Two Women and Some Books
The collected ‘wisdom’ of seven decades on this planet condensed into limerick form. Certainly not philosophy to live your life by…..
When you meet someone who’s talking crap
With full psychobabble and pap
There is nothing to say
So just walk away
Or else you might give them a slap
‘Origin Code’ by Ian Bristow is one of nineteen Game Lit stories by as many authors in Rise and Rescue Volume 2: Protect and Recover, out today to help celebrate Earth Day. All profits from the Rise and Rescue anthologies will go to support wildlife devastated by the Australian wildfires.
Origin Code – Zadyn had a choice. Steal to save the world or die. And he didn’t plan on dying.
Countless merchant stalls lined the streets of Averisk’s city center, making it one of Inworld’s most visited hubs. Chatter from busy shoppers melded with the yells of business owners offering their latest deals on armor, weapons, potions, food and anything else a Quester could want.
The center of a crowded market wasn’t the sort of place Zadyn would have normally agreed to meet an informant, but on this occasion the potential prize was too great to let his usual code of conduct get in the way. And it had been made more than clear by his informant that he wouldn’t be making the rules for their meet. He smiled at that last, knowing full well his reputation for talking his way into or out of anything clearly preceded him.
A quick glance at the purpling sky prompted him to scan the busy street for his mark. She was supposed to arrive at the produce stall across the street from where he had stationed himself at dusk. It wasn’t wise to linger, so if she didn’t show soon he’d have to move on. But even as that thought occurred, a hooded figure arrived at the stall.
Zadyn waited for the signal to be sure it was her—a hand gesture, displaying only three of the woman’s five fingers—then he started toward her.
“Nice evening, isn’t it?”
The four words chosen to let her know he was the one she was meeting.
“It is. But the wind is picking up.” She responded without turning to face him. Then she set off down the street at a sharp pace.
He followed and soon she turned off the merchant-crowded street and into a vacant alleyway, her cloak billowing in the evening breeze. Cautious from his many years thieving, Zadyn hung back, suddenly wondering if this was some kind of trap. She gave a quick backwards glance and slipped into the doorway of a small building.
He’d been told this job would pay more than he could dream of. That if he did this, he could live a life of luxury. Buy any armor or weapons upgrades he desired and still have coin to explore even the farthest reaches of whatever world expansions he wanted. No more joining raids as the expendable thief just to make ends meet. He was tired of being the one who got ignored as soon as he’d swiped the all-important dungeon key or retrieved the necessary ingredients for some ungrateful warlock’s potion-making needs.
Sure, in recent times he had moved on to more high-profile work here in the city, but there was always the looming threat of reverting to darker times if these posh jobs dried up. But if he did this, all that would be part of his forgettable past.
Rise and Rescue Volume 2: Protect and Recover is out today, so to keep reading snag your copy now and help support Australian wildlife.
It hadn’t been in her life plan. She hadn’t intended to become the poster-person, the voice, of a cause. It was just she’d been the one there. Right there, when something happened. And she’d been the one in the crowd who spoke up.
Of course, she hadn’t known it was being recorded. Until her friends started on about how she was going viral. And how brave she had been.
She hadn’t been brave, just there.
When they asked, she shrugged and said: “Someone had to say something. I only did what anyone would do.”
“Yes. But no one else did.”
In the final days before the army of Qabal Vyazin began an improbable and historic winter march through the Great Tusk Pass, Caer found himself caught up in a continual stream of demands upon his time and energy. Having been involved in a manhunt most of the previous day, he slept briefly and rode at dawn to the mustering troops where he spent half the morning reviewing the supplies and arguing with one of the Warlord’s other commanders about the necessary provision and how best to transport it. Then he returned to Tabruth to speak with the Warlord himself; an interview which had not been very pleasant, focusing as it did on Caer’s shortcomings and his failure to find the Harkeran agents responsible for the murder of Ralik Vyazin. He had spent the afternoon looking over the apartments of Commander Brachios which had been broken into the night before. Brachios himself was with the army, but his catamite had been killed and Caer knew that once the Commander received that news he would be getting an extremely irate Brachios descending on him as well.
The Tabruthans, who should have been of the most assistance in this policing investigation, seemed to be oddly unavailable or firmly, but politely, unable to offer any insight. In the end, he took the problem with him to his own rooms where he dined alone with the woman he had desired and won on his own terms: the Caravansi Alexa, she they called ‘the Fair’.
As they were served the rich food she listened to the tally of his frustrations and humiliations over the past few days, starting with how he had nearly laid hands on the assassin, but the man had lost him in the streets of the city and then on through the catalogue of events of the day concluding with his inability to find any real clue to the identity of the second murderer. The beautiful face opposite him looked attentive and when he had finished, frowned very slightly. Alexa raised a goblet to her lips and sipped the wine.
“It seems to me,” she said pointedly, setting the goblet down on the table between them, “you may not be looking for two men but one.”
“I had thought of that,” Caer returned crossly. “But there is no more reason to suppose that is so than that there were two or even more men.”
Alexa watched him with her violet eyes.
“No? So there are two – or more – men presently wandering around Tabruth with the skill to break into and out of the castle at will and act as they please once inside. I am sure you will have been told that Brachios’ lover was well armed and that his death was no simple assassination.”
“I was also told,” Caer said feeling caustic, “that Ralik was killed by an energy pistol and Brachios’ catamite with a jewelled dagger – his own. Why would a man with an energy weapon use a blade?”
“If I were trying to suggest that there was more than one man involved in these attacks, I might choose to vary the way I killed,” Alexa told him, patiently, as if explaining something to a child. “Assuming, of course, I had the skill to do so.”
Caer was silent then, thinking.
“One man,” he said at last. “Not a group of Harkeran sympathisers?”
“One man,” she agreed, “who has the skill to kill even those trained to arms and who seems to want to speak to Commander Brachios very urgently.”
He looked at her as if seeing her for the very first time: the dark red hair in perfect loops, framing her oval face with its high arching brows and the clear violet eyes beneath them. Beauty and intelligence combined with an iron will and the competitive spirit that had made her the best caravansi he had ever served under in his days as a Zoukai. But now the tide had turned and it was he who held the whip hand and she who followed. She needed the favour of the Warlord and could only hold that through Caer. So she spent the winter with him whilst her caravan was secured in separate quarters in the city of Kharzabad.
“You think that our murderer might make a point of visiting Brachios then, if the Commander were known to be staying somewhere – more easy to get to?” Caer asked her.
She turned her head slightly to look at the darkening window. “I think you show some intelligence sometimes,” she said simply.
From Dues of Blood a Fortune’s Fools book by E.M. Swift-Hook and the third volume in the Transgressor trilogy.
The collected ‘wisdom’ of seven decades on this planet condensed into limerick form. Certainly not philosophy to live your life by…
When the poor and unloved f-bombs died
I’ll admit that I lay down and sighed
For the poor orphaned f**k
That ran out of luck
I looked into my beer and I cried
In The Library at Castle Herriot by Stephanie Barr, Sophia is a repressed literature teacher, afraid of love and passion and spontaneity after watching her mother’s trip into madness after her father’s death. She’s hoping for a quiet little holiday in a lodge in Scotland to, well, read. A naughty cat, a brutal thunderstorm, and a few missteps bring her to Castle Herriot, an occupied castle on an island in the loch, where she’s like to be trapped a day or so with its eccentric keeper. At least it has a library.
But in this library, is a hidden library that Sophia finds—and it’s never coincidence—and she gets lost in the pages of one of the special books inside. When she stumbles back out with the unfinished book, she finds she’s lost in a whole different way.
“You expect me to believe that removing this book from the little secret room has transported us all back in time and that we’re trapped here in a storybook until the events have played out. You think I’ll believe that?”
“It doesn’t matter if you can believe it or not. It’s the Gods’ own truth. Would you fight me so hard if part of you didn’t already believe?”
She cradled the book in her hands as the hairs on her arm lifted again. She knew, absolutely, that this was the same book that she had read so many hours the night before, that he hadn’t changed it. She had. With tears starting in her eyes, she said, “I’m sorry.”
“Wisht, darlin’, now don’t be crying. Tis a hardship, right enough, but you didn’t know what would happen.” Charly scratched his head, clearly at a loss as the first tear fell down her cheek. “It’s the problem with secrets; you can’t rightly warn a body without giving it away. Dry your tears, won’t you? I canna bear it.”
“What can we do?” she asked.
The tears stopped and Charly breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, it’s complicated. There are some rather challenging aspects of this story, some that may be hard for one or both of us to stomach. But, if we don’t carry the story on to the end, we’ll never get back to our own world.”
“We’ll be trapped?”
“Aye.” He seemed about to say something else but didn’t.
Sophia refilled her cup. “Well? Don’t you know what happens? You talked like you knew what will happen.”
“It doesn’t work that way, sweetheart. I know the pivotal parts of the book, those steps that we must fulfill if we want to escape the book. I know what the outside characters do, as long as we follow the plans, because that part doesn’t change. But there’s no telling that you and me will do what needs doing when it needs doing.”
Sophia frowned over this last bit and kept sipping coffee while she mused. “Nope, I don’t see the problem. If you know the script, all we have to do is read our lines.”
“Well,” Charly temporized. “There’s a few potential hitches. First, the book, like most of them from that room, only provides the pivotal events we’re responsible for. It’s from the point of view of that belligerent bear out there. The lines, as you say, and details are left for us to fill in, ad-lib as they say in the states. Secondly, some of the pivotal events don’t sit very well with me; in fact, they scare me senseless, and I’m not sure you’ll like a few yourself.”
“I’ve changed my own mother’s nappies. If I have to do something unpleasant, I should be able to.”
Charly paled a bit. “Ah, well, perhaps unpleasant may not be the right word, but that leads me to the third thing. I can’t tell you what to do. You’ll have to decide for yourself.”
“Good God, why?”
You can also read a free precursor story on the origin of this library called Altered Page.
A Bite of… Stephanie Barr
On the one hand, not very much, less probably than my average heroine (I try to have as little in common with my villains as I can because I tend toward really nasty villains). She’s book-smart in the old-fashioned meaning of book smart/bookish and is almost a caricature of that stereotype when we begin. She’s not assertive. She dresses super frumpy. She’s not adventurous. BUT she’s also severely traumatized, first by the death of her father while she was a teenager and secondly by caring for a mother who responded to his death with a descent into madness. Between the two events, her own grieving and her creativity and imagination are set aside to deal with necessities. Even after her mother is out of the picture and she doesn’t have the same challenges, she’s caught in a tight world she demanded of no surprises and minimal passion. To her, loving someone wholeheartedly equates with insanity.
Now, obviously, I haven’t let go my creativity and imagination, but the need for security in my everyday life, I can identify with that with Sophy, the growing up ahead of time, the fear of uncertainty. I’m not much for traveling and adventure. I do love to curl up with a good book. And she has some of my OCD quirks, like hating to watch a movie in the theater if she misses the first few minutes. All or nothing. And I love that way.
I’m also readily thrown when my equilibrium/routine is disrupted and I don’t have a game plan for escape. So, we have that in common, too. Maybe there’s more of me than I first thought.
You’ll be pleased to know I don’t share her love of decadent underwear. Nor do I have an obsession with coffee. But I do like cats. 😊
I have never created a world I’d rather be in than my current self (that might change with a future book, but so far it holds steady). In fact, for this book, that’s part of the point, slipping into a romantic world of seventh-century Scotland and not sugar-coating the hard labor and inconveniences, the lack of caffeine and plumbing, the miserable role most women were pushed into, the miserable existence for much of the poor. All that gets highlighted because it’s one of the reasons the past isn’t much of an allure to me.
Most of my fantasy is set in similar times so, no, I don’t wish I was there. My space sci fi has its own challenges. The closest to being comfortable is my near-term SF like Saving Tessa where it’s much like now only more so (and more environmentally friendly) or Catalyst which is pretty much set in the now. But those are variations on my here and now and not really new worlds. So far, I haven’t made a new world that I like better than now.
Ignorance—pure ignorance—can be cured. Stupidity is harder and not the same from person to person. Generally, I would stupidity can be cured, too, with patience. You can’t teach a person to be clever so much but you can help people who struggle in some areas to work around them, to find methods to deal with them, to find the aspects of their intelligence that works best. No one is stupid at everything. Innocent ignorance and stupidity can be cured for anyone willing to make the effort (and who can find good instruction).
But they have to want to be. Willful ignorance, the kind that revels in their own lack of intellect, those who refuse to learn or even acknowledge different views, that is much harder to cure. And, it’s been my observation, people who are willfully ignorant fit in every segment of society and do a great deal of damage. Once you’ve decided you already know, that you have “common sense” so don’t need those pesky facts, that being intelligent and questioning things is the sign of a fool, it is very hard to cure ignorance or the limited logic used to lock that ignorance in place.
So my answer is wilful ignorance (which is stupid, in my opinion), so the combination?
Although Stephanie Barr is a slave to three children and a slew of cats, she actually leads a double life as a part-time novelist and full-time rocket scientist. People everywhere have learned to watch out for fear of becoming part of her stories. Beware! You might be next!
If you wish, you can find her on Twitter, Facebook, her website, her blog or miss nothing and sign up for her newsletter!
He felt safe and secure behind his screen, in a comfortable chair with the remains of a take out close to hand, ordered online.
Flitting through social media, picking, choosing. Writing pithy, well-deserved comments and sharing his astute observations.
All anonymous.
Smart speaker close at hand, controlling his smart home – even monitoring the new doorbell that protected his house.
He didn’t see the data being gathered. Noting when he had visitors, recording his purchases, how often and when. Tracking his every mouse click, knowing everywhere he visited online – even places he’d never admit to his closest friends…
Safe and secure?
Maybe by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook . Sometimes we walk the edges of realty…
CHAPTER FIVE: JESSICA
It still did not seem real. How could it. This was not any kind of real world. But it was not a dream either. Somewhere between the two was an intersection of experience where none of the verities of reality could be assumed, but the utter chaos of dream was somehow still held at bay.
It happened as she walked to the throne. She felt the rightness of it as if some deep part of herself was nodding agreement with her actions. It was as if a flow of wisdom welled up in her psyche.
“I can do this,” she thought, mouthing the words as she took her seat on the throne. The strange sense of self-and-yet-other, intensified and she realised it was almost as if two of her was seated on the throne. One herself, wearing the flared jeans and purple polo-neck and the other wearing long skirts, a mantle and a cloak, the fabric pooling at her feet.
There was no sense of separation or dissonance, just the flowing of one into the other, like two tributaries of a river joining to flow on together to the sea. But Jessica had no time to consider the significance of it, or even to question what she felt about it. As her hands curled over the serpent heads of the throne, the serpents writhed beneath her touch and cast coils around her arms, acknowledging her right to be there, embracing her not restraining her.
From where she sat it was as if every part of this strange catacombic underworld was visible to her. She could cast her thoughts up and see Annis, arms round her cats, watching and wondering. She could reach out and sense the shifting depths of darkness where the Old Ones moved beneath the earth. She saw the pinioned vampire and as if at her unspoken command, the creatures around him slithered back into gloom.
No longer restrained Roald, pushed himself up from the slab of dark stone and stood staring at her, something of both yearning and desperation in his eyes. Jessica watched as he seemed to flicker between the handsome human form and the bone-grey near skeletal one she had seen in the fair. She realised then that was why Annis had taken her from the safety of the Sanctuary. In the midst of the fair he could not hold his human form against the powers of life and death which met there. She had needed to see it, see him as he really was, if she had not then she would still see him only in his gorgeous human form.
The other part of her knew only the viking Roald, clad in fine furs and wool, his braided beard and golden, on bended knee. Beguiling and beautiful. Telling her how the gulls themselves saluted her as they wheeled over the headland. The high headland where he tried to…
The sunken cheeks and cold-burning eyes filled her vision. He was impossibly fast, impossibly strong, impossibly no longer on the other side of the cavern, but there infront of her, black withered lips pulled back from the row of shark teeth, jaw impossibly wide to close on her throat.
The shots sounded like thunder, booming across a charged summer night and the grotesque head flung back and away, old blood, dark and slow as if in part congealed, fell in liquid clots onto the stone and deep within the core of the earth itself, something sighed in delight.
Part 15 of Maybe will be here next week…
Love in times of Coronavirus
Isn’t about sex
It’s about taking precautions
And wondering who is next
Love in days of quarantine
Isn’t bulkly buying
It’s getting stuff for other folk
Alone and lonely sighing
Love in times of distancing
Isn’t about skin to skin
It’s about calling on the phone
When you can’t be dropping in
It’s about yelling over the fence
Across the street conversations
Trying to be sociable
Without leaving your station
Enjoy the opening of Dying on the Mosaics, one of The Dai and Julia Mysteries by E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago set in a Britain where the Roman Empire never left, which is free to download 18-22 April.
The cheap baths in Londinium were not the most salubrious place to meet but needs must when times demanded. At first he thought no one was there, then a changing cubicle opened. The man who emerged looked much older than he expected and a slight tic flickered in the corner of his eye. They had been friends once, but now there were other bonds that tied them.
The man with the tic washed his hands and under the cover of the sound of running water, murmured. “You have to do something. This could destroy me – destroy us, destroy the entire consortium.”
It was interesting to see how weak and vulnerable a proud man could become. Contemptible but interesting.
“Don’t worry. Fortunately for you I’ve been thinking ahead and will be in a good place to deal with it.”
The man with the tic nodded, their eyes meeting in the mirror for a moment, then turned and walked out. He had left the data drive in the cubicle as arranged and it was a moment’s work to pocket it and walk out.
I
Ante Diem Septimum Idus September MDCCLXXVIII Anno Diocletiani
The body lay sprawled on the cold, mosaic floor of the Basilica Viriconia. Dai found irreverent and irrelevant thoughts going through his mind about how having a murder scene so close to the Vigiles House was so convenient and considerate of the killer. He recognised them for what they were. An instinctive protection against the horror.
And horror this was.
The headless corpse had been carefully arranged so its posture fitted to the Caput Deum, the head of the Divine Diocletian, picked out on the floor there as it was in every official building in the Empire. Haloed in tiny golden tiles, it replaced in two dimensions the murder victims own head. The body was naked, male, and the only obvious identifying mark was the silver ring of Citizenship. Whoever this was they were most-likely Romano-British.
“Same M.O. as the last one,” Senior Investigator Bryn Catrivel observed. “This is getting sick and creepy, Bard.”
His familiar tone and form of address drew an odd look from the other man present, Sextus Catus Bestia who had recently taken up the role of Magistratus for Demetae and Cornovii. Recently enough, Dai knew that he had yet to realise Bryn and Dai were long time friends and work partners. That they had served together in the Vigiles in Londinium for eight years before Dai was appointed to be Submagistratus based here in Viriconium.
Dai looked around the broad expanse of the civic building’s portico and noticed the dead-eyed cameras.
“They even found a way to take the surveillance offline, I’m guessing.”
The Magistratus cleared his throat. His long face looking distinctly sallow beneath the carefully trimmed black hair. He lifted one hand, palm forward, the heavy gold patrician ring of Citizenship very obvious on his index finger.
“Um. I’m terribly afraid that might be my fault. I was testing it late yesterday afternoon and I told the disadattatus I would restore it to normal mode as it was the end of his working day, but I must have forgotten and I suppose it stayed down overnight. Mea culpa. Isn’t there a night watchman of some sort?”
“Used to be, dominus,” Bryn said heavily. “Until Aprilis. That was when the last man retired and as the automatic surveillance had been upgraded it wasn’t felt necessary to replace him.”
“Oh dear. That is not good, not good at all.” The Magistratus looked profoundly unhappy and shook his head. “The poor, poor man.”
Dai was wondering whether the ‘poor man’ in question was the retiring watchman, the disadattatus or the deceased when he caught the look Bryn sent him.
“Dominus, we should allow SI Cartivel to continue this murder investigation. As long as we are here it is getting in the way of what he needs to do.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course.” He started walking towards his office and Dai walked with him leaving Bryn giving clipped and efficient orders to his team. “Two Roman Citizens killed in this bizarre way.” He frowned heavily. “Wasn’t there some extreme Anti-Roman group operating in this area recently?”
“Yes, dominus. We had an unpleasant encounter with such a group last year. But they were dealt with conclusively.”
“Such evil can grow deep roots and spring up like mushrooms. But if you are certain, Llewellyn…” He trailed off as another thought clearly distracted him. “Considering how this is going I think I should take over the investigation myself.”
Dai felt his guts tighten. The new Magistratus had been in Viriconium for less than three weeks and in that time the impression he had made was not one to inspire any confidence in his ability to lead an investigation.
“Might I suggest, dominus that as you are still settling in and are not fully acquainted with the local circumstances, it might be better to let me do so.”
The Magistratus stopped on the spot.
“Well isn’t that the point? How am I ever going to get to know how things are here if I don’t jump in and get my hands dirty? Oh, don’t worry. I won’t be breathing down the neck of the local Vigiles – I’m sure they know what they need to do, I’ll just be overseeing not interfering. This is the kind of thing that can echo all the way to Augusta Trevorum and even Rome, you know. I just want to keep across it so if there is any come back I am the one who gets to do the testudu and your Vigiles won’t have to worry about taking any flak.”
Dai stifled the urge to snap that the Vigiles wouldn’t need any protecting if they were just left to do their job, but clearly the Magistratus meant well and was trying to show care and consideration for his subordinates.
The Magistratus placed a heavy hand on Dai’s shoulder.
“I know I have a very large set of sandals to fill to be able to measure up to Magistratus Ambrosius, but I want my people to know I have their backs. So I’ll have my primus secretarius – what’s his name again? Turtle? Turnbull? Terfel. That’s it – arrange for SI Cartivel to brief me twice daily and on any key developments. I can provide any support and resources as the investigation might require.” He nodded as if well satisfied by his own solution to the issue then smiled encouragingly at Dai. “It’ll be for the best.”
To keep reading FOR FREE (18 – 22 April) click here to download the novella.
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