The Master Stonemason was in his eightieth summer and he was all but blind, still his hands knew their work and each chisel stroke was as clean and precise as it had been in his youth. Once he had cut and carved he began the laborious task of polishing, trusting nothing to the hands of his sons, or his grandsons, or the apprentices who watched in something like awe. When one of his sons would have intervened to help the old man, his only surviving daughter stepped in front of her brother.
“Leave him. Let him make his last work as glorious as his first.”

When the last letter was incised and the last square inch of the finest Carrera marble was polished to a soft pure shine, the old man lifted his eyes to the sky and rested at last.

One by one, each man in the yard stepped up and laid a gentle hand on this thing of beauty the old man had crafted.

Last forward was the Master’s daughter. Her homely features were shaped into the tenderest of smiles and she laid her cheek against the cool marble.
“It is perfect,” she said softly, “now come home to your dinner”.
The old man took her proffered hand and they walked away together – leaving the young men to carry the headstone the Master had created to its place on the grave of his beloved wife.

Jane Jago

The Dog Days are the high days of summer and a perfect time to celebrate our canine companions in verse and prose.

Stop the stressing
That’s depressing
Have a snooze instead
If you can’t eat it
Or defeat it
Turn away your head
If it won’t cuddle
And it makes you muddled
Cut the bugger dead

Jane Jago

In a modern-day Britain where the Roman Empire never left, Dai and Julia solve murder mysteries, whilst still having to manage family, friendship and domestic crises…

The Dog and Onion, was situated at the heart of what counted for the bad side of town in Viriconium. Here small retailers selling dubious items were squashed between nightclubs, gambling rooms and scantily disguised brothels. Above, between and around these were some of the cheapest rooms and apartments to let in the city.
Like most of the business and homes on its street, the taberna was a narrow fronted building which went back a long way. The street itself was also narrow with barely room for two vehicles to pass. Alleyways and car park entrances cut between the buildings, under the tunnel of their first floor rooms.
Most of the buildings were old and ill-maintained. If it had been in Eboracum, Dai reflected, they would have called it something interesting and turned it into a tourist spot, refurbishing the buildings, replacing the sex shops with gift shops, the brothels with fashionable boutiques, and the nightclubs with eateries of various descriptions catering to broad tastes. If it had been in Londinium they would have gated the road at either end and thrown away the key. But here in Viriconium it provided habitation, employment, and what passed for entertainment, to the lowest strata of society. And any of the rest of society who liked to indulge themselves in such a way.
The last time Dai had been here it had been in broad daylight and then the area had looked grimy, run down and insalubrious. But night time was its element. There wasn’t enough street lighting to illuminate more than patches, but the various establishments made up for it with illuminated signs promising any variety of vice. There were shifting, multi-coloured lights emanating from the same open doors as the zing-tinkle of slot machines, and bursts of loud music as the bouncers opened and closed the doors to the nightclubs. The deep background thump-thump of loud bass beats, accompanied them, like an external heartbeat. The smell was a mix of overcooked streetfood, spilt alcohol, cheap perfume and fresh vomit.
Bryn seemed completely at home and even exchanged reserved nods with a couple of the local denizens. But that was to be expected. It was his job to know this place and fit in. For a moment, watching the older man stride confidently on, turning sideways to avoid a gaggle of half-drunk whores and their present companions, Dai felt a stab of envy. This had been him a year ago, prowling the streets of Londinium with the same superb assurance. But here in Viriconium his role was no longer that of street Vigiles and there were times he missed it badly.
Which was the real reason why, when Bryn suggested he come along, Dai hadn’t protested.
The taberna was busy, but not overwhelmingly so. The two of them managed to spot an empty table which they were heading towards when a large man wearing smartish tunic and trews and an ugly scowl intercepted them, grabbing Bryn by the arm.
“Not a good idea for you to be in here. We don’t cater for your kind.”
“My ‘kind’ being?” Bryn asked politely.
The large man nodded at Dai.
“Well, his kind to be precise. You would do better taking him along the road to the Aureum Pomum. They got things a bit more classy there. We don’t cater that way.”
Then Dai realised and felt an irrational sense of anger. Before he became a Citizen he was forever judged on his lack of status and now he was being judged on an excess of it. Bryn must have felt his mood shift because he smiled broadly at the large man blocking their way, then spoke in a pleasant and friendly tone.
“I suggest you let go of my arm and take your assumptions and stick them in your twll tin. Because you’ve read this so wrong it’s like you’ve mixed up the business news with the sports pages.”
The big man moved, but in the wrong way, and a moment later he was on the ground gasping with Bryn standing over him still wearing a friendly smile. Dai stepped forward and trapped his wrist with one foot, quite casually, as the downed man tried to reach for some weapon or other.
Around them people had pulled back chairs and stools, some edging away and some moving in. The atmosphere was as raw as blood on knife blade and Dai spared a moment to feel grateful they had a wall to their backs. Beneath his jacket he had a nerve whip, the non-lethal Citizen-only weapon, but he was reluctant to draw it here. Instead he shifted his stance to something more defensive.
Bryn was talking to the prone man.
“You must be new in here, fresh from the sticks?”
The man made a muffled grunt and tried to get up. Bryn might have been minded to allow him to, but before that could become clear, the gathering group around them parted and a woman who had to be in her late fifties or early sixties, with a plump figure and hard eyes, flanked by men with hard bodies and even harder eyes, kicked at the prone man quite viciously.
Any possible lingering idea that this was a sweet, rosy cheeked middle-aged landlady vanished as she opened her mouth and demolished the unfortunate on the floor with a tirade of vicious profanity. When she had finished he seemed to have withered to half his original size and he scurried off, doubled over, vanishing through a door marked for staff use only.
The woman looked around at the audience they had gathered and made a circling gesture with one finger. “Show’s over. You can all get back to your drinks.”
The clientele of the place dispersed to the tables and conversation picked up almost immediately, with only the odd glance cast in the direction of Dai and Bryn to indicate the topic might not yet have moved on.
“So why is it every time you come in here you make trouble SI Cartivel?” The hard tone had gone to be replaced by a warm, friendly one with a hint of flirtation. That last became more obvious as the woman shifted her gaze to take in Dai – slowly, from head to toe. She was so clearly mentally undressing him that for a moment he almost felt naked.
“I wasn’t the one making trouble, Aoife,” Bryn protested. We just came by for a drink and a chat and your man decided to put himself in my face.”
“You’ll be ruining my trade bringing a Citizen in here. But don’t I remember him? Good looking bachgen like that is hard to forget. Isn’t he one of your Vigiles?”
“Something like that,” Bryn agreed easily. “Now about that drink and that chat.”

 From Dying on the Mosaics by E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago 

Advice on growing old disgracefully from an elderly delinquent with many years of expertise in the art – plus free optional snark…

You are old so you shouldn’t bedazzle
You should be both faded and frazzled
It shouldn’t be you
With a Harley (brand new)
And a Swarovski Crystal vajazzle

© jane jago

August for the children is a small eternity
The time when school goes out to play
And weeks so seem to stretch away
And endless dreaming fills each day
And summer’s path’s a golden way.

August for the farmer is the time to gather in
To combine harvest wheat and rye
To cut them down and pile them high
To stack the bales and let them dry
Until the the last has been set by.

August for the worker is the time to holiday
To pack the bags and pack the car
To make a journey near or far
To see new sights, drink in new bars
And kiss beneath the twinkling stars.

August is the season that closes summer’s book
It takes the flowers and doth them press
Between the pages, to impress
The memories of summer’s dress
As autumn’s change her hands caress.

Eleanor Swift-Hook

A sci-fi story of love, betrayal and Space Pirates!

Pan didn’t go back to Central.
She’d filed her resignation to Rota there and then and mailed it. By wedding a citizen of Central, Jennay had secured that same right for her adopted children, they no longer needed Pan for that. Jennay’s happiness had opened the way to her own.
For the next three years, she was living as a freetrader.
Home became a neat two berth, system flight capable, planet hopper. Big on cargo capacity for its size but lacking on just about every other front. Tolin, his looks almost perfectly restored and his body having regained its tone, was back to his old carefree self again. The memory of the fire on his previous ship that had maimed his face and nearly taken his life, seemed to be receding from him. Some days Pan almost fancied she could see the old sparkle back in his eyes.
It was a gloriously irresponsible lifestyle compared to the heavy weight of box ticking and regulation which working for Rota had been. As long as they picked up and delivered their chartered cargo of goods and passengers within the window of time agreed, they could set their own agenda. It felt like one long romantic vacation, seeing the sights of the galaxy and getting paid to do so.
Other freetraders were less fortunate. Where Tolin owned their ship outright, others had to pay off cripplingly high loans. Where Pan could run whatever maintenance was needed herself, others had to pay premium rates to keep their vessels space worthy. Despite that, Pan found the freetrading community were mostly good people to know. They might be close-mouthed and competitive when it came to trade contacts, but they would look out for each other, pass on tips and warnings and help out a friend in need.
Which was why she was not that surprised when Tolin asked if she would mind helping out some old friends of his who had a ship that needed some work.
“We go back a long way,” he told her as they lay tangled together in the bed that filled their entire tiny cabin. “These guys helped me a lot when I was starting up. Now they’ve hit some bad times. They can’t afford to get their ship patched up and until it is, they can’t fly and make money.”
It was something that they had both seen before and Pan had sometimes been able to help out. She could also see this meant a lot to her man, but she didn’t want to promise something she couldn’t deliver.
“I’ll take a look, of course,” she said, “but it depends what the problem is. If whatever I need to fix it is too expensive for them, there’s not a lot I can do.”
Tolin rolled over to drop a kiss on her lips.
“Thanks, love. I think you’ll be fine. They’ve got access to a full-on maintenance bay, just need someone who can use it.”
Which probably should have rung an alarm bell somewhere.
But it didn’t and six days Coalition Standard Time later, they were docking on a dust world.
The winds of the broken biosphere, ripped across its surface hurling dust, grit and larger objects at rock gouging speed. If the planetoid ever had a name it was not mentioned on any navigation chart. This was marked as an empty system, no inhabited worlds and none listed as fit for human exploitation.
“It was an early-expansion stop over,” Tolin explained as they slipped down through the tumult, relying on the gravity shielding of the dock below to protect them from the highwinds and debris. “From back when they couldn’t make the full run from Central to the Middle Worlds in one jump. The Coalition abandoned it a long time ago as there’s nothing here but the dust. Dek found it and him and a bunch of his friends use it as a sort of base.”
Pan did a rapid calculation. “Early-expansion? That would make this place at least three hundred years old. I can’t think they will have much in the workshop to help out with modern vessels.”
Privately she was thinking that any environment capture settlement that old on a planetoid like this was going to be a dangerous place to be. The risk of some system failing had to be horrifically high. But as the ship settled into the dock she tried to push those thoughts away. They were here now and the sooner she had a look at this ship, the sooner they could be on their way.
But Tolin knew her well. “I think you might be surprised. They had an engineer here for a while who equipped the place and fixed it all up for them. So I don’t think you need to worry about the life-support giving up.” He no doubt meant to reassure her, but as the grating clunk of an archaic locking system secured the vessel, Pan found herself far from comforted.
The outer hatch opened and a man bounded in. There was no other word for it. He was a bit below average height, with a slight frame and wiry muscles. He seemed to be fired by nervous energy, bobbing on the balls of his feet.
“Tols. Great to see you again and this must be Panvia?”
His head turned sharply as he glanced between them. Like a bird’s. From his face Pan reckoned him anywhere between thirty and seventy, the prime of life, but his eyes as their gaze switched rapidly between Tolin and Pan, looked ancient. Pan had seen the same cold and weary expression on too many of the older freetraders. Those who had fought too hard and done too much of the bad stuff, just to keep flying. Those who had turned to smuggling when legal ways of paying their loans and dockrents had dried up.
Tolin was smiling, but something about it felt forced.
“Yeah. Pan, meet Dekker Loxly. We go way back.”
Dekker stepped in and slapped Tolin on the back, hard enough to make him need to take a small sidestep to keep his balance. He might look smaller than average but Pan realised he was strong enough despite that.
“That’s right, Panvia. Me and your man here, we’re like brothers. Blood brothers. Isn’t that right, bro?”
Tolin nodded, but his smile seemed to be fading as he did so. Dekker bounded back and gestured to the main lock with one hand.
“Now you’re here, let’s not waste any time. I’ll leave you to make yourself at home in the maintenance bay, Panvia, and me and Tols will go and catch up on old times a bit and sort out what we’re doing.” He flicked up a screen and shared it to Pan. “This is all we have on the tub that needs patching. Hope you can fix her up.”
Pan wanted to protest, but something in those eyes held her tongue. Tolin was already following Dekker from the ship but turned briefly to give her an odd ‘get on with it’ look which seemed to carry a silent warning. And that was the only reason she bit back the sharp retort that had been burning her tongue.

Roguing Thieves is a Fortune’s Fools story by E.M. Swift-Hook. There will be more Roguing Thieves next week…

They called her Nanny Bee, although as far as anyone knew she had never been a wife or a mother, let alone a grandmother. But she was popularly believed to be a witch – so Nanny it was. She lived in a pink-walled thatched cottage that crouched between the village green and the vicarage. The Reverend Alphonso Scoggins (a person of peculiarly mixed heritage and a fondness for large dinners) joked that between him and Nanny they could see the villagers from birth to burial.
Nanny’s garden was the most verdant and productive little patch you could ever imagine, and she could be found pottering in its walled prettiness from dawn to dusk almost every day. People came to visit and were given advice, or medicine, or other potions in tiny bottles or scraps of paper – but they always had the sneaking suspicion they were getting in the way of the gardening.
But there again, digging is second nature to gnomes.

When eating brownies was first mentioned in the village, there was a certain amount of disquiet: cannibalism and all that. But when it was discovered that the brownies in question were delicious cakes that put an entirely different complexion on the whole thing.
The cake was delicious, dense and chewy and sweet, and the village embraced it with enthusiasm.
Nanny, however, was less enthusiastic and she found a surprising ally in the corpulent person of the vicar who came to air his disquiet.
“There’s no doubt the stuff’s beyond edible,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s safe. It’s from the future and shouldn’t be here.”
“Agreed. But I don’t know how it gets here.”
“Neither did I until this morning. I went out for a fly because the dawn was calling and I saw him.”
“Saw who?”
“The baker. He’s found a wormhole and he’s swapping rocks from the spoil heap of the dwarf mine for trays of cake.”
“Where?”
He showed her and she had a word with the mine foreman. Who was unamused.
When the baker arrived at his wormhole the next morning he was driven back by knobbly dwarfish fists and his source of cake had been dynamited into oblivion.
It took a while, though, for the village to forget the forbidden savour of chocolate.

©janejago

Elron and his sister wife Elanda dallied in the dappled shade of the forest. They walked hand in hand, stopping every few steps to kiss and caress. Elanda slipped away and ran a few steps, for the sheer joy of him catching her in his strong arms and bearing her down into the sweet loam to ravish her with tender savagery.
They strayed closer to the homes of the human creatures than was their habit, standing for a while to watch as the white-clad and silent women of the sanctuary bore a wrapped bundle to the flat rock of sacrifice, leaving it there before scuttling away on silent feet.
“I wonder what gift they spare to the old ones,” Elanda spoke idly, even as her beloved’s clever hands worked their magic. He bent her over a convenient tree branch and they began their unending game yet again.
This time the little mewing cries did not come only from Elanda’s throat as they continued even after she drooped like a spent lily.
“It’s a child. The old one will dine on child tonight.”
Elanda walked on soft feet to where the babe lay and pulled back the blanket from his fair features. She gazed enraptured.
“Look Elron. Is he not beautiful?”
Elron looked, without too much interest, but found to his surprise that the child was indeed of surpassing beauty. Gold of hair, blue of eye, and possessed of skin so thin and white that the blue veins could clearly be discerned beneath their fragile coverlet.
“He is indeed beautiful. Shall we keep him?”
“We could. But what of the old one?”
“I will call him up a fat boar. He will like that better anyway.”
Elanda’s smile was a thing of witchery, so the deed was done. They retraced their steps, only this time The beautiful fae had a beautiful child in her arms. Once away from the grove of the old ones, she stopped and seated herself on a sweetly scented bank of wild flowers.
“The child must feed,” she declared opening her garment.
Elron expected to feel jealousy at the sight of another mouth at his beloved’s breast, and he was surprised to find that all he felt was excitement as the child’s perfect lips encircled Elanda’s long pink nipple.
He watched for some while, until, impelled by some appetite he didn’t know he possessed, he bent his handsome head to suckle the other breast.
As quickly as a bolt of summer lightning, the child stirred in Elanda’s arms and struck like a viper sinking sharp and yellowish teeth into the pulse that beat in the big male’s neck.
Elron was paralysed and could only groan in agony as the creature drunk his life force. The eyes that had looked so blue in the sacred grove now glowed red as the succubus fed.
Seemingly unknowing, Elanda crooned a lullaby and stroked the baby’s milk white skin…

Jane Jago

The Dog Days are the high days of summer and a perfect time to celebrate our canine companions in verse and prose.

Rex had been through several homes so he had no great expectations when he was chosen at the pound that this one would be any different. The woman who had stared at him in his run with an intense piercing look had not seemed that pleased to take him. She wore hard heels that tapped along the floor and didn’t say anything as she put him into the car and drove home.

The man who sat alone in the garden looked very sad until he saw Rex. Then he smiled.

“Charlie? My Charlie!”

Rex decided he liked his new name.

Eleanor Swift-Hook

In a modern-day Britain where the Roman Empire never left, Dai and Julia solve murder mysteries, whilst still having to manage family, friendship and domestic crises…

The door opened to admit one of the gate guards.
“Hywel Llewellyn to see Dominus Llewellyn. In a bit of a lather if you don’t mind me saying.”
Julia sighed. Dai’s brother, who owned land nearby, was as tempestuous as Dai himself was brooding.
“Wheel him in.” As the door closed she looked Caudinus straight in the eye. “You can bail out if you would prefer. But I’d be grateful.”
He smiled reassuringly. “I’ll stay. I quite enjoy Hywel in a rage.”
The door opened with such force that it bounced back off the wall, and Hywel stomped in. His face was puce and he was waving a sheet of paper. Seemingly unable to speak he threw the paper on the table in front of Julia.
She read it and could feel the blood draining from her own face. It was an official complaint that the family of one Hywel Llewellyn, non-citizen, had been observed to be visiting a sub aquila residence without due authorisation.
The Villa Papaverus was not their own house, it was the residence that went with Dai’s job as Submagistratus and was owned by Rome. As such it was designated sub aquila which meant only Roman citizens and those non-citizens employed to work there were legally permitted inside.
“Oh merda,” she said softly. “I never even thought of that. Dai hates having that wretched eagle above our door.” She passed the paper to Caudinus who read it swiftly then sighed. “I am so sorry, I should have seen that coming. As I didn’t, I shall have to investigate.”
Hywel made a noise like a cat that has just had its fur stroked backwards.
“Sorry? Sorry that I and my entire family are being criminalised by your filthy Roman rules?”
Caudinus looked at him severely. “Hush man. Be glad I didn’t officially hear you say that. As I said, I do have to investigate. So will you just be quiet and let me think. Or is shouting and blustering at a pregnant woman something you think a good idea?”
Hywel subsided slightly.
“If this goes through the fine will take most of my livelihood for the last quarter.”
“Oh it’s worse than that,” Caudinus said his expression grim. “The fine would be the lightest of penalties. If it were deemed to have been done in deliberate defiance of Roman authority it could be counted as treason. And this complaint names you, your wife Enya and your step-mother, Olwen.”
Julia felt sick. Dai’s mother, sister-in-law and brother were being placed in real peril through someone’s spite.
“Treason?” Hywel echoed, his tone hollow and slumped into a chair, the fire and fury suddenly deserting him.
Treason always carried the death sentence – a humiliating and agonising death in the arena.
Caudinus swept the printed emails into a pile and got to his feet.
“Yes, treason. But if I have anything to do with it, it won’t come to that and I will make sure you are issued with passes under my authority so there is not a problem ongoing.”
“Isn’t there something you can do to dismiss this?” Julia asked, “It is your legal jurisdiction after all.”
Caudinus pulled a face. “It will depend on the nature of the complaint and who the complainant is. It could go over my head to provincial level and those damnable bureaucrats in Augusta Treverorum.” He touched Julia lightly on the shoulder. “You mustn’t worry about this, you hear me?” His tone was stern. She mustered a smile more for his benefit than because she felt reassured. “And you come with me Llewellyn, I need to get some details from you if you can guard your tongue enough to manage a trip to Viriconium with me?”

An extract from Dying for a Vacation, by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook