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Student of Trinity

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  1. Student of Trinity
    He can almost use his eyes, this starving writer. Perhaps I must tell my invisible angels to draw up their hoods. But of course I have none. I do have servants, many servants, and some of these might be called invisible. Few of my agents are aware that they serve me, and none needs frequent direction. But my affairs are involved, and directing them requires ample time. My young author has seen this much truly, that I have needed more time than is normally given to mortals, and have secured it decisively. That was indeed the first condition of my career.
    How much more will he see? What magic will he have me do? I am content to join in his game of questions, hoping it may distract me from my cares. I am impatient, but not demanding. Impatience I have patiently carried, but I abandoned high standards long ago.
     
    * * * * *

    The old man is in the parlor again tonight, but in the side room, by the crackling fire. He is settled in the largest chair, beneath heavy blankets, looking all the more like a doll. He stares at the fire without moving, without seeming to breathe. If he weren’t a magician one would suppose he had been dead for some hours, but being a magician, a few hours without breathing would not harm him. He might simply forget. In fact, though, his breaths are only slow and shallow, and from time to time he slowly blinks. A plate of thin wafers and an empty glass sit on a tray beside him. Some of the wafers may possibly be missing, but there are no crumbs and the glass looks clean. It is impossible to decide whether he has consumed anything. The wafers are pale; in fact, they are even translucent. Who else would dine on food that could be mistaken for dragonfly wings? What other house would have such fare on offer?
    The magician is gathering his strength, in the house of his closest kin.
  2. Student of Trinity
    The old man is no merely ancient mariner, but a sailor who has sailed away from time. How old can he be? Surely he has seen kingdoms rise and fail; has he also watched their ruins sink in sand and sea, till new kingdoms rise in turn?
     
    He has, and it must be many times, for the question is not how old he is, but whether he is really a man. He is a magician, a true magician, and true magicians must be older than men dream, because true magic takes half eternity to learn. It is foolish and ignorant people who suppose that one approaches magic by opening the mind and accepting unlikely things. Nothing could be more mistaken, because true magic is only approached by the most caustic skepticism, scorning premise, despising conclusion. Only by exhaustive testing of minutest details, long past the point of human endurance, does one detect the infinitesimal signs of the deeper patterns. Only the labor of centuries can make them plain, and only after many centuries can one begin to apply their control. To extend life indefinitely might perhaps have been the summit of the magical art, if it did not have to be the very beginning. Even a journeyman mage must be frightfully old, to have advanced so far. The old man who has slowly drifted into the parlor of this fine little inn is a great master.
     
    Why does he not hover in a cloud of light, or proceed attended by a guard of fallen angels? Who can tell? Perhaps the dark angels are there, only hidden from sight. Perhaps he would travel quite differently if he were entering his enemy’s stronghold; but he has come to this inn to see his granddaughter, so many times over great. After so long a span, is his line not extinct? If it is not, why are his descendants fewer than millions? Somehow the art he has followed must have strange rewards and constraints, as legends hint, and the innkeeper’s beautiful daughter is the old magician’s only living fleshly relation.
     
    She has welcomed him without words. Fossil and flower are not more different, but see how he raises the tiny glass to his withered lips: the crooking of the fingers, the tilting of the hand, is the very mirror of her motion in setting the glass before him, only so much more slow. Seeing this now, one perceives the uncanny grace of his barely perceptible movements, so slow but so perfectly smooth, as the heavens wheel. Seeing that, then, one understands at last how the flight of her hands through the air can comfort a bruised heart, and bruise it again.
    [That just came to me this evening, when I saw the weird old man glance at me in Miss Greta’s mirror. Suddenly it was all there, and I’ve been at it all morning, hammering it into words. I’d forgotten what that’s like. Damn. I used to write pages in a morning. I think there’s more. Dear gods let there be more. He really looks like every bit of it. He looks like a dressed up stick. But he does move like that; I watched and watched. It was like watching clouds change, so slow you don’t notice but once you do you can watch for hours. And Greta too — it really isn’t just her face and turning thirty, she’s like that but quick. That’s a brilliant aperçu this time, you inky gods, not a stupid little conceit.
    So what on earth is he going to be up to now, if he’s a magician? Not just drifting in for a drop of that seabreeze elixir. What on earth must it cost? He must be truly rich, at least; the perfect model for a magician, of course. Why did I ever try to write a wizard as a busking rogue? No wonder that never worked. But what does a magician do, anyway? Well, magic, I suppose. He’s here for magic. But what will that be? What will it mean? Where is it going? I have to go back to Miss Greta’s again, two nights in a row just this once. She’ll let me sit once without drinking, I’m sure she will. I’m a regular after all even if I don’t spend so much. An inn needs its regulars. Even if he’s not there maybe I’ll remember something. Maybe I could even ask about him? Just ask around.]
  3. Student of Trinity
    No-one in the inn even saw the old man before he appeared in the doorway, but the eyes that flicked to him there are staying to stare. He is so far beyond old, it takes very good clothes just to keep him from falling apart. His small grey coat is fine and new. His shirt is clean, his trousers are white, his shoes are black. His shriveled head sits in his stiff collar like the head of a doll. An ivory cane hangs down from within each sleeve, as if his arms are just long white sticks; but inside his cuffs he has hands that grip the canes.
     
    He moves to the bar very slowly, swinging on his canes in such small steps that he seems to be gliding upright. He looks straight ahead but he knows they are staring at him. In a few moments they will look away and be ashamed, but he does not resent their attention because he knows what they see. If he were borne on a litter or propped on a throne he might almost pass for a normal kind of ancient, but his softly creaking unassisted glide is an outrage. Anything as old as that should be under glass.
     
    He is only half way to the bar when the last gaze drops away, but by the time the first glances return he has somehow achieved a perch on the near corner stool. Pretty Greta, a being of a different species, has placed a tiny cut crystal glass in front of him. He looks at his thimbleful of pale blue liquor. The faint scent from its pouring has made everyone in the room think of sailing, without knowing why. He makes no move to drink. It is not clear that he can.
     
    The most ashamed eyes in the room are those of the starving young author. Young he certainly is, from my point of view, but he has just perceived how it comforts him to be so clearly upon Greta’s side of an age divide, and he cannot help blinking. His last ten years have been slower than they were supposed to be. His life has faltered like the plots of his half-finished tales.
     
    I am slow but I do not falter. I am the very old man. Once I was young. I was born just as everyone is, but it is hardly important. As far as the present is concerned, I have always been old. There are scarcely six persons in the world who understand my concerns, and these will not advise me. So I choose my own tasks. Some think I am wicked because my work gives nothing to anyone, but I act for the best as I see it.
     
    I must wait for one week. I can neither afford nor achieve any signs of impatience, but I hate to be bored. I will fill this week by reciting. The young author will have an inspiration, and tell one of my stories. The current one, of course, even though its ending is not yet certain. I have no interest in the past.
     
    I watch in the cloudy mirror behind Greta as his head jerks up and his eyes go wide. The two of us together, our contrast, have spoken to him. He has kept paper and pen on his table every day for ten years, but he seizes them as if it were luck to find them at hand. He has something to write.
  4. Student of Trinity
    My story is roaring along. Somewhere around 40,000 words so far, I think. I'm working on chapter 10, now, and I have already done several pages of what is supposed to be the next section of the book.
     
    After Chapter 12 there'll be a different narrator, for what is supposed to be about a third of the book, before coming back to Anastasia in the end. The middle chunk is the diary of this native princeling, Thomas MacLayne, which Anastasia acquires and pastes into her memoir. A lot of it is about her, but from a different perspective. I like how it's working out so far. The second narrator is another interesting character, at least to me. In part, he's a foil to her. He is suave and charismatic, an actor and a gifted emotional manipulator, where she barely knows what emotions are. My plan for writing him is to spend as long as it takes to come up with the perfect things for him to say in each situation, and then have him say them off the top of his head. He's actually not supposed to be a jerk at all, though. Where Anastasia is the fantasy about the sane and decent person having superior firepower, and never being fazed by anything, Thomas is the fantasy about the sane and decent person having guile and charm. Plus another bizarre superpower of his own. And yeah, he's a love interest, though it's an extremely problematic match from both sides, and the story as a whole is by no means mainly a love story.
     
    None of the major plot twists have yet appeared, but I have them planned out. The whole thing may run to around 150,000 words if the later parts of my plot skeleton expand in the same ratio that the first parts have. It's still a lot of fun to write.
     
    But: I'm starting to worry about the potential legal implications of posting it all here. Someday this thing may be publishable. I'm not planning to give up my day job in any case, and if it turns out that nobody but me really likes the story, Ehh, oh well. It will have been a hoot to do, just for myself. But why close any doors when I don't have to, you know?
     
    I don't seem to be needing the rhythm of posting chapters here to keep me writing. I may post more chapters if I get around to finding out what the commercial consequences of posting them are, and discover that they are unimportant.
     
    Otherwise, y'all may have to wait for a while to find out what happens. Thanks for reading.
  5. Student of Trinity
    The next day began calmly, in the machining shop. I brought Mother a rod of good barrel steel that I had made the previous month, and carefully baked and cooled to anneal out flaws. I turned it on the lathe, carefully making it perfectly straight and round. Then I set it into the borer, and I checked the alignment three times, measuring and laying on the guide wires by hand, and stretching them tight. Mother judged it correct, and in effect that meant I had passed for a trained smith, because nothing in the rest of the project could offer an irrecoverable problem. The boring would take all day, but the machine could do it alone. The barrel would rotate around a fixed half-bit, along whose empty side cutting oil was pumped to flush out the metal chips. To receive a perfect grade I would have had to sit and watch all this, just in case something needed adjusting, but I skipped some of those hours of watching and went to my seminar on partial differential equations. Mother wouldn’t give me the highest grade, but she would make sure nothing happened to my revolver.
     
    The seminar had been a mistake. I had enrolled in it with the hope of learning to predict the detonation waves in my cloud mines, and so perhaps learn to make them stronger by safer means than simply making them bigger. It had become clear within a few classes that this course was not going to help me with that, but I had faithfully attended for two months because the instructor was a guest from Morandau Mill. The Mill branch of the house had grown for many generations, and ours of Morandau House had shrunk in the last few. We were the original settlement, the stronghold built upon the orders of Kelvin himself, but the Mill and the Foundry had grown larger over the centuries. They looked down on us, and although we refused to acknowledge their right to set standards, I could not resign from a course taught by one of their people. The Mill had enough people for some to specialize in higher mathematics, and evidently they thought of Doctor Huygens as one of their jewels.
     
    I thought him a drone. His course had a few useful pieces. The method of characteristic curves, for instance, seemed like something that would often be handy, though for my explosions it really only offered a formal confirmation of the guesses I had made on my own. Huygens also referred briefly to a technique of multiple scale analysis, for which the applications he described sounded remarkably broad, but he said so little about the technique that I had to spend several hours in our library just to discover what it actually was — and to realize that no books we had could explain how to use it. Otherwise the hours of lectures, and the tedious exercises, were all elegantly useless.
     
    Huygens liked to prove that solutions existed, because he could do that quite perfectly. He could also perfectly illustrate his points with ideal examples. So he did a lot of that. In anything but those ideal examples, however, it seemed that there was far too much distasteful estimation involved, for him to say anything about what the perfectly existing solutions were actually like. His course had offered no improvement for my exploding oil clouds beyond the crude estimates I had already taught myself to make. Doctor Huygens was to stay with us for one more month, so his course would go on that much longer.
     
    While under our roof, he served as one of us. As a trained adult he rode patrols when his turn came up. At sixty-three years we reckoned him to be approaching middle age. He rode well, and he could shoot rather well, on the range. He kept strict control in his classroom. His lectures always finished exactly on time, and his exercise solutions were admirably clear. On that day, though, what mattered more to me was that his name was Martinus Huygens. He had our training and he knew our arts. He wore our black and his hair was white. He was Morandau. But not in name.
     
    We are all Morandau, but only some of us bear the name. Perhaps a sixth of us, at the time of which I write. There were dozens of other names. Sometimes children were given the name, though both parents lacked it. Not often. If one parent had the name, it was more common for the child to receive it, usually before the twelfth year. Until then the child would use the other parent’s name. If both parents had the Morandau name, as mine did, the child inherited it at birth. I had never thought much about this. Or rather, I had not thought that I thought about it. I had classmates with many different names, and I would have said that we were all treated exactly the same, by everyone. But would a Jelt or a Liange have been left alone as I was? Of course not. There would have been a good reason why not, a reason that had nothing whatever to do with their names. Maybe even two such reasons.
     
    One day when I was thirteen, Talitha had me stay after a lesson to clean the lab, as punishment for some extravagance or other. Probably an explosion, though I have a faint recollection that it might rather have been a folly with corrosive. The cleaning up punishment was normal, but then she had me walk with her up the stairs to the watchtower, in case she might fall. This concerned me, because she was not in the least unsteady, but I climbed gamely up just behind her, and stood with her as she gazed across the craggy landscape below. Suddenly she told me that her mother had held me as a baby in her arms, shortly before she died. I was surprised just to think of Talitha as having a mother. I knew that Talitha had been on the council for just over sixty years at that point. We knew grim stories about her, and I was surprised to realize suddenly that her own mother had been alive during them, an unremarkable member of the family, under her daughter’s command. Even then it occurred to me, though, that perhaps she had not been so unremarkable to Talitha.
     
    Talitha told me, staring at me in her alarming way, how happy her mother had been to see my birth. The old lady had crowed to me, Talitha said, in an ancient speech that survived among us in a few expressions: “Echt Morandau, du!” True Morandau, you. “But of course,” Talitha had added steadily, her eyes not letting mine go, “we mustn’t think that way.” Then she had walked quickly back downstairs. I had stood alone up there for a few moments, and when I got down, she had been gone.
     
    So my differential equations teacher was not so echt. What did that matter? That was exactly my question. I was looking at him through different eyes now, as if some of the invisible components in the ink on my brow had seeped into them. Scanning for a pattern, at the end of another lucidly useless lecture, I asked him a question. He sighed as I raised my hand, then gave me a slightly quizzical look, the way people looked at my father when he shaved his beard. “Doctor Huygens,” I asked, “Why must we only impose initial boundary conditions?”
     
    He frowned. For the most part he was commendably patient with slow students, but my questions were obnoxious by now. “We are not at liberty to set final boundary conditions, Miss Morandau. Time runs forward. What will be is determined by what is.” But I pressed my case. That was what was obnoxious about my questions. “A commander may select actions to attain a future goal, though, Doctor. Is that not a final condition?” My classmates stirred on the front benches. Twelve others were taking the course, most of them some years older than I was. Doctor Huygens was a highlight in their advanced educations.
     
    Huygens narrowed his eyes at me, and spoke testily. “A commander must recognize what is true, and shape actions accordingly. Some facts cannot be changed. So there are always initial boundary conditions. Adding final conditions to these will — almost always — overdetermine the equation. No solution will exist. This has been a major topic in our course, as those who have been following it will recognize.”
     
    My classmates chuckled and tittered, though some of them stopped abruptly. I did not notice which ones those were. I nodded my head, but made no effort to appear impressed. Huygens was irked enough to begin a general summary about boundary conditions, but his uncanny instinct for timing brought it up shortly, right at the end of the scheduled period. As he waved his hands in dismissal, he raised his voice to me above the clatter of our chairs and notebooks, “I would hold a compulsory review for you tonight, Miss Morandau, but I am afraid I must ride on this evening’s patrol.”
     
    “I know, Doctor,” I said to him, as I followed the others out of the classroom. “I’m leading the patrol.” I stared at him for a moment, until his eyes focused on my forehead and he recognized what looked different about me today. I left him frowning. He was by no means so detached from the world that he could have failed to notice that our great monolith had collapsed during the eight days he was away with the rest, so he must have had some impression of what had happened. Apparently, though, he had rather gathered that I was under severe punishment.
     
    I wasn’t worried about whether he would obey me. On patrol I would have authority to shoot him if he didn’t. Of course I would be very unlikely to do that, and I knew that he knew that. I assumed he also knew not to count on that, though. This was one of my first mistakes, stemming from the flaws in my upbringing.
     
    But something about Huygens did worry me. The fingers of my right hand were tense. I had been riding patrols myself since I was nine years old — four years early, because of my shooting — but I spent more time than usual preparing my mount and my carbine, and loading up my pouches with unlikely stuff. A wolfspray canister, in case we met a pack. An incendiary flare, in case somebody slid into the golden tarn. Those I often carried anyway. I liked them. The deadly mass of golden stalks covering the tarn didn’t burn well at all, but a flare would shrivel its toxin pods and give someone a chance to survive with burns instead of losing their lungs. I added an antivenin pack, in case something bit somebody’s horse. I skipped the howler. The sound drives many predators away, but I can’t bring myself to make that much noise on purpose, on patrol. If I have to do that, I may as well just start shooting.
     
    Apart from Doctor Huygens, the rest of my patrol team was also ready early: Reif Sather who had dragged the white skull for me, Karlin Jelt our master carpenter, young Miriam Nasim who had only ridden patrol twice before, and our head surgeon Rianna Morandau. Aunt Rianna didn’t often ride patrol, because she had an overriding responsibility if anyone were in her inspection room, but she was only in her early nineties, and perfectly capable with her weapons. She was actually some redoubled kind of cousin of my mother’s, but we called most of our older relatives Uncle or Aunt. I had appointed her to the role that she usually took when she did ride, of following a pistolshot or so behind the rest of the patrol, to ride fast home with news if some disaster befell. It was no shame, but an essential job, and she was the most valuable of us. She was an even quieter woman than most of her generation seemed to be. She had never said much to me even when I was her patient, and she only nodded to me tonight.
     
    Miriam would ride with Rianna, and if a disaster did occur, Miriam would have to do what she could to ensure that Rianna got away to report. Miriam was quite a good shot. I had coached her myself. My right-handed shooting is not a transferable skill, but keen youngsters who did not understand this would come to me for advice, and my left-handed experience was something I could pass on.
     
    Reif’s face was blank, but he seemed to sit stiffly in his saddle. I wonder now how he felt about being under my command again, but then I simply expected he would do his job. He would be riding point, with his friend’s father Karlin. Point had been my job for the past two years, and I had often teamed with Karlin. I had sometimes heard Karlin shouting and laughing with his friends, but in his work he was the Morandau model, calm and efficient. He was an excellent rider, and though his eyes were not as sharp as mine, his hearing was remarkable. He always wore ear plugs when his motorized saws were running, to protect his hearing. He was careful that way. I had spent many hours in his workshops, when I was a child. He had never tried to tell me what to do, outside his classes, but whenever I asked him for a tool or a piece of material, he would ask me what I was trying to do, and if the thing I wanted was not the best for my purpose, he would suggest something else. Often I wanted to try the other thing anyway, just to see for myself how it answered, and he was content with this. I think he would have been a good friend for a quiet child, if we had either of us thought in terms of friendship, but perhaps we had managed something like it nonetheless.
     
    Karlin smiled approvingly as he nodded to me, and I believe I caught the sense of his expression. He was happy to have the patrol being led by a properly constituted commander for a change, instead of by an ordinary resident appointed for the evening, as had been usual among us for so long. I’m sure it meant nothing to him that I was the commander in question. An experienced hand who knew us all well, except for Huygens, he would act as needed, regardless, and he had a good idea how we would act, too. But it was good that we had added a new council member. It was nice to see a sign of growth and progress in Morandau House, after all this time. I had found myself thinking that, too, in those moments when I was thinking disinterestedly about our larger situation, and was still finding it a novelty to think that way.
     
    Doctor Huygens rode up from the stable exactly on time. I noticed that his carbine was a new model, brought from the Mill, different from ours. I hadn’t seen him with it before, so he must have been issued it by some Mill people at the meeting from which I had been left home. It seemed to have a second barrel above the main one, but the upper tube had no open muzzle, and instead merged into the barrel below it, two handspans before the end. I was surprised that Mother had not yet talked to me about this new design. We consider it impolite, however, to look too closely at one another’s weapons. Parents and instructors inspect the arms of children. Trained adults are expected to look after their own. A commander can check her troops’ equipment if she sees fit, but it is not easy to do that without offering insult that can impair the team’s action. I know a man now who can do that kind of thing as easily as I shoot, but I am still not deft in that way. That evening with Doctor Huygens, the best I could manage was to look away from his rifle and return his nod — which he gave with an ironic smile for which Talitha, in her day, would probably have shot him. I glanced up, to see if she was watching from the tower. I couldn’t see her.
     
    I waved my left hand vaguely as we all trotted off, in deference to the theory that I was supposed to give a signal. Everyone knew what to do, anyway. We patrolled every morning and evening, and sometimes during the day or night as well, and most of us took a turn at least once a week. My parents did, usually as leader, and so did Yerzy and Lethandra. I had ridden with Lethandra many times, but never with any closer relatives. We try to avoid placing too many people from one immediate family in danger at once. I normally rode two or three times a week, because I liked it and my shooting was useful, but I had been too young to lead a patrol. Nobody close to my age normally did, but the bar on my forehead made my age irrelevant.
     
    My route that night was the northern loop, out to the infested crater lake we called the golden tarn and back, stopping to poke around in gullies and canyons as I saw fit. I had been riding that route regularly for years, and I still liked it because it had been the first route I rode as a child, when it had seemed a tremendous adventure. Dangerous beasts used to come down from the north in those years, and there were some for which my gift was especially useful. There were fewer beasts as I grew older, partly because I kept shooting them, but there was always a chance. We rarely met human threats on the northern loop, but there would be something to report, more often than not.
     
    In fact we met nothing at all for the first hour, though Reif and Karlin nosed into several of the more promising ravines. Twice I pointed up to a high crag, and Reif hauled himself up it to look around. We had cables bolted into them all, so it didn’t take him long — we are strong enough to climb quickly with a fixed line. I climbed up onto a tall outcropping myself while Reif and Karlin were looking into the long box canyon, and looked around with my field glasses. I grinned when I caught sight of a large flyer up ahead, high above the tarn. Those had been the main thing that brought me out patrolling as a girl, and they weren’t at all common any more. The point riders had come back and joined Huygens, so I rappelled down to them and told them quietly, mainly for Huygens’s benefit, “Rocs.” I looked back to Rianna and Miriam and simply pointed up, with a fluttering gesture, and Rianna raised her arm in response. I saw her turn to Miriam to explain. If Miriam didn’t have too many injuries, she might never again hear so many words from our surgeon.
     
    Huygens looked as nonchalant as the rest of them, but the stupid and ridiculous truth was that he thought I had broken our hour of silence to remark upon the boulders along the track. Only later did I realize that no-one from Morandau Mill had seen a roc in over forty years. It was my fault for speaking ambiguously. Huygens thought I said rocks. We both nearly died because of the punchline my friends used to laugh at when I was six.
     
    Karlin knew our roc drill well, though it had been nearly a year since we had last used it. We’d gotten more rocs around the golden tarn than anywhere else, and he had a favorite place to watch from, beside a big cracked slab of stone with an ancient pine growing in its sandwiched slice of dirt. He would sit there with a view over the crumbling huge caldera, whose flat bottom was the golden raft of perilous vegetation that completely covered the deep crater lake. The acoustics were somehow good right there. He could often hear the rocs scrambling over stone, and shoot to warn me as I rode around the narrow track beneath the caldera rim, with my carbine at the ready. But he kept Reif back with him, to let me ride ahead. This drill was about my shooting, no matter who was riding point.
     
    Huygens rode ahead with me. I couldn’t think of an inoffensive way to tell him to stay back, but it shouldn’t have made any difference, so I just told him curtly to stay right behind me. He drew out his carbine as I took out mine, and I would have liked to turn around to see what he was doing with it, that made such odd metallic sounds. It was certainly a new model. But I had to watch for rocs. The ride itself was also tricky around the caldera, and my horse picked his way. Half a pace wrong and we would tumble over jagged stones down into the tarn, and then the golden bulbs of toxin in the thick mat of entwining stalks that covered its water would crack open in a wave, and Karlin would either have to toss down a flare very neatly, to burn off the bulbs, or else try to recover my body before it was too dissolved for a funeral.
     
    Karlin fired. Huygens jerked around to look back to him, and his horse’s hoof slid a span on the rocks and he jerked back again to lean away from the tarn below. Suddenly the roc Karlin had heard soared up over the caldera rim, a hundred paces ahead of us, huge and redder than ever in the sinking sunlight. Huygens shouted, “Flyer!” and then, “Ride back!” as he kicked his horse past mine. The path was too narrow for that, and my horse stepped off it into a tangle of stony shards just downslope. I dismounted in a tumble so as not to be thrown into the tarn, and as I sprang to my feet on the path, slinging off my cloak and raising my carbine, Huygens was galloping ahead firing rapidly at the roc, as it swung around over the caldera and began its long screech. He was firing amazingly rapidly, with his strange new carbine, and he was even hitting the beast a few times. It jerked in the air, lashing its bulbous tail to turn abruptly, and its screech choked off in a shriek. With one of those quick leaps through the air that rocs do, it was gone over the caldera rim again. I fired to try to warn the Doctor, but he just turned triumphantly in the saddle to look at me, and saw the second roc plunging towards him from a notch in the rim wall between us. He fired two shots at it. Both missed, and one sent stone chips flying near me. Then his weapon jammed somehow. The roc seized him around the body in both its huge talons, his carbine went flying, his horse stumbled and rolled, and the roc soared out over the tarn with Huygens firmly in its grip.
     
    I watched the roc turn. Its tail-bulb swayed in a jumpy rhythm, held up above its body. Rocs do that when they’re climbing with prey. We think it helps them balance. They normally hunt in pairs, and they are curious predators. We believe they have common ancestry with the horrible stirges that flock in large caverns. Though rocs are enormously larger, their mouths are quite like the stirges’ narrow probosces. They kill by dropping their victims from great height, and then slurp up the remains. But some ancestor of mine, who must have shared the shooting gift, had discovered their peculiar weakness. Evidently the bulb organ is used for judging altitude. If a roc’s tail-bulb is punctured, it seems to perceive that it is flying too high, and so a shot to the tail-bulb will make a roc smoothly descend until it lands. Our theory is that it does this to avoid dropping its prey from so high that it can’t find the body again on the ground. We believe that rocs must have poor long-distance vision, because they never attack by diving from high in the air. They like to swoop out near ground level.
     
    It would be good for Reif and Miriam to see how this worked. I had done it dozens of times, since I was quite young. Even though the roc was climbing quickly, and might soon let Huygens fall, I had to watch its tail motion long enough to pick up the rhythm. Suddenly I knew that I had it, and fired one shot. A long moment later I saw the tail jerk, then swish several times back and forth. Then the creature began gliding down again, in long circles around the caldera. Once on the ground, it would still be a formidable creature, but nothing bullets couldn’t handle. Karlin and Reif could easily take it down, and Huygens would probably be fine, if his heart had been healthy.
     
    Before I could signal them, however, the first roc snatched me around the waist. It had circled around while I was distracted by the urgency of disabling the second one before it dropped Huygens. I batted its second talon away with my carbine, but then let the long weapon fall as I tipped sideways in the roc’s soaring grip, and my right hand seized my revolver. To get those huge, ropy claws out of my face I blew the roc’s second talon off at the knee. Fifty caliber rounds have enormous impact at point-blank range. But already I was high enough above the jagged rubble, though swooping down into the caldera, that shooting myself free of the talon that gripped me would have been deadly.
     
    A shot sang by, somewhere near. Someone was trying to help me. But the trick with the tail-bulb was one that only I could do, and this time the roc’s thick body was between me and its tail. Its rusty coat of feather-scales was wet with brown in several places from Huygens’s shots, but roc bodies are amazingly tough.
     
    If I couldn’t be on the ground shooting the roc’s tail when it had taken someone, then I was at least the best person for it to take. Strange as it sounds, I knew how to steer a roc. After many episodes of shooting them in the tail, I had years before started experimenting with shooting the descending rocs in the wings and body, to try to make them shift their flight, in order to control where the beasts would come down. That approach simply made them plummet to earth, but I had found that shots passing close by their heads on either side could make them swing away. I had even used this on healthy rocs, to turn them for a clearer shot at their tails. And so quickly, before we got too high for a water landing to save me, I blasted two shots past the roc’s waving red mouth-tube, and swung its flight directly across the golden tarn.
     
    I tried to think of myself as a missile. How should I aim? What was the trajectory that would land me, as a final boundary condition, far enough out in the tarn for its carpet of tangled stalks to be deep and thick, yet close enough to the edge for me to swim ashore? I passed my revolver to my left hand, and reached down through the air with my right, as if I were trying to throw something, until suddenly I felt I could reach down to the tarn, far below, and simply pull myself in ... right there. My left hand pressed my weapon’s muzzle to the roc’s scarlet leg-joint above me, and fired. At the same time my right hand dug a flare out of my pouch, popped the trigger and let it fall.
     
    It didn’t fall, because I was falling with it. I snatched it back just before it started blowing flame, and hurled it down hard, to the spot where I would land. Feeling as though I had all the time in the world, I twisted in the air, and shot the twice-maimed roc in its short neck, so it wouldn’t come back and bother me again. Then I slashed into the golden tarn like a falling blade. Out where I hit it, the tangled mass of stalks and bulbs piled up to several times my own height, buoyed up on thick, yellowish bulbs. I crashed down through it in a blur, the red-gold mass blazing in my flare, feeling only a fierce upward pressure as my weight drove me down and through. My best estimate for my fall was about fifty paces, and I still had some horizontal speed from the roc when I hit the tarn. I had done some cliff diving two years before, but I doubt I could have survived hitting open water at that speed, even if I had landed perfectly straight. As it was, I hit the stalk mass lying flat, and folded up as I crashed through it. The water impact bruised me, but I had nothing broken or ruptured.
     
    The tarn is very deep, and extremely cold, though for some reason it never freezes. The mass of bulbs and stalks that covers it grows out from the edges. Under that blanket the water is dark and dead. Looking up from below, I could see the glow of my flare’s fire. I kicked hard to surface, but I had to let the fire spread enough to shrivel the nearby toxin bulbs anyway, so I took the moment to jam my revolver down the front of my jacket. I released my belt, with its heavy pouches. I slowed as I neared the surface, and splashed through the burning slick of oil and slime only when I was starting to lose vision for want of air. As I gulped depleted air between the flames, air that I hoped was not too poisoned, I saw another patch of fire at the closest edge of the tarn. I dove back beneath the plant layer and swam underwater towards that second fire. My hand touched stone just as I thought I would drown, and my next memory is of gasping smoky air, several paces up the steep caldera slope. I was soaked to the skin and shaking with cold, I had lost my belt, I was reeking with gold-brown slime, and my hands were scorched. I was also dully baffled to find that I still had the roc’s thick, ropy talon clasped around my waist. It was more a forked tentacle than a claw, really, though sharp at the two tips. Its inner side had barbed spines, all caught in my jacket. I left it on. I couldn’t stop coughing.
     
    Karlin had flung his flare to make that second patch of fire, and then he had flung a rope down and made it fast to a slab near the path. Still gasping, and feeling as weary as if I been awake for a week, I waved up at him to go ahead. He ran off around the path. I dragged my revolver out of my jacket and fumbled automatically in my pockets for loose cartridges to reload it while I looked around and tried to catch my breath. I saw Miriam standing up on an outcropping of the caldera rim, aiming her carbine at something out of sight, but not firing. Things couldn’t be too bad. Far across the caldera, on the other side of the tarn, a cloud of green-gold mist was settling around a dark patch in the mass of stalks. I guessed that was where my roc had come down. I heard two quick distant shots, echoing around the caldera. None more. I stuck my revolver back in my jacket and started dragging myself uphill along the rope, and still no more shots came. About half-way up I heard a crashing and rumbling behind me, and looked quickly back, to see a roc rolling down the far slope into the tarn, raising a rockfall as it fell, and stirring up another golden cloud of toxin as it hit the water. I turned back to my climbing.
     
    As I neared the path, I saw my carbine stuck in a crevice a few dozen paces aside, so I picked my way over to it with one hand still on the rope. Its wooden stock was split but the barrel was not bent. I could fit a new stock. I felt lucky, apart from having been snatched by a roc. By the time I reached the path again, everyone but Miriam was there to stare at me, sitting their horses in a foolishly tight single file along the path, with Reif at the head facing the opposite direction to everyone else. Doctor Huygens was mounted behind Reif, with Reif’s cloak on. The roc had kept his own.
     
    Reif had galloped fast enough around the caldera, in the opposite direction to the one I had taken, to meet Huygens’s roc as it landed, and kill it with two shots to the neck and head. Huygens ended up falling only a little more than his own height, with a roc landing on top of him, but rocs are not heavy for their size. The landing had only bruised him and cut his hands, though the roc’s grip had broken two of his ribs. When Karlin got there, they had rolled the dead beast down into the tarn, where it landed not far from the one I had shot in the air. That was fitting, at least. The two creatures were probably mates.
     
    I frowned and swung my hand briskly in the signal for moving forward. Response to my order began instantly, but took a ridiculous half hour. Rianna could regain her proper place just by waiting while we moved ahead, and Miriam jumped down and remounted and joined her, but the path was too narrow for Reif to turn his horse, especially with Huygens riding double with him. As he backed gingerly up, looking for a place broad enough to turn, he met my horse, which had clambered back up onto the path behind him and would not move until I remounted. I had to pick my way around them all through the sharp rocks on the slope, shivering furiously, before even our timid backwards progress could resume. I dragged my discarded cloak out from under Reif’s horse’s hooves and put it on, and began to warm up.
     
    Then shortly after we finally got Reif turned around, we met Huygen’s horse, also facing us the wrong way. She had bolted into a ravine, and somehow found her way back without breaking a leg. But she had been attacked by some scuttling creature, which we never identified in the fading light, and was bleeding heavily from one haunch. Talitha would surely have shot the wounded horse and rolled her into the tarn so that we dread Morandau warlocks could stop this chicken-brained burlesque and get on with our mission, but I figured that if any threat were going to take advantage of our confusion, it would already have done so, having had ample opportunity. So we were probably in no immediate danger.
     
    So I gave up, and just turned to Karlin and introduced the new tactical signal of throwing up my hands, rolling my eyes, and pointing straight at him. Then I dismounted and went to look for Huygens’s carbine. By the time I had found where it landed and was reasonably sure I had collected all its pieces, it was nearly quite dark. But by having some people switch horses, Karlin had gotten everything lined up the right way, given the wounded horse a shot of antivenin, and set Reif at the head of the line with a light to show the path. On my way back to them along the path-side rubble, I stopped to have Rianna listen to my cough. She shrugged, but that meant I wasn’t dying immediately, so I remounted and we continued. We got home late, but that isn’t uncommon. My lungs did eventually recover.
     
    I made everyone wait in the staging ground while I borrowed Karlin’s knife, got Reif to hold the light, and finally cut off my roc talon. Noticing that even Rianna was still waiting while I did that, I gave her the nod to leave, and she did. She had to prepare for a patient. I had meant my nod to include Karlin, but he stayed. Once my grisly trophy was free, I tossed it to Reif, telling him it could stand for his own first roc. Miriam I dismissed with two days of extra chores for nearly hitting me when she shot at my roc, and two days of liberty for trying to shoot it.
     
    I didn’t know how much Doctor Huygens had understood about what had happened. He had had a good viewpoint for much of it, but might not have been paying attention. I think that Reif and Karlin may have had muttered words with him while I wasn’t there. I said to him gravely, “Sometimes we cannot see all the initial conditions, Doctor, and we must try final boundary conditions instead.” He would be heading to the inspection room directly from the stables, and he was doing fairly well just to be sitting upright, but I was still surprised to see him look at me with such urgent attention, as if I were an armed mine. The way people looked at Talitha. “My lady,” was all he answered.
     
    I decided I would not attend any more of his seminar. I had done enough proving that solutions existed.
  6. Student of Trinity
    An alien clan of warlocks and witches, mercenaries, whose own purposes are inscrutable. They will accept gold, but prefer to barter their services for materials, as basic as grain or as exotic as pitchblende. Their interventions in war have shaped history for many generations, but there are no reliable accounts of their battles, for they make no alliances and leave no survivors. Legends about them are innumerable, but the Morandau themselves are no legends. Many have met them. Most have seen them. They buy and sell goods. The mad, the foolish, and the desperate sometimes attack them, to steal their magic. This never ends well. The Morandau are not reputed cruel, but implacable. Everyone knows they are real.
  7. Student of Trinity
    I stared at the small white square in my hand and didn’t notice when Yerzy left the hall. I was thinking about my father, but looking at the marker with which he had thought to banish himself in my place, I was also thinking about the strange white skull. It was a similar color.
     
    The intrusion I had defeated was a real concern. It was a new kind of raider behavior, and the eery skull was a new kind of eldritch. The fact that it had seemed to disturb my shooting had alarmed the rest of the council even more than it had bothered me. Shooting with my left hand, I am expert enough to have a slight edge in accuracy over Mother, who was our champion shooter in her day. But with my right hand I do not aim. I simply reach out and touch.
     
    I can take small birds from the sky, with a handgun in my right hand. The shaman and his eldritch skull were not the first targets I had ever missed with a revolver. But they were only the seventh and eighth, and the previous six had all been birds, flying high, on windy days. I adjust for wind by instinct, but at long range there may come a gust while the bullet is flying, and six times I had guessed the gusts wrong. With the faster bullets of rifles I have had no such trouble. I practice shooting a lot, with my left hand. Normally I only shoot with my right hand a few times a year, just to be sure that the gift is still there. It always is. I am the only one in my generation to have this gift, but it has been recorded many times in our history. It runs in the family. Sometimes it is the left hand, and long ago there were ambidextrous cases. I think this gift, like others, is becoming more rare among us.
     
    The pale skull had somehow interfered with this gift in me, and this was indeed disturbing. I would need to recite everything I had observed about it to our expert on eldritch phenomena. Our expert on eldritch phenomena, however, was my father.
     
    Either he had just become deranged, or there was something important about him that I didn’t know. The rest of the council didn’t act as though he were deranged. They seemed to understand what he had done. I needed to understand it, then, too, even just in order to be able to put his knowledge to its best use. It was not easy for me to talk to my father, even at the best of times. Before I talked to him, I needed to talk to Mother. She would be in her workshop.
     
    Mother was our chief metalworker and our gunsmith. She was obsessed with improvements to machinery in general, and weaponry in particular. Lethandra had to struggle with her constantly, to get her to keep even one year’s production of parts interchangeable. Every few months Mother would try to insert some innovation, whose reliability she had carefully established, and she was savagely bitter when the council ruled, time after time, that the modifications would have to wait until the next year. Every autumn she was ecstatic, to finally bring her new creations to birth. The rest of the year she was miserable. She consoled herself with testing new features until they were so perfect that the council would have to see reason. It never did. It preferred to have last year’s model in decent quantity, so that everyone could train with it and learn to repair it, rather than have next year’s model a few months early, a piece at a time.
     
    The first reason that Mother’s gunmetal crutch did not seem like an impediment was that she was so skillful with it. The second reason is that the crutch of the Morandau House gunsmith was naturally not just a support, but a weapon whose firepower she had augmented year after year. But the third reason that my mother’s steel crutch seemed to be an efficient part of herself was that she was hardly flesh and blood, anyway. She herself was like one of her deadly engines, whose design and construction are so robust that it is almost impossible to disrupt their operation. When something happened that would upset a normal person, though, she would start an especially difficult project, and work on it for many hours by herself. She had shown more emotion in the council meeting than I ever remembered seeing in her, and I would not have been surprised, this time, to have found her building a flying machine. But when I came to her shop, the door stood open, and she was merely sitting in her chair, polishing her crutch. She had set out a chair facing her. I walked in and sat down in it, and just held up to her the little ceramic square with my name on it. Her shoulders sagged a bit, and she stopped polishing. She looked very tired. But she looked me in the eye.
     
    “We should have told you many years ago, Stazya. I should have told you. It was all so long ago. But it was always still there. We put it off with the thought that the story would need a fitting occasion. Perhaps we were even right in that.” She looked down, and closed her eyes, drawing a deep breath. Then she looked at me again, with a softer look in her eyes than I had ever seen, and an expression so strange and awkward, it took me a moment to recognize it for a terribly shy smile. “We never hoped for an occasion as blessed as this.” I frowned at her in frustrated confusion. My abrupt elevation to the council, to command rank in all our house, was terrifying and ridiculous whenever I thought about it. It came from a moment in which I had killed twenty people. I had never understood Mother’s religious concepts, though I had read her ancient books, but ‘blessed’ was surely absurd.
     
    She had never expected me to understand her, though, except in the working of metal. She simply drew another deep breath, and explained her life to me.
     
    “Your father was the first one to think of climbing Stone Kelvin. Did you know?” I shook my head. Scaling Stone Kelvin had been the rite of passage for my whole generation. We thought it was an ancient tradition.
     
    “It had always been a superstition, not to touch the black stone. Moritz was five years old. It is one of my earliest memories. I was four. He couldn’t possibly do it himself, but he saw how Arjan and Mattias could get up, with ropes and hooks. They were teenagers then. Then he got them to haul up the younger kids in a sling, letting two of us up at a time, to see the view. It was like flying. It seemed twice as high, you see, when we were so small. Moritz and I were the last two up, and I decided that when I grew up I would marry him.
     
    “I didn’t lose my leg in battle. It was an experiment. A detonation. A new kind of incendiary. Very hot fire. It ignited unexpectedly and we were too close. It was me, and your Uncle Yerzy, and my friend Genevieve. She died. She and Yerzy were going to be married. They met out east, at the Foundry, and she came back with him for her last year of studies. They were so happy. It made all of us happy to be with them.
     
    “We were all three burned very badly, but in those days the healing tank still worked, mostly. Not enough for Genevieve, but Yerzy’s face regrew without a scar, except his eyes were never quite right. For me, everything but the leg came back. It was too far gone.
     
    “It was your father’s experiment. It wasn’t sanctioned. He was only twenty-three; he was supposed to still be studying. We were all students. We were all such different people, then. Yerzy was so funny. He could mimic anyone.”
     
    Yerzy, funny. I would have been less surprised to learn that Stone Kelvin had used to dance around the square. Mother’s smile went less awkward for a moment, as she talked about the old Yerzy. Then it twisted up again.
     
    “Your father. He was our leader, in a way, but not in the usual way. He was happy to follow along in someone else’s plan. But his plans were the biggest. They were like fairy tales, except they came true. He didn’t have to stand in the light all the time. He was sunlight. Whatever he turned his mind to, he made you see how easy it was. He was always doing something that had never been done before, and everyone lucky enough to be there at the time would join in, laughing at the absurdity of how nobody had done it yet, when it was so easy. He followed no rules at all, but nothing ever went wrong, until it did.
     
    “We had been married a year. I still wasn’t used to it. Tears of joy would still come, now and then, when I remembered that I really had Moritz. He made me a part of everything. That was part of what he did for all of us. Being with Moritz was being part of something. He could do so much himself, but for him that was too easy. The game he played was to think of things that needed other people. There was always this light in his eyes, but it blazed when he saw how someone else could do something extraordinary. And I was special. Everything seemed to need me.
     
    “We mourned Genevieve. We grieved for Yerzy. It was hard for me to learn to walk, and everything else. The loss that hit most of us hardest, though, was Moritz. His body walked, but he was gone. The pattern of what would happen had always been clear, to him. The idea of an accident was absurd. For him, with the accident, it was as Yerzy says. Everything was still there, but the pattern changed.”
     
    My mother’s voice shook, now, finally. “Almost every waking minute since he could talk, he had been dreaming up adventures for his friends. I don’t think there was one of our generation for whom the defining experience of realizing who we were, and what we could do, didn’t come as part of one of Moritz’s projects.
     
    “Suddenly all of those wonderful schemes, all the years of his life, were nothing but steps down the road to the fire that killed his brother’s bride, and crippled his wife. He had scarcely a memory in his head that wasn’t drenched in shame. He told me himself, the first words I could get him to speak: he would live because dying would be too easy. He saw, even before I did, how hard it was for me to live with him like that. There was nothing he could do, though. Perhaps the man he had been could have found the purpose that would have redeemed him. The man he had been, if he had met a stranger in such pain, would have cracked the sky, to try. But the man he had been was gone. He never came back.
     
    “It was six more years before you were born. Of course there could be no brothers or sisters.”
     
    Mother calmed now. I thought, She has come to the part she has long prepared. And she spoke carefully, looking at me steadily.
     
    “Stazya, I know that it has been difficult to have Moritz as a father. I have not been a proper mother, either. I have left half of your raising for Moritz. I have not given you more to make up for what he lacked. I have cut down my love for you to the measure of his. I could have taken another husband, who would have raised you with normal affection. I did not. I hoped ...” Mother’s voice failed for a moment, but she went on without blinking. “Children are so important to us. I hoped that if I let him be your father, as best he could, he might find his way back to us.”
     
    “You are not a normal person, Anastasia. You will need to understand this lack in yourself. You have been raised by ghosts. I think I have sacrificed my daughter’s soul to the shade of my husband who has been dead for twenty years. I knew what I was doing. I cannot tell you I was sorry. I cannot ask forgiveness. I would give my life to give you more than this, now. But I have nothing to give.”
     
    I can imagine now that all this would have been very hard for a normal person to hear. It was not as hard for a woman raised by ghosts. I heard a tale of terrible misfortune, whose victims had dealt with it as best they could. I had learned answers to questions I had been asking for so long that I had forgotten them. This was satisfying, though sobering because the answers suggested unexpected obstacles. Or rather, they confirmed that the obstacles I had begun to imagine ahead of me were probably real. Perhaps I might misjudge the way other people would react, if they had not grown up like me. It would be difficult to take this into account in my plans, but I would have to remember it, and try.
     
    I saw nothing to disapprove in what Mother evidently thought of as her confession, except for that ridiculous idea at the end. I saw nothing she should call a sin, but rather wisdom, in her effort to salvage the leader that my father had apparently been. To recover a resource like that would have been worth a high price. Mother regretted that I had been the one to pay it. If I was, though: why not? Someone had to. Why not me? But how could I have paid a price, when I felt no loss?
     
    If she had raised me differently, I would have become a different person. Could I wish that that other girl, a stranger, had grown up in my place? I was the rightful Anastasia, and would not cede my place to any usurper, no matter how many smiles and kisses she might have enjoyed. So I answered Mother sharply, perhaps more as a commander than as a daughter — already that had become easy. “I am the expert on whatever soul I have, Mother, and I tell you this. Whatever it is, it is mine. It was never yours to give or withhold.”
     
    I shrugged off my frown. I thanked her for the information about my father. I told her that my revolver worked very well, when my aim was not disturbed by an eldritch skull. I told her I wanted a second one just like it, and that I would make it myself. It could be my graduation piece in machining. We fixed an hour the next day, before my mathematics class, to begin boring the barrel. Then I went to find my father.
     
    I looked in his narrow study, but he wasn’t there. He was less likely to be in our quarters, but they were just down the hall so I checked them first, before dashing down the three flights of stairs and descending the ladders to his freezing cold lab in the back end of the undercroft. He wasn’t there either, but I saw through the heavy glass porthole that he had brought my shaman’s eldritch skull down. It was sitting in the vise, with a strong light shining on it. My father was nowhere in sight, but once I was down there, I remembered that the old healing tank, which had never been used in my lifetime, sat down there in an alcove, just around the corner. I fumbled along the dark hallway wall for the lamp lever I remembered. I turned on the light.
     
    My father was standing as he often did, with his fingers to his temples, eyes closed. He had been facing the big silver and white cylinder that lay there under a quiet film of dust. When I snapped on the light he didn’t move at first, but then he turned to me, lowered his hands, and opened his eyes. At first he didn’t say anything.
     
    I found myself watching him warily, as if I had just learned that he was gravely ill. What signs might I see, now that I knew to look for them? I had always thought him a demanding man, who was obsessed with his strange and frustrating work, and angry because no-one else would believe that the work was worth his time. He had been around me my whole life, of course, but now I was suddenly rethinking who he was, and what he was. I suppose every child has such a moment about their parents. (I frown now as I write that, wondering how my own children have reconsidered me.) But my case was probably extreme.
     
    The man in the alcove before me now turned out to be yet a third father. He made a wistful half grin that I had never seen before, and spoke softly. “I’m sorry, Stazya. That was very stupid of me. Your blast didn’t kill any of us. Stone Kelvin was just a rock. The episode was not sufficient grounds for me to abandon my work, just to shout a lesson to you.
     
    “I assume you have talked with your mother.” I nodded. He looked away from me, to the derelict tank.
     
    “Then you will guess, I suppose, that I find rationality more of a struggle, at times, than I hope it appears. This morning I slipped. I think of it as being most like an addiction, if you can understand. Like an addiction to one of the stronger drugs. It will never really go away.”
     
    He waved the subject away, but it didn’t go far. “It’s a change nonetheless, now, your promotion.” He pointed a finger at me, and looked at me sharply. “Don’t imagine that they raised you to command so as not to expel me. They do not think that way. My brother is not a soft man, or a kind one. They judged you very quickly, but that is how their kind always judges. How your kind judges, Stazya.” He let out a breath, and dropped his hand. As he turned towards the old healing tank, though, his gaze snapped back.
     
    “Evelaine doesn’t know this. I put her in there,” gesturing to the tank, “first. It should have been Genevieve. They might both have lived.” A puzzled look crossed his face, as at an unfamiliar sensation. “But who knows how the damned thing worked.” His voice grew stronger.
     
    “Who knows any of the dread eldritch lore of the Few, eh? I found the Postulates kicked into a corner in the tower stairwell. Did you make sense of some magic numbers, and the White Skull of Vengeance came to punish you for piercing the veil?” He stepped past me and around the corner to his lab, and I followed. The Postulates was the awful book I had been reading when the Minden girls called for my help. It didn’t say much about magic numbers, but the few pages near the front that listed strange sequences of fractions were the least unintelligible section of the whole volume.
     
    My father and I had never done well speaking face to face together. This last speech of his was astonishing. But we had always worked well together, concentrating together on something else. I was his only student in the worthless thirteenth art, the nonsensical lore of the Few. By that incomprehensible art the Few brought all people to this world from a star in the sky: our own ancestors as well as those of the people we call natives because they were outcasts before us on this continent, and of course those of the Many who serve the Few still, in their kinder lands across the sea. The Few made miracles like the healing tank and the indestructible ceramic. Our ancestors had not been able to bring enough of this knowledge away with them when they fled from the Few, and in the centuries since, the miracles have mostly broken down.
     
    We assayed the skull’s material against my marker tile, after using diamond files to scrape smudges of dust from both. They were almost the same stuff, but not quite. Every tough white piece that we had previously found had had the same composition, but the skull’s ceramic had a novel trace of antimony. Was it a more ancient artifact than all our previous specimens? Had it been made by some unknown rivals of the Few? It looked ageless. Had someone only recently started making eldritch skulls, out of a material that Morandau couldn’t make?
     
    The assays took hours, and we had no idea what to do next. We locked up the lab and climbed up for supper. That evening Milyena put the black command bar on my forehead, with needles and a mixture of special inks. A finger’s breadth wide, three times as high, just above my eyebrows. Milyena explained how it would show up differently in different kinds of light, and this seemed potentially useful, in rare circumstances. Otherwise I saw little purpose in the marking. Everyone knew who I was. In particular they knew I wasn’t Lethandra or Yerzy. Would they find my plans more worth following because I had a black rectangle on my forehead? If so they were idiots, and we had been idiots to waste time on black tattoos instead of improving their training. Using black for everyone was stupid, anyway. It showed up well enough on Lethandra, but Yerzy’s bars were barely visible, though of course no-one needed to see them, on him. Milyena congratulated me, and I thanked her politely. She seemed pleased, but the procedure annoyed me. It was long and moderately painful, and afterwards I had to do my differential equations exercise with a headache that felt as though the sky was pressing down on the front of my skull.

  8. Student of Trinity
    A Lady of Morandau


     

    In the wide staging ground outside the gate, some sixty men and women are mounting horses and hitching wagons. No voice is raised, but every movement is brisk. They will all be gone in a few moments. The men wear dark coats and brimmed hats. It is late autumn and the air is cool. The women wear cloaks, and hats of a more elegant style, though equally somber. The people’s skin and hair are of all shades, but darker skins predominate, and whiter hair, even on those who look young.
     
    They do not ride out for pleasure. Carbines hang at every saddle. The large predators native to this world have survived, on this unfavored continent, through the centuries since humans came from their distant star. The descendants of those settlers often fight, too, though usually with more primitive weapons than these riders carry.
     
    Beside the gate, another complex preparation is proceeding just as efficiently, on the reduced scale of a single rider. A one-legged woman is mounting her horse. She has paler skin, and snow-white hair tied in a braid, though she is not old. She levers herself up in stages, using her heavy steel crutch, into her special saddle. Another horse stands beside hers, its rider already mounted. He is a black man with a narrow grey beard, clear spectacles, and a narrow-brimmed hat. He sits rigidly tall in his saddle, ignoring the woman’s efforts with her crutch, staring at someone else.
     
    He is watching a much younger woman with light brown skin, who is standing in the gateway glowering as the procession forms. She wears no cloak over her long black gown, and no hat, despite the chill. Her silver-grey hair is tied with a small black bow, and she clutches a heavy ring of keys in her bare left hand. Staying behind alone, apart from the children, she will not be able to maintain the usual watches and patrols, but she has little sense of danger. Past times have been harder, but these are quiet years. No-one will dare attack this place, though its gate is always open and its guards unseen.
     
    When the one-legged woman has mounted, she and the man beside her nod at the girl in the gateway, then ride down to the back of the line. From the other end of the line, a black man wearing dark spectacles rides back up to the gate. He is calm, but his cheeks are wet with the tears that always run from his damaged eyes behind the black lenses. His face turns down toward the girl’s face, and he speaks to her deliberately. “We return in eight days. In case of any serious trouble, remember that you are a lady of Morandau.” She looks up at him. The master of her house, her father’s only brother, he has never spoken a word to her before in her life. He turns his horse and the column rides away down the road. She turns and walks back into the compound with those last words settling in her mind.


  9. Student of Trinity
    The sonnet version:
     
    He hangs in his balloon above the cliff
    That is the titan’s ear to hear his call,
    Sir Isaac shouting down his sermon: If
    You throw it high enough it will not fall.
    Awake at last for one last do or die,
    Great Atlas shudders, straightens out his back,
    And shoves with all his might against the sky.
    Earth rocks. The sky flies clear. Blue fades to black.
    Whether it’s strain that kills him, or respite,
    The titan crumbles, shattered with his hopes.
    Cold Newton might have wept, but look: what light!
    He drifts off rapt, inventing telescopes,
    As peasants wail, to watch horizons flee.
    Dead Atlas lies there still, too big to see.
     
    The quatrain version:
     
    Newton stands just off the mountain shoulder,
    Tiny beneath his sphere of silk and heat
    As it is, to the weathered head of stone
    Hunching, dwarfed, beneath its endless pain.
     
    Hanging below his balloon, in his tiny gondola,
    Small as a hovering gnat, who hears his call?
    Sir Isaac shouts till his sermon echoes: If
    You throw it high enough it will not fall.
     
    Huge crusts of rock crack, slide and plummet, as
    Vast eyelids open on an ancient stare.
    The mountain's every atom moves as one,
    To burn the strength of ages in one flare.
     
    Earth rocks as Atlas pushes, stands, and shoves.
    Peasants stagger in fields as horizons flee.
    The sky flies clear, escapes, will not come back.
    The titan bursts his heart, and he falls headlong.
     
    Cold Newton almost weeps, but glances up.
    The stars have caught his eyes.
    He drifts off rapt, inventing telescopes.
    Dead Atlas lies there still, too big to see.
  10. Student of Trinity
    They speed from all directions, sea and sky,
    The gaunt dark spectral figures gathering
    Unto this withered heath and ruined tower.
    Some stalk in sunken lanes, some drift on scows
    Along the dank canal, while some alight
    From prows of stormblown ships with ghostly crews.
    Some thicken from the mist, some rise from crypts;
    Some merely slip through doors, while others slide
    From scaley necks of ancient batwinged beasts.
     
    Not one but carries something. Some hold staves
    Of runescarred twisted oak with bands of lead,
    Or brandish long black blades that glitter well.
    Some raise up ragged standards flaunting signs
    Of warlike empires fallen long ere Rome.
    One lifts a cross, and one or two clutch scythes.
     
    It has been ages since a scene for them
    Last flickered up. So naturally they rush.
    Even a gaunt dark specter needs to live,
    Or something of the sort.
     
    But now they stand
    Around.
     
    Did there really use to be so many, so alike?
    And why is there no-one else on hand, but them?
  11. Student of Trinity
    One evening in 1978 my family visited another family that my parents had known for years. Their son was older than my brother and me, and he entertained us with his home-brew version of D&D. He just made up his own rules, and those I remember seem kind of odd to me now. When we rolled up our characters, for instance, we rolled 3d6 for most abilities but only 2d6 for wisdom, because "people in those days didn't know very much". I remember I got 10 wisdom, and this was good for 'those days', so I became a cleric. We got minimal experience from killing a few monsters, no experience for gold, but we had a lucky strike in finding a wimpy monster whose treasure was a fortune in gems, and then had the option of 'offering up' the gems, to the gods I guess, for experience. How exactly we did this was unclear; I pictured us somehow incinerating a pile of diamonds in a small campfire. Anyway it yielded a huge boost of experience, and since my younger brother had generously given me his share of the gems, I went up a level after only an hour or so of play. What a game!
     
    We went home and I immediately set about making up my own game, based closely on the other guy's, because I thought that was how such games were supposed to be. We had no polyhedral dice, but I knew we needed lots of different random numbers, so I got a lot of different colored poker chips, wrote numbers on them, and we drew them out of bags and bowls instead of rolling dice. That worked well until I discovered that my only player, my brother, had snagged some high-numbered chips, and whenever he needed a big roll, he would palm them instead of drawing randomly from the bowl. The exaggerated way he would dig around in the bowl when doing this was what tipped me off.
     
    I slowly upgraded. The boxed 'Basic Set' came out, which was a sort of beginners' version of the old D&D rules, with a colorful dragon on the boxtop, a slightly better printed booklet, and some actual polyhedral dice, made of astonishingly cheap plastic. Those dice were obviously lopsided, the numbers were faintly printed and wore off, and the plastic chipped badly in normal use. The rulebook only covered play up to 3rd level, and by way of simplification it had every weapon do the same 1d6 damage. It nonetheless succumbed to the basic complexification instinct of all such rules by mentioning that light weapons like daggers might strike twice per round, while heavier ones might strike only every other round. This made daggers the game's best weapon, and halberds the worst.
     
    The first AD&D hardcover had already been out for a year or so at this point, but it was the Monster Manual and I already had quite enough monsters for 3rd level. I upgraded dramatically when the Player's Handbook came out a year later. The Dungeon Master's Guide seemed cool but I don't think it actually made as big a difference. I acquired a group of half-a-dozen players and they had many adventures. A few years later I was running three separate campaigns with about 20 players in total, but I got too busy with high school, so I shut one campaign down and merged the other two. The merged group had over a dozen players and we had to conduct sessions via a middle management layer of multiple callers. This was horrible because it could take ten minutes to resolve a round of combat, and players would wait patiently through it all just to get their own chance to roll, and miss. So I kicked out half of the group and we continued for several more years with a core group of my brothers and a few friends.
     
    Eventually the campaign got rather sophisticated and I made some significant changes to the rules. We kept things up even when people went off to university with marathon sessions in the holidays, but these petered out, especially after my best friend, who was kind of the heart of the group, died of cancer. I did briefly get back into running a game in grad school, but haven't had time for it since.
     
    Still I think that all those years of gamemastering had a big effect on me, maybe especially as a theoretical physicist. I really think of the real world as a kind of RPG campaign run by God. I think about our current understanding of natural law as the game rules, and I wonder whether they could be improved. On the other hand what really interests me most is the ways in which reality differs qualitatively from an RPG. As far as I can see, the difference is only one of degree, namely degree of detail. But the difference of degree is infinite.
  12. Student of Trinity
    Solving a riddle is a D&D trope, or at least it used to be. It seems that every DM runs a game at some point where the players have to solve some bizarre word puzzle.
     
    The IC problem with riddles is explaining why the heck the riddle is there to be solved. In a world of magic it's easy enough to accept that reciting the right word can open a gate or whatever. As for why any evil wizard would deliberately provide a clue to the right magic word, in the form of a riddle, I guess it's easier today than it was in the 1980s to understand the need to leave yourself a password hint. Not even Sauron himself can remember all his magic words of opening, without leaving a mnemonic riddle beside each door. The more logical kind of hint would be a completely inscrutable phrase that couldn't possibly make sense to anyone but Sauron, no matter how clever they were, but whatever. You can work it in if you think about it a bit.
     
    The OOC reason for the riddles is probably that they all stem from Tolkien's episode at the gate of Moria, "Speak friend and enter." Tolkien did that one really well, but he wasn't running a game. It took Gandalf hours to solve the puzzle, and if it had been a D&D game, Gandalf's player would probably have quit in frustration and gone home long before that, while everyone else would have eaten all the pizza, drunk up the beer, and started throwing lawn darts at the couch. The OOC reason to never do riddles is that they are horribly hard. Every riddle seems easy in hindsight, once you know the answer, and the gamemaster normally thinks up riddle and answer at the same time, or even gets the answer first and builds the riddle around it. So it never seems hard to the DM, but not even Albert Einstein could solve it in a reasonable time if he didn't know the answer to start out with.
     
    The worse problem is that if the players can't answer the riddle, they usually don't just lose some hit points, burn a healing potion, and move on. If it were that simple the party wouldn't bother to spend any time on the riddle at all, and the DM wants them to sweat for ten minutes and figure it out and feel clever (but not as clever as the DM who set the clever riddle, of course). So the game grinds to a miserably boring halt, and the minutes tick by, while the players rack their brains and scour the pizza boxes for overlooked crumbs. After half an hour it seems like time for a hint, but then that would make the previous half hour a total waste and the players will surely guess the answer soon and feel great for having done it without a hint, so another half hour passes. Ugh.
     
    Sometimes it works, though. Here are three rhyming riddles I used over the years. One was a disaster, and led to just the scenario I described. One was just about right: the players figured it out gradually, with several players contributing parts of the solution, and I might have given a few subtle hints that guided thinking without giving too much away. The other had everyone stumped for a few minutes, until the player who normally hardly said Boo because she was really only involved for her husband's sake came back from fussing with her children, listened to the riddle, and answered it immediately.
     

    Falls under darkness, rises into light.
    Words that are not proper, speech that is not right,
    Shall fall under darkness, and arise in light.  
    (The last line was not really part of the riddle, but rather a somewhat obvious threat about what would happen if the riddle were not answered correctly — there was a bright floor and a dark ceiling that would rise and fall to crush the party. At least, the threat became obvious when the party blurted out something wrong, started getting crushed, and spent the next hour squished into a tiny pocket of space maintained by using an artifact staff as a tentpole.) Answer:
     
     

    If tears were rain, what moan would be;
    If clot were ice, what gore would be;
    If flesh were clay, what bone would be —
    Would tell the tale, if four were three.  
     
     
     

    Walks on the water, sinks in the sea.
    Doesn't have a fellow,
    Doesn't have a shadow.
    Shadows follow after him. Who is he?  
     
     
     
    I guess the point is really that you can do riddles, but you have to be careful. Be prepared to be disappointed with how well the riddle goes over, and have some fallback plan to salvage the game and go on.
  13. Student of Trinity
    After writing quite a lot more of this story than I had at the point of my November 2012 post "Cordite and steel and everything nice", it seems that Anastasia works quite well as a character. The people who have read my drafts so far are all family members, so they're an easy crowd, but everyone seems to really like Anastasia.
     
    Liking the protagonist is really important, especially when she's also the narrator. An unlikable narrator-protagonist makes the whole book painful, but with a likable one even a broken shoelace can raise a bit of suspense. My second protagonist-narrator, Thomas, was less appealing. I abruptly switched narration to him, half-way through the story, and everybody found this disappointing. They wanted Anastasia back.
     
    Anastasia has issues and limitations and deep mysteries to solve, but my book is an action adventure, and for my female protagonist, all that stuff is really chrome. The engine is being an escapist super-heroine with uncanny presence of mind in a crisis. Anastasia is sympathetic and nice and all, for a stone cold killer, but being nice isn't enough. The most important thing is, she makes things happen. I'm thinking this may be the simple active ingredient in a good protagonist — the special sauce, as it were.
     
    It's not so easy to pull off. You can have your heroine solve a problem, for instance; but does she really do it? Or does it just solve itself automatically, while the heroine poses for the camera? I don't think that has the same oomph. You've got to show the protagonist making things happen, not just tell it. You've got to write a credible sequence of causes and effects that resolves the problem, and the protagonist's actions have to be crucial links in the chain. Every little problem is a story in miniature, and you make your big story's protagonist work by making sure she's the protagonist of a lot of little stories. In my story, Anastasia herself is the main plot device. She keeps making things happen. I think this goes a long way to making her appealing.
     
    I think that "making things happen" can also apply at different levels in a story. The least effective level has the protagonist jumping through a series of hoops that are presented by others. The jumping may be ingenious, but the hoops aren't the heroine's doing. I think the protagonist makes things happen in a bigger way, that makes her more appealing, if she is also doing things to select the hoops. Anastasia works well in this way, I think. She is pro-active to the point of recklessness. She tends to choose her own targets, and very seldom is it up to anyone else to judge whether she succeeds or fails. She's not trying to make anyone like her. Her success or failure is usually as objective as surviving or dying.
     
    Anastasia is an active protagonist and not just an observer. She is anything but a victim, even though bad things happen to her; she does a lot of dangerous things, knowing the risks. Her decisions drive the plot. This does more to make her an appealing character than anything else, I think. It has nothing to do with her being female, but I think this itself may be an important point about female characters. Stupid habits and preconceptions tend to turn them into bystanders. Avoid this, and you have a more interesting character right away.
     
    Anyway, for what it's worth, both my wife and my mother seem to like Anastasia. Both complained when the narration switched away from her.
     
    That's my main problem now, as I try to hack and hammer out a second draft. I have a second narrator, who is supposed to be a second protagonist, and who should be an adequate foil for Anastasia. She's a hard act to follow, but I have a monstrous mutant with superhuman strength and speed, driven by a fanatical cause; and I have a ruthless manipulator who reads people like comic books by instinctive recognition of micro-expressions, and can play any part but himself. These are both Thomas MacLayne. He's a throwback descendant of a line of bio-engineered special forces who were designed to foment revolutions. People are puppets to him, but he has been conditioned from birth to hate abuse of power, so he's sort of a good-guy psychopath, like Batman.
     
    As an action-adventure protagonist, Thomas seems promising. Yet in my first draft he came across as all dressed up with no place to go, in comparison with Anastasia's abrupt action.
     
    The problem is all in the third of my book's four sections, in which Thomas has entirely taken over narration, but has not yet shown his Hulk side. My draft squandered all his preternatural insightfulness on narratorial observations and gloomy commentary. He watched things go by. He dumped a lot of data. He didn't make things happen. The third section was trickily plotted, and in tying it all up to get Anastasia apparently burned as a witch, I let my second protagonist-narrator retire from protagonism. In effect I finally got the whole thing put together, and discovered I had a lot of parts left over — all the things that Thomas should have done.
     
    I have spent months trying to fix this. I think I'm on the right track. Thomas does make things happen, now. When I first started trying to revise this section, I had the idea of making him a persecuted victim who was just managing to survive; but I've reversed direction completely on this, now. Now he is an expert conspirator setting up a bloodbath of revenge. His schemes derail, because the mysterious bad guys are finally showing their hand, and because Thomas himself will change his mind about who his real enemies are. So he will inevitably look less unstoppable than Anastasia, when the dust has all settled. He'll have made more mistakes and had more things go wrong; he'll have failed to solve some of his problems. Okay. I guess that's just how it is. Maybe it can be enough for a good and likable protagonist to try to make things happen, if he tries well enough, and fails in a good cause.
  14. Student of Trinity
    I worked on my novel for about a year and half using Apple's Pages app. It gave me no problems even as the story stretched well past 100,000 words. Pages is a general-purpose word processor and doesn't claim to be optimized for writing novels in particular, but it's robust and easy to use.
     
    I liked that it wasn't anything more than that. I knew about fancy-pants apps like Ulysses or Scrivener, that offered all kinds of corkboard views and index cards and stuff. I was afraid of them. I thought they would be great tools for someone who wanted to be writing a novel — as opposed to someone who actually wanted to get one written. They would give you endless things to fiddle with, sustaining an illusion of production. The reality is, of course, that the only thing that really counts as progress is the bare text of your book itself. No matter how nice all your index cards look on your corkboard, no readers will ever buy and read your background notes about your world and your characters and your themes and your blah blah blah.
     
    Writing in Pages kept me honest. Every word in the file was a word of the book. If I needed to make notes to myself, I wrote a separate Pages file for notes. I had one big file for my book, and I couldn't kid myself that anything else counted.
     
    But a couple of months ago I decided that I had actually done pretty well in bringing a draft to a conclusion, and maybe I wasn't at such a high risk of getting bogged down forever in navel-gazing. I really didn't just want to be writing. I wanted to finish, and I would.
     
    The task of re-writing the third quarter of the book was just difficult. I knew how the story would end and I knew its first half, so I was painted into a corner in a lot of ways. It was a jigsaw puzzle, to fit everything into the existing frame. I knew I needed to cut some fresh pieces, but I wasn't sure exactly what holes I needed to fill.
     
    I decided to give Scrivener a try. Its killer feature is that it lets you carve up your text into little pieces, give them little titles and summaries and comments, and move them around or see them all together. It makes it easy to do all that, with just a few clicks or keystrokes. It makes moving between big picture and small pieces fast and easy.
     
    That's pretty good, in fact. There's definitely an opportunity to spill your effort into character notes and stuff, which are all part of your Scrivener document and so feel like they're part of your book even though they're not. But the app really does something, with its carving up text into chunks, that is hard to do with a general purpose word processor. Maybe for a first draft you're better to just pour everything into something like Pages until you've got the story told, baldly and badly; but for revisions, I think Scrivener may be a really useful tool.
     
    I've even started using Scrivener for scientific papers now. Scrivener doesn't do equations properly, so I'll have to export into LaTeX for the final version, but for getting the text itself right, the outlining feature of Scrivener may be even more useful for scientific papers than it is for fiction.
  15. Student of Trinity
    So I wrote a 130K-word first draft in a year, and I thought I'd try to finish the second draft in a second year, but that deadline passed four days ago, and I wasn't even close to making it, despite a lot of steady work over all that time. I did manage to hammer out an improved version of the most difficult part. The revised version held together and I thought I was over the hump. But then I asked myself, Why did this take so long?
     
    It took so long because it was hard. I thought that was okay; sometimes writing is just hard, I thought. But now I think that this was hard in a bad way. I was trying to fix an engine with tape. That's hard work, all right, but it's also futile.
     
    In this one part of my story, the engine was broken: there was a basic problem in the plot. Because of timing constraints that I felt I had to respect in order to keep my story's integrity as a realistic fantasy, my secondary protagonist was sitting around for six weeks, waiting for the main protagonist to show up.
     
    This basic problem was concealed in the first draft because I didn't directly describe the six-week waiting period. It was backstory. I introduced the second protagonist at the moment he meets the first one. So in the first draft, the six-week lull came out in reminiscences and background data dumps. I thought it would be harmless this way, but dull and implausible don't really taste any better for being spread thin. I missed seeing the basic problem for what it was, I think, because it hid in the interface between two ideas: "fill in backstory" and "timing constraints". The timing constraints seemed to stick me with this six-week lull in my backstory; of course I had to fill in backstory. So I didn't connect the dots to realize that my writing and re-writing was really all about excusing a bizarre lull in what was supposed to be an urgent plot. The six-week stasis was like a tumor in my story that my scans failed to detect.
     
    Over the past year I moved a lot of backstory into main story, by starting to follow the second protagonist before the two meet. I invented some interesting things that would happen during the six-week lull, and I turned my second protagonist into a vengeful schemer with a suitably nasty scheme. It was all still hard going, however. The episodes that I invented to pass the boring six weeks were interesting but mostly pointless; I tried to present them as parts of the nasty scheme, but they really mostly weren't, because it was nastily simple and didn't really need them.
     
    I believe I have a simple solution to this problem. I'm going to let my second protagonist spend four weeks traveling to the climactic setting. He was always supposed to have traveled there, but his starting point has never been pinned down, so I can easily make his trip take longer. I think I can salvage almost all of the stuff I've invented over the past year, by just transplanting it from the destination castle to a river barge en route.
     
    I think this single trick will really help a lot. Right from the beginning, my guy can be making clear progress towards a clear goal: he's going to the castle. And the interesting episodes that played no genuine role in the nasty revenge scheme itself can now become genuine solutions to problems of the journey. Having the hero solve genuine problems helps a story even more than you'd think it would, I believe. All kinds of nice details seem to fall naturally into place, when the basic plot makes simple sense.
     
    My main concern is that this will end up lengthening the book too much. I think I'll just have to try it and see how it goes. Anyway, I think I've learned something.
     
    When writing gets hard, is it right to just keep on writing? Up to a point, I think it is. By hammering away on my second protagonist, even within his crippling time frame, I improved him a lot and invented some neat parts of the story. But I think I took this too far. There's a level of effort that is too hard, and past this point the difficulty is a signal that something unrecognized is basically wrong. If I had taken this hint a bit sooner, I might have saved myself a lot of time.
     
    And if this trick works, then the next time I find that a story seems to be lacking momentum, I'll try putting in some literal movement. Maybe journeys are the ketchup of fiction, and every one-line plot summary can be improved by adding "... on a road trip."
  16. Student of Trinity
    My writing project is still slowly going along. It will eventually end up as at least one finished novel. I don't really have a lot of time to work on it, but I hack away when I can. Sometimes I plunge ahead writing; sometimes I step back, frown, and gun down darlings. Up to a point I have high standards, but I'm not trying to write a Great Novel; just write something I like. If you want to make money from writing, I am no-one to advise you, but I can recommend writing a novel as a hobby. It's fun.
     
    What was originally going to be one book has expanded into a trilogy. First I cut it into two. Then this summer I recognized that the first volume was getting too big because it was really two stories, and I decided I had to surgically separate the conjoined twins, to make a total of three books. Compared to what was going to be that single, fat first volume with one sequel, the new result for the first and middle books of the trilogy would be two books that were each less densely packed with wild and crazy stuff; but I decided that this was for the best. A dense story that seemed cool to me, having lived along with it for years, would be incomprehensible to a reader. I'm writing to please myself, but still the task with which I'm trying to be pleased is writing a book that could be popular with other readers, at least in an ideal world.
     
    When I first carved off the part of my story that will now be Book 3, I was still at an early stage in the project. Splitting the first volume into Books 1 and 2 is being done now in a heavily re-written second draft. So it's really quite a surgery. It's an interesting task. Some things that I like don't look so easy to save in the separated version; for one reason or another, things they needed to work will no longer work. Some of these may be salvageable, with effort; and that's an interesting puzzle. Some may just have to be lost. That's disappointing, but everybody says you have to kill your darlings. I'll try my hand at that, too. And some things that were kind of pinched into the previous story now have room to expand to a natural length. So it's not all disappointing.
     
    I think I've learned a few basic things about writing longer stories. Who knows whether these are things that will help anyone write commercially, but they're things that, when I first started writing, I didn't realize that even I myself wanted them. Now I realize I do.
     
    One is that there's a kind of physical limit to how complex your plot can be. Past a certain point, you can make your logical connections as solid as you want, but the mere fact that there are too many of them makes the story feel rickety. It just becomes too hard to take seriously. I think that what goes on is that every reader knows instinctively that in any real scenario there are bound to be a bunch of unknown factors. It's plausible that two or three clear and basic reasons are decisive over all these unknown factors; but it's just not plausible that a string of ten reasons would really hold together without getting screwed up by something unknown. So complicated scenarios are just inherently unbelievable. You have got to keep it simple. Ingenious answers for nitpicking hit a plateau of diminishing returns.
     
    A sort of related thing is that you have to give the reader a sense of where your book is going. You may get a certain grace period at the beginning, a couple of chapters in which the reader is prepared to simply gawk and nod Uh Huh. But pretty soon, you have to give your readers a confident sense of which issues they are supposed to be keeping in mind, so they can relax and let the rest of the stuff just wash over them without trying hard to keep it all straight. You can't expect your readers to keep perfect track of everything. It needs to be enough for the reader to be clear on just a few things — and the reader has to know which those things are. They could be things like your protagonist's love life, or where the Maltese Falcon is, or what lies over the mountain. Probably all kinds of different things will do; but by around Chapter 3 the reader has to have a sense of what these main issues will be, for the long haul of the book. You cannot wait until The Two Towers to bring in the Ring.
     
    Once you've established that sense of direction, of course you can mess around with it. Instead of just pulling a plot twist, it's a subtler but deeper way to pull off surprise, to make what seemed like a minor theme turn out to be more important than it seemed to be. Of course you have to watch that this isn't just annoying or disappointing. But at least at this point, my feeling is that those problems are not so impossible to avoid. A well-managed surprise can be good, I think, but a lack of direction is just boring to read.
     
    The other surprising thing I've found is that Anastasia Morandau has taught me to write. Literally: she's my narrator, and in an effort to give her a distinctive voice, I gave her writing a couple of characteristics that I thought would be interesting and yet still easy to take in large doses. In particular, I made her follow most of Elmore Leonard's rules for writing — not because I thought his was the only way to write well, but because I thought it was one way to write well, and it suited her character.
     
    So Anastasia is spare with adverbs, especially emphatics and superlatives. She almost never says 'very'. She has no fear of short sentences. She doesn't use cliché expressions. She almost never reports dialog with anything other than an unqualified 'said'. And she never ends a sentence with a preposition, because she saves the emphatic last place in a sentence for a word that carries more than a preposition's worth of her thought.
     
    Well, after writing a bunch of chapters in her narration, I found I preferred Anastasia's style to my own. I felt that her style was blunt and forceful. I thought it made you take seriously whatever she said. I started writing more like her, all the time.
     
    The other quirk I gave her narration was an aversion to commas. She hardly ever uses them unless they're grammatically necessary. I try hard to make her sentences comprehensible just by making them clear and simple, and by avoiding ambiguous antecedents. So if the sentence is comprehensible at all when read all in one breath, she writes the sentence that way. This is supposed to indicate the high speed of her thought. Her brain is always in top gear. When she speaks to other people, though, her dialog has plenty of commas. She knows instinctively that she has to slow herself down for other people to follow.
     
    Whether this works, I don't know. Maybe I'm mistaken about how clear her sentences are, and they're really misery to read, and at some point I'll have to go through the whole book line by line, adding commas. But these are fun experiments to make.
  17. Student of Trinity
    Okay, it turns out that there's a big difference between having a first draft of a novel, and having a novel. In principle I knew this, but I didn't appreciate what the difference was. I had the idea that if all had gone well it would mainly be fine-tuning prose; and that otherwise I might have to make major changes, like adding or removing characters, or radically revising the plot. It turns out that there's a whole lot of stuff that I now have to do, in between those extremes.
     
    Having a first draft means that you have a lot of stuff. Around 100,000 words, if you want to call it a novel. You may have more than that, and think that's good. That's a lot of stuff, all right.
     
    Is it all the right stuff? That seems to be what the second draft is mainly about.
     
    With the first draft I found that I had the main characters, and the main plot sequence, and a lot of nice individual scenes and episodes. But going through it again, now, it's depressing to realize how many of those nice scenes and episodes are really digressions from the main plot. I wrote them, and racked up word count to make a chapter, and thought that was progress. It was; but it was the progress of a pretty meandering river. Some of my nicest scenes are little oxbow lakes, totally cut off from the main flow as it later evolved.
     
    The emphasis is off in a lot of places, too. Things that actually turned out to be rather minor still take up too many lines, because when I first wrote them in I thought they would be more important. And some things that turned out to be major themes got pretty short shrift.
     
    And I also completely missed some stuff. Like, somehow my main villain ended up with way too little presence in the book. He appears for a quick scene now and then, and says a few words, but he doesn't actually do much at any point. On re-reading, he's a pretty token villain. Kind of a patsy, only there to get beaten. In my mind he was more than this, but too little that was in my mind made it into my book. Whoops.
     
    I believe now that I would have been smarter to work harder on a more detailed outline. But I also see that extensive revisions in a second draft are probably unavoidable. A lot of good stuff comes up as you write. Some things that started out as digressions grow into major threads. Pounding out a detailed outline and sticking to it strictly would probably make a pretty lifeless book. You can definitely save a lot of time, though, by asking sooner rather than later: this is a cool scene, but does it move the story along? Or, conversely: is there something missing that should be in here already?
     
    It's as though there are two quite different tasks involved in writing. Maybe a good writer is a kind of symbiotic organism, like a lichen. One half generates energy, and the other provides structure. There's having ideas and writing along to see what happens with them, and discovering more ideas as you write along. But then there's being disciplined about making a book that someone else will actually want to read, by making sure the plot is coherent and avoiding bloat. I doubt that either kind of writing by itself will make a good novel. Probably it's the first kind of writing that most people think of when they think they'd like to write, but I can definitely see how the first kind alone will produce something that only the author can read. The second kind is really necessary, and it's not as much fun.
     
    Or at least, it's not fun in the same kind of way. It's more of an analytical task, and less creative. Sometimes it will generate interesting creative challenges, though. For instance, once I realized that I really needed to beef up my villain in his final scene, I had the fun idea of giving him a gun, even though he's a medieval type who's not supposed to have anything more sophisticated than a crossbow. I think that'll do the beefing up job very nicely, and it also ties in well with the main thematic threads.
     
    On the other hand, I'm going to have a tough time getting in more dialog among my villains, giving their point of view, because my narrator is one of the objects of their villainy. Since my overriding goal is to avoid stupidity, I can not have the bad guys just start monologuing to the hero to explain their plans. I think I'm going to have to figure out a way for the hero to eavesdrop on them. It's totally in character for him to try to do that, but it's not going to be easy for him to accomplish it. He's in their castle, he has only medieval technology, and he's too big a guy to hide behind an average curtain.
     
    I hope I'll figure something out; the challenge is interesting, anyway. I'm beginning to wonder whether this could be a shark that's better left unfixed. So far I've considered a couple of neat ways of fixing it, but they seem to have fatal flaws.
  18. Student of Trinity
    There's more to do for the second draft than I thought.
     
    For example, for a long time I had imagined my first chapter as this perfect thing, because it came to me kind of out of nowhere and wrote itself quickly and launched the whole story with a bang. Once it actually occurred to me to think about whether it needed revision, though, I found that it needed quite a lot.
     
    Some things had changed since I wrote it. Anastasia had gotten quite a bit more backstory and it had become clear that she had never been even as close to normal as she seemed in parts of chapter 1. One of her first lines had explained that she flung her book away and stomped downstairs for sheer satisfaction, but in fact she's a cold and purpose-driven person, apart from a weird impulsive streak, who wouldn't know satisfaction if it bit her on the nose. Her original persona was appealingly wry, I thought, but as she developed it became more clear that that just wasn't her.
     
    The Morandau, her people, had also been explained rather more. So some of the things that Anastasia and her people allowed to happen in chapter 1 might have been plausible for ordinary people, but they made no sense for what she and her people had become since I first wrote the chapter.
     
    And there were also embarrassingly many things that I simply hadn't thought about when I first wrote them, little stupid things that no intelligent people would really do in the situation I described, even if they weren't hardened mercenaries trained from birth. Like, why would the raiders dismount from their horses? There were several obvious reasons why they should not, starting just from the fact that getting on and off horses is quite an exertion. And why didn't Anastasia post a few of these sharp-eyed children on watch?
     
    I wanted to fix all these little discrepancies just because that's my goal with this story, to eliminate stupidity. And even if few of whatever readers I get will ever be nitpicky enough to care about such things, I have an idea that there's some threshold of realistic consistency that I need to get above, in order to achieve the gritty tone that I want for my story. I don't want to bog down in detail, but I want to be sure I make it above that threshold. So there were a lot of details to revise, or else to justify. And there was stuff to take out, because it just wasn't something Anastasia would do or say.
     
    Finally, Elmore Leonard died, and I read an obituary that linked to a short piece by him about how to write. I really liked Elmore Leonard's writing. Writing like him was definitely something I was hoping to do, as much as I could, at least with part of this book. And he said to do things like cut down on descriptions. He said never to use the word 'suddenly' — I think his point is that the suddenness should come from the shocking abruptness with which whatever it is hits the reader, not just from the author declaring that it was so. He said never to introduce dialog with any verb other than 'said', and never to qualify 'said' in any way. His point was that the characters' speech has to stand on its own, and not be helped along with stage directions from the author. Well, I'm not sure that's the only good way to write, and it might be especially worth reconsidering with first-person narration by the protagonist, since then the protagonist's choice of stage directions is also characterization. But in that spirit, it seemed to me that Anastasia Morandau probably would write a lot like Elmore Leonard.
     
    I had already developed a few deliberately consistent notes for her style, which I then varied drastically in the second part of the book, which has a different narrator. She is quite capable of using long sentences but she's much more comfortable with staccato rhythm than I am myself, so even in my first draft I'd been immediately rewriting most of my paragraphs to break up her sentences. She always says 'perhaps' and never 'maybe', and she says 'perhaps' a lot. So I decided to take this further, and Leonardize her narration.
     
    I'm turning Anastasia's every 'answered' and 'replied' and 'recalled' into a 'said'. I'll keep 'asked' for questions and I've left in a 'muttered'. I'm eliminating all descriptive attributes of 'said' or 'asked', and deleting every 'suddenly'. I'm also deleting an awful lot of commas. Anastasia is smart enough to know where commas are needed for clarity but when they aren't strictly necessary she'll leave them out. Her thought should feel fast and aggressive so I'll see how this works. It's possible that having too few commas actually works in the opposite direction, so I might need to put them all back.
  19. Student of Trinity
    After tinkering and polishing a bit on my first draft of A Lady of Morandau, which was completed in exactly a year, I began work on the sequel. I didn't consider the first book finished, but I had some ideas for what came next, and I wanted to write them down. Now, after some time away from the first book, I'm coming back to it and seeing what it still needs. I post this because I've found it interesting to discover just what kind of thing you do in a novel's second draft. In my case, at least, I'm not really going to make any enormous changes. The basic plot outline isn't changing. But there's more to it than just tinkering and polishing.
     
    My situation is that the first book that I originally planned was turning out to be enormous, so I decided to make a cut at around 125,000 words, and save the rest for the sequel. I think this was a good decision for several reasons. Polishing and tinkering have tended to add more words than they remove, so I'm pushing 130,000 words now. That's already long for a first novel.
     
    Also, since my ambition is to write an exciting adventure story, I've been trying to make the story work as a movie, too. Actually having it turn into a movie would be a pie-in-the-sky best case, when I'm by no means sure the thing is publishable at all, but what I mean is that the kind of book I want to have written is a book that reads like an action flick. Imagining it as a movie is my way of trying to keep up momentum. If I write a chunk and realize that it wouldn't really work in a movie, then I need to take it out. This is not supposed to be a novel of ideas. Anyway, action films normally only run about two hours. I'm not sure whether that's just a coincidence of cinema economics or something, or whether it reflects some kind of medium constraint for fast-paced stories in general, but rightly or wrongly, the movie metaphor was telling me to wrap things up. And I think that is right. For me, books much longer than 140,000 words have mostly been books that seemed to drag in places. My aim is not to drag.
     
    So, fine, I realized that I actually did have a good ending point at a reasonable length. It just wasn't the ending point I'd originally had in mind. What I have to do in the second draft, I've discovered, is to deal with the consequences of this.
     
    The truncated story lacked coherence as it was. It didn't have a clearly discernible shape to it; it wasn't clear where it was going. The shape that the longer version was going to have was classic: girl meets boy, girl leaves boy, girl goes back to boy. There were going to be all sorts of alarums and excursions, but what was going to be the basic shape of the story was just, Here are these two people; look how they get together.
     
    In retrospect, of course, that was very probably a ridiculous basic shape for an adventure story; but it did hang together, such as it was. Assuming that any readers would actually sit through the thing as I had it planned, you could have poked them and asked, "So what's this about?" and I think they could have answered, correctly, "It's about this girl, and this guy she meets." Then they could have gone on to describe what they two character were like, and I'd have been happy to think that my book had been understood.
     
    The shortened version now only makes it as far as girl meets boy. If adventure-novel-as-character-study was a stupid idea in the longer version, it's totally broken in the short form. There's no tension and resolution in merely meeting up. So what I'm doing now, in the second draft, is something I think of as re-balancing. I have to redistribute weight, in a sense, so that there is a clearly recognizable thread running through the whole story — what in German is called a roten Faden.
     
    In fact there will be three threads, related but distinct. One of these will still just be developing the two main characters, to the point where it's clear that if they get together, they will change the world. But since that thread just doesn't go far enough in this volume, there will be two others as well. One new thread is the source of the mysterious skull artifact that appears in Chapter 1: who made that thing, and why? The other new thread is the relationship between the Morandau, as gunslinging mercenaries, and the quasi-medieveal 'natives' who are their clients and victims. The natives are barbaric, but is what the Morandau are doing really the only alternative to something far worse?
     
    Neither of these two new threads is really new. Both were already important in the first draft of the story; in fact, they were the obvious two important threads in it, apart from the characters themselves. It's just that, before, they were clearly sub-threads. They were always running in the background, but they were only really highlighted now and then. You could lose sight of them for several chapters, in places, before they would come back into focus.
     
    So what I'm doing now, in the second draft, is promoting these prominent sub-threads into top-level threads, throughout the story. I'm making sure that they figure somehow, at least, in every chapter, and that they receive enough emphasis that they never fade from the reader's attention. Mostly I'm doing this by adding dialog — sometimes just a line, sometimes a couple of pages — in which the characters talk about these two threads. The major events of the plot already did feature both threads prominently; what I'm mostly doing now is just pointing this out.
     
    In principle there may be a risk of overdoing this kind of thing. Maybe at some point it just becomes monotonous, to keep banging the reader over the head with the book's main threads. The only way to check for this, I think, will be to get reader feedback once I've got a finished second draft. For now, though, I'm going on the theory that it's much better to err on the side of keeping on yanking the major threads into prominence.
     
    I think it's too easy, as an author who has been living with the story for more than a year, to know where it's all really going and what it's about. As an author, I know what parts are meant to be important, and what parts are meant to just be decorations. But unless you resort to boldface and footnotes, which is certainly weird and probably ineffective, then as far as the reader is concerned, major threads and decorative details are just paragraphs in the same font. If you give something space, then the reader takes it as important. Importance is also raised, I think, when the same thing gets mentioned repeatedly within the reader's short-term memory. So if you spend three whole pages describing some gadget, and then give it another paragraph in the very next chapter, then the reader is going to look for it to be a major plot device for at least the next several chapters, even if in your authorial intention it's just a bit of background color. Conversely, if something goes unmentioned for three chapters, then for the reader it's unimportant, even if in the author's mind it's the Main Plot. (Yes, your book might still survive if you let the Main Plot simmer in the background a bit; but I really believe this: if you do that, your book will be seriously weakened.)
     
    This is the sort of thing I mean by 'balance' in a story: keeping the right things prominent, from the ignorant viewpoint of a first-time reader. I suspect that somebody reading a book they haven't read before needs quite a lot of blatant cuing in order to recognize what's going on, and I think this must be one of the tricks of writing that is almost impossible to notice just by reading, because I think a reader takes narrative coherence too much for granted to even be aware of all the mechanisms that keep it maintained. So I'll be going through each chapter, working in clear emphasis on my three main threads. Maybe later I'll have to go back yet again and soften this a bit, if it's too heavy-handed; but at this point I think it's a clear improvement that will make the whole story much sharper and faster-moving.
     
    I've also decided that the third of the book's three main sections — the one with the really confusing tangle of deceptions — is still not working, after all. The deceptions work okay, I think, but the general tone is somehow wrong. Too much depressed musing, too little action. It's good for this section to be somehow oppressive, and for its violent ending to come as both surprise and relief, but ironically detached depression is too static a form of oppressiveness, for an action novel. Rising panic will be a much better alternative, I think. So I'll try to modulate the same tune into this different key. I'll do that by making the villains more vivid and active, and having them persecute the oppressed narrator much more aggressively. I'll let him survive repeatedly by using his wits, but I'll show him being steadily backed into a corner.
     
    This will mean keeping most of what I already have in this section, but kind of re-forging it. It will mean another big bout of moving exposition into dialog — that's just always a good idea, I'm coming to think. And I'll have to add a fair amount of new dialog and action, as well. The finished second draft will probably approach 140,000 words. It will be the same story, but better.
  20. Student of Trinity
    Somewhat to my surprise, I have finished a complete draft of A Lady of Morandau. It's just shy of 125,000 words, so it's long enough. It's well short of the ending that I originally conceived. I have enough material left over for half of a sequel, and I think I may have a couple of good new ideas that will fill that out to full novel length. If the sequel starts looking skimpy or padded, I might still fold it back into the first volume, making a big, fat book. But at the moment I'm optimistic that volume two, tentatively titled Slow Poison, will stand on its own.
     
    Assuming that a more detailed outline supports this hope, then A Lady of Morandau can end as it is now (very far along from the last chunks I posted here). It's absolutely a To Be Continued ending, with a small army of bad guys chasing our heroes, but it's one of those light kind of cliffhanger endings, with only relatively slight indications that this pursuit problem may not be slight. All the major themes and plot threads that have dominated the preceding story have either resolved, or passed a decisive turning point. I feel as though a listening audience would be folding their hands, hopefully in contentment. I could suddenly grab their attention again, for a wild final reel, but you know: this is a first novel. Something tells me it'll probably be best not to overdo it.
     
    What'll I do now? Push this whole thing onto a back burner for a while, I think. I've put a bit too much time into this hobby lately. I have work to catch up on. And I should give it some space.
     
    I'll get some feedback from family members, hopefully. After that, I guess I'll polish the draft up for a while. I may end up making substantial revisions; I don't know. I've thought very hard while writing it, not just raced to get it on paper. The thing is that it's a really tight and tricky plot, with wild and crazy stuff. My sense is that it either works, and if it does there's not much to be done to improve it, or it doesn't, and there's not much that can. It's a quadruple toe loop that either lands, and that's amazing, or crashes completely.
     
    Astonishingly: it was one year ago to the day that I started writing this thing. I may have started thinking about it before that, but that's the date the oldest file I have was created. So I've averaged rather more than 10,000 words a month on the thing, considering that I have quite a few thousand more words of scenes and notes for future volumes.
  21. Student of Trinity
    Without mentioning any details of the actual story, I have something to say about the latest episode in writing my novel. It's really confusing.
     
    Total length is just over 110,000 words, now. The current section is about 40,000 words of confusing stuff. Without my quite realizing it, the plot in this section has somehow turned into a dense composite of deceptions. It's bad enough that there are three different characters within the story who are currently all trying to deceive each other. What makes it absolute hell is that I, as the author, am trying to deceive the reader about all three of them, so that the reader will think they are following every character's cunning plan, but then be shocked and amazed at what actually happens. So the number of cunning plans has just multiplied out of control.
     
    Each of the three characters has a real plan, with a shocking denouement — I mean, something totally over the top. A gruesome villain will turn out to have deceived the world about her race, sex, sanity and loyalty. A character who has seemed to be dying of fever will fake her own death by burning at the stake, and send a large fortress over an immense waterfall with an ANFO bomb. And an apparently effete wimp will turn out to be a four-armed mutant killing machine, go on a rampage with an enormous broadsword made of depleted uranium, and then fly away with a huge pair of artificial wings. Seriously, you couldn't make this stuff up. Well, apparently I could. But it's pretty insane.
     
    So my first task was already hard: find some way to make all of those insane things realistically possible. Amazing as it seems, I think I've done that. These bizarre denouements are not things I'm trying to awkwardly work into another story; they are the story. I can bend the entire universe around them, to make them work. I have. And I think I have done a fair job of covering my tracks, too, in that the things I have written into the world and the previous chapters, in order to justify these crazy things, seem to me to fit smoothly into the rest of the story. They resonate with other parts of the world and the story, well enough that I don't think they stick out as arbitrary elements that have obviously been added just to make something else happen. Given how bizarre the stuff that ends up happening is, this is not trivial; but I've worked hard for quite some time, and taken forty or fifty thousand words to lay it all out.
     
    The next layer of difficulty was that each of these plans is a deception, aimed by each of the three characters at the other two. So each of them involves a cover story. These are all very intelligent people, and they know that about each other. Their efforts to deceive each other have to be realistically effective. Having laboriously made all these outrageous things possible in the world, I have to conceal them with cover stories that can deceive two smart characters. Again I think I have managed this, though. The three characters are all clever and resourceful, but there are a lot of things they don't know about each other — and of course what they know is entirely up to me. So I believe I have made it completely plausible that each of these characters would be attempting to deceive the others in the ways that they do. The ones that should be deceived are believably deceived, and the ones that see through the deceptions do so believably as well.
     
    Only recently, however, did I realize that this still wasn't enough. There's a third layer to the challenge, as well.
     
    The reader will know more than any of the characters. In particular, one of the characters is the narrator of this section, and one was the narrator of the longer section before it. Neither narrator has any reason to deceive their readers deliberately. And anyway, these two are the main protagonists. They have to remain reasonably sympathetic and credible, so the reader has to reliably know quite a lot. This means that the reader is unlikely to believe that the one character is really dying of fever — it has already been mentioned that her people have turbo-charged immune systems — or that the other is such a coward. The reader will have serious doubts, at the least, about two of the three cover stories. And if the reader starts looking around at all, at what else might possibly be going on instead, all my efforts to make the crazy denouements possible will probably be too obvious. I think I managed to stop them from sticking out as totally weird, but if you're actually looking for a cunning plan, because you know too much to swallow the in-world cover stories, then there are obvious possibilities.
     
    So I need yet a third layer of cunning plans. In addition to the three in-world-plausible cover stories, and the three amazing real plans, I have to construct three red herring plans. These need not be plans that the three characters actually consider using. They are alternative plans that the reader will imagine. They should distract the reader from the more astonishing real plans, so that the big surprises can come unspoiled. This may be the hardest challenge of all. I have to contrive additional cunning plans, clever and realistic enough that the reader will accept them as worthy of the story and the characters. In fact the red herring plans have to be pretty compelling; they have to completely stop the reader from looking any further. Yet I have to have good reasons why the characters don't use these plans, but follow their own real plans instead. And finally I have to get my narrator to suggest these red herring plans to the reader — his own red herring, and those of the other two characters as well, even though he himself may be taken in by their cover stories — yet without the narrator ever just lying to the reader.
     
    Nonetheless I think I'm getting there. The third of these deceptive characters, who is not a protagonist, has just entered the story in this section, and will die at the end of it. So I have a lot of flexibility to redefine her character and her knowledge, in order to make things work. Neither the other characters nor the reader know much about her, anyway. So she's fairly easy, actually. And I think I have it pretty much worked out for the guy who is the current narrator. His real plan is so monstrous, and his cover story is so wimpy, that it's pretty easy to insert a much more realistic-seeming red herring plan in between. I can make the red herring plan be an actual plan that the narrator has in mind, though half-heartedly and with doubts. The narrator can quite realistically write things that will sound to the reader like hesitations between the realistic red herring plan and total cowardice, when in fact they are hesitations between the modest red herring plan, and the extreme rampage that will ultimately be chosen.
     
    The toughest one will be the red herring plan for Anastasia. She's the character who is best known to the reader, and she is established as a preternaturally resourceful heroine. She already has a track record of getting out of tight spots with creative tactics. Moreover she narrated everything up to just the week before this episode, and in the past tense; she even told the reader directly, early on in the story, that her role in it would not be that of a victim. So the presumption that she is somehow going to get out of this must be very strong, and the reader will be on the alert for anything that might offer her a hidden opportunity. My only advantage with her is that she is no longer the narrator. So there can now be things that she knows, that the reader does not know. She can also do things out of sight of the current narrator — and the reader knows this, so the reader can also be made to think that she has done some things, when in fact she has not. I guess my other advantage is that I don't really have to deceive the reader for ever. I only need to keep the reader in the dark until close to the climax, when there's enough action going on that the reader will just read on to see what happens, instead of sitting back and thinking.
     
    And maybe I can undermine the reader's confidence that she must survive because she still has to write the first part of the book, by suggesting that she may be writing it all now, and the book may be put together by someone else, from her notes.
     
    Anyway, whew. This has all become quite the brutal tangle. And as if the plot weren't thick enough with deception, there are motifs of deception scattered around in setting and character as well. The massive sword that gets used in the end is not what it seems; it appears to be merely an impractical symbol, and its uranium core is covered in a layer of steel. The current narrator's realistic red herring plan will probably be to hide an ordinary greatsword inside an enormous wooden sword that's a prop for a play. The whole episode takes place in the castle of a rebel earl who is still pretending to be loyal to his king. And the narrator's cover story of wimpiness is specifically to be an effete thespian, who keeps talking about stagecraft and acting.
     
    What a hall of mirrors. I don't know if any readers will ever be able to make head or tail of it, but as the author I can say that there's a tremendous satisfaction in finally blowing the whole place up and flying away from it, with everything finally straightened out and simple. There's an excellent chance that this is story is now hopelessly overwrought and overburdened, and its elaborate plot is either incomprehensible or blatantly contrived. I think there's still a chance that it will actually work, though. Almost anything can make sense, in the right context, and with science fiction, the author has an awful lot of control over context. If it does end up working, it will be one of the most intricate episodes of plotting that I've ever seen. It's been a lot of fun just to try to make it work.
  22. Student of Trinity
    The Bechdel test is named after Alison Bechdel, who introduced it in a comic strip in 1985, but Bechdel herself attributes the idea to her friend Liz Wallace. A work of fiction passes the test if it contains two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man. It sounds like a pretty low bar to jump over, but apparently it's alarming how few books or movies pass this minimal test. (I'm reluctant to start checking through my favorite sci-fi and fantasy books — and the majority of my favorite authors are women.) This should be surprising. It's not asking the moon in political correctness. Have a couple of female characters talk about something other than a man, even very briefly, once in three hundred pages of novel or two hours of movie. How hard can that be?
     
    Well, it's not actually quite so minimal a test as it may at first sound. If there are equal numbers of male and female characters, and they pair off at random to talk, then only about one in four conversations should be between two females. And then a fair amount of any story's dialog is likely to be about other characters in the story, so even without any gender bias at all, there would be a a fair number of conversations between female characters that did at least mention some man. Some stories may not have so much dialog in the first place. It doesn't take an absurd amount of bias to fail the Wallace-Bechdel test. It's easy to not notice that it's being failed.
     
    And that is really the point. Finding books and movies in which no two men ever discuss anything besides women is hard. A book that failed that test would stick out like a sore thumb, for having either very little dialog or unbelievable characters. Even if it weren't necessarily unbelievable that the men were constantly thinking about women, men only talking about women really is unbelievable. Even soldiers and convicts in prison talk about lots of other things. Men in fiction always talk about other things. A book or movie that failed the sex-reversed Wallace-Bechdel test would be ridiculous. Yet it's easy to get through a book or movie that fails the Wallace-Bechdel test, and not realize anything amiss. This is the point.
     
    I stopped posting installments of my story here, but I have kept on writing it, and I recently finished a major section of it, comprising what should be at least a third of the total text. It's just over 70 000 words. I only considered it a first draft of that initial section, and expected to revise it a fair amount. Well, I happened to read about the Wallace-Bechdel test.
     
    My story passed, but only just, with squinting. So I fixed it and now it passes quite fair and square. It didn't actually take much re-writing at all, but it made the story much better.
     
    The problem was that my story had far too little dialog. It has plenty of female characters. The protagonist-narrator is female, and I have carefully balanced genders among all the other characters, including roughly balancing for prominence in the story and coolness. The break in the story I've reached now is to switch to a male narrator. I don't think this comes off as fussily PC. There's no mirror symmetry, but there are lots of rough parallels, and I don't think you can avoid that if you have even rough gender balance in a story. Anyway, I didn't have trouble with Wallace-Bechdel for lack of women.
     
    But the story has first-person narration, and I had far too many passages in which the narrator just told the reader things. Several of these had some character saying something to the narrator, and the narrator telling the reader what she thought about it. (The squinting that made my first version pass was to call a two-sentence response to a long monologue a conversation, and to note that the response was to the short last part of the monologue, the bulk of which had been about the narrator's father. All the ingredients for a much better conversation were being wasted in asides to the reader.)
     
    By just re-writing a few of these scenes into dialog, though, I had three quite substantial female-female conversations in just the first few chapters. One of these does mention a man, but is not mainly about him, and the others have nothing to do with any male. (Well, they do mention people in general, but this is a very gender-balanced setting — people in general clearly does not mean men in particular, either to the characters or, at this point, to the reader. To me this meets the W-B criterion. And just to be sure, there are two more passages I still have to dialogue-ify that will be about strictly inanimate subjects.)
     
    I'm not completely off the hook for gender bias, because my first draft did pass the sex-reversed version of Wallace-Bechdel quite straightforwardly, if still only minimally. It had one brief conversation between two male characters, entirely about something other than a woman. It had two conversations between males about the female protagonist. All the remaining conversations were male-with-female, some of them with several of each talking together. With the narrator being female, though, the number of female-female conversations should have been closer to half, and there are plenty of things for these women to talk about besides men. My problem was that I just didn't turn all these opportunities into interesting dialogue. I left them as monologues of one kind or another.
     
    Now I'm thinking that I need to add more conversations among my male characters. It really livens up the story, and makes characters other than the narrator seem a lot more real. Dialogue is also fun to write. I have a thing for stories with multiple narrators. This one has two, and most of the other stories I've started over the years have had at least two. Well, even with only one actual narrator, a dialogue is a bit like having two narrators. You get to juxtapose two points of view. It's fun to shift back and forth.
     
    Wallace-Bechdel is a good tool for revealing gender bias, just because it is such a minimal test. And yet I think that a work that passes W-B is probably not going to do too badly for gender bias. One conversation isn't much in itself, but if you write even one conversation between two characters, other than as a way of writing about a third character, then you're likely to write more than one conversation between those two, and you might even want to see what a third would have to say to them.
     
    There is no reason to be afraid of the Wallace-Bechdel test as a PC shibboleth. If you're willing to have even just two female characters in your story, then all it asks you to do is to give them something to talk about, and write it as dialogue. The way I'm thinking now, that's never a bad idea for any two characters in any story.
     
    The middle section of my story, with the male narrator, will not be scrupulously gender-balanced. It's set in a pre-modern society, and its narrator is an amateur actor-playwright, on the side from other things, to whom the Wallace-Bechdel test would never occur. This section may not pass it, but we'll see.
  23. Student of Trinity
    I have another chapter of A Lady of Morandau ready, but it doesn't feel like a good time to post it. It's not a violent chapter, but a brief but important passage has Anastasia receiving a modern assault rifle as a gift from her parents. In another chapter or two, I'm planning that she'll use it. This is not the time for any of that.
     
    I don't buy the argument that I sometimes hear, that making things up in fiction has nothing to do with what you'd approve in reality. I happen to despise the entire horror genre, to the point that I would have a hard time shaking the hand of somebody like Anthony Hopkins, who has lent his cool to the idea of a despicable monster. Reality has enough horror in it. To make horror into entertainment seems to me like complicity. Weak complicity, I'll grant. But why get even a 1% solution of blood on your hands?
     
    That is not the same, however, as saying that only Raggedy Ann stories of buttercups and lollipops are acceptable fiction. Bad things do happen in reality, and stories that have any real impact will usually have bad things happen in them. My concern is about how this is done. In reality, bad things often happen with no apparent compensation and no apparent meaning. But that's the horror of which we have enough. Also in reality, bad things do sometimes have some kind of redeeming meaning. I believe it can actually help, in finding that kind of meaning in real suffering, to work through examples in fiction. From the old artistic 'dulcis et utile' canon, that poetry should be 'sweet and useful', I'm willing to let the sweetness go, but I want to see some kind of utility for that price.
     
    My story has a considerable amount of gunfire in it. In large part it is a fantasy about what might happen if, in a barbaric world, the fundamentally sane and decent people — or at least one of them — had superior firepower. What if, what if only, the next time some monster tries to do something horrible, he could run into someone like Anastasia? The story will also try, however feebly, to think about the implications of dangerous technology. How much would superior firepower really help? If it's not enough by itself, is it any use at all? If it is of partial use, what extra help does it need?
     
    It is supposed to be one of the main things that have become clear by this point in the story, that the Morandau are all about enforcing gun control. They keep all the guns for themselves. It's not supposed to be clear that that's right, but the justification they offer is that the barbarian masses around them cannot possibly be trusted with that power. That's not supposed to seem like a crazy idea.
     
    As far as I'm concerned, there are some stories for which no time is right. I don't feel that mine is one of those. But I do feel it isn't right just now. Most of the time, I think responsible fantasies about responsibility for gun violence are acceptable. Right now, I don't think any such fantasy is.
     
    I'll post another chapter eventually, probably next year.
  24. Student of Trinity
    I may change the title of this chapter. I couldn't think of a name until 'Aftermath' occurred to me as a lame joke, since Anastasia quits math at the end of Chapter 4. Maybe just something like 'Shooting high,' since that embraces both the shot in the air when the native dad walks in, and the bizarre effect of the skull talisman at the end.
     
    This one is a mixture of stuff that has been planned so long I don't remember at all when I got the idea, stuff that was planned out more recently, and stuff that came to me just as I wrote the chapter up. It leaves the chapter a sort of jumble, but that can't be helped.
     
    The reminiscence about the childhood roc-hunting was something that came to me in Chapter 4, which was already too long.
     
    The self-loading rifle is part of a developing plot line that I dreamt up a few weeks ago. Some amount of technical detail about equipment is going to be a chronic affliction of this story, I'm afraid.
     
    The outburst from Anastasia's mom was a spur-of-the-moment invention. It seemed as though not even Anastasia's parents could just ignore something like what had just happened. Plus, this is all fantasy, anyway. What's being able to fly or cast spells, compared to not having to listen to your mother?
     
    The cloud mine class was planned from Chapter 2. It's something Anastasia should logically be doing, having invented a new kind of weapon. Also, establishing that she has a skill to teach will provide part of the explanation for why she soon heads off to Morandau Mill: she'll be an exchange instructor, like Huygens or the ground mine teacher mentioned in Chapter 2.
     
    The episode with the native father walking into the Morandau square in search of his son just popped into my head a few days ago. It immediately seemed like something Anastasia would have to deal with. I considered whether she would shoot him, but although comparably grim things will happen in this story, that just seemed like stupid crap, and it's a basic premise of the story that Anastasia doesn't put up with stupid crap. The fact that Morandau children are mostly horrid monsters will be important much later, maybe not until volume 2, but it's already important to establish that this is anything but a militaristic Utopia. The Morandau are not as bad as people think, but they're not the good guys. Yerzy is prepared to let Anastasia's decision stand, but he would not have objected if she had shot these two intruders, either.
     
    I had to think hard about how the heck the Morandau House sentries would ever let a native just walk into the place. I was thinking I might have to postpone that episode to some later, less competently guarded setting. It took embarrassingly long for me to realize that the cloud mine lesson, which was already in the chapter anyway, provided an obvious excuse.
     
    The last scene, with the discovery of what the skull totem is really doing, has been planned since I came up with the skull in the first place. I can't remember at all now when that was, or how I came up with it. I've realized that I have some retcon work to do here, though. In chapters 1 and 3 I have already implied that Anastasia knows the skull is affecting her, rather than deflecting her bullets, but then in chapter 5 it's made out to be a great surprise. What I need to do is smooth this out more. Even at the beginning she ought to suspect that the skull has done something to her, enough to bother checking, after the skull has been removed and covered, that she can still shoot properly. For one thing, it's already correctly implied that she's never sure her gift won't go away; she makes a point of checking on it several times a year. So she's prepared to believe that something could interrupt her uncanny talent. She's also educated enough to be skeptical of bullet deflection. But on the other hand she knows that technology exists that she doesn't understand. She should not rule out deflection absolutely.
     
    Then in chapter 5 it should be clear that she is not so much astounded that the skull is affecting her rather than her bullets, but mainly shocked by the fact that her eyes are really deceiving her at point-blank range. She can see her own gunsights pointing straight at her target, but the image is an unconscious confabulation. Her eyes as well as her hand are being deceived. As one may perhaps guess, the effect involved will be a way of turning Anastasia's game-breaking gift of accuracy into a terrific handicap, whenever the story needs it. Kind of like Kryptonite. Sorry, kid.
     
    It also has to be made clear in Chapter 1 that she is simply out of range of the skull's effect, when she does that successful check of shooting at the little totem on the gate. So there are all kinds of little details that have to be straightened out in a story like this. I've always been a nitpicker about plot details like this. Half the fun of writing a story myself is fixing up these little things. Most of the pain will probably be, not quite fixing all of them. We'll see.
     
    Some more about how the skull works has also been fixed for some time, but I am still working on some other features. I think it has to be powered by a thermoelectric generator running on Strontium-90. The Morandau don't understand that kind of technology, but they have seen it before and might recognize it. Do they have Geiger counters? Would a Strontium-90 source that was well enough shielded to be safe for a user even show up on a Geiger counter? Probably they don't have Geiger counters.
  25. Student of Trinity
    It was late after caring for my horse and cleaning my revolver, but I had to see Rianna about my cough, and I still had to put Huygens’s broken carbine on Mother’s workbench. I had planned to leave a note with it, explaining how it had seemed to jam, but Mother was there, working late. She had her engraving station set up, with magnifying loupe and fine tools. She rarely bothers with that, though long ago she had made some uselessly beautiful patterns, designs etched on metal plates as intricate as any native lady’s tapestries. If her new prototype part required such small detail, her chances of getting it approved by the council would be lower than ever. She was intent as always, though, and listened distractedly while I explained briefly about Huygens’s weapon. She seemed typically unhappy about a weapon failure, but surprisingly little interested in a quick-firing carbine. She would examine it in the morning, and I left her with no further discussion.
     
    I went to the inspection room. While I waited outside as Rianna finished binding Huygens up in splints, I wrote up a short report of what had happened on the patrol. One advantage of my new rank was that I didn’t need to report in person to a council member. I could just decide for myself that there was nothing urgent to communicate, and leave it for the morning to post the news.
     
    Rianna listened with a stethoscope to my breathing, and shrugged again wordlessly. This was her usual bedside manner, and I found it reassuring. We all knew that the world was fundamentally hostile to all our kind, and that the centuries of human settlement had not been nearly enough to probe all its dangers. Previously unknown poisons or blights could suddenly prove lethal, and there was nothing in our medical knowledge that could prevent this. Confidence would have been dismaying evidence of delusion in a surgeon, but a sign that nothing urgent was apparent meant that I would probably recover. We are only very rarely affected by illness. Something in our bodies resists disease. We also heal well. I had never been sick in any way, but I had been cut and burned many times, and had numerous fractures. I healed quickly from all of these episodes, and they left no scars.
     
    Rianna put salve on my scorched hands, and gave me some of her famous yellow throat lozenges. She hands them out at every excuse. We have all been taking them since childhood. The lozenges are a comfort to her patients, if only because they are familiar, and it comforts Rianna to have something to give. One of my classmates once went to the inspection room with a twisted ankle, and came back with lozenges. Rianna had been exhausted just then, dealing with the effects of a nasty ambush by bandits trying to steal magic from one of our patrols. This time the lozenges actually seemed to help my cough, a bit. I went to my room and slept. In the morning I remembered no dreams.
     
    At breakfast I saw Lethandra eating porridge with Joel Strander, her husband. I surprised myself by calmly sitting down opposite her and showing her my report, as a courtesy, before posting it on the main hall board. Lethandra showed no surprise at my disturbing them, though everyone normally left her and Joel alone at their table. They have little enough time together. She read my few lines, nodding at the fact that we had sighted rocs, and frowning at what she read between the lines in my opaque explanation of how Doctor Huygens had been taken. She looked me in the face at that point, and I just blinked back. She rolled her eyes and read further. Her eyes went wide as she read, “Anastasia was seized by a second roc. She broke free in the air and killed it. She fell into the golden tarn and emerged with help from Karlin. The golden tarn stalk mass proves able to break a fall from at least sixty paces’ height, but flares must be used at the landing point.” I was no more an eloquent writer then than I am now.
     
    Lethandra glanced up at me quickly, and passed my report to her husband. She looked me over anxiously, and I assured her that I was fine except for a cough that was already much better. She shook her head, blinking, and then smiled. “I remember the first day we took you out to hunt rocs,” she said. “They were really becoming worrisome, you know. We could hit them, but they’d just spring away that fast, and come back at some unpredictable time, from some impossible angle. We always told ourselves that some of them must have been hurt enough to fly off and die somewhere, but we never actually downed more than one or two, in years of trying, and their numbers were only increasing. They hadn’t killed any of us, but they were starting to take natives from the roads.
     
    “Finally Joel found some log entries from the last century, that spoke about how the altitude bulb attack had been developed, based on your great-great-grandfather’s shooting gift. It went so against the grain, to take a child of nine out on patrol! A dozen of us stood around you anxiously, with enough weaponry to melt the damned roc if it came too close. You lifted up your little sub-caliber carbine as the roc flew over the far side of the caldera, watched its tail flick, and suddenly fired. It was such a little sound, in all that space. The echo was like a whisper. I asked you, ‘Did you hit the bulb?’ And you just looked up at me with enormous eyes, and nodded. We turned and saw the roc gliding stupidly down. It didn’t dart away and circle back, the way they always did. Two of us just rode over and shot it as it neared the ground. Nothing easier.”
     
    I remembered that, too. The roc had just been a target. With all those grim adults around me, though, and Lethandra herself asking me a question, I was too awed to speak. The adults were all pleased, but still serious. They asked me whether I had been afraid, and I shook my head. So after that I got to do a lot of patrolling. I had less time for playing with my friends, but I didn’t mind that. Hunting rocs was real.
     
    Joel smiled at me as he gave my report back. He was our archivist, and he said he would put my observations about the stalk mass into the log, adding one more fact besides the ones that its toxin is caustic and its fibers do not burn without oil. We don’t really know much else about it. We’ve never seen anything else like it. I doubt that any future Morandau patroller will have leisure to read those notes while flailing in the grip of a flying roc, but we record anything that seems interesting, on principle. My childhood had been shaped by obscure facts recorded about rocs long before I was born.
     
    I posted my report on the main hall board, for everyone to read, and went to ask Mother about the quick-firing carbine. By house etiquette we were supposed to do our best to repair it and return it to Doctor Huygens, so I wanted to get a look at it while I still could. If I could fire that quickly, I could destroy a small army single-handed, unless the weapon failed as it had for Huygens.
     
    Mother wasn’t in her workshop, but she hadn’t come to our quarters either, so she was probably washing or eating after working all night. She often worked strange hours. Huygens’s strange carbine lay on the workbench straightened, reassembled, cleaned, and oiled. I was disappointed not to see a little pile of Mother’s quick but accurate drawings, recording how the parts had been put together and deducing how the mechanism had worked. I started disassembling the piece myself, laying the parts out carefully in order on the table.
     
    I discovered that it was a clever design, but stupid. Its second partial barrel, above the real barrel, was a tube that would carry pressure from firing back to the weapon’s breech. I realized that there had to actually be a hole in the barrel, to vent some of the blast into the return tube. The blast of force traveling back down the upper tube would then simply knock the breech block back, ejecting an empty casing. A strong spring then drove the breech block back forward again, loading a new cartridge. The weapon held a dozen cartridges in a sort of box under the breech, and all of these could be fired in rapid succession, for the carbine would reload itself with every shot.
     
    All that was very clever, but also obviously stupid. A gunshot produced not only pressure, but also heat and a lot of grime. We were not using plain black gunpowder much any more, with its enormous clouds of white smoke, but our powders still didn’t burn very cleanly. Huygens’s carbine was a beautifully simple design on paper, but with every shot it would blast hot dirt and grease into its own mechanism. Our metalwork could produce this design of rifle, but our mills could not yet produce the clean-burning powder it would need in order to keep up its high rate of fire for very long. Seeing how it worked, I was surprised the Doctor had gotten as many shots out of it as he did before it jammed.
     
    I was just starting to put it all back together when I heard Mother’s crutch in the hallway outside, moving unusually fast. With a pang of alarm I guessed: she had read my posted report. I started to jam Huygen’s carbine back together as fast as I could, my mind racing with excuses for why I was there, and why it had not been my fault that I had been grabbed by a roc, when suddenly I remembered that I needed no excuses. For casualties in battle I would answer to the rest of the council, but for any lesser failures than those I was now my own judge. I set the carbine down and stood up straight behind the bench.
     
    Mother swung into the workshop with her eyes grim but her voice level. “Anastasia. Why would you ride out under a pair of rocs.” She didn’t make it sound like a question. Then she met my strangely calm gaze, and I lifted an eyebrow. It drew my mother’s eyes to that awful black mark just above it. She stopped short, reeling slightly on her crutch. She shook her head, frowned, then her face suddenly brightened and her eyes went wide, and slightly wild. She barked, “Ha, so this is scrapwork! Well, then!”
     
    She swung right up to me and shouted in my face, barely pausing for breath, “Anastasia what are we going to do with you? You ride out on your first patrol with your father and me sitting up worrying, and even old Talitha hiding up in her balcony with her spyglass, and you ride out around the tarn, alone, when you know there are rocs waiting for you, and you get dragged off and plunge how bloody far I can’t bear to think into the golden tarn and then you come riding back and don’t even tell us? You have been the most bloody difficult child to raise that anyone in this whole House of violent lunatics has ever seen, and even if your father and I hadn’t been three parts mad before you were even born I can tell you we would be no pretty vision of sanity now with all you put us through! Damn it, girl, can’t you wake up? You may not give a damn about a damn bloody thing in the whole flaming universe, but can’t you try letting it vibrate through your thick Morandau skull that other people care about you, and be just the slightest, tiniest bit more careful? Anastasia? Please?”
     
    She finished breathless and elated. She hadn’t spoken to me like that in years. Maybe ever. Scrapwork, she had said. That was her word for working with leftover materials that were useless for anything proper anyway, so it did no harm to use them up in crazy prototypes. Scrapwork meant being free of the responsibility that otherwise weighed so heavily on her, of carefully husbanding our limited stock of good supplies. Somehow she felt the same way about shouting at me, apparently, now that it didn’t make any difference. She looked younger than she had ten seconds before. She gazed at me happily, this woman grim as a gun barrel, as if she had finally performed an amazing trick that she had been trying for ages to learn.
     
    I was bemused to find I was almost smiling, too. “I’ll consider this tactical suggestion,” I answered. We stood there staring at each other for a moment. It was odd, but there seemed to be nothing further we needed to say. We could talk about the carbine later. I knew enough about the thing now to discuss it with her then. So I nodded at my mother and left her to her work.
     
    My morning’s work would be to teach a class to build cloud mines. I had ordered a dozen brass shells the day before, hollow balls the size of a porridge bowl, as well as clay shells for the bursting charge, the two different kinds of powder, and a small barrel of fuel oil. All this was laid out on benches set up in the square, between the gateway and the remains of Stone Kelvin. I was not trying to be dramatic. We needed to be outdoors, and this way the gate sentries could join in the class. We were so few in Morandau House, in those days, that we were always trying to save time in ways like that.
     
    All my students were familiar with detonations, but cloud mines are not simple devices. I had blown up the grinding shed despite being familiar with detonations. We were all watching carefully, and I was watching everyone else carefully, except when I had to shout away a crowd of eight- and ten-year-olds, who were playing some nasty game with one of them wrapped up in a sack, being dragged around the square, squalling faintly. I recalled enough about what it was like to be in that group that I guessed they were pretending the victim was a native they had captured from a nearby village. Morandau children of that age are half-trained soldiers, but they are still children. The stupidity of their cruelty had always infuriated me, but I had never known how to explain anything to them. I turned back to my class.
     
    I was explaining about the effects of adding metal filings when I saw my students all gaping in horror at something towards the gateway behind me. I turned to look and my revolver was half raised before I knew it. Twenty paces before me a young native man with skin as white as paper was stepping into our square, his mouth working silently and his hands clutching the air like claws as he forced each step. I pushed my revolver straight up above my head and pulled the trigger. The children at the side of the square all dropped to the ground at the terrible sound, just as they had been trained. The native man dropped to his knees and pushed at the air with his palms. He gasped for breath, and in the suddenly ringing silence, the muffled squalls from the children’s sack sounded loud.
     
    “Jammy! Jammy be quiet!” yelled the native, in his own speech. I knew it fairly well. He was obviously from one of the nearby villages. He even looked slightly familiar. I might have been buying fodder from his father for years. He was only a few years older than I was, I judged, but evidently he had a child. Our children’s game had been more real than I had thought.
     
    The man began babbling to me so quickly that I could barely make the words out. I heard him call me queen. Dread lady. He begged me to spare his son and take him instead. Flames of hell, was all I could think. Death to pass Morandau. Twenty-four eyes at my back, there to learn destruction from my example. What did I do now?
     
    But I found myself speaking sharply, in Vocal. “Get the boy from the sack. Bring him to me.” I heard one of my students sprinting across the square behind me. I still had my arm up, as if aiming a sky flare. That was stupid, whatever I had to do next, so I hauled it down. I took a cartridge from my belt and reloaded, slowly, as the kneeling man’s words faltered into sobs and the crying child behind me became louder. It was Miriam who had gone to fetch him. She brought him to me. He looked to be about six. I holstered my weapon and took him onto my right arm like an oversized infant, and he wailed, “Pappi!” and craned his head around to his father, but clutched my neck. I strode over to the kneeling man, hauled him upright by the upper arm with my left hand, and dragged him stumbling back down to the gateway, through it, and around the corner, out of sight of the square.
     
    I gave him back his son, but squeezed his arm nearly hard enough to break it, so he would look me in the face and hear my careful words in his language. “One day you will owe me two lives, man. Be ready.” It was the best I could come up with on the moment, to serve as a sufficiently dramatic excuse for not killing them both. Then I let him go, and watched him run down the road with his son until they were out of sight.
     
    I turned back, and in the gateway I met Uncle Yerzy. He had naturally come to the sound of my shot, but I was relieved that he did not have his carbine. He was not going to go and hunt down the man I had let go, along with his child. He had not done anything to stop me from shooting them, either, though. Our traditions were clear.
     
    I stared into Yerzy’s dark lenses. The tears that trickled from behind them were no sign of pity. In case he was planning to go hunting later, I argued that the natives had enough fear of Morandau that one day’s mercy would not bring us into contempt. “We invest in our legend,” I said to him. “It can afford to pay us back some, for once.” He nodded very slightly. “Sometimes it can,” he said. We walked back up to the square together, and he went back into the House while I finished my class. The children who had captured the native boy stood silently at the other side of the square, squinting as the sun rose to midday. I recognized that Yerzy had told them to stay until I dismissed them, probably just by the way he looked at them.
     
    We would detonate the cloud mines after the midday meal, then discuss the lesson I had given, in order to improve it for the next group. My students filed back into the House, except for the four very grim-looking gate sentries, going back to their posts at the outer wall. I raised my voice to correct their mistake. “If you had paid more attention to the gate, you might have killed us all with your mines. Double duty is a risk we take.” They walked more briskly. I turned to the children.
     
    Still unsure what to say to them, I let them stand in the sun. I saw the sack they had used, lying on the ground. I picked it up. I walked over to our cairn of Stone Kelvin, and spread the sack across a few of the stones. I picked up one of the smaller chunks from the cairn, and weighted the sack down, so it wouldn’t blow away in a wind. Somehow that seemed correct. I walked back to the children and told them that they would remain standing there until it was time to clean the stables that night, and then they would do that, and would keep doing it every night until I said they could stop. I still had no way to explain to them, but I could make them remember.
     
    We took all afternoon igniting cloud mines in the fat canyon near the start of the northern loop trail. It was slow work because each mine had to be brought up from the square separately, and armed, and the long fuse carefully laid. We used each one to experiment with cloud mine effects. Some we detonated on top of platforms, and some we lowered into holes. We set up test targets at different ranges, made of different materials, and observed the effects. No-one there but me had seen a cloud mine burst before. They were all very impressed by the first one, and in fact they seemed to retain their respect for the devices right through to the last. They were, after all, already familiar with detonations.
     
    Two of the mines failed to detonate. We had to wait half an hour in case the fuse was somehow slow, and then I had to walk out to the armed mine and set a demolition charge beside it, to destroy it. Of all the bad parts in being a commander, destroying failed mines has always seemed one of the worst. Sometimes they do detonate, belatedly. At least in this case there was some sense in my doing the awkward job, since the devices were my discovery. We decided that we would simply repeat the class the next day, with the same group of students, in order to revise the lesson and try to get everyone’s mine to ignite.
     
    That evening I joined my father in his laboratory, to try our luck again on the eldritch skull. My father had spent the day reading, poring over his tomes, but he had nothing to tell me from them. At the end, he said, he had become frustrated enough that he imagined he could hear my cloud mines detonating, even from deep in his lab, and he had simply hauled out a pistol and shot the skull in the forehead.
     
    He had used a light air pistol, firing a soft lead pellet which had smacked itself flat onto the skull’s white front, and of course not even scratched it. The point was, the skull didn’t seem to be able to deflect bullets any more, since it was obvious that if it couldn’t deflect the light pellet, it would not deter a full-bore round. Probably obvious, anyway. We agreed that it was unlikely that the skull could know that the pellet wouldn’t harm it, and let it fly straight on purpose. We could not really be sure of this, though. Some of the artifacts of the Few, such as the healing tanks, could behave as though genuinely intelligent.
     
    I wanted to repeat Father’s experiment myself. I took up his pistol, with my left hand as I usually shot, and from just across his workbench I easily put a second pellet-splat on its forehead beside his. I automatically charged the pistol with another pellet and set it down on the bench.
    Suddenly I looked at my father, and he looked at me.
     
    I picked up the pistol with my right hand, and casually fired. The pellet broke a jar against the wall. I reloaded the pistol, and tried again. The pellet hit the wall again. I loaded once more, and took careful aim at the skull, my arm outstretched across the bench so that the muzzle was nearly touching my target. I pulled the trigger and paint chips flew again from the lab’s far wall, quite impossibly. I stared at my father in dismay, to find him looking curiously at me. “Why are you shooting above it, Stazya?” he asked me.
     
    As soon as he saw my eyes widen and my head start to shake, he grinned, as if understanding a jest. “You don’t think you are, do you?” I shook my head more vigorously. I couldn’t seem to speak. “You have a clear sight picture? Aiming just above the eye sockets?” I nodded. I could see exactly where I was aiming. I had been shooting since before I could talk. “But you’re not, Stazya!” my father told me, delightedly. “You’re aiming well above the skull. You’re aiming exactly where you’re hitting, of course.”
     
    His smile changed, and his voice became almost sympathetic. I knew that he knew I understood, but it was too disturbing to have to doubt my own eyes, so he said the words for both of us. “It’s not steering bullets, Stazya. It’s steering you.”
     
    I forced my mouth to move. “Only my right hand, Father. Only my right.”
     
    We would discover more in the coming days, but this was the moment that set many things in motion. The beginning of those things was that someone would have to get this news to the intelligence advisors at the Mill and the Foundry. That someone, it soon became clear, would be me, and so I would leave Morandau House less than a month after being raised to command, not for the first time in my life, but for the first time alone.
     
    I would be away for much longer than we planned. Those miserable children cleaned the stables for more than a year.
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