REALJimBob

While Teppo's Dreamer was a freebie at the front of my copy of [b:The Mongoliad: Book Two|13665175|The Mongoliad Book Two (Foreworld, #2)|Neal Stephenson|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1350486135s/13665175.jpg|19285506], my copy of the previous novel, [b:The Mongoliad: Book One|12853147|The Mongoliad Book One (Foreworld, #1)|Neal Stephenson|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1335306387s/12853147.jpg|18004624], had no such gift (it didn't have maps either which was a point of some annoyance at the time). It appears that later versions of Book One do now have [b:Sinner|16058981|Sinner (Foreworld)|Mark Teppo|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1349118049s/16058981.jpg|21633814] up at the front, but by that time I'd already borrowed a copy from the Kindle lending library. Again, Teppo visits Raphael's past in this prequel to the Mongoliad trilogy. I say again, but actually I've read them in the wrong order – this is the first of Teppo's prequels rather than the second – although it's actually set several years after the events of Dreamer.

Andreas and Raphael, both knights of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae, meet coincidentally, while snooping around the beginnings of an inquisition into the brutal murder of a villager, and as Andreas points out: "One Shield-Brother might be a curiosity [...] but two?". The villager's wife is accused of both witchcraft and his murder; and the inquisition is not keen to properly investigate at all. The hotheaded Andreas and cooler-minded Raphael step in to avert the judicial miscarriage. The story is called Sinner, and all the chapters are named after the seven deadly sins (all in Latin of course): lust, gluttony, avarice, slot, anger, envy and pride; with the final, eighth, chapter being named humility. I wasn't entirely paying attention to the chapter titles at the time, but each chapter presumably concentrates on its titular sin.

While the Foreworld conglomerate, in the shape of the Subutai Corporation, continues knocking out the main Mongoliad novels – presumably there will be more than the three so far – Teppo seems to be making a nice sideline in these prequel short stories building out the back-history of characters like Raphael and Andreas. He has a third one to go with the third novel, [b:The Mongoliad Book Three|16059493|The Mongoliad Book Three (Foreworld, #3)|Neal Stephenson|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1349126928s/16059493.jpg|21846255], which I've already got lined up on my Kindle.