Wednesday, August 22, 2018

The Codex of Desire by Lauren Alder

Release date: August 16, 2018
Subgenre: Time Travel, Prehistoric Fiction

About The Codex of Desire:

 

Love and violence, war and lust, lies and betrayal — even intelligent feathered dinosaurs fell prey to such savage impulses, more than 67 million years ago.

When Raoul Deguchi, a human palaeontologist, touches the alien-forged metal band wrapped around the forearm of a small theropod dinosaur fossil, he is mentally transported back in time to experience the tragic intersection of five dinosaur lives. Girn'ash, a shrewd and secretive female slave, falls in love with Tir'at~Esk, a dashing military prisoner — and will do anything in her meagre power to win his freedom. But Girn'ash's queen is determined to coerce the handsome warrior into her harem, and when so many ferocious desires collide it might doom an entire civilization to nuclear extinction.

 

Excerpt:


He gazed with unwavering predatory intensity, his neck subtly curving beneath its mantle of feathers as if readying itself for her conquering love-bit, while softly, as softly as rain creeping through the fissures in a cliff, she sang for him and for him alone:



Their Souls, Their Souls, Their Souls in love united

Shall fill the Sky forever with its fire!



And all the Stars shall sing of Their desire!

The Stars, forever, sing of Their desire!



And he, who had always scorned the concept of the Soul in anything, who had always clung to the teachings of the Sky Emperor which forbid the indulgence of any superstition — he, who had been blind in truth, was now awakened to a whole new world of instinctive recognition — in Her!

She slowed and slid into a final pose with Her back to him, the delicate double black line of feathers along Her spine burned into his sight, the contours of Her physical perfection traced by firelight, Her angled wings like flame itself — and Tir'at felt a new hunger, even deeper, seize him as irrevocably as an ardent love-bite to his nape: he must know Her, not only Her body, but the ineffable Soul revealed in Her dance! And he must reveal his own Soul to Her, the Soul She had created in his Culture-trained body simply by virtue of Her existence!

The audience warbled and rattled their claws together, expressing their raucous appreciation for what, to them, was merely a fine bit of entertainment. Tir'at could not bear to offer so trivial an expression of his adoration, but was at a loss for what tribute could possibly serve. The irony that he, one of his Culture's trained custodians of the Word, should find himself completely incapable of speech was not lost upon him...

.. and though he was aware, dimly, of the keen eyes of Ev'ora watching him — and even more distantly aware of the danger potentially involved, if she recognized his utter enthralment with this brilliant red singer — he simply could not bring himself to attach any importance to that peril at this moment of supreme emotional engagement so alien to his normally cool state of mind. Through the blasts of his inner heart-storm he barely heard the Tribal leader's deceptively gentle query: "A fine example of the type, is she not? And the granddaughter of My mother's second daughter, who was sent to dwell with the tribe of the Soul of Evening Rain before I was hatched... we are rightfully proud of her skills, which have been well carved and polished by the dedicated attentions of the venerable Wa'Nilin~R'ral'Ur."

There was a note of mockery there, of a story hinted yet untold. Tir'at barely heard the tune: he was watching the brilliant red female turn gracefully again to face the dais, and the sweet lines of Her noble head ran into his breast like so many blood-soaked blades. She bowed low, Her chin touching the floor, and his heart swelled with rage at the abasement of One so much fairer than the white monster to whom She paid homage... and all the while Her name fluttered and murmured in every beat of his quickened pulse: La'leet, La'leet, La'leet...

 

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About Lauren Alder:


Lauren Alder was born and raised in Winnipeg, where she currently lives with her husband. She is a freelance commercial artist, a past Eisner Award nominee, and a lifelong science nerd with an enduring interest in dinosaurs, history, and the sociology of food. "Codex" is her first novel, but will certainly not be her last.

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