SAZUMA Cover (+ Excerpt) (Patreon)

This is the cover I ended up going with for my spy fantasy, Sazuma. While I do miss the dark vibes of my first cover concept, this image captures the story’s weird aesthetic better than a scared guy on a black background (and good thing too! Because I spent ages in Photoshop cobbling this cover together from stock images).

The city of Sazuma, a multi-tiered metropolis woven from the living roots of a giant tree, is a central “character” in the story and I wanted a cover that featured that.

EXCERPT:

Zahn had done most of his training in the city’s upper districts, where tactomages kept every inch of wood carefully manicured, gathering roots into clean edges, wide windows, and broad streets. Here, in the lower districts, residents couldn’t afford to have tactomages in for maintenance more than once a year, so the roots grew as they willed, tangling into uneven rooftops, snarls of shadow, and narrow walkways smoothed only by foot traffic.

A pattering rush from the west made Zahn think of rain. But there was no precipitation out here in the Wilds. Just the wind that periodically swept in from the desert through Sazuma’s canopy, making leaves swarm from her branches and berries drop like rain. The tiny, nut-like fruits pelted onto the pathways between houses, bouncing, rolling, and gathering in corners. A few pinged off Zahn’s left arm and he pulled his cloak over it to muffle the sound. As he neared his destination, he sheathed his climbing daggers and crept onward on his feet and right hand, not wanting to risk the scrape of metal on bark alerting his prey—though the cascade of berries would likely cover the sound, even if he did slip up.

Gray shapes jumped in the night around Zahn—lemurs descending from the rooftops to take advantage of the windfall—and, for once, Zahn didn’t envy their speed. At dawn, Sazuma’s urchins would pick over what the lemurs had left behind, cleaning the streets to the last berry. Before the sun was high, each morsel would be stripped of its unpalatable shell and traded to the merchants in exchange for the sustenance the orphans needed to forage another day. Many of the agents in Zahn’s guild had gotten their start collecting berries or searching out rarer foods for Sazuma’s merchants. He made a note to ask his co-spies if they regretted the promotion now. Because at the moment, he would have given anything to be crawling for berries or climbing for birds’ eggs. How did you go from a thief of food to a thief of human life?

Access to the full chapter (and all subsequent chapters, as they come out) will be available through the $3 Saber Tier.