The Human Mind Is a War Weapon in Robert Jackson Bennett’s Locklands

Hugo nominee Robert Jackson Bennett started his critically acclaimed Founders trilogy in 2018 with epic fantasy Foundryside, adopted by 2020’s Shorefall. Next yr, he’ll reveal the much-anticipated concluding quantity, Locklands—however we’ve bought a sneak peak, together with the quilt and an excerpt, to share immediately.

Here’s an outline of the e book, showing right here for the primary time:

A god wages struggle—utilizing all of humanity as its pawns—within the unforgettable conclusion to the Founders trilogy.

Sancia, Clef, and Berenice have gone up towards loads of lengthy odds up to now. But the struggle they’re preventing now’s one even they will’t win.

This time, they’re not going through robber-baron elites, and even an immortal hierophant, however an entity whose intelligence is unfold over half the globe—a ghost within the machine that makes use of the magic of scriving to own and management not simply objects, however human minds.

To combat it, they’ve used scriving know-how to remodel themselves and their allies into a military—a society—that’s like nothing humanity has seen earlier than. With its energy at their backs, they’ve freed a handful of their enemy’s hosts from servitude, even introduced down a few of its fearsome, reality-altering dreadnaughts. Yet regardless of their efforts, their enemy marches on—implacable. Unstoppable.

Now, as their opponent closes in on its true prize—an historic doorway, lengthy buried, that results in the chambers on the middle of creation itself—Sancia and her pals glimpse an opportunity at reaching it first, and with it, a final determined alternative to cease this unbeatable foe. But to take action, they’ll should unlock the centuries-old thriller of scriving’s origins, embark on a determined mission into the guts of their enemy’s energy, and pull off probably the most daring heist they’ve ever tried.

And as if that weren’t sufficient, their adversary may simply have a spy of their ranks—and a final trick up its sleeve.

And right here’s the complete cowl by Will Staehle, adopted by the excerpt.

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She cleared her throat, and requested, “Are you familiar with twinning?”

Governor Malti seemed up at her. “T-Twinning?” he mentioned absently. He seemed concerning the map room as if looking for a scriver to seek the advice of, however appeared to have forgotten he’d had the room cleared for this dialog. “I believe so. It’s a scriving method, mostly for communication, yes?”

“Yes,” mentioned Berenice. “It’s a scrived way of asserting that one thing is another, or like another. Write the correct sigils on two panes of glass so they become twinned, then tap one with a hammer, and both will break. Twin two pieces of metal, heat one up, and the other will grow hot.” She leaned ahead over the maps. “The enemy you fight – the one we all fight – is using an advanced form of twinning to wage its war. That’s how it’s managed to conquer so much territory – all in only eight years.”

She touched the biggest map, depicting the Durazzo Sea and all of the lands surrounding it, and the taint of pink flooding all through practically all of the territories within the north.

“The enemy captured all that,” mentioned Malti dubiously, “with twinning?”

“Yes,” mentioned Berenice. “Because it knows how to twin something very unusual.” She checked out him. “Minds,” she mentioned.

Malti stared. He seemed to his mercenary chief, who shrugged, bewildered.

“Twin minds? What does that mean?” Malti demanded.

Berenice stood and walked to the place the crate nonetheless waited on the desk. “May I finally show you our gift?”

Malti seemed on the crate warily, then nodded. Berenice opened it, then turned it over and spilled it onto the bottom.

A scrived rig slipped out of the crate and clanked onto the ground. It was an odd little machine, wrought of wooden and metal and inbuilt a clunky, improvised method, with internal plates left uncovered just like the designer was detached as as to if it seemed first rate or not. Yet anybody with any familiarity with scrived rigs might acknowledge that it was an ungainly pairing of two frequent units: an espringal, and a lamp.

“A… floating lamp?” requested one in all Malti’s lieutenants.

“Yes. One that fires a very strange ammunition,” mentioned Berenice. “Not a bolt, but a scrived plate. A small one. Your son was almost certainly shot with such a plate.” She tapped her proper temple. “It buried itself in his skull, and then his mind was twinned. With the enemy. Two things made alike. The enemy scrived his body, his very being, and its thoughts became his. It saw what he saw, its mind became his mind, and it told him what to do – and he did it, because his will was no longer his own.” She sat again down. “And you brought him back to your city. Where the enemy could see everything through his eyes, hear everything through his ears, and wait for the chance to attack.”

Malti’s ashen face grew even paler. “That can’t be. This is… This is my child you’re talking about.”

“And you know what he did at Corfa,” mentioned Claudia. “Something he’d never normally do, yeah? Something you’d normally think was mad?”

“But you’re asking me to believe the unbelievable,” mentioned Malti. “Scriving is about… about stuff.” He rapped the desk beside him. “Bolts. Swords. Ships. Walls. Scriving the mind is… it’s simply mad!”

Claudia met Berenice’s eyes. <Is now whenever you inform him all of us have our personal little plates in our our bodies? Ones that enable us to share ideas and every kind of loopy shit?>

<I need him to allow us to save him and his folks,> mentioned Berenice. <Saying that would most likely get us burned alive like witches.>

Yet she had much more private causes to keep away from this topic. Bringing that up would undoubtedly lead Malti to ask how Giva had come to study this method; and if she have been to inform the reality, she must admit that she had been one of many scrivers to develop it, earlier than it was stolen by their enemy; and thus she herself bore some guilt for the lots of of little cities daubed with pink on the maps stretched throughout the desk, and the hundreds of refugees exterior the partitions of Grattiara who had escaped the onslaught – in addition to all those that had not.

Stop, she advised herself. Fight the battles earlier than you, not those from so way back.

“Even if you are telling the truth,” mentioned Malti, “why did you bring me this… this lamp as a gift? Did you know my son was suffering from this affliction?”

“No,” mentioned Berenice. “I brought you this to warn you, to tell you what was coming, and how all the rest of these cities had fallen. And how your city will fall as well.” She pressed a hand to the ocean of pink on the map prefer it was a wound. “You’ll first see just one lamp, floating at your walls,” she mentioned. “If you see it at all, that is.”

“It’ll probably come at night,” mentioned Vittorio flatly from the tip of the desk. “They’re small. Hard to see in the dark.”

“It’ll target one of your soldiers,” mentioned Claudia. “Shoot them anywhere – head, hand, back, it doesn’t matter. It just needs to be buried in living flesh for the scriving to work.”

“Then it’ll twin that solider – own them, take them over – and use them to see,” mentioned Diela, quietly and meekly. Her eyes have been massive beneath her helmet. “To see what defenses you have. Where your people are stationed.”

“Where you’re strong,” mentioned Vittorio. “Where you’re weak. What you’re saying, what you’re planning.”

“It’ll pick the perfect time to attack,” mentioned Claudia.

“And then the sky will fill with these,” mentioned Berenice, kicking the lamp with one foot. “They’ll descend on your soldiers like locusts, because they’ll know where to find them. They’ll shoot them, plate them, twin them, turn them. The soldiers will go to your defenses and kill the people manning them, or open up the gates, or set fire to the buildings, the homes, maybe their own homes. Anything.”

“We call them ‘hosts,’” mentioned Claudia quietly. “Because once one of those plates are in them, you have to recognize that they’re not themselves anymore. That they’re not human anymore. Not really.”

“They’re twinned with something different,” mentioned Berenice.

A flash of a picture in her thoughts: a person standing in a shadowy nook, then turning to face her; then pale gentle glancing throughout his options, revealing his eyes and nostril and mouth streaming blood…

“Something monstrous,” she mentioned softly. “Something we can’t really understand.”

“This is all ludicrous bullshit,” snarled one of many mercenary captains. “Lamps that can target? Shoot? I remember when scrivers tried to rig up lamps to bring baskets of fruit to people’s homes, there were melons tumbling everywhere. The idea of one wielding an espringal is beyond foolishness.”

Claudia shook her head. “The lamps aren’t doing the aiming and shooting any more than a normal espringal does.”

“You mean they’re being controlled by someone at a distance?” Malti requested. “Who?”

The Givans exchanged a look.

<He’s sharp, however he doesn’t actually know,> mentioned Diela.

<No,> mentioned Berenice. <He doesn’t.>

“By the enemy,” mentioned Berenice. But she knew as she mentioned it that the reply wouldn’t fulfill.

“By its infantry?” requested Malti. “Then why can we not deploy our sharpshooters to eliminate them? Stop the people controlling the lamps before they can attack us?”

“No,” mentioned Berenice. She grimaced as she struggled to think about how one can say this. “Not by its infantry. Because all of the enemy’s forces – the infantry, the lamps, its ships, everything – are controlled at a distance. By one thing.”

“One mind,” mentioned Claudia.

“One entity,” mentioned Diela. “Seeing out of many eyes. Working many hands. Controlling many, many rigs – all across the continent, simultaneously.”

“One mind twinned to exist in many places at once,” mentioned Vittorio. “In anything scrived – rigs or people.”

Malti stared at them, horrified. “No,” he mentioned softly. “That’s impossible.”

“Have you never wondered, your grace,” mentioned Berenice, “how the enemy can maneuver so perfectly? How it appears to communicate almost instantaneously? How its shriekers always hit targets out of line of sight of their artillery teams? And why it never, ever bothers to even try to negotiate? Why it never sends emissaries, never announces itself, why it’s never even named itself to you?”

Malti was staring on the map, his flesh practically colorless, the bristles of his beard trembling.

“It sounds inhuman,” mentioned Berenice, “because it is inhuman.”

He swallowed. He sat in silence for a very long time, then turned to the plating lamp on the ground. “You didn’t come just to persuade me to let you take the refugees, did you,” he mentioned quietly.

“No,” mentioned Berenice. “We came to ask you to leave as well. You, and all your men.”

“To come with us,” mentioned Diela. “Where you can be safe.”

“Because there is no standing your ground against this,” mentioned Claudia. “No pitched battles. No sieges. No blast of trumpets and glorious charge of men-at-arms.”

“The warfare of the merchant houses is gone,” mentioned Vittorio. “This is different.”

Berenice shot him a glare. “Warfare has changed. So we must change. All of us. Including you, your grace.”

From the e book Locklands by Robert Jackson Bennett. Copyright © 2022 by Robert Jackson Bennett. Reprinted by association with Del Rey Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Locklands by Robert Jackson Bennett will likely be out June 21, 2022; you’ll be able to pre-order a replica here.

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