Excerpt from Nicked by M.T. Anderson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You mistake me," said the dog-headed person. "I am no bitch."

"You look like a very good boy to me," said Aquilina huskily. The man in the barrow said, "It talks really well." "As do you, my malingering lazar," said the cynocephale.

"Do you get friendly with mankind ladies?" asked Aquilina.

"Not generally," the dog-man said, swallowing goat, his tail in a slow wag. "I find my sentimental evenings are often foiled by the oviform tang."

The Tartar and Gallenice were admiring each other.

"And you're ... ?" said Gallenice.

"A relic hunter," said the Tartar.

"Any samples?" she teased. "Sell me your wares."

"I sold a church the very finger John the Baptist pointed with when he said, 'Behold the Lamb of God.' "

"Anything that might protect a girl from disease?" She leaned close to him.

Nicephorus found himself interested in the man's relaxed repose upon the bench, the sprawl of his legs beneath the table; and he wondered why he was so offended at the smile the man gave Gallenice, why he was irritated at the contract being drawn up in the air between saint hunter and provincial waitress.

"I retrieved a phial of the seed of Adam, First Man, from the mountains of the East."

"Did you now?"

"It was from a shrine in a walled garden near the gates of dawn."

"And you found it?"

"Imagine this, ladies," said the Tartar pirate. "Within our living seed float countless homunculi, waiting for life, each of which contains the next generation. And within those homunculi are curled, even smaller, the homunculi of our children's children. We were within our parents' seed. They were within our grandparents'. So, within Adam's seed, if you could examine it closely enough, you would find all human generations, the whole history of man, manikins of all of us nested within each other, like the ziggurats of Mataram—a series of steps, ever broadening, crammed with faces and carved figures striving and loving." At "loving," he gave her a kind smile, which made the monk step to the side of the wheelbarrow and announce to his friend, "We should return you to your wife."

"In Adam's seed, however," the Tartar continued, "there is one difference: Suspended within that blessed solution, we are all laid out, one generation to the next—but without sin. When this seed fell, that first bite from the Tree of Knowledge had not yet been taken. We had not yet been corrupted. Adam's seed is prelapsarian. During our conception, deep in our parents' viscera, we receive sin like the pox. We are born screaming with it. But within the seed of the first man, our images are perfect and unblemished. What floats in Adam's semen is God's hope for what we all should have been—a perfected history, not what we became outside the gates of Eden."

The monk couldn't stand any more flirtation. He lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow with an aggressively chummy "Heigh-ho, here we go!"; and despite the complaints of the sick man, he began to rattle him over the cobbles, back through the gate in the city walls.

The relic thief watched him go. "Benedictine?" he asked Gallenice, with a nod of his head.

"Yeah. Nice guy, though."

"Good," said the Tartar, as if calculating a strategy. And then he resumed his pitch: "You can imagine," he said, "the price we got for that phial. It contained the whole history of humanity, unmixed with sin."

Gallenice leaned close to hear the sum. The Tartar whispered it with lips that almost touched her ear.

This is how Brother Nicephorus met the saint hunter Tyun and the dog-head Reprobus for the first time, and how their disastrous heist began.

Excerpted from NICKED by M.T. Anderson. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by M.T. Anderson.