Richard K. Morgan is best known for his 2002 Philip K. Dick Award-winning debut novel Altered Carbon, a hardboiled detective cyberpunk story that was adapted into a visually stunning Netflix series in 2018. Along with continuing the story of Takeshi Kovacs in two more books and a pair of graphic novels, Morgan also penned Black Widow comics and wrote for the first-person shooters Crysis 2 and Syndicate. Now he’s returning to the hardboiled genre mashup with the standalone novel No Man’s Land, which follows a World War I veteran trying to find a baby stolen by the fae.
In No Man’s Land, the ancient and monstrous Huldu ended the Great War by covering much of Britain in a dark forest. Duncan Silver works to recover babies who have been stolen by the Huldu and replaced with changelings. But his latest case pits him against a thousand-year-old Huldu who will force Silver to confront his own past while entangling him in a complicated power struggle. It’s a story that feels like it could be great on screen as a sort of fusion of Carnival Row and Perry Mason.
Ahead of the book’s release on March 24, Del Ray offered Polygon an exclusive excerpt from No Man’s Land:
Garner rang Irene Rush’s old landlord from the pay phone in the White Mare’s public bar. He offered money. It seemed to do the trick.
“An hour,” he told Duncan. “He’ll send someone to let us in. It’s close; we can walk it from here in a quarter of that.”
“You say why we wanted to see it?”
Garner stared at him. “Don’t be daft.”
An hour later, past sundown but with plenty of residual light in the sky, they stood waiting outside Number 17 Tegg’s Road. It was part of a modest Victorian terraced row in red brick, set back a little from the road behind waist-high iron railings and gates for the short paths up to each door. Tall sash windows looked out over the road from the first floor, gave views into fairly spacious front rooms at ground level. Soft curl of smoke from chimney pots, homely odor of it on the evening air. Duncan saw fires in fireplaces, lamps already lit against the promise of evening, cozy rooms. In one, a well-dressed middle-aged man sat and dozed over a book. In another, a young mother played with two toddlers on the rug. In sharp contrast, the windows of Number 17 were shuttered, nothing to see behind the glass but white-painted wood panels locked across.
“Odd they haven’t rented it since,” Duncan mused.
“Not necessarily. Lot of lost jobs around here the last year or so. Money’s tight, and they say it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”
“Aye, might be that.”
Garner caught his tone. “Tha think different?”
“I don’t think anything yet. Oh, look—here we go.”
A taxi had come puttering to a halt just ahead of them in the smoky, early evening light. The rear door opened and a small, gray-whiskered man in a suit bustled out clutching a satchel. He introduced himself as Simon Wilkins, agent for the owner, opened the gate to seventeen and led the way up the path. At the door, he wrestled a large key ring out of his satchel and worked his way round it until he found the right key.
“Most irregular, this,” he insisted in a slightly high-pitched voice, which, combined with his painfully unfashionable mutton chops, put Duncan in mind of comic characters out of Dickens. “We really would expect to see references before . . .”
“Got thy references for thee right here,” said Garner impassively, handing over one of Duncan’s ten-shilling notes. “I was told that’d be acceptable.”
“Oh, yes,” Wilkins sniffed. “Mr. Carruthers made himself very clear on the amount.”
He made a show of unfolding and turning the note over, though the green and brown print was visible at a glance, marking it out pretty clearly as 1918 issue and perfectly legal tender. Duncan cleared his throat, shifted impatiently. Wilkins looked his way, flinched as their gazes met. He stuffed the note away and got on with opening the front door.
Inside, the house offered a short no-nonsense hallway, staircase straight up on the right, doors off ahead and to the left.
“As you can see, it’s spacious living over two floors,” Wilkins exaggerated and threw the switch by the door. A feeble bulb glowed to life inside a small stained glass lampshade over their heads “Fully electrified. Comes fully furnished, too, though I believe there’s space in one of the bedrooms for—”
Duncan shouldered past him and up the stairs. Sudden gooseflesh along the inside of his arms. Whisper of something unquiet, up there waiting for him.
“I say . . .”
Garner slid in behind Duncan, turned to block Wilkins on the threshold. Duncan heard him talking in uncharacteristically plummy tones.
“My client’s in the way of being a bit peculiar about these things, Mr. Wilkins. He’d rather form his own impressions alone, if that’s all reet with thee. It’s a habit of his. Perhaps tha could wait for us down here while he gets a feel for the property.”
Wilkins coughing, muttering, “Irregular, highly irregular,” but by then, Duncan was up on the short landing, looking at another set of closed doors, listening to the stillness in the dark and dusty air. He found a light switch, flicked it, and watched more feeble light spring
up in lamps along the wall. He felt the trace again. It wasn’t much—if it was four or five months old, he was honestly surprised it was there at all—but he could feel the slight rise in his pulse as he cast about and—
This room.
He opened the door. Stepped into a darkened bedchamber.
Soft loom of furniture under dust sheets, the faintest filter of light through cracks in and around the shutters closed across the window. Bare boards underfoot, a threadbare Persian-style rug laid across the center of the floor, most of it under what looked, under its sheet, like
a brass-frame double bed. The small fire grate in the far wall was dead and cold.
By the shuttered window, a basketweave rocking chair, uncovered. He looked at it and felt every hair on his nape stand up.
Something was sat there, grinning at him—
Ah, there you are, Duncan, so glad you came. We’ve been waiting for you . . .
Death and the Forest, right there, woven together in some nightmare embrace of bones and pale dead tree limbs, spilled and lolling in the embrace of the chair. A worm-eaten grayish skull crowned and grown through with ivy and thorns, a mossy rib cage hung with more of the same. Skeletal fingers gripped the arms of the chair, as if the thing was poised to rise and greet him in some parody of manners it had been told must be honored—What a pleasure to have you here finally!—and the twig-dry grip of those fingers around his own. The eager grin
of the skull. So much to talk about, so many, many things to show you . . .
A Huldu claim spell—marking territory, the way a wolf might raise its hind leg and piss on a tree. A vortex of disturbance in the order of things, chaos peeping through. Magic laid down like a proclamation nailed to a forest oak. I was here. I did this. Witness, if you dare.
A Huldu claim spell—marking territory, the way a wolf might raise its hind leg and piss on a tree. A vortex of disturbance in the order of things, chaos peeping through. Magic laid down like a proclamation nailed to a forest oak. I was here. I did this. Witness, if you dare.
High-pitched Faerie voices calling him from beyond—Duncan, Duncan, come to us, Duncan . . .
Something behind him.
It reached out and touched him lightly on the shoulder blade. He whipped around in the darkened room, fists clenched.
“Duncan!” Garner, backing rapidly off, hands raised. “Come back, lad! Get a grip!”
He swallowed, grunted. Nodded jerkily. Garner lowered his hands, but not all the way. Duncan stood aside a little, gestured at the rocking chair.
“Can you see that?” he asked tightly.
“Not clearly, no.” Garner grim faced, hands still partway to the instinctive guard. “But I know it’s there. I can feel that much.”
The thing in the chair seemed to shrug. It rustled, it grinned. The shadowed empty eye sockets in the skull dragged at Duncan’s gaze. He felt like someone off the Titanic, flailing desperately against the suck of icy waters as the big ship plunged into the depths and tried to bring him with it . . .
Duncan, Duncan, come to us, Duncan . . .
“Are tha all reet, lad?”
Garner’s voice, too faint, coming from too far away. He clung to it like a piece of driftwood, drew a deep breath and shut out the vision in the rocking chair.
It’s just a fucking chair, Duncan. All right?
As if huffily disappointed, the thing seemed to shrug again, fold in on itself in whispers and wavering resolution he had to blink to focus on, a cold wind moaning, a hole in something through which the core of the apparition flowed, and then nothing much at all but a musty green odor that hung in the air and a kind of floating dust that sparkled briefly and then went out.
It’s just a fucking chair.
It is now.
But he knew that a little over four or five months ago, some Huldu of rank had sat in that same chair with unhuman immortal patience, watching Irene Rush and her daughter sleep together in the big brass frame bed, perhaps night after night, for who could tell how long. And then, at some point—maybe that night, maybe a few nights later—that same Huldu had risen unhurriedly, cast a casual glamour, taken the sleeping child from its mother, left a changeling in its place, and slipped away with its prize into the Forest.
Duncan knew these things with the same conviction he knew that the men he’d killed in France and Flanders were still dead.
And with the knowledge came the same icy, murderous rage he’d used to kill those men, the same rage he carried unslaked into the Forest with him, as ever, time and again, to unleash there in the woody gloom like some savage chemical flare.
“Tha’re sure about this, lad?”
“A trace that strong?” Duncan unrolled the oilskin gun wrap on the bed in his low-ceilinged room under the eaves at the inn. The McCulloch gleamed up at him in the low light. “A trace still hanging around like that, better than four months after the fact? You got any idea what it takes to leave that kind of imprint in our world? Had to be high-caste Huldu. No one else gives off magic like that. This fucker’s a thousand years old, at least.”
“One for the trophy hall, eh?”
Duncan took the trench gun from its retaining loops. “That isn’t what I meant.”
“Is it not?”
“I’m not being paid to kill Huldu. Not unless they get in my way.” He opened the ammo pouch on the wrap, scooped out a handful of Crumley & Kegg’s small grape cartridges. Fed them one by one into the McCulloch’s loading port. “What they pay me to do is bring back the weans. For that I need a trail. And a high-caste Huldu passing through the Forest with a human child in tow is going to leave a lot of trace. Local Fae will talk about it, the Haunts will talk about it, Christ, even the fucking trees will talk about it.”
“And tha think they’ll talk to thee?”
The McCulloch went one better than the American combat shotgun models it’d been copied from. It was built for a seven-shell load.
Duncan fed in the final cartridge and laid the gun back down. He looked at Garner.
“The Fae? It’s not like I’m going to give them a choice. You ever see what iron filings will do to a Huldu’s eyes?”
The other man broke gaze, looked away, as if Duncan was suddenly somehow too bright to stare at directly. Duncan snorted.
“Oh, come off it, Garner! Don’t get prissy on me. You choked one of these fuckers to death with your bare hands not so long ago. I bet they still stand you drinks on that story.”
“That was him or me, lad. I took no pleasure in it, then or now.”
“You think I take pleasure in these things?”
Garner said nothing.
Duncan sighed. “Look, it probably won’t come to that anyway. I can get the trees to talk to me most of the time. The Haunts are trickier; they like to play games, but you can usually work around that, too. It’s not like torturing Huldu is my preferred option. It’s just . . . it might come to that, is all. And if it does?” Duncan shrugged. “Well, I’m not squeamish about it.”
“Aye, I’ve heard that.”
Silence stretched in the cramped bedchamber. Garner would not look away. Duncan nodded. Started to lay out Crumley & Kegg’s Fae-fucker bombs on the oilskin.
“Tell you a story,” he said quietly as he worked. “Back in the summer of ’16, I went out as part of a reconnaissance party at Delville Wood. We got pinned down there in a bombed-out sap, and we were still there when the German counteroffensive kicked off. We were low on ammo already, ran through what was left pretty fucking fast, and they just kept coming, so it was down to bayonets and whatever else you could grab. Fucking mud everywhere from days of rain and the artillery, men slipping and sliding in it as they fought. Screaming, bloody chaos—”
“I don’t need to hear thy bloody war stories, lad.” Something abruptly broken off in Garner’s voice. Duncan raised a pacifying hand.
“This won’t take a minute. I’m not trying to bore you.”
They’d never talked about Garner’s loss, and he didn’t want to start now. What it must have done to the other man, to take his son back from the Huldu, to bring him home safe, bundled up in his arms, and then to lose him sixteen years later to a poster of a mustachioed
fuckwit in a field marshal’s cap over the mawkish plea Your Country Needs You.
Duncan held down the old rage. He drew a long breath.
“So like I said—bayonets and whatever else you could grab. What
I could grab was a signal pistol, and when this big fucking Fritz came
over the top and down at me bayonet first, I shot him in the belly with
it, pretty much point blank.”
Garner grunted. “Guess that stopped him well enough.”
“Aye, worked a treat. Flare went right into his guts, buried itself there. Killed him.” Duncan’s face twitched with the memory. “Eventually.”
Silence again in the small, homely room. Beyond the attic window, above the Forest skyline, a fading glow as the last light of evening drained down to amber dregs.
“You want to know what that sounds like?” Duncan asked. “A grown man screaming for his life as a flare burns his insides out? Slithering around in the mud and rain, tearing at the wound with both hands, trying to dig it out with his fingers as they scorch? You want to know what it smells like?”
Garner shook his head, wordless.
“That’s right, you don’t.” Duncan finished laying out the Kegg bombs, stared down at them for a long moment. “And you know the thing about that Fritz? He was a total stranger, probably a husband and father, a man who never did anything to me.”
“Apart from come at thee with a bayonet.”
“You know what I mean. He was just a man, slapped with a uniform that said he had to kill me, or I him. Seven years later, I close my eyes and I can still smell him burning to death. I can still hear and smell what I did to that man.” Duncan swung his gaze on Garner. “So if you think it should bother me in some way, working my way through a handful of these Fae fucks one scream at a time to get Mimi Rush back to her mother, well, that ship has sailed. Now, I’m going to the Forest. You’re welcome to sit this one out. Not sure I could afford to pay you enough to come along anyway.”
Garner nodded at the window. “It’s getting dark out there.”
“Aye, but it’s a good moon. Clear skies, still mild. Come on, it’s as perfect a woodsman’s night as you’ll get this time of year.”
“Daylight would be better.”
“Not for me, it wouldn’t.”
Garner gave him a come-off-it look. “Forest is a quieter place during the day. A safer place, and tha know it.”
“Aye. Which makes getting the answers I want a harder, slower slog.” Duncan found his rings in another pouch on the oilskin wrap, dug them out. “That’s no use to me, Garner. The evidence says Mimi Rush has been gone at least four months. If I don’t act fast, the trail is going to be cold. Look, you don’t have to come. I’ll understand if you don’t. But I’m not wasting any more time.”
Garner stood for a moment, watching him slip on the rings in silence. Duncan finished, flexed his fingers a little, and glanced at the other man. Garner nodded.
“I’ve a short-barrel Woodward’s over-and-under in the cart,” he said gruffly. “I’ll get it.”
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