Under the Scab,” the seventh episode in Matthew Hughes' The Kaslo Chronicles, is now available for a free read at Lightspeed Magazine.

As a new age of magic dawns amid the ruins of the former technological civilization on Novo Bantry, wizard’s henchman Erm Kaslo is on the trail of the horde of multi-legged creatures that carried off the survivors who had taken shelter at the castle of his employer, the wizard Diomedo Obron. The tracks lead to an interplanar portal into the Seventh Plane. Kaslo has no idea what awaits him there, but knows that he must go through.

The six previous episodes are available in Lightspeed‘s archive. Matt has now written and turned in the final episode in the serialized novel.

Eileen Kernaghan's poem "Night Journey: West Coast", which appeared in the Tesseracts Seventeen anthology, won this year's Aurora Award for best poem. The awards were presented in October at the Vancouver SF convention, VCon 39.