Introduction
The world of the Dread Empire, from the beginning, was conceived as the stage for numerous, often unrelated stories. The earliest were intended to center on the characters Bragi Ragnarson, Mocker, and Haroun bin Yousif. Most of those stories have never been published. Some were quite amusing. Like the novelette about the sorcerers’ convention inspired by the insanity witnessed at my first science fiction convention, the St. Louis Con Worldcon of 1969. There were a whole string of stories, back to back, that, in time, would have filled several volumes set before the events chronicled in The Fire in His Hands and, mainly, between With Mercy Toward None and A Shadow of All Night Falling. Only a minority of those got written and fewer saw publication. Of those actually written only a handful can be located anymore. See below.
The Dread Empire world grew fast, over a decade, going through several reincarnations, before A Shadow of All Night Falling actually found a publisher capable of surviving long enough to get it into the bookstores. It was accepted twice in the earlier 1970s. The first publisher went bankrupt. The second suffered a devastating fire in its production and storage facilities. Its business response was to turn back all non-bestseller titles scheduled for the next two years.
In 1980, when the first books appeared, the Dread Empire series was expected to consist of fourteen volumes, the central feature of which would be one vast mega-novel, in multiple volumes, spanning the lives of Bragi Ragnarson and Haroun bin Yousif. Seven of those titles did see print. Two more, Wake the Cruel Storm and The Wrath of Kings, were started but never finished. The former, following on from An Ill Fate Marshalling, was 85% complete. The manuscript and all associated developmental materials have disappeared, presumably appropriated by a visitor to my home who just had to know what would happen next. There are no viable suspects in this or several other disappearances of rare artifacts from my earliest writing career.
About 15% of The Wrath of Kings survives, fragments of draft material that happened to be outside my filing cabinets, lost in the mess of the house, whenever the rest of the material disappeared. A few of the short pieces, some of which appear here for the first time, survived by hiding in my agent’s files and came home to Papa when the passing of the head of the agency caused it to shut down. Among these was a novelette entitled “The Funeral,” which would be the capstone—or headstone—for the entire series. I’d completely forgotten having written it till I came on it while putting this collection together.
The published stories are presented here as they appeared in print, less typographical errors, however tempted I was to make improvements. Bad grammar, run-on sentences, squirrelly punctuation and all. Much of the latter not having been my fault but that of a couple of editors whose relationship with proper punctuation was somewhere beyond the second cousin twice removed state. Only “Silverheels” received even cosmetic revisions. I felt it important to show any evolution that might have occurred.