‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ says Adelaide’s Fiona McIntosh, but her protestation of innocence loses its veracity when she follows it up with: ‘And I didn’t mean to kill Alyd either.’’

The deaths of Jorn, the naively talkative page boy, and nobleman Alyd probably came as less of a surprise to readers already familiar with McIntosh’s penchant for bloodletting in the pages of her breezy fantasy books. The latest victims met their demise in The Quickening, a trilogy recently concluded with the publication of Bridge of Souls (Voyager, $18.95).

While Alyd lost his head, young Jorn had a slower demise, based on a medieval torture McIntosh discovered in Germany.

‘I was in Regensburg, in Germany,’ says McIntosh, who travels broadly thanks to her other job, running a travel magazine with her husband. ‘It’s a very old city that dates back to Roman times. I was on a tour and asked the girl, I don't know what made me do it, “do you have a dungeon here”. People stared at me wondering  what was wrong with me. I think the girl wondered what I was going to do. But she showed me the dungeon. There was this wheel as big as the room itself and they really did start at the toes and work up slowly so the victim could feel every crunch. I got to use it on Jorn.’

There are a lot more slips on McIntosh’s keyboard throughout the trilogy, and one character gets to shuffle off his mortal coil more than once.

The central plot device has shades of the Highlander movie, in that Wyl Thirsk is cursed so that whoever slays him gets to swap souls with him. At the moment of his death, Wyl finds himself inhabiting the body of his killer.

Thirsk is the general of Morgravia, the childhood nemesis of the prince, and later dastardly king, Celimus. With a few trusty companions, including the boy, Finch, who has his own destiny to fulfil, Wyl must use his dubious magical gift to defy Celimus and win the hand of his beloved Valentyna.

‘Until the third book, that's the only magic there is,’ McIntosh says of Wyl’s gift. ‘The story is about human struggle. I increasingly find readers appreciate it. They don’t want blitzes of light or powerful sorcerers.’

With The Quickening being picked up for distribution in the UK and US, McIntosh couldn’t be happier, but she isn’t resting. Plans are already underway for a new series, Percheron, with a distinctly Persian flavour, following a trip to Turkey. ‘It’s an exotic setting, a mix of Byzantium and Turkey and Persia. Much is set in a harem so I had to know what it is really like.’

Her visit to Istanbul included the Tokapi palace and other classic landmarks harking back to the city’s fabled past — the grand bazaar, the spice bazaar, the Blue Mosque.

‘The travel industry helps the writing, the writing complements the travel side. You'll never hear me complaining about work.’

McIntosh is looking to raise the bar with Percheron, admitting The Quickening was more about pace and character than setting.

‘I’m quite lazy from that point of view (setting). Readers understand that sort of (European Medieval) world. They know what castles, meadows and mountain ranges look like. With this one there (Percheron) there are minarets and stone palaces.

‘This is a far more challenging series, the most complex tale I’ve told. It’s a simple story but on an enormous canvas. It has a love story at the core of it, but it gets more adventurous and gruesome.

‘What the Turks were capable of is terrifying. I showed my husband this piece I was reading and he said, ‘”don’t you dare put that in one of your books”, and I said, “ooh, I have to”. It’s coming up in Percheron.’