CHAPTER 24.3

The next morning he ran a line of braided hide through the handles of the two of the amphorae. A full waterskin over his shoulder, he dragged the containers behind him into the sunlight. He trudged in the direction of the mountain pass to the west. When he’d walked until what he judged to be mid-afternoon he’d reached the top of the long slope. He rested for a moment, taking sips from his skin and scanning the land below.

A lazy circle of kite-like shapes whirled in the burning sky. He unsnapped his telescopticon and fixed it on a funnel of black carrion eaters swirling above some prey out of sight beyond a ridgeline. They were ugly creatures, leather-winged reptiles with long, fanged snouts, skulls covered with fine black scales for plunging their heads deep into dead flesh. He idly watched a pair wheeling about with a ropey length of innards or sinew clamped in their beaks. They clawed and beat against one another until one released his end. The other, triumphant, gulped down its meal as it banked away.

It was the remains of his thoat that they were probably feasting on, he reasoned. It had probably been visited by banths and other scavengers until there was only enough left for the worms and the birds.

He stood then and, using his hands, dug a shallow hole in the sand. Into this he placed the two amphorae. He covered them over and marked the spot with stones arranged in a rough cross shape. This would be the first stop on his way back to Yttrium over the badlands.

The bounty man shouldered the skin and returned the way he’d come at a steady trot. He would reach the refuge in plenty of time to fortify his sleeping chamber before the nightly march of the fascii.

The next day, he returned to the same spot with another amphora. He traveled what he thought was a good day’s progress past the cross of stones. It brought him past the remains of his dead thoat to the opening of the mountain pass. Here he buried the amphora as he had done the day before. He camped that night on a ledge of rock overlooking his freshly dug and marked cache.

He would, by stages, create watering stations that would allow him to cross the wastes to the northern range. There would be enough water in the buried amphorae at each station to water a pair of thoats he’d purchase in Yttrium. With these he would return and load them with tanks of water for sale in the city. Along the way he would replenish his caches to allow him to increase his pack train and thereby the amount of water he’d be able to carry for sale.

He fell into a sound sleep, dreaming dreams of water and gold.

He awakened to something prodding him in the chest. His eyes opened to a shadow over him blotting out the moonlight. A broad grinning face loomed toward him, a sneer twisting the flesh about its tusks.

“We’ve come a long way, little man,” Kal Keddaq said. “And now I go on alone.”

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

Subscribe to Castalia Library

CHAPTER 24.2

The sun was high as he stepped from the grand entrance and out onto the broiling sand. He had the full waterskin slung under arm and his carbine on his shoulder as he trudged away from the mountain in a direct line.

He reasoned that, while any fauna would steer clear of the Eye of Water no matter how tempted, some brand of edible animal must range even on as desolate a plane as this.

With the mountain at his back, he walked farther into the desolation. He scanned through the wavering heat haze at an uninterrupted horizon. This place was a lifeless cauldron that no degree of optimism was going to populate with wildlife. Not a bird crossed the sky. Not a reptile, like a darseen, crawled on the surface. No mounds of sand ants rose to interrupt the featureless surface of crushed rock.

Sweat streamed from every pore as he resigned himself that his carbine proved to be nothing but a useless burden on this hike. There was no game here. He undid the spigot on the waterskin and held it above his head for a good dousing. Water was the one thing he could afford to be generous with. It ran through his hair and down his bare shoulders raising whisps of vapor off his baking skin. He let it run until there was a puddle beneath his feet, the water being quickly absorbed by the thirsting sand.

He took the skin to his chapped lips to take a long drink from the water. As he capped it and lowered it back in place on his shoulder he felt a subtle movement at his feet.

In the damp sand beneath his feet something under the surface was roiling the surface. He tipped the skin to allow more water to stream down. Spiny legs emerged from the muck, clicking and swaying. They were followed by the fat bodies of eyeless beetles that rose from the sand to wallow in the shrinking pool. Scores of them, as big around as a clenched fist, formed a squirming pile as they fought one another for what remained of the vanishing moisture.

The bounty man smashed at them with his carbine butt. A greenish, creamy slime sprayed from where he fractured their shells. He mashed five of them before the others burrowed away out of reach, the sand smooth as before.

The carbine slung over his shoulder, he scooped up the dripping carcasses into his arms and trotted back to the mountain.

He skewered the beetles on the cleaning rod of his rifle and held them out to roast slowly over a fire. They proved to be bland but filling. They had a citric aftertaste that remained no matter how much he rinsed out his mouth. But he kept them down and awoke the next morning with no ill effects. He could live on these for now until he figured out a way to hunt farther afield.

And that led to the greater challenge he faced. Yes, he’d located the magnificent bounty of the Eye of Water. But it had been a torturous trek on his way to it. Here he sat on a rich resource set at the very center of a desert hell. He had no means of transportation, either beasts of burden or an airship, to bring his water to market. And to reveal its location meant losing it to rivals. And unless he wanted to spend his remaining days subsisting on bugs, he’d need to work out a solution.

He started the new day with a breakfast of more beetles raised by dousing the sand just outside his refuge’s entrance. He then retrieved some clay amphoras from a stack in what might have been a larder in its day. He carried them to the shore of the lake and cleaned out their interiors with handfuls of wet sand. These he filled with water and capped them. He built a stack of the amphorae just inside the entrance.

It was well into the afternoon by the time he’d completed this task and so he called it a day.

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

Subscribe to Castalia Library

Castalia House has just completed translating the first volume of the complete Casebook of Hansichi, Japan’s answer to Sherlock Holmes. Volume I: The Ghost Master, will be next week’s subscription ebook, in case that inspires you to take out a paid subscription here, and it will be available via Kindle and KU, as per usual.

We’re very, very excited about this project, very nearly as much so as we are about the Episodios Nacionales, because the Hanshichi stories are every bit as original and clever as the Conan Doyle stories that inspired them, and their setting in historical Edo renders them even more intriguing. It also happens to be the centenary of their original publication. And while there is one previous English translation of 14 of the stories, it’s an academic one, and the other 55 stories remained untranslated until now. Castalia House will publish all of them in seven volumes, first in ebook, then in print.

But rather than speak for him, why not let Okamoto-sama speak for himself, as he explains why he began writing the Hansichi stories almost exactly 100 years ago.

It was around April of 1916, as I recall, that I first conceived the idea of writing the Hanshichi Casebook. I had been reading Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories here and there for some time but had never read them straight through from beginning to end. One day, having occasion to visit the Maruzen bookshop, I bought three volumes — the Adventures, the Memoirs, and the Return — and read all three at a single sitting. A keen interest in detective fiction welled up in me at once, and I found myself seized by the desire to try my hand at the form. I had read Hume and others before, of course, but it was Doyle who truly struck the spark.

I was not yet free to begin, however. I went on hunting down more of Doyle’s writings and set about reading The Last Galley, The Green Flag, The Captain of the Polestar, the Round the Fire Stories, and various other collections of his short fiction, one after another. But I had my own work to attend to: I was preparing a serial novel for the Jiji Shinpō at the time, and my reading did not progress as quickly as I would have liked. From when I had started it took roughly a month, and it was late May before I finished the lot.

When at last I sat down to write, what struck me was this: no one had ever written detective fiction set in the Edo period. The tales of Ōoka and Itakura were fundamentally adjudication records, concerned with trials and judgments rather than with investigation, and it seemed to me that a story built around detection itself would make for something fresh. There was a further consideration. Writing detective fiction set in the present day carried the constant risk of lapsing into imitation of Western models, whereas committing to a purely Edo-period mode might yield something with a flavor all its own. I was fortunate in possessing a reasonable working knowledge of Edo customs, manners, and statutes, as well as the world of the city magistrates, their constables and inspectors, and the network of private thief-takers. Enough, I felt, to manage tolerably well.

On the third of June that year I began writing. First came “The Spirit of Ofumi,” forty-three manuscript pages; then “The Stone Lantern,” forty pages; then “The Death of Kanpei,” forty-one. At that point I found myself committed, from August onward, to a serial novel for the Kokumin Shinbun. Writing simultaneously for the Jiji and the Kokumin left no room for the casebook, and it was set aside. Then Mori Gyōkō, who was serving as chief editor of the literary magazine Bungei Kurabu, wrote to ask whether I might contribute something for serialization. I offered the three completed stories under the collective title “The Casebook of Hanshichi,” and they began appearing from the New Year’s issue of 1917. Through January and the months following I continued writing, adding “Upstairs at the Bathhouse,” “The Ghost Master,” “The Mystery of the Fire Bell,” and “The Lady-in-Waiting” to the series. In the magazine the run extended from the New Year’s number through the July issue.

This was my first venture into detective fiction, and I was conscious throughout of groping my way forward with rather uncertain hands. The stories found favor with readers, however, and Mori pressed me for more. Over the first half of the following year I produced another six installments. After that, commissions arrived from one magazine and newspaper after another, and the casebook grew into something far larger than I had ever foreseen. To date I have published approximately forty stories.

“Is old Hanshichi a real person?” This is a question I receive with some frequency. There were models of a sort, I will admit, but Hanshichi is in the main a creature of my imagination, and I would ask the reader to understand him as such. I am told that various people have claimed to know him, that his son has been variously identified as a dentist and as a watchmaker, and that one gentleman has gone so far as to announce that he himself is Hanshichi. These are, I must suppose, persons who happen to share the name and have no connection whatsoever to the old detective of my casebook. I should like to make that quite clear.

As I mentioned, the casebook first appeared in Bungei Kurabu in January of 1917, which, looking back, means more than ten years have passed. Writing these reminiscences for the pages of that same magazine, I find myself struck afresh by how swiftly the years have gone.

Okamoto Kidō

Tokyo, 1927

CHAPTER 24.1

The fascii trooped away from the rim of the basin as the first milky rays of sunlight beamed down to touch the water.

The bounty man lay prone to spy over the lip of the terrace, watching as the last of the hideous plants shambled its way out through the gap and into the daylight of the crater beyond. Only when they were all gone to root under the baking sun did he descend the stairs to the ground level.

There he found his goods, his rifle and waterskin, where he left them on the tiles of the entry chamber. By some miracle the plant men had not sensed his last hunk of thoat beef bundled in rags inside his saddle pouch. He took a long drink from the pool before filling his skin. After that he allowed himself two hearty bites of meat.

If he couldn’t find some solid nourishment in the next few days, he would die with an empty belly and full bladder.

He wondered what the meat of the fascii might taste like until he dimly recalled that their flesh was toxic. Even boiling would not remove the poisons. It was just as well as he could not imagine a way in which he might cull one of the monster plants without bringing the entire crop down upon him.

The edge of his hunger dulled for now, he decided to deal with his other pressing issue. Lack of sleep was as sure a way to death as lack of sustenance. He would need to secure a safe sleeping quarters, barricaded from the fascii or any other predator who might sniff him out in the night.

By the light of full morning coming down through the apertures, he did a more determined search of the rooms that lined the terrace all around. In one of them he found what had probably been a tabletop in its day. It was a rectangular slab of malachite that lay half buried in a heap of moldering detritus. He dragged it to a room deeper in the warren of dwellings and chose a room with an entrance only a bit more narrow than the tabletop was wide. After shifting it inside he set it in upright in place and found that it covered the opening securely.

This was to be his home, his fortress through the night. He saw that it even had what amounted to a natural chimney in its high ceiling, a natural flue that would allow him to have a fire to warm his quarters against the cold desert nights.

He spent the remainder of the morning clearing the debris from the room. After tossing the bulkier rubbish into a neighboring room, he did his best to sweep out the corners with an improvised mop of bundled cloth tied to the end of his carbine butt. He found what might have been a standing ceramic basin or commode in one of the rooms. This he brought to his chamber and filled it with stones until it was weighted but not so heavy that he could not shift it. This would secure the door against the jamb at night. It would not hold against a determined assault but would give him time to awaken.

His most fervant hope was that the malachite door would appear to be only another section of wall to any dull-witted fascii that might wander up here. And the plant creatures were really the only threat he could foresee. Their presence had long ago scared off any other marauders that might sniff him out.

As he completed his labor he felt his stomach growl. There was a pinching sensation, a twinge, that told him he was moving past mere hunger and into the realm of starvation. He need to find a source of meat and soon.

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

Subscribe to Castalia Library

CHAPTER 23.2

He was thark and his kind were the true masters of the land that lay between the cities of men. He would survive.

Kal struggled to his feet, resisting the call of sleep that he had denied for more days and nights than he could recall. From somewhere in the shadows at the base of the range that lay before him he heard a murmuring bleat. He unsheathed his sword and moved low toward the familiar sound. He kept a steady pace, taking care not to shift the crush of pebbles beneath his feet.

A small herd of wild thoats had taken refuge in a crevasse that ran down from the crown of the rock. He was on his belly now, crawling toward them, his blade returned to its scabbard. It was a collection of no more than ten animals. A bull with two mature females and a litter of juveniles of various ages. They were grazing on bulbous shoots of lichen that sprouted in the deepest shadows of the cleft’s interior.

If he startled them to flight, he knew the bull would stand firm to cover their escape. But they had to move past Kal to reach open ground. It was not food on his mind as he watched the barrel-chested male standing tall, eyes trained on the moon-lit opening of the crevasse.

He crept to the very edge of the herd until he could almost feel their hot breath, until his nostrils filled with the rich musk of them.

With a hoarse cry he swept his sword from its sheath and rushed the gathered animals. They scattered in panic. Their feet shook the ground like thunder, sending sprays of shale fragments flying to clatter behind.

Kal charged into their midst as they bolted past him, some brushing him nearly off his feet. He slapped at their rumps with a flat of his sword, howling a war cry as he raced on.

He sprinted now, the stampede opening a gap in which stood the bull turning about in search of the threat to his brood. With all the force he could muster, Kal’s feet left the ground in a leap that carried him to strike the side of the bull between the two sets of four legs on the flank facing him.

The large creature was taken by surprise, its feet sliding in the loose scree. Kal’s momentum had struck it high enough to unbalance it momentarily. The thark braced his feet into the gravel and shoved to press his advantage and felt the thoat begin to tip. It came down with a crash just as another beast like it had when he played this game as a boy. Tipping thoats was common sport among the Warhoon and he had not forgotten his winning methods.

The thoat rolled over on its side with a keening bellow, Kal atop it. The thark swiftly moved over the heaving body toward the head. He leaped down to straddle the animal just behind his head. He gripped his sword in both hands and held it over his head with the point of the long blade aimed down. With a mighty downward thrust he drove the blade into one of the bull’s nostrils at an angle across its snout that saw the point emerge from the opposite orfice.

His full weight upon the pommel, he hammered the blade into the scree beneath them effectively pinning the great beast to the ground. Should it try to move, to rise, it would only increase the agony of the saber now firmly jammed through the gristle of its fleshy septum.

Kal slid down from the quivering thoat, its eyes wide with terror and rage. With each snort came a bloody spatter from the painful, but not lethal, wound. In stark contrast to his cruel attack, the thark crouched by the thoat’s head and offered soothing words as he gently stroked its temples.

After a time the white-rimmed eyes grew calm, the breathing sonorous. In its tiny brain the huge animal knew that its tormentor was also its savior and, finally, its master.

The thark left the thoat pinned as it was to fashion a crude bridle and reins from a loop of rope he’d braided from strips of fresh hide. He returned to his new mount’s side, brushing hands down its neck with cooing words of comfort. At last the thoat dozed off, its chest rising and falling in a regular rhythm. Then Kal surrendered to sleep, his last thoughts were for the morning when he would free the now docile thoat and ride it along the rim of the range in search of a southward pass.

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

Subscribe to Castalia Library

The Gold Demon by Ozaki Kōyō is this week’s new translation.

Kan’ichi Hazama and Miya Shigisawa have loved each other since childhood. Raised under the same roof, pledged to marry, they share a bond so deep that Kan’ichi has staked his entire future on it. Then a wealthy man with a diamond on his finger enters their world, and Miya’s parents, dazzled by the prospect of a brilliant match, break the engagement. On a winter night at the beach in Atami, Kan’ichi confronts the woman he loves and demands she choose. She cannot answer.

What follows is one of the most famous scenes in all of Japanese literature, and the beginning of a long descent: Kan’ichi, shattered by betrayal, abandons his studies and remakes himself as a moneylender of terrifying ruthlessness, a man determined to worship the only god that never disappoints: money. Miya, married into luxury, discovers that wealth without love is its own kind of prison.

As the years pass, guilt, longing, and the memory of what was lost draw them toward each other again, but the damage may be beyond repair. The Gold Demon is a story about what happens to the human soul when love is weighed against fortune and found wanting. It is also a story about Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, a society in the grip of rapid modernization and new money.

This edition, translated by Kenji Weaver, is the first complete English translation of The Gold Demon ever published. Available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook on Amazon. The ebooks have already been sent out to the paid subscribers.

About the author. Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903) was the most celebrated Japanese novelist of his generation. A prodigy who founded the influential Ken’yūsha literary society while still a student, he became the star writer of the Yomiuri Shimbun. He began serializing The Gold Demon on New Year’s Day, 1897, and the novel became a national sensation, but his health was already failing. He died of stomach cancer on October 30, 1903, at the age of thirty-five, leaving the story unfinished, mid-sentence, in the middle of a letter. It is the most celebrated unfinished work in Japanese literature. The novel was adapted into seventeen films and has never been out of print in Japan.

Excerpt

“Therein lies a story fit for a novel. Not a lover: a husband. And this husband is one of the great moneylenders of the age before ours, a man named Akagashi Gonzaburō, lawless, rapacious, and on top of it all a prodigious lecher.”

“I see! Avarice and appetite struck a spark, and the candle is burning at both ends.”

The Ōshima tsumugi gentleman delivered this witticism with relish, and even the grave Arao could not help breaking into a smile.

“This Akagashi made a practice of using debt collection as a pretext to toy with women, and the number he debauched extends into quarters you would never expect. Now, the Beauty, she too fell into his hands. Originally the daughter of a poor samurai family, perfectly respectable, but the old fox took one look at this girl and his appetite stirred mightily. To make her his captive, he lent a trifling sum to her father. When the term came and the father could not repay, the old man said nothing, but lent again, and again, three or four times more. Then, when the hook was well set, he announced that he was short-handed at home and would be grateful if the girl could come work as a housemaid for a fortnight or so. Even if the father could see through the old man’s designs, it would have been humanly impossible to refuse under the circumstances.

This was six years ago; the girl was nineteen, the old man a bald skull of about sixty, so naturally no one suspected anything amorous. He got her into his house and made his proposition. He had no proper wife, just a dubious creature he kept as a cook and bedwarmer. Before long the girl had become a concubine in all but name. She begged to go home at first, but presently her father began sending word: Come back, come back — and she would not go. In time the truth came out, and the father, a man of samurai sensibilities, flew into a towering rage. There was a great scene of you are no daughter of mine and I am no father of yours. Then the old bald head sent word: If you object because she is a concubine, I will put her in the family register as my legal wife; give her to me. The father went to see her, and the girl said: Father, please consent — which only made the old man angrier. But in the end he gave her up as lost to some demon, and surrendered his only daughter to a moneylender ten years his own senior.

“After that, Mitsue won the old man’s favor entirely and took charge of the household. You would think she would send money home to her own father, but aside from the ceremonial gifts at the proper seasons, she would not part with a leaf or a twig. This too pleased the old bald head. Meanwhile the woman, having watched the moneylending business from the inside, found herself developing a taste for it, and when she looked at the family fortune and reckoned it as her own, she arrived at a resolution of breathtaking audacity: a single father was less valuable than money.”

“Astonishing,” murmured Arao, his expression clouding with something close to distaste.

“She is a quick-witted woman, no question. She absorbed the art of usury by osmosis, and eventually, when there were more cases than the old man could handle, she began going out on his behalf — more astonishing still. Then, the year before last, the old man suffered a stroke and has been bedridden ever since. She nurses him to the point of attending to his bodily functions, and all the while she runs the business single-handedly and thriving. As for the father, he died the year before the stroke, they say. He breathed his last lying on a thin rush mat spread over a bare plank floor. While her husband was still well, she would scarcely let the old man near. Heartless beyond description, yet somehow one cannot quite fathom her. Still, these are the facts. So: the husband is an invalid, and the woman has the field entirely to herself, swinging her arm with more vigor than ever. Hence the name ‘the Beauty.’

“Her age? Twenty-five, I am told, though she looks no more than twenty-two or -three. She has a sweet, soft voice and a gentle manner; she says little, but what she says is devastatingly well-chosen. She has an air of such refinement that you would think she might mistake a silver coin for a foreign decoration. Yet the skill with which she pushes for a renewal, or presses a promissory note to its crisis point — the suppleness and cunning of her technique — it is as though she uses some drug to melt men’s wills. I myself have been melted three times. Softness conquers hardness; for moneylending, a beauty is ideal. Give that woman a kingdom and she would be Cleopatra. She would destroy you.”

The Castalia House 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

• Trafalgar by Benito Pérez Galdós

• The Court of Carlos IV by Benito Pérez Galdós

• The Nineteenth of March and the Second of May by Benito Pérez Galdós

• Bailén by Benito Pérez Galdós

• Napoleon at Chamartín by Benito Pérez Galdós

• The Gold Demon by Kōyō Ozaki

To support Castalia House’s historic translation efforts and receive a translated ebook every week, become a paid subscriber to this substack. To receive a deluxe leatherbound book every three months, subscribe to Castalia Library.

Subscribe to Castalia Library

In the unlikely event it has somehow escaped you that Castalia House has published a new children’s fantasy novel, which, if it is successful enough, may eventually find its way into a leatherbound edition, this is an example of the deep lore lying underneath the text of Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood.

This small selection from the Chronicle written more than 500 years before the events of the book appears nowhere else, not in the book, not on any other site, and while it will almost certainly appear somewhere in print someday, for the nonce, only those who read this site will know the true history behind a very different sort of binding.

A Chronicle of the First Rising and the Binding of Mordreth the Undying

Being an Account of the Great Calamity that befell the Realm of Inghiltar in the Year of Our Risen Lord 1291, the Sacrifice of the Seven Wardens, and the Founding of the Royal House that thereafter claimed its Current Dominion over Inghiltar, Kerlow, and Wellys

Compiled from the ancient sources and set down for the instruction of those who would understand the origins of the institutions that govern the magical governance of the realm unto this day.

Book the First: Of the State of the Realm Before the Rising

In those days before the great calamity, the lands south of the Wall and west to the grey sea were governed not by any single crown but by the Compact of Aldworth, which had been sealed in the time of King Aldworth’s grandfather and had held the peace for the span of three generations. Under this Compact the seven Thanes of the realm — being the lords temporal and the lords of the vinculum, which is to say those who held dominion over both land and ley-line — swore to maintain the wards of their territories, to keep open the channels of the vinculum upon which all workings depend, and to submit their disputes to the judgement of the Warden’s Council, which sat in those days at Dunmore upon the northern marches.

Now the Warden’s Council was a body of seven learned men and women, appointed each by their respective Thane, whose office it was to oversee the maintenance of the great ward-network that protected the cities and the roads and the ley-line channels from such daemonic, sorcerous, and haematic threats as had plagued the land since the first workings were drawn from the deep earth. And it must be understood that in those days the ward-network was not as it is now — a seamless lattice of interlocking geometries maintained by trained practitioners and anchored in the ley-lines by methods refined over seven centuries of study. In those days the wards were cruder things, raised by individual masters in their own frameworks and joined to one another by agreements of craft and mutual obligation rather than by any unified theory. Each city had its warden, each warden had his method, and the methods did not always speak to one another, so that the ward of Dunmore, which was cast in the old northern style with anchor-stones set at the cardinal points, could not readily be joined to the ward of Ashmore in the south, which was woven directly into the ley-line channel by a technique that the Ashmore masters guarded as their particular treasure.

This want of unity was known. It had been remarked upon by the learned for a generation. But as is the way with known deficiencies in the governance of realms, the knowing of it and the mending of it were separated by a distance that no amount of urgency seemed able to close, for the Warden’s Council was constituted in such a manner that the approval of five of the seven members was required for any alteration to the established protocols, and no five could be found who agreed upon what the alteration should be, each being naturally inclined to favour his own method and to view the methods of others with the particular suspicion that practitioners of the magical arts reserve for those who practise the same art differently.

Into this state of learned paralysis there came, in the spring of the year 1291, the breaking of the Compact.

Book the Second: Of the Rise of Mordreth and the Breaking of the Compact of Aldworth

Of the origins of Mordreth, whom the chroniclers call the Undying, and whom the common people of later ages named the Dread King, the Usurper King, and the Warden of Souls, there is much dispute among the learned and little that is certain. The Thurlow school of historiography, whose founder maintains with considerable vigour that his predecessors have been inadequately attentive to the documentary evidence, holds that Mordreth was born in the northern territories beyond the Wall, in the wild lands where the ley-lines surface raw and unworked and the vinculum runs through the very stone of the mountains. Other authorities place his birth in the fenlands of the east, where the channels run slow and deep and the earth has a particular affinity for the preservation of things that ought not to be preserved. Still others maintain that he was no man at all but something older, something that had dwelt in the deep places beneath the Cairngorm massif since before the first men learned to draw vinculum from the earth, and that what walked abroad in the guise of a sorcerer-lord was merely the outermost expression of something vast and patient that had been waiting in the dark for a vessel through which to act.

What he did is not disputed.

In the spring of that year Mordreth broke the Compact. He did not break it by arms, nor by treachery in the common sense, but by a working of such scope and malice that the Warden’s Council had no framework within which to comprehend it. He turned men evil and wicked beyond all understanding. Not by temptation, not by persuasion, and not by the crude compulsions that hedge-sorcerers had employed since time out of memory to bend a weak will to their purpose. He bound them. He reached into the channel between flesh and vinculum — that intimate connection which is the foundation of all magical practice — and he seized it, and he twisted it, and he made it his own. The bond between a man and his own magical essence, which every practitioner since the first working has taken as sacred, inviolate, and as fundamental as the bond between blood and bone, Mordreth learned to sever and remake it in his own image.

The first of Mordreth’s bonded servitors appeared in the northern territories in early spring. They were not immediately recognised for what they were. A garrison commander at the border fort of Cragmoor reported to the Warden’s Council that three of his men had begun to behave strangely — that they no longer slept, that they responded to orders with a mechanical precision that lacked the usual complaints and delays that characterise the behaviour of soldiers, and that their eyes had changed, developing a flatness of expression that he compared, in his dispatch, to the eyes of fish lying upon the slab. The Council received the dispatch. The Council filed the dispatch. The Council’s existing threat-classification framework did not contain a category for men whose soul-bond had been externally seized, and what the framework could not classify, the Council could not act upon.

By midsummer there were hundreds. By autumn there were thousands.

The soul-bonded were not daemons. They were not undead raised from the soil. They were living men and women whose will had been severed from their bodies and replaced by the will of him who held their souls. They ate. They breathed. They bled when cut. But they did not speak unless spoken through, they did not sleep, they did not tire, and they could not be reasoned with, because there was no longer any mind remaining behind the eyes to whom reason might be addressed. They were, in the precise and terrible language of the Aldworth diagnostic that would later be developed to identify them, haematically restructured, their blood itself magically reworked to carry the signature of their dread master rather than the unique structure of their own selfhood. They were, in the plain speech of the people who suffered them, Y Gweigion, the empty ones. They walked and they fought and they served, and behind every pair of flat, dead eyes there was nothing but the will of Mordreth.

And they spread the curse of the binding. For this was the great horror of the First Rising, the terrible thing that made it unlike any threat the realm had faced: a bonded servitor could, by the shedding of its remade blood into the blood of another, extend the binding. This was not accomplished with the precision of Mordreth’s own insidious working, as the secondary bindings were cruder, weaker, and more easily broken by a skilled practitioner, but it held with sufficient force to overwhelm the spirit of an untrained man, and in a world where the vast majority of men and women had no training in the magical arts whatsoever, its force was more than sufficient.

The fall of Dunmore came in the autumn. The siege lasted — and on this point the sources are in genuine disagreement — either fourteen days or seventeen, the discrepancy arising from a dispute over whether the initial investment of the outer walls constitutes the beginning of a siege or merely a prelude to one, a question that Mr. Thurlow addressed in his monograph on the chronology of the siege, the binding of which has, by his own account, deteriorated. What is not disputed is that Dunmore fell, and that when it fell, the Warden’s Council fell with it, and that the members of that Council who were not killed in the fighting were taken and bound, and that the ward-network they had maintained, however imperfectly, fractiously, and with all the querulous jealousy of craftsmen who cannot agree upon a common method, ceased to function.

Twelve towns fell to Mordreth’s unholy forces that winter. The wards of the twelve towns, maintained by twelve separate wardens utilizing twelve separate frameworks joined by agreements of convenience rather than by any unified architecture, were broken by Mordreth’s wizards in the space of a single season. And as each town fell, more people were taken and bound, and the army of the empty ones grew, and the Dread King’s dominion spread across the land like a dark scum across the surface of a pond.

Our friends at Fandom Pulse published a story yesterday about the end of a well-respected deluxe publishing house that was essentially the American Folio Society of science fiction and fantasy.

Bill Schafer announced Monday that Subterranean Press, the Burton, Michigan specialty publisher he founded in 1995, will permanently close. The press intends to continue publishing through the end of 2027, which Schafer says “may bleed into 2028 as we wrap things up.”

What made SubPress different from every other publisher operating in the genre was its physical product. The company’s collector’s and limited editions were issued with author signatures, in both numbered and lettered states, and produced using high-grade book papers and bindings with matching slipcases and traycases. Numbered editions typically ran 500 copies. Lettered editions — bound in cloth-and-leather, housed in custom traycases — ran 26. The books were physical objects built to last a century. In an era when trade publishers are shrinking trim sizes, cutting paper quality, and pushing readers toward ebooks, Subterranean was doing the opposite. Every production decision treated the book as an artifact worth owning.

The press published approximately 45 titles a year and won awards including the World Fantasy, Locus, Horror Writers Association, and Hugo awards. Subterranean won the 2025 Locus Award for Best Publisher — meaning the announcement of its closure came one year after it received the field’s recognition as the best at what it does.

The broader context around this closure is not encouraging. Small Press Distribution, the nonprofit book distributor that had served small presses since 1969, abruptly closed in March 2024. Diamond Comics’ bankruptcy the following year pulled another distribution pillar out from under independent publishers — the same collapse currently bleeding Paizo dry. Between 2025 and 2026, many science fiction and horror publishers focused on the genre closed, either to submissions or entirely. The infrastructure that allowed specialty publishing to function — distribution networks, reliable fulfillment, the collector market that subsidized literary risk-taking — has been contracting for years.

Subterranean was one of the last major operators doing what it did at the level it did it. Grim Oak Press, PS Publishing out of the UK, and a handful of others occupy the same space, but none of them have the thirty-year back catalog or the author relationships that Schafer built. The Dresden Files collector’s editions alone, fifteen volumes in matching slipcases spanning 2008 through 2022, represent the kind of sustained publishing commitment that requires both capital and trust.

The genre has fewer places now that take physical craft seriously, fewer outlets for the novella, and one fewer press that operates on the premise that a book should be built to outlast the person who bought it.

The end of Subterranean Press is a genuine loss to the genre and to the industry. It’s no secret that the book industry is contracting, being squeezed by independent ebook authors and AI production on the supply side, Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited sucking up the majority of readers on the distribution side, and rising prices on the production and shipping sides.

So, it’s important, especially in light of Castalia Library’s considerable backlog, to reassure everyone that we are very healthy, very solid, and in a considerably stronger position than we were five years ago, three years ago, and even one year ago. Allow me to introduce the evidence.

That is a photo, taken yesterday, of some of the more than 550 copies of DE BELLO GALLICO, the Castalia History subscription book, that have been bound and have already been shrink-wrapped and palletized in preparation for being shipped to the warehouse in the USA next week. Unlike nearly every other publisher in the industry, our production costs have been methodically reduced over time, because, thanks to all the supporters who helped us build it, we now have a fully operational leather book bindery. We’re now making our own books; unlike Folio Society, Subterranean Press, and most other deluxe publishers, we’re not sending them out to be made for us. This is a significant and fundamental advantage.

And not only have our production costs been reduced over time, but the level of quality of books we’re producing is rising, even as the quality of the books we used to have produced for us has fallen. Longtime supporters will recall that the reason we originally decided to build our own bindery was because we observed, relatively early on, that the quality of the books we were receiving was not only well short of the Franklin Library standard to which we aspire, but was actually beginning to slip. Below, you can see an unretouched photograph of a book that is fresh off the crusher. Notice how clean even the most detailed stamping is, and the genuine texture of the real pigskin.

The books coming out of the Castalia bindery are observably, palpably, and tactilely better than anything we’ve produced to date. They’re not perfect, and they’re still not quite at the Franklin level, but we are continuing to improve them with each and every print run. For example, we have already identified three more things we are going to do to further improve our production processes.

Moreover, we’re now starting to receive inquiries from other publishers, both large and small. We’ve already completed one print run bigger than any of our current runs, and we’re knocking out a very small one for an independent author this weekend while we’re gearing up to produce A HISTORY OF THE FREEDOM OF THOUGHT for Castalia Library next week.

But the failure of one of our esteemed competitors underlines that these are challenging times, and we appreciate your ongoing support. If you want to know what you can do to help us, the two easiest things are a) buy our remaining books from print runs that remain in stock and b) subscribe to our translation subscription here on this site. Both of those things are effectively cost-free from our end, since the cost of producing them has already been paid, so it allows us to direct the income to shoring up the areas where the revenue won’t come in for a while.

It’s worth mentioning that even without a subscription you can obtain one of the 50 or so extra copies of DE BELLO GALLICO at NDM Express.

CHAPTER 23.1

Sun-drenched and weary, Kal Keddaq fell to his knees. He’d lost track of how many days he spent crossing the cracked plains now at his back. If he had regrets, it was far too late to entertain them. The only way for him was forward up into the rocks rising blue before him in the gathering dusk.

Two burning urges continued to drive him. His need to find this mysterious source of water the bounty man swore lay somewhere ahead. And his desire to repay Bhartee Bhar for betraying him. Both vied for prominence in his mind as wild thoughts of that ferocious reckoning swirled about in his fevered brain.

He survived the long, dry march by drinking the blood of creatures he’d slain. He brought them down with his rifle or fell upon them with his dagger. Sometimes he was fortunate enough to find a thoat or some other prey who did not void their bladder before dying. He drank these bitter quaffs as he traveled, utilizing the baggy organs as makeshift chagals.

He was thark. He was a rider of the western Warhoon. His breed survived in the wastes where all others died. He could keep up a trotting pace for all of a day and all of a night if he had to. Even so, his travels brought him to the extent of his stamina. Blood and piss might sustain him but he would need water before long. Real, pure untainted water free of acid or alkali or salt.

In addition to insufficient hydration, he was exhausted from the sheer struggle required to survive in these lands. To make the best time, he traveled along the ridges rather than in the arroyos and washes. Where he came to a cut he climbed down into it to continue up the other side and on his way south. Some fissures were narrow enough to leap. This allowed him to maintain a more direct route to the far mountain range.

This chosen method of travel also made him visible for long distances across the near-featureless landscape. More than once, he had to discourage attacks of banths by killing the largest of them, their sire, with a well-placed shot as they loped for him. On one hellish afternoon, he fought off an entire pride with gun and blade over the carcass of a freshly killed thoat. He placed his back to a wall at the end of a blind ditch. It was only the bite of his sword that discouraged them in the end. They retired leaving four of their own dead.

He ate their hearts.

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

Subscribe to Castalia Library

CHAPTER 22.3

It also resolved the mystery of how the lake’s level remained constant. The plant men consumed their share each night. The volume of the Eye’s issue went to create the sap that passed for blood in these beings.

And the absence of vermin. These carnivores would prey on anything with blood in its veins no matter if it were the size of a lice or as big as a thoat. As well, it revealed how this source of water had been lost to memory. Any creature lured to drink of the water would fall prey to the fascii. Soon, even the lowest of beasts would know this is to be a place of death.

The bounty man was careful to make no noise as he withdrew from the edge of the terrace. He had only the scantest knowledge of these things and no idea of the measure of their senses. The safest course was to assume that their sense of hearing, their sight and even a sense of smell were keen enough to make them able hunters. They had no cause to climb the stairs to where he was but could were he to give them a reason.

He spent a cold night in the confines of one of the chambers, wary of building a fire so as not to arouse the horde of vegetation below. He sat up facing a narrow opening to the room, his back to a wall and his handguns at his side. Little good firearms would do him if the plant men came for him in the night. Creatures without a heart or lungs could absorb every bullet he had and keep on coming. One of them could finish him. A gang of them would consume him in seconds.

When day came, and the fascii returned to their sunlit crater as he supposed they would, he would fashion some kind of barricade for this room. For the moment, all he could do is watch the dim outline of the doorframe for anything that interrupted its bounds.

Except in brief fits, he did not sleep that night.

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

Subscribe to Castalia Library

The fifth volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain

Napoleon at Chamartín by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It returns the protagonist Gabriel to Madrid in the closing weeks of 1808, as the imperial Grande Armée, recovered from its humiliation at Bailén, marches on the capital with the Emperor himself at its head.

Gabriel’s Inés has vanished into another world. Discovered to be the lost heiress of one of the greatest houses in Spain, she has been carried off to a palace on the Cuesta de la Vega and groomed for a marriage of fortune to the young Count of Rumblar — the dissolute, easily led Don Diego, who divides his nights between gaming dens, comic masonic lodges, and the salons of the manolería, where the celebrated greengrocer beauty known as the Zaina holds court. Barred from the palace and reduced to flinging pebbles at a lighted window, Gabriel shadows his rival through this doomed demimonde — while behind the marriage scheme moves the afrancesado Santorcaz, who has his own secret plans for Inés.

Around this private drama, Madrid braces for the French. The city throws up earthworks and musters a citizen militia, and Galdós fills these chapters with the comic Gran Capitán playing at general, the swaggering bully Mañara, and the whole brawling life of the lower town. Then comes the unthinkable betrayal that Galdós renders into one of the great crowd scenes of European fiction, and the mob, sold out and maddened, falls upon Mañara.

Madrid falls. Napoleon installs himself at Chamartín, just north of the city, and from his headquarters dictates the decrees that will remake Spain entirely to his design. Amid the wreckage Gabriel is captured and swept out of the conquered capital in a chained column of deported “patriots,” driven past the Emperor’s own coach on the road by Chamartín, and sent toward a city about to endure the most terrible siege of the entire war.

Napoleon at Chamartín is at once a panoramic chronicle of a nation’s capital under siege, a savage comedy of Madrid society, and a love story pursued through a falling city, narrated with the older Gabriel’s characteristic blend of self-deprecating wit and moral seriousness.

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

About the author. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Over four decades, he produced the Episodios Nacionales, one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written; only 8 of its 46 volumes have ever been translated into English. Pérez Galdós was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times but never won.

Excerpt

The corps of volunteers to which I belonged was assigned to defend the Puerta de los Pozos (the same gate later called the Puerta de Bilbao, at the top of the Calle de Fuencarral), and the adjacent garden of Bringas. Its fortifications consisted of a ditch of no great depth, a large parapet of earth and stones thrown up in the greatest haste, and six six-pounder cannon. The wall, which had no appearance of being impregnable, as those who have seen any of its heroic remnants will recall, had been loopholed along its entire length. The fortifications at the neighbouring gates of Santa Bárbara and Fuencarral were more or less the same. The place where the most considerable works had been raised was the Puerta de Recoletos, a monument that lasted until yesterday and that I need not locate for my readers with its little hill of the Veterinaria or its Augustinian convent, for beardless youths have known them. But let us return to the Pozos, the gate destined to be the theatre of our heroism, and begin by saying that on the night of the first of December we took up our position there, so convinced that we were about to be attacked that we stood to arms for long hours, prepared to sell our lives dearly.

The force was composed of these elements: some sixty soldiers, who, though not all artillerymen, served as such from dire necessity; four companies of old volunteers, among whom was mixed an irregular number of conscripts; and some eighty men of the honourable militia, whom the Gran Capitán commanded, or wished to command, whether with the title of sergeant, colonel, or general I cannot say, for any of these ranks would have suited him. The soldiers were cold and dispirited; the volunteers ablaze with patriotism and full of illusions, but so inexperienced that they could not hit the broad side of a barn, as the saying goes, despite having among them the great Pujitos; and finally the honourables could not contain their enthusiasm, notwithstanding that they were all men of peace and that some bore a good burden of years upon their backs, especially those of the company, or rather, the little band over which Don Santiago held sway, whose forces were composed of respectable porters and clerks from the office of the Accounts and Records.

As for officers, I must say that there were none in the strict sense of the word, for although among the troops there were brave and capable men, they did not know how, or did not choose, to make themselves obeyed by the civilians, with the result that each man did as he pleased and followed his own inspiration; and although my friend had pretensions to impose his authority, this never went beyond a tentative dictatorship that inclined more to the comic than to the tragic.

On the other hand there reigned great fraternity, and when, late in the night, we had the certainty that no French were anywhere in the vicinity, we gathered in the garden of Bringas, and lighting a great bonfire, held an agreeable gathering where patriotic subjects were discussed with the volubility, eloquence, and exaggeration proper to Spanish tongues. One man praised the defence of Zaragoza; another set the defence of Valencia against Moncey above all feats of arms ancient and modern; a third said that nothing could equal the affair at the Bruch; yet another extolled to the skies the return of La Romana’s troops; and at last there was one who, without denying these glorious actions their merit, set upon the horns of the moon a certain famous Portuguese campaign of 1762.

All fear having been dispelled, many women came to visit us, and among them Doña Gregoria was not wanting, nor Doña Melchora with her girls, nor the wife of Cuervatón, for it should be known that her husband served in the ranks of the honourables. And lest anyone suppose we were all people of no account, I will add that certain very great ladies came to visit their sons, brothers, or husbands, who were there rubbing shoulders with us, whether as volunteers or as conscripts.

We supped, we drank, we sang, we talked, and at last we were all seized with the desire to carry forward some feat of arms that very night. The first to put the idea forth was Don Santiago, and it was accepted at once with great rejoicing, the resolve being to make a reconnaissance up the road toward Fuencarral, to see whether the French were really as near as was believed. In the greatest haste the sortie was prepared, and at about two in the morning we set out, some two hundred men, in good order and commanded by an army colonel.

“What a fine thing it would be,” Fernández said to me, “if we were to stumble upon an enemy advance guard and rout them in the blink of an eye, returning to Madrid with a few thousand prisoners!”

“Anything is possible, my friend,” I replied, “for to the will of God nothing is impossible.”

The Castalia House 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

• Trafalgar by Benito Pérez Galdós

• The Court of Carlos IV by Benito Pérez Galdós

• The Nineteenth of March and the Second of May by Benito Pérez Galdós

• Bailén by Benito Pérez Galdós

• Napoleon at Chamartín by Benito Pérez Galdós

To support Castalia House’s historic translation efforts and receive a translated ebook every week, become a paid subscriber to this substack. To receive a deluxe leatherbound book every three months, subscribe to Castalia Library.

Subscribe to Castalia Library

CHAPTER 22.2

The bounty man pushed himself back onto his feet and rushed to re-enter the chamber in which the Eye of Water lay. From this vantage he watched the walking plants enter through a narrow opening. They moved at a slow but relentless pace to encircle the pool. They assumed places in the shallows all around in a daily migration they had performed for untold centuries past. As he watched they formed an uninterrupted wreath about the Eye of Water.

He could still make out their hideous characteristics even in the gathering darkness. Long stalks that served as legs at the base of their bulbous bodies. At their rear depended what might pass for a tail with a bulb spiked with wickedly curved thorns at its end. The torso tapered to a horrific caricature of a head. The head’s main feature was a single eye with the vertically set iris above a spicule that took in air through a sphincter like opening. The head was topped with spines or thorns that could bristle or lay flat as determined by the creatures’ miniscule brains; little more than a clump of ganglia driven by nothing aside from pure instinct. They were an organism created with the sole purpose of survival.

The most horrifying aspect of the species lay at the end of their long, segmented arms. Each of these tentacled limbs ended in a clawed appendage, perfectly round and ringed about by hooked talons. And in the palms of these repulsive blooms lay a hideous, circular mouth rimmed all about with chitinous fangs that the bounty man knew by reputation could bite through solid bone.

It made more and more sense as he considered it. These plant creatures spent each day in the sun, soaking in the gifts they received from the light. As the sun fell, they filed into the cavern where they set down roots in the fine sand to draw nutrients from the mineral rich water. It was an enclosed cycle that had been occurring and recurring with each passage of the sun for perhaps millennia or more.

The presence of the fascii potentially explained a lot. Certainly, the bones that covered the floor of the basin were past victims of the creatures. Maybe among those bones were the men who built this place and once lived in the dwellings in the rock. This was the fate of those long-dead people, he surmised. Perhaps they themselves cultivated these plant men as slaves or as mindless sentries to protect them from intruders. And then, one day, the balance tipped in the favor of the fascii who rose up against their masters.

Or, equally as likely, some ill wind blew seeds across the desert that took root in or near the Eye of Water. Unware that they had been invaded, the humans allowed the fascii to germinate in their soil and multiply. Before the ancient inhabitants could take defensive measures, the walking plants overwhelmed them and fed upon their flesh and marrow to grow their number to the forest of mankillers he could see below.

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

Subscribe to Castalia Library

CHAPTER 22.1

Taking advantage of the remaining daylight streaming in through the openings in the rock walls, the bounty man made his way around the terrace level.

He felt a slick surface under the thick layer of dust beneath his feet. Brushing some it aside revealed squares of decorative tile that covered the floor of the shelf ringing the pool below. His eyes adjusted to the gloom until he could make out man-made openings in the walls that ran around the interior of the terrace. The frames had been carved with figures and scrollwork as well as motifs of fruit and leaves. Clever artifices that were remnants of a time before whatever catastrophe fell upon this place.

What he could see of the interior of the chambers beyond the openings only compounded the mysteries. Debris covered the floors. Furniture, wooden frames long ago surrendering to rot, lay in heaps. Piles of broken crockery lay in drifts in every corner. More books, that turned into dry flinders at the touch, crowded the shelves that remained upright. Shreds of draperies hung in the still air, all color gone leaving them a lifeless gray.

It was time alone that had turned once fine furnishings to useless trash. He could see no sign of vermin of any kind. This was unusual. Even in a place as inhospitable as this there should be insects, reptiles, and other pests residing among the remains.

There was little of use in the chambers except for some wood with which he might build a fire. There were some sealed amphoras of oil that retained some viscosity. He spun a bit of moldering material at the end of what was once a chair leg of hard ebon wood and dipped it in the oil. By the light of this torch, he was able to further explore the warren of dwellings carved in the living rock.

As the torch began to gutter, he made his way back to the trace. By the time he did so he noted that the natural light coming through the apertures was dimmed now. The sun was setting and he still wished to see the deeper recesses where the terrace level rounded the back of the chamber. As he moved along the shelf he discerned a faint glow at the rear of the cavern. It was an unwavering source of light that he quickly determined was sunlight. It proved to be an opening out into what was a bowl-shaped depression open to the sky. This would be the crater of the once-active volcano that had created the isolated mound.

Above him the setting sun left behind a dome of violet in which the stars were beginning to appear. The eastern rim of the bowl was touched by the last light of the setting sun, a necklace of gold that shrunk as dusk set in. He could see in the failing light that the sloped interior crater had once been fashioned into terraces. Perhaps for the growing of food.

He walked with caution to the edge of the shelf to peer down into the bottom of the crater. It was blanketed end to end with wavering shapes. It looked like the tops of a forest moving in the wind. Or what he imagined a forest might look like. Trees were a thing long extinct. He had only read of them in old books and seen illustrations and old mosaics in his youth. It was difficult to imagine a verdant woodland could have survived in this bleak isolation.

The branches of the trees swayed back and forth as though stirred by evening zephyrs. Only there was no wind. The branches below seemed to shift independent of any outside agency. Lying on his belly now, he raised his telescopticon to his eye to scan the crater floor. His mouth went dry at the sight that filled the lens.

What he had first imagined were trees was something far more sinister. He watched in dread fascination as the movement of the beings below became rhythmic, cadenced. What he thought were trees now moved with purpose over the crater’s floor. They moved with determination, marching in unison toward an opening in the near wall of the crater.

Fascii.

The plantmen of Barsoom.

Barely sentient abominations that towered above men. Though vegetable by genus, they were capable of movement. In short spurts they could move as swift as any predator. And they were indeed predators. They subsisted primarily on the minerals in the soil but were equally inclined to drain the blood from any living creature unfortunate enough to encounter them.

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

Subscribe to Castalia Library

A few days ago, we mentioned that we would soon be able to provide more accurate images of Julius Caesar’s DE BELLO GALLICO, the Castalia History work that is being bound at the Castalia Bindery this week. Next week both it and DRACULA will be shipped over to the US warehouse for global distribution, so there is a very good chance that History and Library subscribers will have their next book the first two weeks of July.

These things take time. We are not producing Amazon ebooks here. Unfortunately, due to the impatience of some of the non-subscribers who clearly didn’t understand that our putting a book on sale for non-subscribers is not synonymous with the book actually being available for shipping, we will no longer be offering sales to non-subscribers before the books have reached the warehouse. We’re working on a system that will permit subscribers to do so, but until that is available, we cannot put the additional 50 or so books that remain in the print run on sale.

UPDATE: We are working on a solution with NDM Express. Details to follow in a future post.

Once the cases were complete, we were able to begin the foil stamping. The design of DE BELLO GALLICO is a little complicated due to all of the intricate leaves that make up the perimeter frame, but the stamping on the pigskin was very clean, with no visible pinholing.

The bookbinders have become increasingly adept at stamping an entire print run without significant errors. Each case is examined for visual defects before it is passed for the hubbing process.

The spine hubs on the pigskin are both clean and prominent. We haven’t quite reached the Franklin Library standard yet, but we are observably making progress in that direction. This is a thinner volume than DRACULA, so you can see that it required a different spine tool. We have a complete set that ranges from fairly thin to wide enough to accommodate an 800-page monster. The image below is just the case, not the complete book; you can tell even without being able to see the gilded pages because it lacks the French groove that we now incorporate into most of the books we bind.

Below is an updated mockup made with the actual front stamp design, the actual spine design, the correct spine hub positioning, the correct color of the leather, and the bindery’s signature 10mm French groove. We should have photographs of the real books available early next week.

As you have probably noticed, we are now fully operational and are actively reducing the backlog at a rate of 2-3 books per month. While we are very eager to eliminate the backlog and even get ahead of our subscription schedule, we absolutely will not risk sacrificing any quality in order to do so. And for those who might question why we elected to stop manufacturing at the previous bindery before ours was operational, I encourage you to review the pictures at this link. Keep in mind that happened one year after we made our decision.

The book blocks for THE HISTORY OF THE FREEDOM OF THOUGHT, LOSING MILITARY SUPREMACY, and THE HISTORY OF FLORENCE are already in the bindery and will be the next books bound.

Subscribe to Castalia History

CHAPTER 21.3

Fully lifted by the rippling waves, he felt his feet leave the bottom and panicked. His head plunged under the water, and he fought with flailing arms to rise to the surface. The weight of his bandolier and holstered guns were drawing him farther down the shoal into the deeps of the lake. He turned, slashing at the water, until he felt his feet on firm ground once more.

Exhausted, he dropped to the black sand. He turned to lie on his back, amused by the irony of having found the source of water he sought only to drown in it. He studied the grid set in the ceiling above and found his curiosity stoked to life once more. After eating a portion of the remaining thoat meat, washed down with more water, he looked for a way up to the top of the domed chamber.

He found he could walk the circumference of the lake along the shore. It appeared to be almost perfectly circular and entirely contained in this vast cavern. He wondered at the source of the gentle waves as he could discern no spring that fed the pool. When he judged by the curved shore to that he was nearly halfway around the body, he found a niche that led him to steps hewn into the rock. These led up to a stairwell that followed along the arc of the wall in a series of flights and landings. By this path he reached a shelf of rock, a natural mezzanine that oversaw the lake below.

Crouching at the lip, he could look down to more closely examine the grid he’d seen from below. It was made up of heavy iron beams thicker around than his arms could span. These rods were crusted over with ages of rust and mineral deposits that had dripped from above. Over some sections of the grid he could see where rocks, some the size of boulders, had fallen to to be caught on the protective screen. That was the purpose then, to prevent any larger stalactites that might break from above falling into the water.

He dropped to his belly to gaze at the full expanse of the lake far below. Outside, the sun was at its zenith. Shafts of brilliant light beamed down directing from the apertures above. The light was cast back from the pearly bottom of the lake. Tendrils of vapor rose from wherever the shafts touched the surface. The water was clear as glass and he could clearly see to its depths, down to the bottom of the bowl-shaped depression.

From the center of the body, he could see the ripples emanating all about. There was a roiling of the water there, a domed shaped iris created by water rising from the rock to feed the great pool from a source deep in the shale. A kind of reverse whirlpool.

The Eye of Water.

This presented an evident mystery. If the lake was continually replenished from a subterranean source then it should have overflowed its banks long ago. The chamber below should have filled to the brim and the excess flowed out to the outer chamber and even out onto the sands.

He imagined that in its day, the people who inhabited this place were drawing daily from the reservoir as they used the water for their own use as well as for commerce. He could imagine that this endless supply of water might have been used to irrigate fields. In his mind he pictured a verdant landscape all about the dead volcano. Perhaps even dwellings, a community built from the liquid bounty that blessed this place. All of it gone, eroded by time and the elements until all that lay about the lonely mountain was dead sand.

Perhaps the level of the water remained constant through evaporation. That made no sense to him. More likely there was a drain of some kind that he’d yet to find, a channel that carried the water back underground to some vast pool or flowing river hidden deep in the mantle rock.

After retrieving the telescopticon from its pouch, he fixed it on the wavering surface below. As he conjectured, the water was free of either flora or fauna. No fish swam in it. No lichen grew in its shallows or along its shores. The water of the lake was free of any contaminants other than natural minerals deposited from its environment.

He adjusted his vision as well as the focus of the lens to study the floor of the lake. He concentrated his vision through the undulating surface to determine what composed the base of the body.

Beneath the rolling wavelets was a gleaming carpet of bones, a blanket white as snow of countless species; animal, man and thark.

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

Subscribe to Castalia Library

Castalia Library is very pleased to belatedly announce that after some internal debate, the May-August 2026 subscription book for Castalia History is the ANABASIS of Xenophon, one of the great military histories of all time.

Anabasis is the most famous work of the Ancient Greek professional soldier and writer Xenophon. It gives an account of the expedition of the Ten Thousand, an army of Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger to help him seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II, in 401 BC.

The seven books making up the Anabasis were composed c. 370 BC. The story of the army’s journey across Asia Minor and Mesopotamia is Xenophon’s best known work and “one of the great adventures in human history”.

Traditionally, Anabasis is one of the first unabridged texts studied by students of classical Greek, because of its clear and unadorned prose style in relatively pure Attic dialect.

In other news, History subscribers will be pleased to know that DE BELLO GALLICO is being bound this week. The pigskin leather cases have already been made, they are now being stamped and hubbed, and there should be about 40 spare ones that will be available for purchase by non-subscribers.

Below is a mockup made with the actual front stamp design, the correct color of the leather, and the French groove that we are now adding to the books bound at the bindery. We should have photographs of the real books available early next week.

THE HISTORY OF FLORENCE book blocks are already in the bindery and will be one of the next books bound.

Subscribe to Castalia History

BAILÉN by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation.

The fourth volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain

July 1808. Napoleon’s armies are invincible. They have crushed Austria, humiliated Prussia, and forced the Tsar to the negotiating table. Now twenty thousand French soldiers occupy Andalucía, and all Europe waits for Spain to submit as every other nation has submitted.

Gabriel Araceli, a young Spanish soldier who survived the slaughter of the Dos de Mayo and the French firing squads in Madrid, rides south with the ragged army assembling to challenge the Empire. Around him march raw recruits, militia volunteers, and hard-bitten regulars — fourteen thousand men with short rations, blistering heat, and the knowledge that no army on the continent has yet beaten Napoleon in open battle.

But Gabriel is fighting two wars. On the parched plains before Bailén, he faces Dupont’s veteran infantry and the terrible French marines. In the intercepted letters he carries in his coat, he faces something worse: the news that Inés, the woman he loves, is to be made legitimate and married to another man — his own commanding officer’s son. While the armies clash under a pitiless Andalusian sun, while men kill each other for a mouthful of water and the guns fall silent for want of powder, Gabriel must reckon with the possibility that victory on the battlefield will mean defeat in everything that matters to him.

Bailén is the fourth novel in Benito Pérez Galdós’s Episodios Nacionales, the great historical cycle that follows Gabriel Araceli from Trafalgar through the upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars. In this volume, Galdós delivers one of the finest battle narratives in nineteenth-century fiction — the engagement that shattered the myth of Napoleonic invincibility and changed the course of European history.

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

About the author. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Over four decades, he produced the Episodios Nacionales, one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written; only 8 of its 46 volumes have ever been translated into English. Pérez Galdós was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times but never won.

Excerpt

The estate of that house was handsome, though much inferior to those of other families of Andalucía and Castile; but Doña María counted upon its becoming one of the first in Spain once her son inherited the mayorazgo of certain collateral relations who lacked direct heirs. To bring this about, Doña María had conceived a vast project upon which, as the reader will see, the perpetuity of that house and lineage and illustrious seat depended through the long course of the centuries; she proposed to marry her son to a young woman of the family of those relatives who at that time held the mayorazgo, and who resided in Córdoba, though their habitual dwelling was Madrid. The moral rather than physical childhood of Don Diego was no obstacle, for it was then the custom to marry off the mayorazgos as early as possible, wedding them while they were still fresh and before they had time to poke their noses through the cracks of the door of the world, where, as Don Paco maintained, there was nothing but perdition and vanity for youth, because the sweetnesses of the cup of pleasure lasted but fleeting instants, while its bitter dregs persisted for many a long year.

But someone upset, or at least postponed, the plans so wisely laid by Doña María and her illustrious cousins; that someone was Napoleon, Emperor of the French, when he cast his eyes upon this jewel of the continent and invaded it. The war, that holy war of which history shows us no other example in our times, obliged the suspension of this as of other projects, and Doña María, who was Aragonese and a great patriot, found it necessary to summon Don Diego and, from the height of her chair, to strike him with terror by means of the following words, which were afterwards confided to my discretion by Don Paco:

“My son, I love you dearly. Your death would not only kill us with grief but would annihilate our house and lineage. You are my only male child, you are the soul of this house, and yet you must go to war. Valiant blood runs in your veins and I am well assured that despite your few years you will leave in a worthy place the name you bear. All young men owe themselves to their king and their country in these terrible days when a miserable foreigner dares to conquer Spain. My son, I love you deeply; but I would rather see you dead on the field of battle and trampled beneath the hooves of French horses than have it said that the son of the Conde de Rumblar did not fire a shot in defence of his country. The sons of every noble family of Andalucía have already enlisted in the army of Castaños; you shall go too, with a retinue of servants whom I shall arm and maintain at my own expense for as long as the war may last.”

As she spoke these words the marble face of Doña María did not alter; but Asunción and Presentación wept without restraint. The young man thrilled with excitement at finding himself sent to take part in a game he did not know and which, seen from a distance, is very pretty.

The Castalia House 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

• Trafalgar by Benito Pérez Galdós

• The Court of Carlos IV by Benito Pérez Galdós

• The Nineteenth of March and the Second of May by Benito Pérez Galdós

• Bailén by Benito Pérez Galdós

To support Castalia House’s historic translation efforts and receive a translated ebook every week, become a paid subscriber to this substack. To receive a deluxe leatherbound book every three months, subscribe to Castalia Library.

Subscribe to Castalia Library

CHAPTER 21.2

When he felt the sun warm the sand around him, he awoke and drained the dregs of his water from the skin. His stomach roiled at the thought of food. He left behind the remaining shank of meat as he made his way farther along the base of the mound. He retained his carbine though, holding it cradled in one arm.

The wall of runes was visible now in the morning light and stretched higher and wider than he could see in any direction. He resisted the urge to read all of the ancient words. Their presence meant that men were here long ago. Perhaps the same breed of men who piloted the wrecked airship he and the thark found back in the canal.

Though wasting, he broke into a trot, brushing a hand on the wall as he made way along the gently curving edifice. The carved panels of writings ended at a columned entryway, the columns fashioned into human figures many times his height. They appeared to be that of a man and a woman though time and the desert winds had abraded the finer features. They guarded an aperture partly obscured by a dune that had blown against the walls of the recessed entry.

He clambered up the sand on hands and knees until he reached the top where he crawled through a gap between a massive arched crossbeam and the crest of the dune. Once through into the dim interior, he tumbled and slid down the lee side of the slope until he reached a level stone floor. The surface was smooth beneath his boot soles. He bent over and ran his hands over the floor. It was set with tiles and each embossed with a design he could not discern in the dimness.

He rested then, closing his eyes against the dark. When he re-opened them he realized his sight had improved. Sources of light beamed down into the chamber he’d found himself in. Recesses had been cut into the walls and vaulted ceiling. These allowed natural light in that illuminated the interior enough for him to navigate. The shimmering luminescence revealed massive columns like the ones that guarded the entrance. These were unmarred by time, their details clear.

Images of Issus and others of the godly pantheon entwined with images of plants and animals. Some the bounty man recognized, others he had never seen in his life. He assumed they were either long-extinct or creatures of the artisan’s fancy.

At the far end of the chamber was a broad archway that appeared to lead down farther into the heart of the mountain. He moved toward it over the tiled floor, avoiding piles of rocky debris that had fallen from the cavernous ceiling in ages past.

As he neared the archway he felt an unfamiliar sensation on his skin. He touched an arm and his fingers came back clammy. He stopped a moment and drew a lungful of air in through his nose. The air was sweet and musty at the same time, heavy with moisture. There was a damp fug in the air, and it was then he heard the sound of water dripping.

Droplets cascaded down on him, dropping from the spines of stalactites above. He stretched out his arms and arched his head back to enjoy a phenomenon he had never before experienced.

Rain.

As he continued toward the arch he saw an aurora swirling beyond the opening. A phantom glow shimmering against an unseen surface. He stumbled into a run then. Rushing beneath the vaulted entryway, his boots slipped on a slick surface and, for a moment, he was airborne. He landed to roll down a flight of steps carved from the rock. He landed on a sloped surface of finely ground sand and pumice to slide to a stop.

Dazed, it wasn’t until he raised himself on his arms that he realized that he had come to rest in water that covered him to his knees. In wonder, he stood and looked out across a subterranean lake that stretched into the darkness further than he could see. It moved gently, lapping on the shore with a ripple as regular as a heartbeat.

He dropped into a crouch and drank his fill from cupped hands. It was sweet and pure as the contents of the tanks he found on the wrecked airship.

He had no way of gauging the depth of the water. All he knew was that this was a greater body of water than he had seen in all of his life. A greater expanse of open water than anyone on this planet had seen in a thousand, thousand years.

The floor of the lake was white and reflected the scant light allowed through apertures in the domed ceiling. The light danced gemlike, casting kaleidoscopic specks of light over every surface. It revealed some kind of grid mounted high above the water, a system of pipes or grates whose purpose was not immediately clear.

The bounty man immersed himself into the water with a gasp. For the first and only time in his life, he was engulfed in liquid. He allowed himself to be buoyed along, the toes of his boots scraping the pebbled surface of the sloping bank.

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

Subscribe to Castalia Library

CHAPTER 21.1

He drank his fill from the water skin as well as a double portion of raw thoat steak. If he found no water at the end of his quest, if the promised lake was dry as a bone, it would not matter that he gorged himself.

Restored, he began his march toward the lonely peak. It lay dark across a sea of white sand under the hammer of the sun. The surface below his feet was like a mirror, reflecting every blistering ray up at him with a furnace heat. His body was now streaming away the precious water he’d consumed in a sheen of sweat that soaked his loincloth and harness. In addition to the heat, the blinding light threatened to rob him of sight. He wrapped a strip of cloth over his eyes to view the world through gauze.

Only sheer will drove him on. Will and curiosity. He desired more than anything to see this wonderful Eye of Water. Every step carried him closer to what might be a miracle of nature or an empty lie. Or even a relic, robbed of its remarkable properties by the ages.

He stopped to rest, not daring to drop in place. He knew that to take to his knees would mean never rising again. With a bitter laugh, he turned the spigot on the waterskin and held it above his head. A stream of water doused him, cooling his skin as it evaporated in a thick cloud of white vapor. It didn’t matter now. He’d either refill the skin at the fabled pool or die on its arid shore.

It was late in the day as he stumbled on after his lengthening shadow to the base of the mound. The sand was littered with black rocks that he knew to be the remnants of volcanic activity. The face of the conical slope that loomed above was formed by vertical streaks, the trails of molten rock that had run down the sides in molten streams and cooled long ago. It explained why the mountain sat solitary on a featureless plain. Some long-ago eruption created this rent in the earth. The peak that rose above the desert was like scar tissue. The twin pillars that soared above were all that was left of a tremendous slab of granite pushed upwards by massive tectonic forces. Millennia of winds had torn at it and shaped it into its present form.

The bounty man walked about the foot of the slope, examining the face in search of an entrance or some other sign that this was more than just a heap of lifeless rock. He pulled down the band of cloth from his eyes to lie draped about his neck. Once away from the sunward side, he stopped to take a seat atop a slab of pumice worn smooth by time. He was grateful for the shade offered by the mountain, grateful to be out of the glare of the setting sun.

He came too with a start, unaware that he’d drifted off into sleep or slipped into unconsciousness. It was all the same now as he walked as in a dream, compelled forward by a forgotten urge. The sun had set and the dome of rock was just more blackness in a world of black.

His hands ran across an upright section of rock. He was growing weak and needed the support to remain standing. The wall was smooth under his fingers, cold against his fevered flesh. His burdens fell from his shoulders to the cool sand drifted against the rock face. He leaned against the wall, struggling to remain on his feet. His hands ran along the wall, his fingers finding the stone deeply etched. His touch revealed that these features were not a results of nature. Regular rows of figures or patterns were scored into the rock.

Dropping to his knees, the bounty man retrieved the device he used to spark fires. He removed the band of cloth from about his neck and lit the end like a taper. In the wavering light he saw a wall before him covered in rows of runic letters. Each character was the length of his extended hand. The columns of text ran up the wall many times his height to disappear in the gloom high above.

The section he could read was part of an imprecation and a blessing to the god Issus and made mention of the waters of the River Iss and the bounty it offered. He moved further along the wall, reading as much as he could until the last of the rag was consumed by the flames. His hands ran over the smooth surface freeing sand that had become trapped in the engravings. The final passage he was able to discern made mention of the Eye of Water. It welcomed all to its shore to drink of a gift from the gods.

He collapsed then, huddled against the wall until he surrendered to weariness.

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

Subscribe to Castalia Library

CHAPTER 20.2

Five more days brought him through the pass that snaked up and through a gap in the gray rocks. He’d killed the pack thoat three days prior. His mount served to carry slabs of the slain animal as well as their dwindling water supply. The reduced contents of the skin sloshed back and forth with each movement. The sound was maddening to the bounty man’s ears.

His mouth and throat burned for a drink between rations. His joints ached for lack of water. He saw the world before him through lids gritty with dust and scant tears to wash them clean. The animal he rode was suffering as well and would not last another day on the meager amount of hydration he allowed it.

The trail topped off a slope of scree with only open sky visible behind it. He dropped from the saddle to lead the thoat upwards by its lead reins. The beast protested, bellowing its objections in a weak squawk. He set his feet and pulled with all his weight but only brought the thoat to the knees of its four front legs. They’d come only halfway up the rise and the thoat would go no further.

The bounty man slid back to where the animal was now keeling over onto its side. He dropped to his knees by it to draw his curved dagger. The thoat bled out quickly from the slash across its neck, the blood thick and black. He was tempted to drink from the rivulets but knew the salty content would only further enflame his thirst and leech away whatever moisture remained in his muscles and joints.

After unpacking what goods he deemed essential, he climbed the hill under the weight of his rifle, bandoliers, water skin and what remained of the animal he’d slaughtered days before.

As he climbed, he felt his strength being sapped away with each lumbered step. The crest of the hill swam before him against the painful glare of the sky. The light stabbed into his brain until it began to flicker to black then white again and back to black. He felt his senses leaving him as he crested the slope. His legs gave way beneath him and the ground rushed up to embrace him in a scalding darkness.

It was full dark when he awoke. A chill ran through him causing his limbs to convulse. The stars seemed to explode against the black sky. They looked down on him with cold disinterest from a firmament that had not known clouds in his lifetime. He fought down the urge to close his eyes again, to surrender to the crushing weight of weariness, and forced himself onto his knees.

From this vantage point, his arms shaking with the effort to hold him off the ground, he surveyed the way ahead.

The trail had brought him to a broad mesa. Before him lay a flat plain interrupted only by a mound of land that lay with its features concealed in ebon shadow. With an agonizing effort, he raised himself to stand on trembling legs. His eyes were fixed on the solitary feature that stood alone in the distance.

He remained that way, wavering, to stare at the black shape defined only as a gap in the star-spattered firmament, a blot on the universe.

It was not until Cluros, the smaller of the two moons, rose into the sky that he could make out more details of the lonely hummock before him. Blue shadows danced down its slopes. An aura shimmered about it in an azure corona.

The bounty man squinted hard, his entire being fixated on the details emerging as Thuros, the larger moon, arced overhead in its race with its sibling. The ghostly light defined ledges and rifts in the face of the mountain that emerged from the shadows in stark relief.

And chief among the details the moons revealed were a pair of rounded spires jutting up into the sky like two fingers raised in silent defiance.

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

Subscribe to Castalia Library