the wake of the fleeing animal. The remaining red man raced into the path of the bleating thoat to cut off its progress. They closed with the beast sliding to a stop in a thick haze of choking dust. The riders closed in from either side, sure to find their target trapped.

With a single leap, the bounty man bounded over the thoat, well clear of the balking animal’s bucking back. He’d left his carbine behind and had a pistol in each fist. At the apex of his arc the bounty man fired at the red rider, taking the man in the head to spill from the saddle, his skull a bloody ruin. The bounty man dropped to the ground in a crouch to fire both pistols into the back of the black man who was thrown hard against his mount’s neck to slide to the ground lifeless.

He holstered a pistol and stepped to the frightened thoat’s head and took hold of its bridle. He calmed it with kind words and strokes to its stout neck before leading it back to where the pack animals stood, ear stalks forward and stamping nervously.

He’d ride now to Yttrium rather than walk.

Signed First Edition collectors might be interested to see what the endpapers of the leather edition are going to look like. Here are the front endpapers:

Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.

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