The Star Tsar: Cover Reveal and Extract

My new novel, The Star Tsar, will be published on the 31st March - preorders available soon...

A HUNDRED ICONS scattered in the snow, churned up with blood and soot - all dead, all useless.

The Theotokos of St Theodore

The Virgin of Kazan 

Mandylion 

Christ Pantokrator.

They drifted by like leaves on a river, their annealed faces full of laughing contempt as Grishka stumbled, weeping, away from the train. 

An officer strode ahead towards the trees. What was his name? Prince Vasyutin. As arrogant as all the rest. So arrogant that he waded through the snow picking off the fleeing soldiers with his Mausers, one in each hand, shooting the poor bastards in the back of the head as if he was hunting pheasants. 

Leaving them for her so she'll feed on their corpses first and give him time to escape. He won't turn around and shoot me because he doesn’t want to see her break free.

A blast of sound – a cracked bell as an iron fist hit the inside of a steel prison. And again. And again. The last one brought Grishka to his knees, the snow swallowing his thighs. Burrow under it like a rabbit and she won't find you.

Vasyutin stopped at the edge of the trees and turned around. Grishka waited for the bastard to murder him too but instead the prince gazed past, frowning like someone trying to make out a friend's face in a crowd. 

She's right behind me. Burning eyes waiting to bore out my soul as she peels my face off with her dagger teeth.

But the White officer’s expression wasn’t that of a man standing before Hell, so Grishka risked a glance over his shoulder.

He laughed. He actually laughed. The armoured train, all six hundred tons, lay neatly on its side in the drifts next to the track, like an amber necklace dropped from a girl's throat. Ruptured valves shrieked steam that rolled over the track in waves and melted the banked snow. Shapes sprawled in the slush around the wreck.

The world rang again, and a dome appeared in the wall of the middle carriage – the one the priests had hung with icons, garlanding the house-sized cylinder with seraphs, saints and Christ himself. A crack appeared in the glitter-stretched steel. Claws worked through the rent and forced it wider. The last of the gold faces fell away. Grishka managed to stand. 

Don't look into her eyes.

Instead he turned to Prince Vasyutin just as the officer put a Mauser to his own temple and blew his head open in a bright spray.

He wasn't running away. The last one was for himself.

Grishka floundered towards the trees. Tearing metal. He didn't need to look - he knew exactly what was happening. She'd rip open her cage and leap into the sky, riding her iron mortar, burning with hunger for the flesh of Russian men. She'd smell him out, under the snow, under the dark pines, wherever he hid. And yet he kept running until he was among the trees.

A shape howled across the sky and he glimpsed red eyes, writhing hair, the crucible in which she'd grind his bones – and then nothing, just endless grey clouds.

The demon let me live. I'm saved, I'm free.

But through the forest more icons floated towards him. These were the size of men and rolled through the snow on wheels - staring eyes and skull grins in golden light. And between them, walking on their hind legs, came her spider children - idiot faces filled with monstrous hunger.