The Ghosts of Tieros Kol is now available!
Purchase links and sample chapter!
Hello everyone! Today is the day! The highly anticipated third novel by yours truly—
The Ghosts of Tieros Kol - Lisa Kuznak
Let’s jump right in with purchase links (adjust to your locale as necessary!)
Kobo: Ebook
Thank you to all of you!
Thank you to everyone who preordered, and thank you to everyone who grabbed an ARC!
As reviews are posted, I’ll be updating with links. You can also check out the Goodreads listing. Keep scrolling for the blurb and a sample chapter!
Blurb:
An ancient landscape, dotted with standing stones that sing for those who listen, metallic shards on the wind that glitter while they cut, and under the surface threads a blue mineral, tierosite—radiant, strange, and haunting.
King Cedri has gone mad, the palace is in turmoil, and Princess Brena hasn’t heard from her older sisters in ages. She suspects a man named Dene Eame is at the center of all her troubles—an antiquarian with an unhealthy obsession with the standing stones—but she needs real proof of his involvement.
Nikolai Lev, thief-for-hire, had a simple job to do: fake some mining contracts, steal some data, wipe all traces . . . but when his client attempts to kill him after the job is done, it makes it harder to pay the bills. To top it all off, a princess finds Lev while he’s too injured to run. What luck—now he has to keep himself out of jail, too.
As Brena questions Lev while he recovers, she finds the evidence she needs—but why would Dene hire Lev, and what does he want with the royal family? Brena and Lev must work together to answer Dene's riddles—and what they uncover might risk the future, and the past, of Tieros Kol.
Sample Chapter:
COLOURS, SHADOWS, LIGHT
1
What is data? It’s both tangible and intangible. It flows like oil, one can scoop it right out of the air, out from the void of space. It’s so plentiful it should be valueless and yet it’s treated like pure gold. It keeps everything about us, yet nothing—humanity is more than zeroes and ones. It’s worthless without someone to read it. We construct devices to keep our data from prying eyes—sorted like filing cabinets of old, and yet this too is imperfect, the yearning for that data is so strong no matter what we think of to keep it safe, someone is there to crack it. Yet it is nothing. As perceptively empty as space itself.
—Professor Alex Fleck, University of Ganymede
Server towers, conical and sleek, all lined up row upon row in the ship’s library, humming in welcome. Lev found what he came for, watching the rhythms of flickering blue lights from under the steel faceplates as he walked through. Data flung out in all directions, a hub searching for more to input, a constant exchange. Out of all the transfers, he was picking the winner.
He ran a hand through his hair and tugged his collar up, a dart of eyes around himself. Alone in the room, surveillance a risk. He felt along the edge of a faceplate for the latch and dug in a small knife to pry it open, twisting it slow to avoid the pop. Six slots for chips, but only one was occupied. He held his data pull against the chip, sweating through the seconds while the device heated in his fingers.
As Eggar Trent, he had just concluded a long business meeting to arrange a contract between mining firms, one real, one imaginary, though his host was unaware of that fact. Georg Savickas, a scythe of a figure, healthy radiance from good lights, had a habit of picking at his clothes and smoothing his lapels repeatedly and unconsciously. Earthen, spoke Lingua, but smoked Tierosan cigarettes—he admitted it was the only thing from his time on the surface he could never shake, an acquired taste that stuck. That got the two of them on the same page, agreeing on the pleasantness, the unique terroir, like burnt nostalgia, while shrouded in a haze that pillowed their lungs. Savickas had asked Lev if he had ever been to Tieros Kol as they first shook hands. Lev said he had, once. Then they reminisced for a while, with Savickas false-pining for his youth while complaining about those peculiar regulations on the surface. Too much red tape to effectively run a business. Eggar Trent’s affiliated firm could help with that, of course.
Lev could relate to Savickas’ frustrations, in an odd way, but had to appear at ease and sincere long into the night cycle. Savickas was a very one-sided conversationalist, and that only made Lev’s job easier.
They spoke of robotics—that was where Savickas’ heart lay, as an engineer. Unfortunately, specializing in robotics was useless on Tieros Kol, another reason to leave. “I should have listened to my father!” He had faith, though. Soon that hurdle would be overcome, and when it was, he was ready to do business on the surface again. Meantime, he was happy within the sector. There are always other worlds to mine of course, though Lev knew the Savickas family enterprise was somewhat lacking in fiscal optimism, but Savickas himself never spoke of it like that. Everything negative was flipped positive, that very specific language of misdirection, mastered by the perpetual businessman.
“Well, time to call it a night, eh? I’ll be glad to see you again, Mr. Trent. I hope your visit was worthwhile,” Savickas had said with a final handshake.
“Worthwhile?” Lev flashed a smile—Savickas was more right than he knew. “I’m confident our organizations can come to some sort of agreement. Thank you again for showing me around your extraordinary yacht. Quite the place.”
Lev was given a tin of the expensive cigarettes as a gift, with genuine appreciation, and walked from the humidity of the ship’s garden to the cool, dry interior decks and proceeded to avoid whatever crew was working the graveyard shift, retracing his steps to the library he had been graciously shown.
Now that the data was pulled, job done, he pushed the button on his cuff. “Be ready with the pick-up.”
“Got it.” The communications between himself and Tawny were all encoded. He’d be safe until the crew noticed Eggar Trent didn’t exist and some other asshole left his DNA all over their ship.
Out of the library, he walked to the shuttle launch and climbed in his borrowed craft. He tapped his pocket twice; the hotwire device sent the signal and his shuttle came to life with a lovely whirr of the engines. He piloted the craft from the departure deck. The airlock doors were taking goddamn forever. Leg bouncing, the first door took enough time he could dig into his coat pocket for the cigarettes and stuck one in his mouth before the shuttle was able to enter the airlock. First door closed, he lit the cigarette and breathed the heat deep—the second door opened up to an ocean of stars, thickest in a crystal stripe cutting the vastness in half. Forcing his attention from the beauty of the scene, he checked the coordinates on his display and dialled in the route, and he was off to meet his client on Tieros Kol.
Tawny hailed him once he was out of the airlock and making good time, her cropped hair, freckles, and smirk lit the screen. “Done with being Mr. Trent for a while?”
He put his boots up on the console, sinking into the pilot’s seat. “Forever, hopefully. Job’s done. That part.”
“I’ve already got your letter of resignation all written up. Mr. Trent is regretfully quitting the mining sector and won’t be doing business with Savickas Resources ell-tee-dee, how sad.”
“Heartbreaking.”
“Marco wanted me to remind you, you still owe him for the hacks to your data pull.”
“Tell Marco to fuck himself. I get paid, he gets paid.”
She shrugged a sarcastic defeat. “Have fun on Tieros Kol, stranger.”
He blew a gargantuan cloud and slapped the screen to disconnect the communications. Fuck, he was glad to be alone.
* * *
Lev didn’t expect to be as breathless as he was, seeing the planet so close for the first time in years. Tieros Kol bled memories through the surface scan, as enchanting as he left it, all the colours leaching into one another like a nebula of flora, of watersheds and farmland, deceptively virginal. A magic place. The cities were extravagant and delicate paint palettes; spots of silver flake, ivory black, and titanium white amongst countless brilliant hues. As he landed the shuttle, the chunk of countryside turned from palette to painting—every blade of grass made of blues and greens, pointillation that heaved in the breeze. Purple and orange lichens grew on rocks, the rocks themselves shimmered like tears. The air had that unmistakable tang. But it was drenched in nostalgia, real nostalgia that ached. Lev had to remind himself not to think back too fondly—it was wiser to remember the inside of a Tierosan prison, and move on once the trade was done.
Lev hopped from the gangplank with a crush of coarse pink sand, ancient shells, and went to the cave where his client waited. The portal was dark as space without the benefit of stars, no tierosite veins to light it. Lev paused to let his eyes adjust, hearing a man clear his throat from deeper inside the blackness.
“You hardly pass for a miner. I mean, maybe the ones down the shafts, but I am impressed you managed to fool that prat into thinking you had any authority at all.” His Lingua was thickly accented, an upperclass drawl.
Lev ignored the snickering as he climbed down the rough slope, his footfalls and tumbled pebbles echoing.
Their names were never exchanged, but the man had a long duelling scar down the side of his face that shifted with his wry expression, the pearlescent oils on his cheeks and down his neck of a Tierosan native. Despite dressing for wealth, there was a reek of alcohol on his breath, and his dark hair, slick from sweat, plastered his forehead. “The data?”
“Here, but not parsed.” Lev stayed at arms length from his client, brushing back his coat enough to show his pistol holster.
His client noticed the holster and flicked his eyes back up to Lev’s face, no hint of surprise or nerves, just business. “Not a problem. That’s what my parsers are for.”
The data Lev had pulled had been transferred to a ring, and he slipped it off his pinky finger to pass palm-up to the client, who slipped a credit ring from his thumb and the swap was made. Gold, with a flat disk of amethyst hiding the credit chip. Lev twisted the ring onto his own thumb and made to leave, but his client seemed stuck.
“Anything else?” Lev asked, the question punctuated by a flutter of bat wings over their heads.
“Yes . . . One thing. Do you discard the data once it’s transferred?”
“I don’t need it traced to me. You’ve got the only copy.”
“Yes . . . Of course. Very wise.”
It was also a lie—Lev always kept copies until the deal was truly done. “If this credit ring defaults, I’ll know where to find you.”
The scar shifted again as the client laughed. “You think I live in this cave?”
Lev turned to the bright outside and climbed the slope, knocking shells and pebbles and left the client behind to shiver in the dampness.
He needed to ditch the stolen shuttle and get back to Tawny and Marco, currently orbiting Tieros Kol on false tourist visas.
Don’t forget, I have other books, too!
Pallas - Scifi/horror - Amazon Kobo
The Highwayman Kennedy Thornwick - Literary fantasy - Amazon Kobo
Pull Me Under - Fantasy - Free on Substack
I saw some money come out of my account and I thought “what's that for?” then I remembered my pre-order! Yay.
Awesome, Lisa! Belated Congrats! I have been /away...