Tales From the Magician’s Skull is one of the top magazines if not the top magazine for sword & sorcery short fiction the past few years. Issue #5 continues a continuity of contents and presentation present from the first issue.

San Julian returns as the cover artist for this issue. Dimensions are 8.5 x 11 inches, 80 pages total.

Contents:

“Pool of Memory” by James Enge is another Morlock Ambrosius story.

Adrian Simmons is the editor for Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. “The Guardian of Nalsier-Fel” is his first appearance in Magician’s Skull. Ahlzlamin and Penkatel are street performers forced into a conspiracy of assassination in order to find a street urchin who is a friend. Setting is Middle Easter/Arabian Nights.

John C. Hocking’s “Benhus, the King’s Blade” character has been a fixture of Magician’s Skull. He is like a 1930s hard-boiled private eye transported to Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar. “In the Corridors of the Crow” has him accompanying King Numar Flavius with a few guards and a shawoman in a figurate journey to hell. King Flavius uses the shawoman to her crow god to ask for extension of life. The story is sort of reminiscent of C. L. Moore’s “The Black God’s Kiss.”

“Road of Bones” by Violette Malan is the second Dhulun and Parno adventure in Magician’s Skull. The duo are paid to escort an old man who used to be a mage in a mission to a tomb of a mage.

Adrian Cole has been continuing the tales of Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis. This story picks up after Elak has united Atlantis and on his way back to his capital city. Elak’s ship is sucked into a vortex to an undersea kingdom with the last remnants of the Valusians from Robert E. Howard’s Kull stories.

C. L. Werner is always a reliable writer. The same holds with “Demon of the Depths” featuring Shintaro Oba. Oba comes to the aid of a clan under attack by pirates commanded by a sorcerer who uses shark demons for ship assaults.

Editor Howard Jones has a non-fiction piece on Harold Lamb.

You can order a pdf file of Tales From the Magician’s Skull #5 directly from Goodman Games or the physical magazine at Amazon.