We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Mountain Crown, a brand new epic fantasy novel by Karin Lowachee, available now from Solaris.
War between the island states of Kattaka and Mazemoor has left no one unscathed. Méka’s nomadic people, the Ba’Suon, were driven from their homeland by the Kattakans. Those who remained were forced to live under the Kattakan yoke, to serve their greed for gold alongside the dragons with whom the Ba’Suon share an empathic connection.
A decade later and under a fragile truce, Méka returns home from her exile for an ancient, necessary rite: gathering a king dragon of the Crown Mountains to maintain balance in the wild country. But Méka’s act of compassion toward an imprisoned dragon and Lilley, a Kattakan veteran of the war, soon draws the ire of the imperialistic authorities. They order the unwelcome addition of an enigmatic Ba’Suon traitor named Raka to accompany Méka and Lilley to the mountains.
The journey is filled with dangers both within and without. As conflict threatens to reignite, the survival of the Ba’Suon people, their dragons, and the land itself will depend on the decisions—defiant or compliant—that Méka and her companions choose to make. But not even Méka, kin to the great dragons of the North, can anticipate the depth of the consequences to her world.
Even the air around Fortune City tasted dirty. Méka felt it like a mucus of smoke and waste on the flat of her tongue. She spat on the deck of the river barge. The Mountain Guard who’d climbed aboard to check the papers of the passengers watched her do it, his lips curling with a familiar disdain. She’d witnessed the same expression on the crew of the whaling ship that had brought her north to this island that was once her home. As if she no longer belonged in the land of her ancestors.
She didn’t look away from the Guard and he approached with the stiff-legged swagger of a typical Kattakan. His energetic presence was a hollow clang to her, an empty bucket struck by the hammer of the cosmos. The infestation of Kattakans to Ba’Suon land created ceaseless echoes of nothingness. Even the wind carried a fervor of life these Kattakans lacked. She had not felt such absence among so much living nature in ten years. Despite her parents’ warning before she embarked on this journey, the absence was nearly impossible to tolerate, as was the condescension and arrogance from people like this Mountain Guard.
His sun-lined eyes roved from her shorn hair to the gray dappled suon scales stitched into the wool and fox-fur collar of her coat. His gaze lingered on the rifle slung on her shoulder. “You plan to use that, Bastard?”
“No.” Her people were not prone to violence but this was not a language Kattakans understood.
He grunted and continued his staring assessment of her attire. She was the only Ba’Suon aboard the barge; all the other passengers were the same ilk of desperate homeless hoping for a better opportunity in the gold fields or in town. The clog of boats along the river, both steam and paddle of every size and craftsmanship, seemed unceasing in its traffic. So many foolish individuals hoping to strike it rich, or exploit one another, or perhaps with little inclination to find another path. She was now a part of the throng, not for the gold but for the suon, though perhaps no less foolish for the journey no matter how necessary the rite.
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The Mountain Crown
The Mountain Crown
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The Guard waved his hand at the chains crisscrossed over her chest. “What’re those for?”
“I could show you but I’d need to call one of those suon closer.”
Four of the creatures circled overhead in muted ellipses, dull shadows against the canvas sack color of the sky. Dragons, the Kattakans called them, but they were suon: creatures of fire to the Ba’Suon. Perhaps these suon were wild but their proximity to Fortune City and the subdued waves around them told Méka they were probably enslaved to the gold like the indentured people digging below. They were no threat, they barely disturbed her senses for how tethered they were to the work of these Kattakans, but the Guard glanced upward quickly as though one of them could breathe flames onto his head at any moment. He caught her watching his reaction and flicked a hand at the black twin blades hitched to her belt. “And those?”
She stated the obvious. “I’m Ba’Suon. These are Ba’Suon blades. If there is some sort of law against them, you’re welcome to try and take them from me.”
He was armed, a pistol in a holster on his belt, his navy woolen jacket a ragged testimony to the weather he endured here during harsher months. He squinted into her eyes as if he expected her to look away. She didn’t. This was not a Kattakan used to taking the initiative. He seemed to come to a temperate conclusion and held out his hand. “Papers.”
She delivered them from the pouch at the front of her coat. He read through both sheets, front and back, staring a heartbeat longer at the stamps issued by his Kattakan government and the attached card from the government of the southern isle from which she’d traveled. Both supposedly gave her permission to cross the border, but she had known coming here for the first time since the end of the war that there was no telling what agreements would stand. She had volunteered for the seasonal rite to allow her this access rather than her parents or anyone else in the family Suonkang. It was time she saw their land with her adult eyes, instead of with the emotional vision of the dream that plagued her. A dream like this was a message from the cosmos and she had no choice but to follow its path in order to glean the meaning.
“Where’re you coming from?” said the Guard, even as he read her papers.
“That is the stamp of Mazemoor.”
“And why’re you here?”
He held her permit in his hand but she answered anyway. “To gather suon.”
“You know you can’t use your Bastard magic in Kattaka around our people.”
“I’m aware.”
“Where you aim to get ’em?”
She looked pointedly toward the Crown Mountains looming in jagged majesty beyond the hills and plateaus around Fortune City.
“How you gonna get there?”
“The most expedient course would be to hire a horse.”
“You ain’t allowed to fly those dragons back.”
It was an entire other protocol to register a gathered suon and he must have known that. Just like he knew the answers to everything else he asked her. So she didn’t bother to answer him again.
They were paranoid about the wild suon, with reason. On the borders of Fortune City stood wooden tower emplacements for iron cannons aimed to the sky. His gaze flitted toward them then looked all around the deck of the barge, the crates wrapped in rope and oiled canvas and the two dozen other passengers milling about. Another Mountain Guard moved among them asking for identification. He looked back at Méka.
“Rifle.”
She unslung it from her shoulder and handed it over because pointing out the waste of time would only delay her further. He folded her papers and pocketed them, then seized the rifle in both of his hands at stock and forestock. With perfunctory movements he braced the butt of the weapon to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel. Then he angled it down and slid back the bolt. The rifle was unloaded. He seemed disappointed, as if she should have been breaking the law by carrying it live to the town. He locked it and passed the weapon back to her. She slung it back on her shoulder. He retrieved her papers from his pocket, looked at them and looked at her, then he held them out as if she were somehow forcing him in this dance. With a twist of her lips she accepted them and he moved past her to the next passenger.
She hauled up from her feet the lumpen bag of her supplies and draped it over her other shoulder. Another gust of gritty air brushed against her cheek, carrying the scent of mud and unwashed bodies. For Kattakans, gold as both idea and allure alone defined the ambitiously named Fortune City, where nearly ten thousand dream-laden people pitted the wilderness bank like debris left behind by an army long decamped. Méka had come to this river mouth with her family in her childhood, when the terrain had been untouched, but she barely remembered it. She had been perhaps five years old the last time. Soon after, she and many other Ba’Suon families were corralled into camps by the Kattakans who had settled this island by force.
It was early summer and steam rose up off the wet land at the mouth of the Derish River. A delicate mist breathed over all of the angled tents and crooked cabins hewn from green lumber. The flat façades of public emporiums were lined up along Shore Street, with their weathered, upswept lettering mimicking the décor of a civilization hundreds of miles away. It was a ghost town, not for a lack of population but for the empty carousing that gripped these souls hanging on to some semblance of a life remembered. Méka couldn’t understand such a life. Her family had quit this land and its overseers after the war ten years ago so they didn’t have to witness it. But the sky and the cosmos bore witness as they had since creation and rang with a stifled fury, the reverberations of which she felt in her Ba’Suon blood. If her dream foretold some sort of reckoning for the imbalance, perhaps this journey would enlighten her to it.
Overhead, the shades of low-flying suon still spun, indistinguishable from the sadness of bondage to this town. This far north the summer night sank to twilight blue, when the suon yearned for pitch night and nests. These suon got neither. She wanted to call them to her to soothe, but any outstretch toward them was met with fear and she watched as they darted higher, further away from the river. A faint whistling of air fluted through their hollow scales as they sailed updrafts with the mountains as backdrop. Once these ranges had been free for both suon and the Ba’Suon. Her parents and their parents stretching back as far as families remembered had grown with the mountains and its life. Now only the highest peaks stood liberated from the greed and scrabble below, for no other reason than because the Kattakans’ need for gold could not tame them.
Excerpted from The Mountain Crown, copyright © 2024 by Karin Lowachee.
