Pure Impure

Writing the beginning of the new far future, dystopian, hard science fiction story. Solid so far. Also: making good progress with the triple editing pass of the fantasy/myth/fae story. This story has really come into its own. The narrative voice is unique, and strong.

A Storm of Swords, by George R.R. Martin

This is the third book in a series of machiavellian fantasy intrigue between warring royal families in a realm knows as The Seven Kingdoms. (Spoilers for the first three books) After the King dies in the first book, and multiple claimants go to war in the second, by the end of the third only the families Lannister, Bolton and Frey have all come out on top, though remnants of their destroyed rival’s hosts and bannerman, including some turned brigand, remain. The Freys especially are hated, because they betrayed their leige lords, the Starks, in a brutal coup, killing their whole family at a wedding feast.

In the epilogue, a young Frey is kidnapped by brigands, and his uncle, an otherwise worthless drunk afflicted by migraines from a wound suffered early in life, is sent to ransom him. But the trip will cost more than gold.

…

(pg. 787)

Merrett had plenty of fear. His head was pounding too. Much more of this and he’d be sobbing. “You have your gold,” he said. “Give me my nephew, and I’ll be gone.” Petyr was actually more a great half-nephew, but there was no need to go into that.

“He’s in the godswood,” said the man in the yellow cloak. “We’ll take you to him. Notch, you hold his horse.”

Merrett handed over the bridle reluctantly. He did not see what other choice he had. “My water skin,” he heard himself say. “A swallow of wine, to settle my—”

“We don’t drink with your sort,” yellow cloak said curtly. “It’s this way. Follow me.”

Leaves crunched beneath their heels, and every step sent a spike of pain through Merrett’s temple. They walked in silence, the wind gusting around them. The last light of the setting sun was in his eyes as he clambered over the mossy hummocks that were all that remained of the keep. Behind was the godswood.

Petyr Pimple was hanging from the limb of an oak, a noose tight around his long thin neck. His eyes bulged from a black face, staring down at Merrett accusingly. You came too late, they seemed to say. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t! He had come when they told him. “You killed him,” he croaked.

“Sharp as a blade, this one,” said the one-eyed man.

An aurochs was thundering through Merrett’s head. Mother have mercy, he thought. “I brought the gold.”

“That was good of you,” said the singer amiably. “We’ll see that it’s put to good use.”

Merrett turned away from Petyr. He could taste the bile in the back of his throat. “You . . . you had no right.”

“We had a rope,” said yellow cloak. “That’s right enough.”

Two of the outlaws seized Merrett’s arms and bound them tight behind his back. He was too deep in shock to struggle. “No,” was all he could manage. “I only came to ransom Petyr. You said if you had the gold by sunset he wouldn’t be harmed . . .”

“Well,” said the singer, “you’ve got us there, my lord. That was a lie of sorts, as it happens.”

The one-eyed outlaw came forward with a long coil of hempen rope. He looped one end around Merrett’s neck, pulled it tight, and tied a hard knot under his ear. The other end he threw over the limb of the oak. The big man in the yellow cloak caught it.

“What are you doing?” Merrett knew how stupid that sounded, but he could not believe what was happening, even then. “You’d never dare hang a Frey.”

Yellow cloak laughed. “That other one, the pimply boy, he said the same thing.”

He doesn’t mean it. He cannot mean it. “My father will pay you. I’m worth a good ransom, more than Petyr, twice as much.”

The singer sighed. “Lord Walder might be half-blind and gouty, but he’s not so stupid as to snap at the same bait twice. Next time he’ll send a hundred swords instead of a hundred dragons, I fear.”

“He will!” Merrett tried to sound stern, but his voice betrayed him. “He’ll send a thousand swords, and kill you all.”

“He has to catch us first.” The singer glanced up at poor Petyr. “And he can’t hang us twice, now can he?” He drew a melancholy air from the strings of his woodharp. “Here now, don’t soil yourself. All you need to do is answer me a question, and I’ll tell them to let you go.”

Merrett would tell them anything if it meant his life. “What do you want to know? I’ll tell you true, I swear it.”

The outlaw gave him an encouraging smile. “Well, as it happens, we’re looking for a dog that ran away.”

“A dog?” Merrett was lost. “What kind of dog?”

“He answers to the name Sandor Clegane. Thoros says he was making for the Twins. We found the ferrymen who took him across the Trident, and the poor sod he robbed on the kingsroad. Did you see him at the wedding, perchance?”

“The Red Wedding?” Merrett’s skull felt as if it were about to split, but he did his best to recall. There had been so much confusion, but surely someone would have mentioned Joffrey’s dog sniffing round the Twins. “He wasn’t in the castle. Not at the main feast . . . he might have been at the bastard feast, or in the camps, but . . . no, someone would have said . . .”

“He would have had a child with him,” said the singer. “A skinny girl, about ten. Or perhaps a boy the same age.”

“I don’t think so,” said Merrett. “Not that I knew.”

“No? Ah, that’s a pity. Well, up you go.”

“No,” Merrett squealed loudly. “No, don’t, I gave you your answer, you said you’d let me go.”

“Seems to me that what I said was I’d tell them to let you go.” The singer looked at yellow cloak. “Lem, let him go.”

“Go bugger yourself,” the big outlaw replied brusquely.

The singer gave Merrett a helpless shrug and began to play, “The Day They Hanged Black Robin.”

“Please.” The last of Merrett’s courage was running down his leg. “I’ve done you no harm. I brought the gold, the way you said. I answered your question. I have children.”

“That Young Wolf never will,” said the one-eyed outlaw.

Merrett could hardly think for the pounding in his head. “He shamed us, the whole realm was laughing, we had to cleanse the stain on our honor.” His father had said all that and more.

“Maybe so. What do a bunch o’ bloody peasants know about a lord’s honor?” Yellow cloak wrapped the end of the rope around his hand three times. “We know some about murder, though.”

“Not murder.” His voice was shrill. “It was vengeance, we had a right to our vengeance. It was war. Aegon, we called him Jinglebell, a poor lackwit never hurt anyone, Lady Stark cut his throat. We lost half a hundred men in the camps. Ser Garse Goodbrook, Kyra’s husband, and Ser Tytos, Jared’s son . . . someone smashed his head in with an axe . . . Stark’s direwolf

killed four of our wolfhounds and tore the kennelmaster’s arm off his shoulder, even after we’d filled him full of quarrels . . .”

“So you sewed his head on Robb Stark’s neck after both o’ them were dead,” said yellow cloak.

“My father did that. All I did was drink. You wouldn’t kill a man for drinking.” Merrett remembered something then, something that might be the saving of him. “They say Lord Beric always gives a man a trial, that he won’t kill a man unless something’s proved against him. You can’t prove anything against me. The Red Wedding was my father’s work, and Ryman’s and Lord Bolton’s. Lothar rigged the tents to collapse and put the crossbowmen in the gallery with the musicians, Bastard Walder led the attack on the camps . . . they’re the ones you want, not me, I only drank some wine . . . you have no witness.”

“As it happens, you’re wrong there.” The singer turned to the hooded woman. “Milady?”

The outlaws parted as she came forward, saying no word. When she lowered her hood, something tightened inside Merrett’s chest, and for a moment he could not breathe. No. No, I saw her die. She was dead for a day and night before they stripped her naked and threw her body in the river. Raymund opened her throat from ear to ear. She was dead.

Her cloak and collar hid the gash his brother’s blade had made, but her face was even worse than he remembered. The flesh had gone pudding soft in the water and turned the color of curdled milk. Half her hair was gone and the rest had turned as white and brittle as a crone’s. Beneath her ravaged scalp, her face was shredded skin and black blood where she had raked herself with her nails. But her eyes were the most terrible thing. Her eyes saw him, and they hated.

“She don’t speak,” said the big man in the yellow cloak. “You bloody bastards cut her throat too deep for that. But she remembers.” He turned to the dead woman and said, “What do you say, m’lady? Was he part of it?”

Lady Catelyn’s eyes never left him. She nodded.

Merrett Frey opened his mouth to plead, but the noose choked off his words. His feet left the ground, the rope cutting deep into the soft flesh beneath his chin. Up into the air he jerked, kicking and twisting, up and up and up.

…

Finished the pre-writing draft of the military science fiction story. Really like how this one turned out. Beginning to write another far future dystopian hard science fiction story. Very excited about exploring the new setting, and cast of characters.

Just finished the first editing pass of the urban supernatural story, and moving on to a triple editing pass of the fantasy/myth/fae story. It will be my second story released (after Übermensch), so I can’t wait to share more about it with you all in the coming months 🙂

Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card.

The alien hive-mind Buggers launched two devastating interplanetary fleets against Earth, and humanity barely emerged victorious from the conflict. No third fleet is sighted, but none can rest easy. Earth begins drafting child geniuses into a battleschool, with the goal of eventually launching a third and final conflict. Ender Wiggin is the best of the young soldiers, overcoming all challenges and obstacles set before him. But, ruthless as Ender is in the pursuit of victory, he is not a killer. (Ending Spoilers) So the government calls the last section of his schooling a final test, and sets him a series of mock computer engagements with the enemy, ending with his victory over the simulated invasion of the Bugger homeworlds. Except it turns out the simulation was a real war, and he had been tricked into exterminating the Buggers entire race.

Ender exiles himself, hopping on one of the first starships sent out to re-colonize the Buggers empty worlds. But after landing, he finds part of the land terraformed into a scene from his childhood, of a fantasy game from the battleschool that he could never win… 

…

(pg. 331)

The mirror was waiting for him on the wall. It was a dull sheet of metal, in which the rough shape of a human face had been scratched. They tried to draw the image I should see in the picture.

And looking at the mirror he could remember breaking it, pulling it from the wall, and snakes leaping out of the hidden place, attacking him, biting him wherever their poisonous fangs could find purchase.

How well do they know me, wondered Ender. Well enough to know how often I have thought of death, to know that I am not afraid of it. Well enough to know that even if I feared death, it would not stop me from taking that mirror from the wall.

He walked to the mirror, lifted, pulled away. Nothing jumped from the space behind it. Instead, in a hollowed-out place, there was a white ball of silk with a few frayed strands sticking out here and there. An egg? No. The pupa of a queen bugger, already fertilized by the larval males, ready, out of her own body, to hatch a hundred thousand buggers, including a few queens and males. Ender could see in his mind the slug-like males clinging to the walls of a dark tunnel, and the large adults carrying the infant queen to the mating room; each male in turn penetrated the larval queen, shuddered in ecstasy, and died, dropping to the tunnel floor and shriveling. Then the new queen was laid before the old, a magnificent creature clad in soft and shimmering wings, which had long since lost the power of flight but still contained the power of majesty. The old queen kissed her to sleep with the gentle poison in her lips, then wrapped her in threads from her belly, and commanded her to become herself, to become a new city, a new world, to give birth to many queens and many worlds—

How do I know this, thought Ender. How can I see these things, like memories in my own mind.

As if in answer, he saw the first of all his battles with the bugger fleets. He had seen it before on the simulator; now he saw it as the hive-queen saw it, through many different eyes. The buggers formed their globe of ships, and then the terrible fighters came out of the darkness and the Little Doctor destroyed them in a blaze of light. He felt then what the hive-queen felt, watching through her workers’ eyes as death came to them too quickly to avoid, but not too quickly to be anticipated. There was no memory of pain or fear, though. What the hive-queen felt was sadness, a sense of resignation. She had not thought these words as she saw the humans coming to kill, but it was in words that Ender understood her: The humans did not forgive us, she thought. We will surely die.

“How can you live again?” he asked.

The queen in her silken cocoon had no words to give back; but when he closed his eyes and tried to remember, instead of memory came new images. Putting the cocoon in a cool place, a dark place, but with water, so she wasn’t dry, so that certain reactions could take place in the cocoon. Then time. Days and weeks, for the pupa inside to change. And then, when the cocoon had changed to a dusty brown color, Ender saw himself splitting open the cocoon, and helping the small and fragile queen emerge. He saw himself taking her by the forelimb and helping her walk from her birthwater to a nesting place, soft with dried leaves on sand. Then I am alive, came the thought in his mind. Then I am awake. Then I make my ten thousand children.

“No,” said Ender. “I can’t.”

Anguish.

“Your children are the monsters of our nightmares now. If I awoke you, we would only kill you again.”

There flashed through his mind a dozen images of human beings being killed by buggers, but with the image came a grief so powerful he could not bear it, and he wept their tears for them.

“If you could make them feel as you can make me feel, then perhaps they could forgive you.”

Only me, he realized. They found me through the ansible, followed it and dwelt in my mind. In the agony of my tortured dreams they came to know me, even as I spent my days destroying them; they found my fear of them, and found also that I had no knowledge I was killing them. In the few weeks they had, they built this place for me, and the Giant’s corpse and the playground and the ledge at the End of the World, so I would find this place by the evidence of my eyes. I am the only one they know, and so they can only talk to me, and through me. We are like you; the thought pressed into his mind. We did not mean to murder, and when we understood, we never came again. We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other’s dreams. How were we to know? We could live with you in peace. Believe us, believe us, believe us.

He reached into the cavity and took out the cocoon. It was astonishingly light, to hold all the hope and future of a great race within it.

“I’ll carry you,” said Ender, “I’ll go from world to world until I find a time and a place where you can come awake in safety. And I’ll tell your story to my people, so that perhaps in time they can forgive you, too. The way that you’ve forgiven me.”

Weeks later he came to Valentine and told her to read something he had written; she pulled the file he named from the ship’s computer, and read it.

It was written as if the hive-queen spoke, telling all that they had meant to do, and all that they had done. Here are our failures, and here is our greatness; we did not mean to hurt you, and we forgive you for our death. From their earliest awareness to the great wars that swept across their home world, Ender told the story quickly, as if it were an ancient memory. When he came to the tale of the great mother, the queen of all, who first learned to keep and teach the new queen instead of killing her or driving her away, then he lingered, telling how many times she had finally to destroy the child of her body, the new self that was not herself, until she bore one who understood her quest for harmony. This was a new thing in the world, two queens that loved and helped each other instead of battling, and together they were stronger than any other hive. They prospered; they had more daughters who joined them in peace; it was the beginning of wisdom.

If only we could have talked to you, the hive-queen said in Ender’s words. But since it could not be, we ask only this: that you remember us, not as enemies, but as tragic sisters, changed into a foul shape by fate or God or evolution. If we had kissed, it would have been the miracle to make us human in each other’s eyes. Instead we killed each other. But still we welcome you now as guestfriends. Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home.

The book that Ender wrote was not long, but in it was all the good and all the evil that the hive-queen knew. And he signed it, not with his name, but with a title:

SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD

…

The Riddle-Master of Hed, by Patricia A. McKillip.

The premise: in a fantasy island realm, Morgan, the Prince of Hed, is discovered by his siblings to have secretly won a crown in a riddle-contest with the cursed ghost of King Peven, then kept it hidden under his bed. Discovered, it is then brought to his attention that King Mathom of An had pledged his daughter, Raederle, to marry the man who won the crown. Morgan sets sail for adventure, but is waylaid along the way in a storm, and loses his memories…

Beautiful prose, though it took a while to hook me. I was expecting more swashbuckling. But the book has a steady charm, and presents a magical realm unlike any of its contempories. Unique, and short. I’m looking forward to the meeting between the princess and Morgan, who is a prince barely one step up from a farmer.

Finished the final edit of Übermensch, and submitted the manuscript to the studio for eBook formatting. On the home stretch now! Will release it before the end of October. Stay tuned.

Still doing the final edit of Übermensch, but almost done. Made a lot of great subtle changes to it overall in the last few days, as well. Sometimes you just need to look at things from a different perspective, and aesthetic necessities become clear. Great progress 🙂

Feast of Souls, by C.S Friendman.

This book is set in a world of medieval intrigue, where dread Magisters,  immortal male sorcerers of unholy power, serve the Kings of man to while away the long centuries, and plot dark machinations. Kamala is a young, hardbitten woman, full of promising magical ability, and has sought out a retired Magister, Ethanus, in order to attempt the impossible: become a female Magister. But the price to become a Magister is that you burn yourself out magically, unto death, and then reach beyond your own mortality.

So out in the nighttime forest, beneath a starry sky, Kamala attempts it.

…

(pg. 23)

He hears her scream. Not a sound voiced by her flesh, but an agonized howling of her innermost soul. It is at once defiance, fear, determination – raw stubbornness, which has always been her strongest trait. Yet even that is not enough now. You must be willing to leave behind what you are, he thinks, and become something so dark and terrible that men would cringe in horror if they knew it walked among them. And you must choose that course of your own accord, without being shown the way; you must want it so much that everything else is cast aside.

Does a man truly cast everything aside? he wonders. A woman must. Nature has prepared her to bring life into the world and nurture it, and the very essence of her soul is shaped to that purpose. Such a soul cannot manage Transition in its natural state, nor survive the trial of the spirit that will follow. Can Kamala strip herself of all that the gods gave her in making her a woman, can she hunger for life so desperately that the lives of others are as nothing to her? It is a trick men are born to, for Nature has fashioned them for war, but women must learn it unnaturally.

You were meant to bring life into the world, he thinks. Now, to survive, you must bring death.

She is on her knees now, shaking violently as spasms of dying engulf her soul. Ethanus can hear her desperation screaming out across the heavens. He even hears his name, voiced as a prayer – a plea for the information she needs to survive – but he makes no answer. Each student must find his own way to the Truth; that is the Magister’s tradition. To do otherwise may bring weaker students through Transition safely, but it cannot make them fit for what comes after.

Forgive me, my fierce little whore. And forgive the gods, who have decreed that all birth must be agony.

And then-

He can sense it in her. A sudden awareness of something outside herself. Beyond the clouds, beyond the wind, beyond the parts of the earth that man has given names to. A source of power outside herself, like but unlike the athra whose flow trickles to a stop within her soul. She grasps at it but it eludes her. No! she screams. I will not fail! Another spark takes its place and she focuses her will upon it, desperate to lay claim to it before her flesh expires. Ethanus can taste her determination on his tongue, the sudden elation of understanding. This, this is what she was mant to discover – this foreign spark that is not soulfire, but might be bound and made to take its place. Why did Ethanus not simply tell her that? Why has he not taught her the tricks she needs to tame it? Now she must wrestle with Death even as she races to weave a link between herself and this distant power, so strong that no force wielded by man or god can ever sever it.

And he knows it before she does, when she has won. He knows because he has watched other apprentices expire at this point, consumed at the very threshold of immortality. In them the final sparks within their own souls had died before they could claim this new power, and Death had dragged them screaming into oblivion. In her… the ice within her veins cracks… the strangled heart dares a new beat… the breath that has been all but choked off by the force of her trials draws inward once again, bringing warmth to her lungs. He knows what she does because he knows what signs to watch for. She… she knows only that awareness of a foreign power throbs within her now like a second heartbeat, and that her flesh draws strength from it, easier with each passing breath.

When she is sure of what she has done, and sure it cannot be undone, she looks at him. There are tears in her eyes, red tears, for her body has squeezed forth blood in it’s exertions. How appropriate, he thinks. There were tears in his own but he wiped them away before she could notice. He does not want her thinking to question what emotions spawned them.

“I live,” she says, and in that phrase are captured a thousand things unsaid. A thousand questions.

“Yes,” he responds. Answering them all.

…

Still working on the military science fiction, which is nearing the home stretch for finished pre-writing, and editing the urban supernatural, and also doing a final edit of the far future hard science fiction story… which now has a title, and a book cover.

Enjoy!