Admirable advice from Madame Pendulica’s mystic moggy!

So today she (that’s Madame Pendulica to you or Dotty Doris to me) was doing this thing where she grabs a handful of polished stones (she calls them crystals) and throws them on a black cloth divided up into the houses of the zodiac and then proceeds to give her client a ‘reading’ based on which of the stones land where (“You have jasper in your first house and that is bringing optimism in your immediate future.”)Please note that he’s not the one to be optimistic, Dotty Doris is – she’s making a wad from this consultation.
Anyway, I digress, she was doing this reading for a client who was trying to decide whether or not to accept a proposal of marriage. We’d been through the background already:
“She’s perfect in every way and we are madly in love. But should I marry her?”
Madame purred in her throat (I swear she takes lessons from me).
“You are wise to seek my guidance and I shall consult the stars through their union with the earth by the power of the crystals.”
Translation; “I can see we have a gullible one here who’ll pay for at least three sessions and keep me in prosecco and the cat in tuna for a week.”
He nodded and looked grave.
“You see I know the economic and legal commitment of marriage is a serious undertaking and if I am besotted I am not going to be able to think things through clearly. So please, tell me, should I marry her?”
Oh ye gods and little fishes, what a complete asshole!
I’d had enough so put my paw in and told him that if I was his girlfriend I’d be telling him to take a hike. If he’s the sort who can’t even know his own heart and mind over whether he should marry then he’s better left on the shelf with that open packet of dried kibble that’s sat there the last six months since I refused to eat it anymore.
Unfortunately, the mad bat went on to convince him that his answer was obscured by the moon being occluded by onyx and his having obsidian falling in Scorpio so he should come back the next week to get clarification.
I really do have to admire her.
And I thought of him almost fondly when I ate my tuna that evening.

Ailuros the Mystic’s Mog predicts she will be offering more advice sometime in the future!

Big Brenda was asleep in the afternoon sun, when she felt a polite tap on the sole of her boot. Opening her eyes, she saw the honeysuckle fairy accompanied by a whole cloud of beez.
“What’s the trouble Honeysuckle?”
“It’s that Chiggers ma’am. Keeps trying to steal hunny.”
Brenda rubbed a hand over the stubble on her chin, making a dry scraping sound.
“All right. Tell the beez I’ll have a word.”
Picking up her knobkerrie she strode over to the greenhouse.
“People what don’t want me to come down there and break their toy, better leave the beez alone.”

©jj 2022

…for a moment the silence was blissful. Then the screaming started…
Writing team Leo and Mike Johnson have their day disturbed when a body turns up near their house.

The girls thanked the WPC, then the oldest girl spoke up again.
‘You really want to know about the thing floating in the river don’t you?’
‘They do’ Leo said steadily ‘but they aren’t allowed to ask you any questions without a responsible adult present.’
‘Ain’t you lot responsible?’ a petite brunette grinned.
‘In this case responsible has a quite specific meaning. It’s either a parent or a social worker. Somebody who will be looking out for your welfare.’
‘Oh. Right. But we could tell you anyway. Without questions.’ ‘You could.’
The girls looked at each other speculatively; the one who seemed to be the de facto leader of the group nodded sharply. ‘You need to understand that we haven’t been having a very nice time, not the least of which has been no proper washing. Anyway, we decided to take some shampoo into the river and see if we could wash our hair. Environmentally unsound, but we really were stinky. So we’d all washed and were swimming around naked, feeling much better. Of course, Molloy appeared at the side of the pool and started berating us as sinners etcetera, etcetera. I wanted to smack her one, but the others persuaded me to just swim away. We all swam to the dam, where we knew the silly bitch wouldn’t come, being unable to swim. She started crying and carrying on, and we did some diving to really piss her off. Then Mags got her foot caught in something. It could’ve been serious but we noticed she wasn’t coming up fast enough and two of us grabbed her. We were towing her back to the beach because she was coughing and spluttering a bit. That was when Molloy started screaming hysterically. To start with we didn’t take a lot of notice, being more concerned with Mags. When we all got onto the beach, the silly bitch was still pointing and screaming, so we looked. And there was something floating. Something bloated and dead. Mags was very sick. And after that there was just a lot of screaming happening. Until Mr Leo turned up and smacked Molloy’s face. Which was very satisfying.’
The WPC who had been busily scribbling grinned.
‘I don’t think I need to write the last bit down.’
One of the girls who hadn’t yet spoken piped up. ‘Was that dead thing a person?’
‘Probably. Unless the local sheep have taken to wearing denim.’
‘Just don’t think about it’ Mike was bracing. ‘It’s none of your never mind. You consider what you are going to say to your father so he takes you away from that bloody school.’
She had just finished speaking when a perfunctory tap on the door heralded the entrance of a bulky mannish-looking woman with an incipient moustache. Mike raised an eyebrow.
‘Yes?’ she kept her voice neutral with an effort.
‘Come along girls. Time to leave.’
The oldest WPC looked up. ‘No. You can go, but the children stay until their parents come for them. That’s the rules.’
The woman tried to stare the WPC down, but had no success.
‘Very well’ she said’ on your head be it. I will leave them in the hands of the ungodly.’
Mike opened her mouth, but Ro reappeared and forestalled her. She grasped the interloper by her collar.
‘You. Out.’
She forcibly ejected the woman from the kitchen and frogmarched her to the back gate. A grinning policeman opened that gate and Ro all but threw her out. She returned to the house smiling somewhat grimly. ‘Bitch’ she said before striding off waving a duster.

From Shall we gather at the river? a hard hitting murder mystery thriller by Jane Jago which is available for 0.99.

Because life happens…

It isn’t as if we can know
The future and where things will go
To always be stellar
Take sunscreen and umbrella
And then you can go with the flow

E.M. Swift-Hook

“We’re investigating a murder then?”
“You’d think.” Dai made no attempt to keep the wry note from his voice. “But we got the budget for this from Antiquities. Our masters value the stolen document, ‘an artefact of Roman significance’, more than the life of the courier — but then she was only a Briton.”
His mood was not improved when they went to interview the owner of the stolen document, a Roman Citizen and an official who also owned the chump half of Valentia in northern Britain. Claudius Albus Balbus. Balbus refused a polite invitation to come to the vigiles headquarters, so they tracked him down to his plush hotel.
It was a shimmering construction built beside the skyliner ascent, convenient to transport access for visiting Romans. Dai noted the stylized eagle, wings spread, hovering over the door ‘SPQR’ clutched in its ceramic talons. He was not surprised this building was sub aquila — Roman only. He was also not surprised when he and Bryn had to show their ID before being allowed past by the discreet security guard in the portico. He was surprised, however, when Bryn nudged him in the ribs and nodded at the retreating back of a man who had just walked out of the building.
“Atty Brickenden. Thug for hire. How could scum like him even get let into this place?”
“Maybe he was providing drugs for one of the visitors.” Dai suggested.
“True. Or fixing them up with a girl.”
Asking after Balbus, once inside, Dai was told the magistratus could be found in the atrium. Dai led the way until he was brought to a halt at the door of the open courtyard. An elegant woman, wearing a stylish stola, daringly cut and in this season’s colours, stood occupying the entrance.
“Oh, there you are. At last.” She lifted a languid hand imperiously and pointed to her feet. “Crinitia needs to visit the little girl’s room.”
Dai’s gaze followed her pointing finger down to what appeared to be a perfect sphere of fluff, from which emerged a leash that was looped over her arm. By the time he had registered that ‘Crinitia’ had to be some variety of canine, the woman was pressing the end of the lead into his hand and, as he opened his mouth to explain, she walked away.
Behind him, Bryn was suffering an inexplicable fit of coughing and wore an unrepentant grin when Dai spun round.
“I don’t know how you do it. Your Celtic charm wins the ladies every time, Bard.”
Dai returned the grin, but with an edge of irritation behind it. He held out the lead.
“Looks like you get to take Fluffy here for a mingo and merda, Decanus Cartivel.”
Bryn’s smile faded suddenly. “You don’t seriously mean— ”
“Oh but I do.”

From Dying to Alter History by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook, one of the fourteen alternate history short stories in Tales From Alternate Earths 3 from Inklings Press.

Glossary
Please note these are not always accurate translations, they are how these terms are used in Dai and Julia’s world.
Decanus – sargeant.
Magistratus – senior official with legal jurisdiction over an area.
Merda – shit
Mingo – piss
Portico – entrance hall
SPQR (Senātus Populusque Rōmānus) -The Senate and People of Rome.
Stola – female formal wear.
Sub aquila – literally ‘under the eagle’. An eagle above the entrance of any building means it is Citizen access only – aside for those who might work there of course.
Valentia – we would call it Northern England.
Vigiles – Police. In Dai and Julia’s world the police are a sub-branch of the military.

When the loud banging and creative swearing started to emanate from the hole in the ground under the greenhouse, Brenda went for a visit with Granny.
“They find somebody to read their book to them?”
“No. They’m following the pictures.”
“What. Like the biggers and flat pack furniture?”
“Very like.”
Brenda winced. “I’ll just have everybody move to a safe distance then.”
“I would. Them three isn’t likely to get hurt, they’m too stupid. But one of the flower fairies could cop for a big problem.”
Brenda nodded.
The fairytale people shifted themselves away from the veggible garden and waited…

©jj 2022

What happens when the hunter becomes the hunted…

Even for someone who’d seen more bad things than most in a long career with the Coalition Security Forces, the images being projected onto the wall of the briefing room were hard to look at.
Really hard.
At first glance, he found it difficult to tell if the images showed something that had indeed once been human. Plastered up on a screen and close to twice normal size, it looked more like something drawn from the hyper-imagination of a special effects creator working on some VR linkcast nasty. In case any gory detail of the torture inflicted was missed by the viewer, the images showed it all from several angles, and zoom shots homed in on each specific injury in horrid magnification.
It was butchery.
“Just in case there is any doubt about the kind of people we are dealing with here, this is just one example of their work.” The voice of the briefing officer was unemotional. “This man was once one Foss Fingal. Almost all the injuries you can see were inflicted before death.”
The narrator paused as two male faces appeared, one on each side of the original image. One showed a man smiling and at ease with himself and the world; the other, a man who wore a taut expression, watchful, expecting some kind of attack.
Durban Chola and Jazatar Baldrik.
“These, then, are the two people responsible,” the briefing continued. “One ordered it done and the other carried it out. Let’s be very clear from the outset, these are not pleasant individuals — even by ‘City standards.” The understatement hung in the darkened room like a bad smell.
So this really was something serious.
Even before the presentation began it had been pretty obvious this was going to be big. Instead of the briefing taking place in the usual way by link conferencing, he had been ordered to report to Coalition Security Force Headquarters in Central. And he’d been given the kind of thorough security check-in normally reserved for visitors, not for the fully-cleared, ID carrying operative that he was. Then there was the fact that he had been shown into a room buried deep in the heart of the HQ complex. A briefing room with no external windows and quietly dominated by the subtle hum of full-on surveillance damping with all external link access shut-off. Just in case anyone there was inclined to make an illicit private recording of the proceedings.
Another giveaway that this was anything but a regular briefing, not that he had still been in any doubt at all by that stage, was the identity of the man who greeted him: Garn Jecks. Calculating it out, Jecks would be the boss of his section head’s boss’s boss. In fact, Jecks was the ultimate boss. He was the man in charge of the entire Coalition Security Force and hovering close to deity as far as most regular serving CSF officers were concerned.
“Dugsdall. Right. Good that you are here. Take a seat.”
There was only one empty seat in the area of the room where Jecks gestured, so he sat on it and glanced around briefly to see if he knew anyone else. The woman on the chair beside him looked the lean, mean and hungry kind – the only doubt being exactly where that hunger was focused. She was presently focused on whatever personal screens held her attention, but he had a strong feeling they were not going to be ones about her favourite esport celebrities.
Whatever it was she was looking at must have been pretty attention-grabbing though, as her top teeth were visible, pressing hard into her bottom lip as she concentrated. Then she moved her arm and he saw the slight bulk of a wrist slot analysis device, no doubt the source of her screens. It also answered all his questions: she was on a power climb – a woman literally wired to her work. Which made her exactly the kind of person he would choose to swim a shark-filled river in full spate to avoid.

From Iconoclast: Mistrust and Treason a Fortune’s Fools book by E.M. Swift-Hook – which is only 0.99 to buy for a limited period.

Because life happens…

Growing older means now you can smile
When you think how it was for a while
In your youthful years
When all of your fears
Were about if you had the right style

E.M. Swift-Hook

One For Sorrow, an impossible steampunk love story from Jane Jago, is out today…

It was an unremarkable chop house in an unremarkable street. The gas lamps hissed, the waitstaff hustled, and the ‘companions’ of both sexes cruised the room like hungry alligators. In the darkest corner, two people sat at a table eating pie and mash of the day. The man was handsome, in a narrow-featured sort of a way, and his well-pressed city clothing might have marked him out for a chiv in the ribs had he not been well known in these parts. His companion was less remarkable, if you discounted the scar that marred the smoothness of her face, drawing down the left-hand edge of her eye and twisting her lip into a permanent sneer.
She pushed her chair a little back from the table. “Lovely though it is to see you, Louis the Lip, I’m pretty sure you never asked me here for old home week.”
His smile was humourless and didn’t reach his fish-cold eyes.
“I might have a job for you, Marta.”
“Go to hell, Louis. I ain’t forgot where the last job you talked me into got me.”
He showed her his teeth. “Do this one and you can forget you ever owed me a debt.”
“That’s what you said last time.”
“I did. But you never done the job, did you.”
She reached across the table and bunched her fist in the snowy whiteness of his shirt.
“Careful Louis Boy. You know what that train wreck cost me.”
He couldn’t meet the cold anger in her eyes, instead he tried and failed to pull his shirt out of her hand. He gave up and grabbed her wrist exerting all the pressure he could, but she was immobile. He tried another tack.
“Be reasonable Marta. That weren’t none of my fault.”
She let go of his shirt and snarled deep in her throat.
“No. But I bet you enjoyed it. You’re the sort of son-of-a-bitch that’d take pleasure in that kind of carnage.”
He snarled and snatched for the pistol that hung at his side, but his hand never got there. Marta laughed, though it was a sound as cold and smooth as the skin of a winter rattlesnake. Louis looked towards the sound and found himself staring into the twin hexagonal ‘eyes’ of a short-barrelled flintlock.
“Don’t move, asshole. If’n that’s your idea of a fast draw, it’s a wonder you managed to survive this long. You want to be careful or you’ll end up in the ground with a cross at your head and a stone at your feet.”
Louis put his hands on the table and a big red-headed man in the next booth laughed.
“Smart Mouth Louis. Died of a case of the slow.” He mocked.
Louis’s neck went puce with anger, but he knew not to push his luck any further. At the moment the clientele of the chophouse was amused, but if he drew down on Marta after being beaten fair and square he knew he could expect to wind up as full of holes as his cooking cousin’s best colander.
She looked at him and the contempt in her face might have seared his conscience if he possessed such a thing.
“Frag off Louis, and don’t forget to pay for the food.”
He leaned towards her. “You owe me.”
“Louis. If we’re talking about owing, I think the shoe’s on the other foot.”
“Oh, yeah. Who paid your hospital bills?”
“The same man that bought my arm, Louis. And it warn’t you.”
“Arm?”
Marta stripped the thin leather glove off her right hand to expose the contraption of brass and wire that was her arm from the elbow down.
“Yes, Louis. Arm.”
He stared, mesmerised and she crooked a brass finger at him.
“Why don’t you come a bit closer? Let me get these fingers around your throat.”
He reared back as if he had been stung.
“Marta. Please.” He sounded desperate. “It’s a bodyguard job for Lyonette Firedrake. Just for one journey. She wants you and her daddy already paid me.”
“Then you’re gonna have to pay him back ain’t you.”
“I can’t.” His anguished voice rose towards falsetto. “I don’t have the money no more.”
Marta lifted a shoulder. “I should care.”
“What about what I done for your man?”
He only just managed to leap back in time to avoid her grasping hand.
“Don’t you mean what you done to him, if it really was you. If you’re telling the truth for once in your miserable life you better be afraid because when I catch you, I’ll rip your head off and shove it up your arse.”

If you would like to keep reading you can snag your copy here…

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

With the rotting potato having been given a decent burial, life returned to something like normality, although…
Some days later, Oisin was seen staggering across the croquet lawn with a book clasped in his skinny arms. He stopped beside the stone seat where ‘Dolphus nome sat reading his little volume of pomes. The ensuing conversation was loud and recriminatory.
“Brenda said no poteen.”
“I ain’t axing you to make poteen.”
“No. But you’m axing me to tell you how to do it.”
“Don’t be a bumwipe ‘Dolphus.”
Even reading nomes have a breaking point—as Oisin and his book discovered.

©jj 2022