Madness suggested that a lot went missing from draft to word-count-capped GdM publishing. But thats just an excuse, he should have planned better if he knew he was going to run out of words. Still though, maybe he's just no good at paring down stories/ideas to consumable morsels, and/or time restraints kill his prose. He certainly hasen't had a publication deadline and a word cap in recent years, so maybe he's rusty.
Yeah, maybe he's used to writing longer novels and posting stories on his blog where the word-count limit is the sky, so the constraints of a fan-mag choked this story. But I agree, he should definitely have planned to make it short in the first place - "The False Sun" is a lot shorter, and it's also Bakker's best short story by far. This one was just badly edited and awkwardly written.
I liked a lot of things about the story - the use of magic was really creative, the politicking of the Scarlet Spires was cool, the Queen of Ainon was a rare non-prostitute female character, and the Norse barbarian in a decadent southern city is always an adventure classic - but it just felt awkward and sloppily put together. A lot of parts were good, but the whole wasn't.
Some scenes are too long and verbose, others are way too short, there's typos all over the place. The ending, wherein Our Hero escapes the city and Carythusal burns down in the space of one sentence, is way too abrupt to make sense. My reaction to the whole story was just "meh".
