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

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.
Keran, the only place on Temsevar which had some kind of spaceport, had been worse than the worst place she could think of. This was a planet where the First Expansion never happened. People lived in crude buildings made of mud. They had no tech at all.
Like none.
You couldn’t even link out to anywhere civilised.
No one on Temsevar had known who she was. Gernie and Micha, who had taken her in when her guardian abandoned her, told her she had once been a slave. That was what the odd mark on her shoulder meant. She had been someone’s property and they had sold her to the Perselles when she was a toddler. That meant there was no way to ever find her parents.
Micha hadn’t filled in the details but she didn’t need to. Raine was plenty old enough to get the picture. Her real mother would have been a sex slave and her father was probably some sick bastard who had owned her and raped her whenever he wanted, selling off her kids as soon as they were old enough. She’d worked it out and she’d come to terms with it. She’d stopped stabbing at the brand and cutting her arm. Mostly.
But that was not the worst thing.
The worst thing was the thought she might be stuck there forever. So when she’d been told she had a chance to get away. To get back to Central, she’d been willing to do just about whatever it took.
And that was why she was now in this place with Creepy and Cute.

Snag a copy to keep reading…

The cover is an original artwork by Ian Bristow, you can find more of his work at Bristow Design.

Jem wondered what to wear.
Meeting his parents for the first time and a formal dinner too to celebrate their engagement. She had never been to a formal dinner before so it was double terrifying and so far out of her comfort zone she wanted to hide under the duvet and tell Rafe she was ill.
Eventually she found a dress she thought suited her and the occasion, did her own hair, tried for a little make-up and waited.
When Rafe arrived she knew she had got something right.
His face lit up with stunned awe.
“My God!” he said.

E.M. Swift-Hook

With the last strands of his grand plan meshing together, Durban Chola is beset by doubts about his own motives and identity.
The consequences of his past actions make it difficult to persuade old allies to support him or to find new ones. His enemies have their plans well advanced.
Then there is the price of his ultimate success to consider – a price that will be paid by all of humanity for good or ill.

Who am I?
How can I be sure I am who I think I am?
The question had begun to plague Durban. Any time he was not actively engaged with one of the other myriad and pressing problems, it crept back and nagged at the edges of his conscious mind.
To be fair, it was a question he had asked himself many times since the first moment, in childhood, when he had realised that not every boy was brought up in a high tech castle on a technologically primitive planet. As a child, his answer had been based around the idea he might be the son of a wealthy Central dweller who was one day going to come and reclaim him from the endless round of focused discipline which constrained his life. Later, as his understanding of both his situation and of the possibilities offered by the biotech lab beneath the castle grew, he became convinced he was some kind of genetic experiment.
But that was an illusion too. An illusion that Alize, the woman whose guardianship dominated his life on Temsevar even after childhood, had brushed aside carelessly. As if the fact that his entire life had been based upon lies was irrelevant. To her it was. To the being he had once been it should have been too. But to the Durban Chola who had until then lived a human life, it mattered profoundly because it meant he was not human.
He was an alien being which in its natural state knew no physical form, did not even come from a physical reality, but which had been housed in a human body to help prepare the way for more alien beings to make the same transition. His kind wanted to exploit the human ability to take energy from their physical base and convert that into a form accessible and utilisable by their own higher consciousness.
A truth which was hard to accept even though his full awareness and memory of that alien existence had been restored. A truth that had far-reaching implications and consequences. Having lived all his conscious life as a human up to that point, it’d been a truth too far. Durban had rejected his own people and chosen to sever their link with this universe. In closing that linking Nexus, Durban had stranded himself and Alize in this physical universe—except at that time Alize had no physical body, sustaining herself from the energy of the fusion core that powered the lab on Temsevar.
In a brutally honest moment of self-analysis, Durban had come to see that it wasn’t a pure, selfless love of humanity that had been his sole motive in that decision. He had been spurred as much by a cold and bitter hate.The only person who Durban ever loved had been sacrificed to further Alize’s ends.
Alize had let his sister, Jaelya, die when she could have been saved.
He had spent the years since burying that hate and denying it, knowing hate destroyed the one who held it close far faster and more thoroughly than it destroyed its object. And he must have succeeded to some degree because when Alize’s non-corporeal form had been eliminated, along with the final remains of his childhood home on Temsevar, he had felt nothing. No sense of victory. Not even relief. Just a flat sense of closure. There was just no cause to feel hate anymore as the object of his hatred had ceased to be.
Or that was how things had been.
Until Avilon suggested the possibility that it had been Alize who had walked away from the final act on Temsevar wearing his body, with Durban nothing more than a puppet personality under her control. Durban was very certain that wasn’t true, even if he had no way to prove it to Avilon. But he couldn’t be equally sure that her second suggestion wasn’t true—that perhaps Alize had survived by somehow attaching herself to him and was influencing him from a threshold below his usual level of consciousness.
That idea was chilling because unlikely as it sounded, it could be true.
How could he be sure he was his own master and not under another’s influence?
How could he prove—even to himself—that he was still the same person he had been before those events on Temsevar three years ago?
Whenever his mind was not engaged in anything else, it homed in and teased away at the problem, seeking a way to prove to his own satisfaction that he was still Durban Chola, uninfluenced and in control.
How can I know who I am?

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

Portrait of Durban Chola by Ian Bristow.

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

I am old I have noticed this fact 
There’s no need to approach it with tact
I don’t bother that you
Will have noticed it too
But stop smirking or you will get smacked

© jane jago

I have never tried to review nine books in one go before, but this trio of triplets is too good not to shout about.
We begin in the harsh world of Temsevar, where life is cheap and people trade whatever they have and whoever they have in their power. It is a place of warlords and ambitious underlings.
It is a place more for endings than beginnings.
Here is where we meet the two threads that wind their way through all nine books: Avilon who is a warrior, soldier, thinker, and perhaps ultimately a sacrifice. His character echoes across the interwoven stories, but he is not a hero in the traditional mode. He is rather one whose actions are sometimes heroic, and sometimes not.
And then there is Durban Chola whom one might term the eminence grise of the whole piece.
Who is Chola? What is he? Is he as amoral as he seems or is there a deeper meaning to his actions? What is he striving for? And do we even have the stomach to find out?
The harsh reality of the lives lived in these pages and the normality of casually brutal acts reverberate through the whole oeuvre like thunder in the next valley.
Those who become part of Chola’s quest leave deep footprints in the mind of the reader, and we are sometimes left hoping that they will at least find their ‘happy for now’ when their usefulness has been devoured by the great plan – which I can’t talk about without a bucket of spoilers, suffice it to say it’s a biggie.
So there we have it. Nine books leading us to a Necessary End.

This is space opera with bells on. Never mind ‘the fat lady’ Fortune’s Fools will have you waiting for the universe to sing!

Jane Jago

The pot had been repaired so many times that Mary called it her ‘tinker’s darling’. It had been her mother’s and her grandmother’s, had seen fair times, poor times and even civil war. It hung on its nail more like a trophy than a working pan, looking down on the other pots as if it knew it had a special place.

When her first grandchild arrived and Mary was cooked the meal to celebrate, it was only natural she reached for her tinker’s darling.

When her daughter died bearing the second, it was the pot that cooked for her wake.

E.M. Swift-Hook

The adventures of Piglock Homes and his sidekick Doctor Bearson

Bearson reached into his capacious pocket and pulled out a packet of hunny sandwiches. He unwrapped the greaseproof paper and handed them around, frowning a warning at Homes who seemed about to question Yore.

“Leave the man be, Homes. He needs to eat before he talks.”

Homes glowered, but buried his sharp little teeth in a doorstop of brown bread liberally spread with butter and hunny.

After he had eaten his sandwich, Yore looked a little better and he turned his long mournful features to where Homes sat licking hunny off his trotters.

Once Yore was satisfied he had the pig’s attention he put a hand in his inside pocket and withdrew a newspaper which he passed across. The headline across the front page was smudged but readable.

‘Fearful Haunting. The Dartymuir Dog strikes again.’

“What has happened, man?”

“Yesterday the old Lord Sleepytown went for his morning walk on the muir. When he didn’t return, his heir went looking for him. The old man was found fallen in a bog, he had suffered some sort of a seizure. The young one carried him home on his own broad back. The doctors say the old one is close to death. He has only spoke three words since they laid him on his bed…”

“And what were them three words.”

“Orange bounding dog.”

“That was very much what I feared.”

Homes hunched in his corner of the carriage, looking, Bearson thought, like a wizened old crab apple hanging from a tree.

For a very long time he said nothing. But when he did speak, his words were utterly unexpected.

“Bearson, old chap. Do you recall the name of that rogue whose circus was accused of harbouring known criminals?”

“The man whose name you so cleverly cleared?”

Homes puffed out his skinny chest. “Yes. Him.”

Bearson closed his eyes to better think, calling to his mind’s eye the hulking brute who swore to be Homes’ servant for life. For a moment his brain paused among the tattoos that liberally decorated a torso rippling with muscles. And then the name came to him. 

“Crispermeadow. The man’s name is Arnold Crispermeadow.”

“Well done old man.”

Homes scrabbled about in his many pockets, coming up with a pad of telegraph forms and a purple indelible pencil….

Piglock Homes and his sidekick Doctor Bearson will continue their investigation into The Affair of the Dartymuir Dog next week…

Jane Jago

Don’t give me fabled glory or a great heroes life
I’ll settle for a muffin and a nice cup of tea
There’re those who like to spend their time in ongoing strife
I’ll just take the peaceful path, that’s the one for me.

I’m happy to applaud those who stand up for the rest
Without them we’d never have the freedoms we enjoy
But I’m not the kind to march on streets or to beat my breast
I’ll have another coffee please, a sweet latte with soy

Of course I care about the world, I live in it too, you know
I’ll sign all your petitions and support your right to march
Though my philosophy is to go with, not fight, the flow
But right now I need a cuppa, before my lips do parch

I’ll click your links and semaphore my virtue to the world
I’m the one who holds the towel in your fighting corner
I’ll cheer you on the telly with your protest signs unfurled
Then I’ll say how nice it is the weather’s getting warmer.

E.M. Swift-Hook

A Necessary End is the third part of Iconoclast, the final book in the final trilogy of Fortunes Fools. To celebrate its upcoming launch, the entire first trilogy in a single volume, Transgressor, is free to download today.

“Who the fuck do you think I am?” Cista Tyran found she no longer cared if her boss heard her anger, assuming that he was still her boss. “You set me up. You fed Dugsdall to the wolves. You gave me your word you’d let me hold his safety line. You’ve gone back on that. So now you want me out altogether?”
Perhaps if he hadn’t been lying in bed pinned by the weight of her body as she lay half over him and with the flush of exertion still on his skin, she might have responded differently. But she doubted it. She was done playing nice with the man she worked for who had become her lover. And yes, she was pretty confident that he did love her. He had shown it, putting himself out to protect her from events that could have ended her career. On her side, if not love there was real affection. It hadn’t started out that way, but no matter who else she had been seeing, he had been a constant. It wasn’t easy, but they were both highly capable of the kind of subterfuge it involved, finding ways and means to be together.
After all, he was Garn Jecks, head of the Coalition Security Force and she was one of his top project managers.
Outwardly, he seemed unmoved by her words, just shaking his head and remaining stone-faced. But that meant little.
“Right,” he said. “I’m sorry Cista.”
She stifled her usual annoyance that eight years into their secret affair he still insisted on using her given name and refused to call her Ty.
“You’re sorry but…?”
He lifted a hand defensively. Ty realised she had seldom seen him so incredibly distressed. Anyone else would have been screaming in her face, Garn Jecks just lifted a hand. “Right. I am. Truly. Things have changed and we have to change with them.”
“You mean the mad old bitch poked her crystal ball until it burped and you caved in to her crazy?”
He said nothing to that. But what could he say? They both knew it was true. Ty had no idea the nature of the hold Kahina Sarava had over Garn except it was powerful and had something to do with Future Data—the algorithmic crystal ball that seemed to be commanding everything. Sometimes she got the impression Garn was its victim, controlled by it. Which didn’t sit well with her image of him and she knew it must cut deeply into his own sense of self.
Feeling suddenly sorry for her outburst, Ty lowered her head to kiss him, but he moved impatiently and swung his legs over the side of the bed to sit up.
“You don’t understand quite how bad this is,” he said, his back to her. “And it’s not just Sarava. There is some…thing else.”
The slight hesitation made her wonder if he had been going to say ‘someone’. But it was hard to think of anyone with the ability to bring down Garn Jecks. After all, he was the man who was paid to ensure the security of every member of the Central corporate-political establishment. He knew where all the bodies were buried.
“This could destroy me,” he went on. “It will destroy you. Unless you let me get you out. Do you understand?”
A chill in the air made her skin prickle. He did love her, that was really sweet. So why was he being such a bastard about this?
“You think I could just walk away?”
She could feel the tension in his entire body and when he didn’t answer her right away, moved her hands to massage his upper back.
“I don’t want you to walk away,” he said at last. “I want you to run. Resign. Today.”
Something in his tone impacted deep in Ty’s guts. It punched into her anger and knocked the wind out of it. He was afraid. For her. She stopped moving her hands, resting them on his shoulders and leaning in to press her cheek against his, her hair swinging forward in a silver-blonde bell, loving how that was a stark contrast to his dark-complexioned skin.
“Maybe you should take a moment to explain what’s happened, what’s changed things, instead of just telling me you want me to resign from the service.”
“Right. I wish I could. I can’t.” There was an uncharacteristic note of hopelessness in his voice. This the man who was always in control. Always one step ahead in his planning. He turned to draw her into his embrace and buried his face in her hair for a moment. “Knowing would place you in even more danger. I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to you because of me.”
“I am all grown up, you know,” she said, squashing the surge of annoyance. “I work for the CSF. You may have heard of them? The S is for ‘security’.”
He sighed.
“You didn’t follow orders.”
That brought her up short and she pulled away. Distancing herself. Then started hunting out her clothes.
“It’s what you pay me for,” she reminded him as she dressed. “If I did everything by the book I’d be as much use to the service as a fractured fusion core.’
“Right. No. This was not that.”
“Then what?”
“I told you when I transferred you from the team hunting Dugsdall that you shouldn’t contact him to tell him so.”
Ty frowned, her teeth digging into her lower lip. How could he know…? Of course, Future Data would have thrown it up as a high probability. But she was also certain Future Data had no way of knowing if it had actually happened. No one could know that. She’d used a one-burn link and an anonymised message drop which would self-delete as soon as Grim picked it up.
“Yes,” she agreed. “You did. You said it was important. You didn’t say why though.”
His gaze met and held hers.
“But you did it anyway.”
“No. Not yet.” The lie came easily. But then lying was her day job and she was very good at it. “I was going to, but I’ve been too sick at the thought of how he’d react knowing you’ve cut the line.”
She let how she felt about what he’d done to Grim creep into her voice. This wasn’t the first time Garn had angered her with a work decision, but she had a policy of never allowing work into their relationship. The fact he had dragged it in now was breaking all their rules. It was that which scared her more than anything else he was saying.
He looked away, lips tightening and then stood up to get dressed.
“I’m not sure it makes any difference anyway. If you haven’t, then good. But it changes nothing. You have to resign.”
She finished dressing and then sat and watched as he did the same.
“I don’t see why.”
“Right. You wouldn’t. But you must. Today. It has to be a clean break.”
A clean break? Ty shook her head. Surely he couldn’t mean…?
“You don’t want to see me again?” It was harder to say than she would have imagined it might be. Somewhere along the line this man had crept further under her skin than she’d intended.
He pulled on his shoes and avoided her eyes.
“It is not anything I want. It is, if anything, the exact opposite of what I want. But it’s not anything I have any choice about.”
“And I don’t either?”
“Right. There is more going on than you know—than you can know. It’s not just what you think it is. There are other factors in play here that weren’t before.”
“Can’t you tell me—?”
He cut across her. “I’ve told you all I can. More than I should. Don’t ask me for more.”
And that was that.
She knew there was no point protesting, his entire body language shut her out, until he finished dressing and drew her to him, briefly.
“Put in your resignation—but don’t let what I’ve said today stop you doing what you always planned to do.” He palmed something into her hand and brushed her ear with his lips. “Keep in touch. Please.”
Then he was gone.

From Iconoclast: A Necessary End by E.M Swift-Hook, the final book of Fortune’s Fools which is out 24 March.

The cover is an original artwork by Ian Bristow, you can find more of his work at Bristow Design.

I’m cool in my shades and I’m telling you
If a pig can rap then a donkey can too
This is Yore Rap
(voices off) Our rap?
No. Yore Rap

See, donkeys are cool and donkeys are hard
And I’m coming your way to mark your card
This is Yore Rap
(voices off) Our rap?
No. Yore Rap

I’m wearing my hoodie and my high-top wellies
And I just don’t care if my underwear is smelly
This is Yore Rap
(voices off) Our rap?
No. Yore Rap

And that middle-class pig ain’t street or ghetto
Even if he do have a high falsetto
This is Yore Rap
(voices off) Our rap?
No. Yore Rap

And now just to prove the Yore ain’t soft
I’m about to chastise the voices off
This is Yore Rap
(sound of running feet)
Yore Rap

©Jane Jago 2021