Track of the Snow Leopard by Dariel R.A. Quiogue

 

Release date: July 31, 2022

Subgenre: Sword and Sorcery, Short Fiction Collection

 

About Track of the Snow Leopard: 

 

Track of the Snow Leopard features five savage tales of Orhan Timur, the gray-eyed wanderer known and feared as the Snow Leopard. From an enchanted palace lost in time to a haunted temple-city, to robbing an Emperor's tomb for the keys to an immortal army to a hunt for a demon tiger to finding a lost world beneath the snow-clad Drokpa Mountains, Orhan Timur swashbuckles and slays through a world filled with hostile forces and magics in the classic pulp sword and sorcery style.

Also includes the bonus story, The Lions of Malakkaria

Excerpt:

 

Chariots raced past them. Bearded faces contorted in wild triumph flashed past, and some of the looks he got were of downright contempt. The chariot warriors of Lakshaar, nobles all, held themselves a different breed from Gabal despite skin as dark as his own, their hook noses and fuller beards recalling the blood of long-ago settlers and invaders from the far East. And they could never forgive a tribesman from the far Zangalla Mountains for being promoted over them. 

 

Even worse, they could never forgive him for the way he was idolized by the soldiery. For Gabal was a giant in both frame and heart, near seven feet tall and broad as a buffalo, with a buffalo’s mad instinct to always face toward danger and overpower it. His dark skin gleaming with oil where it was not covered by his armor of bronze scales, his face covered by a great bronze helm sculpted in the form of a lion’s maned head above and a scowling bearded mask below, Gabal was the very image of Lakshaar’s ancient warrior gods. And for this the chariot-nobles hated him, ignoring his orders when they thought they could. 

 

There was only one remedy for it. As the next chariot made to pass him, Gabal lashed out with his spear shaft, sending it whistling before the horses’ noses and spattering them with the blood still on it. Despite the urgings of driver and warrior it slowed, the horses rearing and whinnying. 

 

“Halt and turn, you fools! Reform the line!” Gabal roared. “Look to the hill!” 

 

And with a roar of desperate fury, the other half of the barbarian horde crested the knoll and began galloping down.

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About Dariel R.A. Quiogue:

Dariel R. A. Quiogue is a writer-photographer from the Philippines. In 1977, he was simultaneously exposed to Star Wars, Herodotus, Homer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard, and his brain has never been the same since. He now writes fantasy and science fiction in his spare time, flavored by his fascination for history, science, the sea, and the richness and diversity of Asian cultures. His creative motto is "Simple stories, powerfully told." Quiogue's works have appeared in The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Volume I, the Philippine Speculative Fiction Annual Volume 7, Rakehell Magazine, and his self-published story collection, Swords of the Four Winds. 

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