The Road of Skeletons: Thurvok, #3

By Cora Buhlert and Richard Blakemore

On their way to the northern city of Khon Orzad, Thurvok, the sellsword, and his friend Meldom, thief, cutpurse and occasional assassin, travel along a road lined with the skeletons of executed heretics.

It's a grim path that becomes even grimmer when Thurvok and Meldom come upon a blindfolded woman who is still very much alive tied to a stake by the side of the road. 

Should they continue their journey or rescue the woman and risk the wrath of the priest kings of Khon Orzad…

This is a short story of 5500 words or 20 print pages in the Thurvok sword and sorcery series, but may be read as a standalone. Includes an introduction and afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pegasus Pulp Publishing
• Release date: Feb 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386206989

Cora Buhlert

Cora Buhlert was born and bred in North Germany, where she still lives today – after time spent in London, Singapore, Rotterdam and Mississippi. Cora holds an MA degree in English from the University of Bremen and is currently working towards her PhD. Cora has been writing, since she was a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. When she is not writing, she works as a translator and teacher.

Book preview

Introduction

by Cora Buhlert

sword

Nowadays, pulp fiction writer Richard Blakemore (1900 — 1994) is best remembered for creating the Silencer, a masked vigilante in the vein of the Shadow or the Spider, during the hero pulp boom of the 1930s.

Furthermore, Richard Blakemore is also remembered, because he may or may not have been the real life Silencer, who stalked the streets of Depression era New York City, fighting crime, protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty just like his pulp counterpart.

The mystery surrounding the Silencer has long overshadowed Richard Blakemore’s other works. For like most pulp writers, Blakemore was extremely prolific and wrote dozens of stories in a variety of genres for Jakob Levonsky’s pulp publishing empire. Blakemore’s work spans the wide range of the pulps, from crime stories via westerns, war and adventure stories to romance and even to science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, the sheer amount of stories Richard Blakemore wrote during the 1930s refutes the theory that he was the Silencer, for when would he have found the time?

Of the many non-Silencer stories Richard Blakemore wrote, the most interesting is a series of heroic fantasy adventures that Blakemore penned between 1936 and 1939, making him one of the pioneers of the genre now known as sword and sorcery.

Richard Blakemore was an acknowledged fan of Weird Tales and particularly admired the work of Robert E. Howard and C.L. Moore. And so, when Jakob Levonsky started up his own Weird Tales competitor called Tales of the Bizarre, Blakemore of course jumped at the chance to write for the magazine and created Thurvok, a warrior hero in the mould of Conan, Kull and Bran Mak Morn.

Thurvok first appeared in the story The Valley of the Man Vultures in the first issue of Tales of the Bizarre in 1936. He started out as a lone adventurer, but Thurvok quickly gained a companion in Meldom, thief, cutpurse and occasional assassin, whom he encountered towards the end of The Valley of the Man Vultures.

In the third adventure, Thurvok and Meldom encounter Sharenna, a young sorceress and the first female character of note to appear in the series. She is introduced as a damsel in distress, a heretic who was tied to a stake and left to die of drowning or exposure, but it quickly turns out that she is much more than that. There is some suspicion that Sharenna was at least partly inspired by Richard Blakemore’s fiancée and future wife, Constance Allen. She is a formidable character, at any rate.

The Road of Skeletons