Showing results by narrator "David Pickering" in All Categories

Port-de-Paix, 1691. May Stuart is ready to start a new life with her young daughter in care in Charleston. No longer content with her role as an English spy and courtesan, she gains passage on a merchant vessel under a false identity. But her journey to collect her beloved child is thrown off course when ruthless corsairs raid their ship.

Fictional? Authoritative? Fantastic? Deadpan? Investigations into the real, the true...and the things that should be true....

Earth was old, her riches gone. Her children too had left her, all but a few who lived peacefully off the land. And then came the Kar-Chee, to crack Earth open and suck out what remained of her richness, threatening the twilight of the old planet with an evil beyond anything that had gone before. With them they brought their servants, beasts so cruel and horrible that men could recall their like only from ancestral nightmares, and named them "dragons"....

Ten years in the service of Kublai Kahn...Marco, Niccolo, and Maffeo Polo have seen magic and miracles, and accumulated riches beyond their dreaming. But now all they want is to return to their beloved Venice. Alas - as the only Westerners in the glittering Mongol court, they are high favourites with the Khan of Khans. And before he will allow them to leave, they must undertake one strange, final quest.

The history of Ukraine is a fascinating story of how cultures, political systems, religions, and power have met, intersected, morphed, and expanded. The region was relatively sparsely populated for much of ancient history, a wilderness of rivers, forests, and steppes, but that does not detract from the rich historical development of the region.

The history of Ukraine is a fascinating story of how cultures, political systems, religions, and power have met, intersected, morphed, and expanded. The region was relatively sparsely populated for much of ancient history, a wilderness of rivers, forests, and steppes, but that does not detract from the rich historical development of the region. This geographical formation has influenced some of the country’s key historical developments, as well as the location of its major settlements.

New York, 1689. Jacob Delpech thinks day and night about his wife and child. He's determined to reunite with his family in London, but New York’s brutal winter deep-freeze has ruined his carefully laid plans. With transport across the Atlantic at a standstill and European politics on the verge of upheaval, his chances of ever making it home grow slimmer by the day. Snowbound in Switzerland, Jeanne Delpech’s heart aches for a loving reunion with her husband. To make it back to London, she and her son must travel across extremely treacherous terrain.

The Phoenix and the Mirror: or, The Enigmatic Speculum by Avram Davidson is a fantasy novel that tells the story of a sorcerer named Vergil Magus. This sorcerer was named for Virgil (or Publius Vergilius Maro), poet and author of The Aeneid. In an introduction to The Phoenix and the Mirror, Davidson claims that during the Dark Ages, people tended to forget that Virgil was a poet and instead believed he was a sorcerer. The Phoenix and the Mirror was the first book in which Davidson attempted to retell the legend of this mysterious sorcerer.

Jerrod Northi-rogue, pirate and a citizen of Pemath, was desperate enough to want to go through the transformation. It cost 100,000 units for the Craftsmen to endow him with the Seven Signs - a rather steep price even for him. But he would pay it somehow, for since the attack of the deadly leeris, he feared that the cost of missing this opportunity to find a refuge in the land of Tarnis would be even higher.

Set during the reign of the Aztecs in Mexico, two alien forces, dormant for centuries, enter a confrontation on a remote mountain that will decide Earth's fate. The great old ones benevolently ruled before the cruel Aztecs were shaped by the Huitzil, who came from the evil stars and taught the Aztecs how to conquer and demanded endless human sacrifice.

Avram Davidson was widely regarded as one of the most outstanding authors of short fantasy fiction in our time. This collection comprises his distinctive historical fantasies - tales of strange Mitteleurpoas, of magic in Victorian England, and on the American frontier. Here are "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire", "Traveller from an Antique Land", and "What Strange Stars and Skies"; here are dragons, cameras, and "The Singular Incident of the Dog on the Beach".

Geneva, 1688. Jeanne is barely scraping by on meager earnings from weaving. She dreams of her previous life as a wealthy merchant’s wife before Louis XIV’s soldiers ran her family out of France for refusing to renounce their faith. But even in Geneva, Jeanne and her son aren’t anywhere close to free from persecution. Jacob hopes his letters make it to Jeanne from the other side of the ocean. As he bides his time as an indentured servant on a Caribbean plantation, tragedy strikes in the form of shipwreck and pirates.

The Maze is a pathway between worlds and times. Its Masters know the secret but decline to interfere. Its Guardians at different levels prevent invasion of one world by the inhabitants of another. But the alien hive-creatures called Chulpex mean to find their way past the Guardians to colonize a new world, and one ordinary, untrained Earthman is catapulted into wild adventure in his determination to stop them.

An embattled prime minister is handed an unexpected solution to all her country's problems.

Inspired by medieval legends about the poet Vergil, who was revered not only as the author of the Aeneid but also as a powerful necromancer, Davidson embarked on his Vergil Magus series in the '60s with the intriguing novel The Phoenix and the Mirror. In this sequel, Vergil answers a magical summons from Averno, both the wealthiest and the filthiest of cities. The magnates there are worried about the waning and shifting of the natural fires that have fueled their industries and fouled their air.

Ten years ago, the Starsingers - tyrannical magicians who draw their power from the stars - suffered a brutal defeat at the hands of an ancient order of magic-resistant peacekeepers. Their rebellion quelled, their magic controlled, the five families of starlight magicians have been forced to live in a fragile truce with the starless commoners...until now. When an assassin begins killing Starsingers, the defiant peacekeepers are blamed, for who else could slay a magician? As another war approaches, Ezai and Ahryn form an unlikely alliance.

Billy and Bonnie’s journey continues as new mysteries and dangers arise . . . Where is the magnificent sword used against the evil Devin? What was the strange book used by the dragon slayers to summon a dragon? What happened to the candlestone, a strange gem that has a dangerous effect on dragons? When their exploration leads Bonnie into captivity and even more danger, what can Billy do to save her?

Avram Davidson's final Vergil Magus novel, The Scarlet Fig, continues the adventures of the wandering mage through an alternate ancient world filled with exotic landscapes, populated by creatures of myth and legend.

A world of living legend, peopled by centaurs, golems, harpies, and primitive but shrewd humans - all this in a mysterious realm of Starflux and Earthflux, closer to the primordial chaos than the world we know and told in a style at once familiar and fantastic, homely and horrific.

Journey to the exotic South Sea island of Bali, a magical land of dark jungles, of ancient gods, and terrifying demons! Madai lives in Bali and dreams of life beyond his island paradise. Yet, his wildest dream could not prepare him for the odyssey that lies ahead after he finds a moonstone amulet that introduces him to the spirit world.