Imagine waking up one day unable to recall who you are or where you came from – only to find you are serving a sentence as a convict conscript for crimes you have no memory of ever committing…

The meal went on much longer than either of them intended and it was late in the day when Vane finally returned to his office, planning to process anything which might require his immediate attention, before meeting up with Cista again to spend a night on the town. He checked the log with half his mind pondering what ambience he should set to be ready in his accommodation for later and discovered, around the time he and Cista sat sipping their after meal drinks and sharing childhood memories, Avilon Revid was being discharged. He had already been released into the care of the Criminal Rehabilitation Department on the strength of Vane’s recommendation.
That was unexpected.
Such things were notoriously slow to feed through the processing of Coalition bureaucracy and despite what he had told Cista, he had not expected the discharge to be finalised for a few days at the least. Not that it mattered, in fact he would enjoy seeing her face when he told her the good news, but it did mean he needed to do one more thing to satisfy his own conscience before heading back to his accommodation to get changed for the evening.
He raised a link to the outer office where the duty admin would be working.
“Sir?”
“Get me a link to ex-Lt. Jazatar Baldrik.”
A very good soldier, popular and respected by his fellow convict legionaries and well known, even admired, for his ability throughout the Special’s command structure, as high up as Vane himself. It remained one of the most rewarding moments of his career when Vane completed that man’s discharge. No one could doubt it was well deserved and Vane knew this was someone who, in the rest of his life, would demonstrate the wisdom of the Special’s five year pardon policy by becoming a model citizen.
It even made sense such a man might have extended some measure of protection and friendship to one so vulnerable from complete memory loss. But Vane wanted to be sure Jaz Baldrik knew where he stood, and what expectations were being placed upon him. Having no idea what kind of briefing the CSF or CRD would provide, Vane wanted to be sure he fully understood what he agreed to take on.
“I am sorry, sir,” the admin answered after the briefest pause, “he got listed as MD eight cycles back, reported by the property agent he leased an apartment from. No further update on that and I can’t find a current link access for him.”
Missing or Displaced.
But Cista had told him –
Dropping the office link, he switched to his personal one, a sick sense of realisation gripping his stomach as he called Cista. The link he had used to reach her just moments before, coming up to his office, when they had laughed and confirmed where they were to meet to go out for the evening, was dead – registered as disconnected. Cista Tyran, if that was indeed even her name, clearly felt her mission accomplished. For a moment Vane considered contacting her department directly, but there was no accusation he could make that would stand any official scrutiny. It had been his responsibility and his decision after all.
“You complete idiot,” he muttered, full of anger at himself, as the implications hit home. “What the hell have you just done?”

From Trust A Few – book one in Haruspex, the second Fortune’s Fools trilogy by E.M. Swift-Hook – which is only 0.99 to buy for a limited period.

Because life happens…

The secret of living is plain,
It’s not about pleasure and pain.
It is simply enough
To take smooth with the rough
Then grab for the vodka again.

E.M. Swift-Hook

The Fated Sky is free to download until 9 February

Caer sat on his pony looking at the dead body on the ground and wondering if he should send more scouts back towards the road, almost a day’s trek behind the caravan. This man had been alone, half-mad and no threat to the caravan, but others might even now be following the same path that they had taken from the road and for the same reason they had taken it: others who were scouts for brigands, bandits or bigger caravans than his own.
He spat in the dirt and narrowed his eyes as he looked past the file of wagons, ponies and people. It was late afternoon and his breath misted slightly in the air. The long cold winter was over, but in the barren Wastelands, spring was always slow to come. The air still carried a biting chill, even in the heat of the day and the distant peaks kept their mantle of snow and ice, tinged with crimson by the light of the huge red sun. Spring was having to claw its way free of winter’s greedy clutches so that Temsevar could bask in an all too brief season of warmth and growth.
The Wastelands were vast and magnificent. Here and there, standing proud and alone in the plain, like the lost sentinels of a forgotten age, were towering flat-topped mountains of rock, some so massive they were too big to cross in a day on foot. It was as though at some point in the distant past the ground had simply dropped away, leaving the high plateaux stranded above, like giant stepping stones, creating a two-tier terrain. If in the winter, these high grounds were the coldest and most exposed, in the spring they seemed always flushed with new vegetation before any managed to creep out of the more parched stones below.
Caer made his decision. With the work to be done, the four men he already had out scouting their back trail were all he could spare for the moment. He called to one of the mounted men who was riding with the caravan.
“Shevek, we are camping here.”
The man he spoke to wheeled his pony away and rode at a brisk pace towards the front of the train of wagons and animals, issuing sharp orders to make the night’s camp around the rocky debris beneath the steep cliff face of one of the high monoliths. Caer felt a familiar sense of satisfaction as those orders turned the straggling ranks of moving people, ponies and wagons into a brief flurry of chaos, before brightly coloured awnings, tents and pavilions sprung up from the chaos, like strange blossoms. Caer and his men rode through the quickly forming encampment, shouting instructions, solving problems, helping secure ropes and encouraging any who were slow to respond with the whips they carried curled in their belts.
In a remarkably short time, the caravan resembled a miniature town with streets and open spaces, stables, and pens. Fires were being kindled, children tending the animals as women kneaded dough and cut the vegetables for the evening meal. Toddlers screamed and got underfoot or rolled like puppies amongst the big, sharp-toothed dogs, which ignored them and begged for scraps with soulful eyes and then turned on each other snapping and snarling when an unsavoury morsel was cast their way.
Once the familiar routine was well established, Caer’s men guided their mounts towards the middle of the camp. The ponies’ short stubby ears, thick coats, wall-eyed glares and powerful necks, made them far from beautiful to look upon, but their split hooves could splay to grip surefooted even on snow and ice or could run fast on firmer ground. It was their broad backs which carried the burden of human traffic in both trade and war with a sturdy strength and agility which, for Caer, had a beauty all of its own.
The men who rode were as tough as their ponies. The older ones amongst them wore their hair long, stained red and tied back into a heavy braid, the greater length of the braid telling of ever greater age and experience. The youngest men had their hair shaved so close to the scalp as to seem bald. They were not even allowed to begin to grow a braid until they had served a year of apprenticeship with the caravans. All the men wore coats made from a brightly coloured heavy-felt cloth, over shirts with billowing sleeves, patterned skirted jerkins made from fleeced hides and plain felt britches which gathered loosely into calf-high boots. All were armed: every man wore a bandolier of wooden cartridge boxes over one shoulder and carried a crude pistol; one or two had a long-barrelled musket or rifled carbine, on their backs and each wore a long-bladed knife with an ornately carved hilt and whips hung looped at their belts.
These men were of the Zoukai, a brotherhood of warrior guardians, hiring themselves to protect the caravans which carried the trade of Temsevar. Named after the swift and ruthless, red-plumed predatory birds which hunted from the skies in these very wastes, they were bound by a strict code of honour which placed loyalty to their captain and their caravan above all else.

You can keep reading The Fated Sky which is free to download until 9 February. It is the first part of Transgressor Trilogy, and the first book in Fortunes Fools by E.M. Swift-Hook.

The cover is designed by Ian Bristow, you can find his work at Bristow Design.

Big Bigger crouched in the herbaceous border, in the pouring rain, wearing only his jimjams and a look of terror.

“Wossee doin’?” Bernard was puzzled. 

Big Bertha snorted. “You just watch.”

Mother Big appeared in the doorway. She had a shotgun in one hand and a bag of something in the other. Putting the bag down on the veranda she hefted the shotgun and the sound of birdshot hitting grass made Bernard wince.

“If that’s still there in the morning, the next shot is your balls.”

“Let that be a lesson to you, Bernard, never buy your wife costume jewellery.”

©jj 2021

A brutal fantasy tale of piracy, friendship, romance and revenge on the high seas…

The sun was heading for the western horizon and Tall Jack Stainless awaited his opponent with grimly amused patience. He stood at the western corner of a hastily roped-off arena made of stamped down sand. Two copper-skinned pirates all but dragged Don Esteban into the ‘ring’. The Spaniard’s eyes darted about him and Jack was pretty sure he was hunting for a means of escape. With no exits immediately available, Esteban seemed to reach a decision. He stood taller and straightened his shoulders.
The crowd of witnesses pressed forward and Jack whistled sharply. Somebody in the crowd threw a sword and dagger, which landed point down in the tight-packed sand about a foot in front of Esteban. He bent, snake-swift, and came up with the sword in his left hand and the dagger in his right. Jack didn’t move. He just allowed a slow smile to spread across his face.
“Where’d you get the bruise pretty boy? Been playing with the big kids have we?”
“Keep taunting me, dwarf, and we’ll see how long it takes you to die with a dagger buried in your gut.”
As he spoke, the Spaniard was sidestepping slowly, and when he adjudged himself perfectly positioned he tossed his dagger into the air – catching it by the tip and throwing in one seamless movement. It was a good throw. Only Jack had read the move and he wasn’t where the knife landed. With a swift move of his own he picked up the thrown dagger from the sand and shoved it in his belt.
“One down,” he said mildly. “Your move, pretty boy.”
Esteban stared at him, unable to believe that his thrown knife hadn’t so much as nicked the skin of the short, broad-faced half-man who he held responsible for the death of his brother.
It was as if the deformed creature read his mind because it laughed harshly.
“Oh yes, pretty boy. I shot your brother. Right between his lying eyes. He was screaming at the time and the noise annoyed me.”
This was too close to home and the blood rushed to Esteban’s head. He determined to end it there and then and rushed towards his opponent screaming wordlessly, and swinging and slashing with his sword.
Jack simply sidestepped.
“Missed.”
His obvious amusement flicked some sort of switch In Esteban’s head and he went completely berserk. Forgetting his sword he rushed at Jack with his hands clawed and his teeth bared.
“I will bite out your throat,” he grated, “and after I have fed on your blood I will take the woman and sell her to the worst whorehouse in Tashkent.”
Jack didn’t even bother to sidestep this time. He simply ran the madman through. Even on his knees with his lifeblood staining the white sand Esteban continued his litany of hate. Jack listened for a brief moment before stepping up behind the dying man and cutting his throat. The curses stopped. And Don Esteban de Herrera y Corrado died on a coral atoll a thousand miles from his home in the vineyards of Spain.
Jack cleaned his sword and knife oh the dead man’s salt-stained clothing and then walked into Mary’s waiting arms.

Jane Jago

There will be a new Sunday Serial here on the Working Title Blog next week!

Today there were snowdrops
Pushing green lances
Through the dull earth
To the sky.

The small white blooms bowing
With heads in lace veils
Brides of the spring
Bright and blythe.

Winter’s last rearguard
Summer’s first promise
At this moment
Seasons bide.

True heralds of nature
Announcing a rebirth:
‘Life doth return
Hope stands high’.

Today there were snowdrops
With heads in lace veils
At this moment
Hope stands high.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Who am I?
She had been ripped into pieces and put back together so many times only to be torn apart again, that she didn’t know the answer any more. If she ever really had.
Raine Perselle stared through the window at the dark clouds overhead. It was raining. Heavily. She hated it. It made her think of the few days she spent in school where she’d been unwanted from the moment she crossed the yard.
Her guardian dropped her by the gate and told her to go in and find the teacher. There were a group of kids in the yard, playing despite the fine drizzle falling from a grey sky. Two were twirling a rope and the others jumped in and out. She’d thought it looked fun and was going to ask if she could join. Then she heard the chanting.
Raine, go away.
We want to play.
We don’t want you
Raine here today.
She’d felt so bad inside she wanted to scream. Instead, she’d piled into them fists flying. After that, no one wanted her in the school for real. So her guardian took her out again. And then it was just the two of them in the small ex-prospectors cabin halfway up a mountain. The two of them and the hollow emptiness where her mother should have been.
Except she wasn’t Raine’s mother. But Raine hadn’t known that back then. Back then it had been different. Memories of being held and feeling safe. Of playing daft games. Of being happy. Yes, there had been the boyfriends who came and went and yes, they’d moved around a lot. She said it was so they could see a lot of interesting places. But it had meant Raine never got to have many friends, except a few she’d got to know through links. But Raine had always known she came first. Then one day she just wasn’t there. And Raine was left with the cold-eyed woman who said she was Raine’s guardian.
It might have been yesterday the memory was so clear in her mind, not years ago when she was still a little kid. They’d been camping out in a cabin on a wilderness world as she wanted to paint the unspoiled mountains. A kind of vacation. Just the two of them for once. There was nothing much there apart from the wilderness. Not even any link access.
The cabin was very basic, it had a room with two beds and a bigger room with everything else. There was no proper hygiene suite, just an outbuilding with a hole in the ground and water had to be pumped up from a bore. She loved all that, but Raine liked it better when they were in proper places.
Raine had gone to bed with the usual hugs and smiles from her but woke to find herself alone in the cabin. Alone except for an old woman with cold-eyes who was doing something to a dead animal with a knife. She’d put the knife down and wiped the red from her hands on a cloth, then crossed over and looked down at Raine.
“You’re awake. Good. Go fetch some wood. Be sure it’s dry.”
“But…”
“Don’t you dare argue with me you little bitch. Just get the wood.”
She’d been too shocked to be frightened. “I don’t have to do what you say. Where’s my mother?”
The slap had been hard enough to make her stagger back. Raine wanted to shriek, to cry. But she’d stood there, nursing her sore face with one hand and glared back at the old woman. For some reason that seemed to change her mood. Almost as if she was pleased Raine stood her ground.
“You will get the wood,” the old woman insisted. “Then we can eat. Then I will tell you.”
Var Tynacar.
That was the old woman’s name. If she had a first name, Raine never discovered it. That first day, after Raine gathered the wood and followed instructions to help cook their meal, Var Tynacar told her that she was the older sister of her mother’s last boyfriend. She said that her mother had left Raine there as she had needed to go away for a while and she had appointed Var Tynacar to be Raine’s guardian. At the time, Raine had believed it. Now she wondered if it had ever been true. Any of it.
Life on Tranch, as the planet was known, was not all wild woods and people panning for precious metal up in the mountains. There was a half-way decent settlement with a spaceport, medical clinic and the school. Tranchtown. It was all grey block buildings, but then just about everywhere on the Periphery was like that. Their cabin was not even too far from the place. Near enough that Raine could have gone to the school. If they’d have taken her. But that hadn’t worked out. So she had learned from her guardian.
After that first slap, she’d not ever been hit again. Var Tynacar sometimes seemed to quite like her. She’d even smile when Raine did well. And as most of the lessons were things Raine found she liked to learn and was good at, she often did well. The lessons had names different from what she was used to. Tracking. Surveillance. Agility. Endurance. And when they got a passive link set up in the cabin she was able to study regular stuff too. Like any regular kid. She realised her guardian wasn’t as old as she’d thought. Older than her, but not old. No one as fast, fit and athletic could be that old.
Once, four of the prospectors who lived well up the trail rolled up at the cabin high on recs and wanting sex. When they didn’t take no for an answer, her guardian had killed them all. Her only weapon, the gutting knife. The men were all wearing snubs. Raine helped her drop the bodies down a sinkhole. So no, Var Tynacar wasn’t old.
Each cycle they’d go to the town for supplies and then her guardian would leave Raine in an eatery with free run of the menu whilst she went to the spaceport. Raine knew that because she’d followed once, using the skills she’d been taught to keep out of sight. But what her guardian did in there, Raine had no idea.
It was a bit over three years since she had arrived on Tranch when on one such visit, her guardian came back to the eatery looking like she was ill. She’d not stopped to eat and had made Raine leave half her own meal, ignoring Raine completely until they were back home. Then she had still ignored her questions.
“Just pack what you need for a few days. We’re leaving.”
“But we can’t leave. What if my mother…?”
“She wasn’t your mother and she isn’t coming back.”
And that was that. In those few words, Raine had all that remained of her life, who she was—who she’d thought she was—scooped out from inside her. Like when Var Tynacar was scooping the guts out from an animal she’d killed to eat.
“All I know is the Perselles bought you from a stranger on some planet called Temsevar. So I’m taking you back there. Maybe you can find your real family. Someone to take care of you. I can’t. I have work to do.”
So that was how her guardian had really seen her? Taking in a stray and then sending it back when it became inconvenient?
Raine didn’t say much all the way to Temsevar.
She couldn’t.
Someone had sliced her open, taken her heart out and put it in cryostorage.

From Iconoclast: A Necessary End by E.M Swift-Hook, the final book of Fortune’s Fools.

As a responsible adult
It’s your destiny
To protect the world
From eejits like me
To not allow my mind and pen
To cut the stupid deep
And not write stuff so horrible
It bubbles in their sleep
As a responsible adult
You are sensible and kind
And I’m the jester in your court
With the twisty rhyming mind

©️jj 2022

Prunella teaches you how to cook like a toff!

You know a bad day is about to get worse when you are in the kitchen quietly chugging the cooking brandy and the Hon. Rodney invades your space with a fatuous smile running down his pinkly chubby chops. He looks at you with the Fundador in your fist and his smile fades, leaving behind only the vague mulishness of a public school boy with a secret. You attempt a smile and he perks up instantly.
“I say, old girl, I’ve bought one of those outdoor kitchen thingies. Thought it was about time yrs truly helped out with the old commissariat.”
This is the point where your heart attempts to drop out of your bottom, and a headache beyond even the power of brandy from the bottle leaps into action behind your eyes. But there is worse to come. Because the urge to burn food in the garden is not to be denied. Sadly, this is not the time to for the normally effective spousal veto, and nor will it avail you to offer to meet him halfway. He will have spent what amounts to the national debt of a small Slav republic on a metal monstrosity, and he Will use it – say what you will.
My advice is to get out a couple of heavy-bottomed tumblers and propose a toast in his best single malt. He’ll be so relieved that you are being ‘sensible’ that he won’t even grumble about you glugging back about a hundred quid’s worth of whisky in one swallow.
When the awful thing arrives, and is installed (almost inevitably by a bunch of young men with man buns and body ink and names like Bullfinch and Labrador) your deluded spouse will immediately decide to throw a party. No amount of reasoned argument will persuade him to have a practice run first. And nor will he even consider reading the instruction book (which runs to 3000 pages of very fine type badly printed).
At this point you have two courses of action open to you.
Plan A. Leave the stupid overgrown adolescent to sink in his own ordure.
Plan B. Make your own stratagem to save his face.
I, personally, lean towards the second. Having an indebted spouse is infinitely more satisfying (ultimately) than the short pleasure of watching him sink in a midden (even if it is of his own making) until the sewage closes over his prematurely balding cranium.
And what is plan B?
It’s pretty simple. Obtain, without grumble, whatever meat your deluded spouse proposes cremating and also offer to be responsible for such irrelevances as bread and salads. He will be thrilled with his wonderful wife, so much so that daily depredations to his whisky will be overlooked smilingly.
But now the crafty bit. Also purchase suitable numbers of boned chicken thighs and some bags of those skinny chips our colonial cousins call fries. Set the chicken to marinade in olive oil, garlic, herbs, and cooking brandy. When the Hon. Rodney throws the first offerings to the gods of ineptitude onto the hot coals, slide trays of chicken into the oven (after liberally daubing with someone or other’s proprietary barbecue sauce). When the flames in the ‘outdoor kitchen’ are at their highest throw the chips into the deep fryer.
They should be about ready when your red-faced and embarrassed spouse appears in the kitchen. In desperate straits.
Pat him kindly and bring out the chicken.
Help him to carry chicken and chips to the buffet table. Then help yourself to a very large whisky….

Look out for more tips on how to cook like a toff next week!

There was panic in the garden. Granny had lost a knitting needle. Nomes scuttled in every direction hunting high and low.

“We gotta find it or the ole bat’ll make our lives a misery.”

“We have but it’s a puzzle to me how it got lost. Her don’t hardly move from that bliddy tidstool.”

Brenda stopped dead. “Her don’t, do her.”

She strode back to where Granny sat, rigid and complaining.

“Stand up.” 

Even Granny obeyed when Brenda used that voice.

The needle fell from the mouldering haystack of Granny’s clothing. She grabbed it and life went back to normal.

©jj 2021