Hanuvar
He Will Find a Way, or Make One
When their walls were breached at last, the people of Volanus fought block by block, house by house, until most fell with sword in hand. Less than a thousand survivors were led away in chains.
The city’s treasuries were looted, its temples defiled, and then, to sate their emperor’s thirst for vengeance, the mages of the Dervan Empire cursed Volanus and sowed its fields with salt. They overlooked only one detail: the greatest Volani general had escaped alive.
Against the might of a vast empire, Hanuvar had only an aging sword arm, a lifetime of wisdom… and the greatest military mind in the world, set upon a single goal. No matter where they’d been sent, from the festering capital to the furthest outpost of the Dervan Empire, Hanuvar would find his people. Every last one of them. And he would set them free.
— From the Codex of Hanuvar Cabera
Hanuvar is coming to bookstores near you in August 0f 2023, from Baen Books. The first book is titled Lord of a Shattered Land. For more details about the book deal, visit my blog announcement. The second books arrives only a few months later, in October of 2023, and is titled City of Marble and Blood. I’m hard at work revising book three.
As of August of 2022, Hanuvar stars in thirty-three short stories, only seven of which have been published. In order they are:
- “The Way of Serpents,” first published in the Goodman Games Gen Con 2016 Program Guide and then reprinted in Issue 0 of Tales From the Magician’s Skull, 2018.
- “Crypt of Stars,” printed in Tales From the Magician’s Skull, Issue 1, 2018.
- “The Second Death of Hanuvar,” printed in Tales From the Magician’s Skull, Issue 3, 2019.
- “A Stone’s Throw,” printed in Heroic Fiction Quarterly #40, 2019.
- “Course of Blood,” printed in the anthology Galactic Stew, available for order here.
- “From the Darkness Beneath” in Terra Incognita, available here.
- “Shroud of Feathers” appeared in issue 6 of Tales From the Magician’s Skull.
Fourteen occur in a sequence that has been organized into a first collection now making the rounds through publishers. Fifteen more occur in a sequence that forms a second collection. The aforementioned “From the Darkness Beneath” occurs outside this sequence.
About the Tales
The Hanuvar stories are naturally rooted in my love of heroic fiction and sword-and-sorcery, particularly as crafted by Robert E. Howard, Leigh Brackett, and Harold Lamb. They’re inspired by my abiding interest in Hannibal of Carthage, my love of hardboiled fiction techniques, and my long-time desire to spin standalone tales that make a larger epic, like the novellas of Harold Lamb’s Khlit the Cossack.
It’s ironic to me that these stories are perhaps my least well known, because I’m not sure there’s anything I enjoy writing quite as much. Originally I had thought I had enough ideas for three or four collections, but the ideas just keep coming, and I’ve kept planning, and at this point I’m aiming for six large collections, each of which is full of interconnected themes and recurring characters and then ends in a kind of “season climax.”
