Bob Studholme's Blog, page 3

The Dragon, the Enfield Bullet and the joke about spandex trousers.

I should explain that Wyrm is a Scandinavian word meaning dragon. I should probably also explain that ex-colleague Jon Lavelle posted up some pics of motorbikes on Facebook. At this time of the night that's all it needs to inspire this.

JamesAlright, I don’t much like the beasties, but I had a real kick out o’ flying one. I wanted ‘Dambusters’ playing while I was up there. Though to be honest, the closest thing to a flight on a Wyrm is the Enfield Bullet 500cc. A beautiful piece o’ engineering, ye stick it into gear, open up the throttle, get a noise like God farting and go. Stick wings on it and it’s a Wyrm.It was a real hoot to be doing the ‘Wyrm leader to Wyrm Flight, bandits at six o’clock’, business and I drilled them through all that stuff. Well, everything I could remember from watching The Battle of Britain every Christmas. And like the guy with the Poles, tried to get them to behave with proper discipline. We landed by a small loch and had a quick go at strafing runs. Then we went through the defence against attack that young Earle had come up with. I was reluctant to admit it, but it looked like it all might just work. Against the new crop o’ Vere anyway. Vere born o’ Vere ye might just have to kill, but I couldn’t see myself crying real tears over that.I checked with Udaam after a wee while how he reckoned the Wyrm were fairing and he said they could go on for a while yet. I reckoned it was enough for the day, though, so I ordered a return to the Gard. I gave them a last strict order to observe proper procedure while talking on the Wyrms and to keep good formation and then we set off.
KattemWe were barely in the air when we saw them. We had lined up in the good wing formation the Senior had taught us. Already we were feeling proud of what we had done. Why had we never thought of flying with the dragons before? With us on their backs they were clearer in their minds and less likely to panic. We could fight with them. Better still, our cousins who were not Mages could do this. It only asked the skills we have developed in living with dragons.That Brendan apprentice’s idea was to turn the vampires back into humans was well enough. I could see the sense of it, we would gain and Maldon would lose, but, in truth, I would be as happy to kill them too. We have generations of blood to pay them back for.So is it any wonder, when we saw the group of vampires resting by the road from Black River Bridge, we Duerg did not have to think of what to do next.“Dragon eight to Dragon Flight, bandits at 9 o’clock. Engaging.” We peeled off in a very perfect formation, the dragons folded their wings and we dropped towards them like the talons of a hunting hawk.“Get back here ye wee buggers. What do ye think yer at going Polish on me?”I did not understand the question, but I would have ignored the order even if I had. They were going to be ours.
AdamMcGregor was in front, Phoebe and I flying in parallel behind and the rest of the flight in a nice wing formation behind us. I heard the 'bandits' call, but the other dragons had peeled off and were heading for the Vere below before we knew what was up. We followed them. There wasn’t really much choice.The Vere didn’t know what to make of it. I think they’d never been attacked by dragons or Duerg before, and were used to the idea that everything ran from them. They stood too long watching to see what was happening. Then it was too late. The flight came in at ground level and back-winged to a stop, knocking half the Vere down in the cyclone blast. In dropping down the Duerg had already pulled their weapons from their backs and, as the dragons’ claws hit the ground, they opened up.Supersoaker water guns are not the most imposing of ways of taking on vampires, but loaded with Rowan berry spirit they could reverse the magic effect of the vampire bite. I doubt that’s in any of the books on vampire lore either, but the AI had assured us it would work and it made the rules around here. Alistair had made a big deal of the anti-magic properties of the Mountain Ash, so it was his own fault. He’d set up the AI with something it could extrapolate a solution from and it had.And I was more delighted than I could say. Alistair would have had his heart attack early if he’d have seen his beautiful fantasy degenerating into a water pistol fight. We didn’t kill anything and I took the piss. Some days it does all go right.As the stuff hit the Vere they collapsed in twitching masses. The dragons didn’t give them the chance to get their wits or legs under control and kept back-winging to knock them down, advancing and herding the crowd, harrying them until they were splashed and changing.Some didn’t react. These, I guessed, were the Vere born of Vere I’d been told about before. Two of them lifted off and tried to get behind us. Reflex I suppose, as that was the way they’d always attacked dragons. McGregor’s mount rounded on them and let fly with a white hot jet of flame. It missed, but the point was made, these dragons couldn’t be confused and scattered. They had discipline.Another three managed the same trick of getting out from in front of us and swinging in for an attack from behind. Before my dragon could barbecue them I sprayed two with spirit and watched them twitch, fall and hit the ground with bone-crunching thuds. The third I hit in the solar plexus with one of the distance punches Jake had taught. It went down trying to hold its gut and flap its cloak at the same time.In only a minute it was done. Perhaps five of the Vere escaped. The others were on the ground curled into snails of quivering flesh, caught in the change back to human form. We got down and walked among them. The scene scared the Duerg. Seeing the pain of the twitching teens wasn’t something they’d geared up for. One of the figures on the ground clutched at my leg as I got too close.“Again,” it croaked. I waved the spray at it.“This?”It nodded, so I gave it another blast. It arched as though electrified then slumped back to the ground. I could see that the cramp-like rigor had gone out of it now though. It looked me in the face. Another painfully skinny, painfully pale, suffering teen. Not the stuff of nightmares any more. “Thanks,” he wheezed and passed out. I wondered which personality he owned, but realised I could never know.We went through the others then, spraying them until they slumped and the pain had gone out of them. It looked like a mass execution, but we’d brought them back to life, not taken it from them.McGregor looked around at the flaked out crowd. “Looks like the morning after a beach party in Goa,” he said, “Without the spandex psychedelic trousers o’ course. Now, how are we going to get these back to the Gard?”There was a question. None were in a condition to even start walking yet, and wouldn’t move fast when they could. We agreed Malaika and I would go back to the Gard and get transport and reinforcements. The others would stay.There was a risk of a counterattack. We didn’t know how great, as there’d been no sign of enemy in this area, but the Duerg and dragons were quietly confident they could see off anything thrown against them.Mere vampires they would laugh at, werewolves or sand giants they could escape by taking to the air and our reports suggested that Maldon’s ranks of rogue Mages were thin on the ground by now. What a dragon couldn’t burn or a Duerg apprentice punch a hole through, McGregor could deal with.McGregor thought they’d have no trouble. He’d send his familiar to the nearest Duerg village to ask for help in getting the rescued kids a place to stay until the transport arrived.“Hey,” I called just before we lifted off, “Are we still on for a concert soon?”“Ye know what they say, ‘If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.”“I’m still up to sing?”“Is the Pope a Catholic?”“Lai too?”“Does a bear crap in the woods?”“Hey Jock,” called Phoebe, “Are we going to win this war?”“Er, that’s one o’ them, ‘Does the Pope crap in the woods?’ questions hen. I’d love to ken the answer. We won’t know till it’s over and it’s not over till Oprah Winfrey says so, but I think so. Today, I really think so.”He waved his arms around him in an expansive gesture. “Look upon my works ye mighty, and wet yourselves, eh? Now get a move on and get some o’ the lads down here, right? See ye soon.”We waved goodbye, but, before we could start our run-up, he called again.“Hey! Earle?”“Yeah?”He waved the supershooter like an AK47.“I think I look a fool with one o’ these in my hand. I don’t care. Damn good idea son, damn good.”

Magic in the use of dealing with bullies

AdamI went back into the hall and stuffed the rest of my breakfast down my neck. I was already regretting telling Phoebe about the books. Now I’d have to get her to promise she wouldn’t say anything when we got out. Bugger.A bell tolled outside and the seniors came back in to get us all to line up and file out and go down to a field. Communication wasn’t great here and I didn’t have a clue what we were supposed to be doing.When we arrived, other groups were practising what looked like various styles of martial arts. That looked a bit more like it. Lined up in front of us were a set of straw bales with pumpkin heads set up on poles.Even as we got there I could see the Yorkshire man from the walk yesterday, talking to… I’d better get used to calling her Malaika; otherwise I’d use the wrong name at some point. He told us to sit down and not fidget. How to describe him? He wasn’t an angry person, just very intense, but it worked out the same way – I didn’t think anyone would try to find out what would happen to fidgetters.“When you’ve mastered the skills we teach here, you should be able to project your own energy in ways you can use to defend yourself.” He began. “Like this.”He spun and slashed out at one of the straw dummies. It sliced in half along the diagonal as if cut by a sword.“Or this.” He spun the other way and pushed a palm towards the dummy on the other end of the line. It shuddered visibly as if shoulder-charged by someone big.“Or.” He did some gesture and a ball of flame shot from his hand and covered the dummy. He turned back to us, opened his mouth as if to speak and then turned back to the dummy, blew at it as you would a candle and put the flames out.The cohort was gobsmacked; mouths hanging open all around. For myself, well, I’ve seen Kunetsuka Sensei do things that impressed me as much without having a quantum computer to put in the special effects.“Now, before you reach that stage, you’ll find it useful if you’ve some object that allows you to focus and direct energies through. The traditional wizard’s wand is one you’ll practice with. Later.”He drew one from his sleeve. “Its chief advantage is it’s light, which is important if you’re going to carry it all day, and easily hidden. Make no mistake though – it’s not a magical thing in its own right. The power comes from you. I’ve seen young Mages use twigs they plucked from trees as wands. So long as you don’t try to use Rowan wood, and so long as you can think of it as a focus, anything wooden’ll work. Mind, I’d leave your mam’s rolling pin at home or she’ll likely clip your ear for you.”There were a few laughs, but I think they were being kind.“The chief disadvantage, for you, at present, is it’s just a small piece of wood. You can’t yet do this…” He turned again to the dummies and blasted one clear out of the ground by flicking the wand at it. “And if you can’t, then a wand’s nowt more than a pencil you can’t even use to write angry letters with. Therefore, we begin our training with the staff. Chuck me that one, would you Max?”The thing Max threw over to him looked like a broomstick, without the broom bit on the end. This looked interesting. Despite myself, I wanted to see what happened next.“It’s a big bit of wood. No more useful for magic than a little bit of wood, however, it can do this…”Again the swing, but this time he faced the dummy with the staff held like a snooker cue and stabbed it forwards in honte tsuki as he lunged. The dummy shook violently and dust rose again. Without pause, he back-stepped, side-stepped, changed his grip on the staff and swung it down like a sword against the side of the pumpkin head on the next dummy – naname uchi. The pumpkin exploded, but the pieces hadn’t all made it to the ground before he’d swirled, side-stepped round to stand in front of the next dummy and stabbed the staff backwards to hit it so hard it canted over at an angle – ushiro tsuki. Text book execution. Very neat. He turned back to us and the dummy slowly tilted and fell. Hub-cap-from-the-exploding-car syndrome. That dummy had watched too many films.There’d been winces from kids around me when those blows went home, and I wasn’t sure they hadn’t been more impressed by the jo than the fire. Magic was magic, after all, and they couldn’t do that, but hitting things with sticks...Jacob moved like a ballet dancer with a licence to kill. Those steps had flowed from one to the other, and, although he’d clearly hit the dummies hard enough to have broken bones, he hadn’t put a lot of effort into it – the staff had done most of the work.“It’s not magic. It’s physics. Wood and muscle and correct movement and…”he nodded towards the dummies, “pain. Enough pain and your opponent won’t know or care you didn’t use magic on ‘em. They’ll be too busy suffering. Vere can be seen off with a well-used staff by a Duergar that doesn’t get charmed, and whatever you might have heard about chain mail and axes, they haven’t all got 'em.”  There were at least two questions in that last sentence I thought I’d have to ask someone about.  No one else seemed puzzled though.“Now, what we’ll begin teaching you today is a set of basic moves. These moves’ll prepare you for the next level. They’ll also help you start to feel energy moving. Without that feeling it’ll be hard for you to begin to project your own energies as magic. You’ll work under these seniors,” he nodded to a group of teens in dark grey that included Max and Xianjin, “They’ll teach you parts of the 31-step exercise that you’ll be working on this week and next. After a while we’ll put you onto sparring with staves that are specially adapted for it.”He scanned us all with that intense look of his.“I do hope you noticed I said ‘After a while’. A well-used staff can break a rib, or a leg, or a skull. So can a badly used one. You pay attention to the safety rules your senior teaches you and you remember - anyone playing silly buggers becomes my next assistant when I need to demonstrate on someone as can move – at least until I’ve finished the demonstration. That’s not a threat mind. It’s a promise. And it’s easy to check if I’m telling the truth. Think on it.”How had I not known his Mages practiced with the jo? Had there been some photo somewhere showing this I’d missed? And how come no one’d ever mentioned this to me when they’d seen me with one later? Haru had never said anything about it and she’d know. Was it only here they did this, or had it appeared in one of the DIVs? Never mind. I’d talk about this with Phoe…Malaika later. For now I could have some fun. I’d have read his books if I’d known about this, just to see how much he knew, though surely he hadn’t known anything.The seniors split us into groups of ten, sorted us out with a staff each and shifted us around the field so we were well spaced out from other groups. I noticed two things at about the same time This cohort was fifty strong and it didn’t include the girl I’d called a moo yesterday. Not a thing I was going to quibble about. The number hung in my head for a second, though. There was something about it.Then the girl who was taking our group introduced herself as Aliya. Central Asian face, something like Russian in the accent. The original owners of all of these faces had to have been actresses, and they hadn’t been selected for ugliness, but Aliya was striking. She explained about spacing to ensure you couldn’t get hit by a staff that slipped out of a hand and repeated the warning about playing around with the staves.For the next two hours, with breaks only to drink water, we did warm-up exercises, stretched and stepped through the moves of the drill. I could have done it in my sleep if the truth be told, but I tried not to make that obvious. Instinct again, but I just didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I’d probably get out of this place at the end of this day, so why bother?Aliya did compliment me on the smoothness of my movements, though I’d been watching the others in the group and they were picking this up very quickly, with few of the mistakes a normal group makes when they first meet the jo. Were they programmed to learn at around the speed of the real player, I wondered? Aliya herself, or whatever was directing her, knew her stuff. Her own movements had a fluidity suggesting a lot of practice. A few of the moves she did at an extremely slow speed, like Tai Chi, and at that speed you see the rough bits better. She didn’t have any.At the end of the two hours we had a toilet break. I went to a thing that looked like a barn, but was again one of the clean, un-modern facilities that I’d seen in the city inn. It was screened behind a small stand of trees. As I was walking back, but before I came into sight of the others, a staff prodded into my kidneys. Just enough to let me know it wasn’t an accident, but not enough to call it a blow. “Well, well,” came a distinctly Geordie voice from behind me. “It’s our twinkly, twinkly little Paddy star, isn’t it? What’s the name again little star? Brendumn? Or was it Brenda?”Anyone who has ever walked into a school playground could write the script for this, I thought, as I pivoted around and yes, there they were, made to order. Three of them. Older than Brendan by about two years, maybe three. Standard issue bullies. A cliché, perhaps, but I’d been duffed up by a gang like this once in real life.They usually come in one of two patterns. It’s either the shrimp with the brains backed up by two obvious thugs with only the muscles, or, as in this case, a muscular thug with brains backed up by two other obvious thugs with even more muscles. Bullies who don’t come in threes probably can’t manage arithmetic.I hadn’t had time to run an I.Q. test on them, but they didn’t look like Nobel Prize candidates. Mind, that might have just been me being prejudiced. I was the one who was going to get humiliated or thumped here.Three against one and the one younger and not as well trained with the staff each of us was carrying – this crew had no intention of being brave. Fair enough, but I was going to write the script this time. There were three other boys coming up behind the bullies. They hadn’t seen anything yet, but they could take part in my play.“Hey lads? Do you want to try some advanced practice with this crowd?”Nothing strange there for them, just some older students going to show us some tricks. They were up for it. My merry crew of thugs were a bit unsure now. This could be just a way of getting witnesses, in which case I was smart and they’d have to put off the intimidation. They weren’t sure, though, you could see.“You make a ring around me about this wide.”I held out the staff at maximum length and made a circle. They formed up while I turned slowly. I finished facing towards the middle of the thugs, with the extras behind me. They shouldn’t be any threat and I’d no plans to touch them.“Okay, now it’s six against one, you can attack any time you are…”Ready was what I didn’t want them to be. Thug number one got honte tsuki in the solar plexus, just hard enough to take the wind out of him. He folded up like origami and dropped to his knees. Step the right foot to the right, slide the left foot forward, swing the body round and deliver gedan barai, a sweeping blow, against the thigh of thug number two. He now had a dead leg and was hopping on the other one. I stepped forward and shouldered him off both of them.One to go, but by now he’d had time to wake up. I reversed the grip on the staff, raised it like a sword and, yes, he went for it, and raised his own staff to ward off the blow to the head. Which I didn’t make. As his jo came down I did uke nagashi tsuki, parrying his down-strike, side-stepping to get out of line, and striking at his inner thigh. Too ambitious. I missed the thigh, so followed through by using the staff as a lever to take his leg out from under him in sukui otoshi. He went down backwards and landed heavily, knocking the wind out of himself. Done. And he wouldn’t call me Brenda again in a hurry.I turned to the other three, about to thank them for their help. The two on the ends were shocked and motionless, scared numb by what they’d just witnessed. Made sense I suppose. I’d just knocked seven shades of good for the roses out of the bigger lads, what might I be about to do to them? The wiry, Indian-looking kid in the middle, however, was very pissed off.He launched himself towards me with the obvious intention of putting some of my teeth in the corner pocket. I parried the thrust while moving aside and back and tried to tell him whoa.He swung the staff like a cricket bat for my head. Again, not too difficult to parry, but I didn’t want to fight this kid. I was trying again to tell him to stop the demonstration of his sporting prowess, while he was trying to hit me in the crotch with a golf swing, when a voice snapped out.“Quit that!”I could say I obeyed the order, but to be honest, I didn’t have a choice. Every muscle in my body locked for a second and I couldn’t move. The cramp faded away as fast as it’d come on, but both of us had stopped fighting.  We turned to look at the source of the voice. Jacob. Standing by a tree, the look on his face that same intense expression that got attention.“You.” He snapped, looking at me. “Stop here, I want to talk to you. You three,” this to the younger ones, “Back to your group, I may want you later. And you lot,” this to the gang, who were picking themselves off the ground. “Hall. And wait for me.”No one said a word, but moved off as quickly as they could. I stood thinking about how to describe my situation. The only word I could think of without four letters in it was ‘bad’, and that just didn’t cover it at all. I thought I’d just passed the audition for a starring role as a carpet about to get spring cleaned.Jacob waited till the others were out of sight and then a few heartbeats longer to let them get out of earshot too. How to explain this one to him? Before I came up with an answer, or just admitted there wasn’t one, he spoke.“Young Hadaway and his mates are known to me. ‘Nowt overt out of ‘em for a while, but still I tend to keep an eye on them. I can see which way those branches are growing, as it were, and they need training in a better direction. Now, what I just saw there was interesting. You knocked the snot out of those three, but you didn’t do ‘em as much damage as you could‘ve done, that was clear.Young Hatim too. Has a very good fighting spirit and attacks right well, but he’s no idea of defence. You do. You were blocking him and not even trying, but you didn’t put him down like the others. Suggests to me you were facing six and fighting three and you’d reason for it. Like to share it with me?”“I could read Hadaway and his friends like a road sign. They were ready for me to have a go straight away if I didn’t just wimp out and let them push me around. So I invited the others in to distract them. They weren’t ready for that, so I caught them off guard. They’ll think twice before they try again. On anybody, I hope, not just on me.”He nodded. I’d never play poker against this man, his face might as well have been cast in concrete for all the information it gave out.“I didn’t see any of that level of skill on the field before. Where’d you learn it and why didn’t you let on?”“I’ve studied Aikido for a few years now with a really good teacher. He takes us through the drills with the jo and the boken. I didn’t want to show off in front of the others after yesterday.”That was all close enough to the truth. I’d seen my teacher, Kunetsuka sensei, take on six black belts armed with jos when he had nothing. He took them apart. They weren’t trying to kill him, granted, but they were serious about the attacks they launched; mostly because they were pretty sure none of them would land. He’d had us sparing with weapons for over a year.“If you were old enough to look the part, I’d have you teaching your mates as of now. When word gets out about this we may be able to do it anyway. We’ll see about making time for you to work out with some of the seniors, save you wasting your time on the knees-bend-arms-stretch stuff.” He paused again.“Max given you the speech about bullying yet?”I nodded.“Tell him what went on here. You won’t likely see or hear anything after it, but he’ll have words with those that might think about testing out the newest gunslinger, if you know what I mean. Once he’s spoken to them, they won’t. Can you talk to those lads from your cohort and sort things out with them? Make sure that there’s no misunderstandings or hard feelings? Or do you want me to?”“I think I can handle it, but if it doesn’t work out I’ll tell you.”“Grand. Get yourself back to the practice then. I’m off for a slash.”I walked back confused. There was too much here I didn’t really understand and I wanted to talk with Haru about. She was good at this stuff. Where did characters like Jacob come from? Surely not out of his mind. He wasn’t like any of the people here – I was ready to like them. Though the fact it was Mark Hadaway who was the villain was just like him. It’d nearly wrecked our friendship when he did that. Luckily, that lad didn’t look anything like the real Mark. I was going to have to talk with Phoe… with Malaika. I needed some clues.But I wondered. Was it ok to duff up the bullies here? They were written like that. They didn't have a choice in the matter. Yes, I decided. If the alternative was me copping it, it was.Bugger!

One of my favourite bits

Book one, Chronicles, is a lot more the children's book than book two, Virus, is. That's not to say I think it's a book for children. It's set inside one, so has to conform to more of the rules. By book two the story is starting to escape from those limitations, for reasons that you'd have to read the books to understand. This bit could probably only happen in book one, though, to be honest, I'm not even sure of that and I'm writing it. I still love this part, though, and want to find some excuse to keep the Geordie grannies in the story and give them more speaking parts. There are times in a writer's life when you find yourself loving what you've done and yourself for having done it. When I realised that I could pit Grandmothers against wolves, I hit one of those times.

PhoebeI woke up in the morning and couldn’t think where I was for a moment. When I turned over I was looking into Brendan’s face from about two centimetres away. It gave me a shock. Then I remembered it all, running through the streets of Newcastle after someone had set fire to the house I was sleeping in. Where did they get off? That sort of thing can hurt people.I thought about that thought and realised how silly it was. But it was natural. No one had ever tried to kill me before and I wasn’t used to the idea that they would want to yet.It was all unreal. Like, we’d got away without being hurt, so it was ok, kind of. I’d been more shocked to wake up with Adam’s hand over my mouth, you’d guess, innit? But still, this wasn’t a lol.I got up quietly and went outside. I needed to find a tree to go behind. It wasn’t till a lot later that I wondered why I’d gone outside. While I was having a pee I looked around. It was very early. What to do next?The problem was how to get to Black River Bridge. Did we need to sort that out ourselves I wondered? Niall and Megs should be coming through the Gate sometime in the morning at the end of their week. The hours we’d passed would be days to them. I didn’t know how long had passed over here, but the sun was nearly coming up and it wouldn’t be long before someone would be coming through. It bothered me that there were no Duergars here to greet people, but I just thought we’d have to deal with that.Ok, let’s think. If Niall had come back to the house any time that week, he’d have found it burned down and us gone. He might have checked the hospitals. Not finding us he’d guess that we’d come back through the Gate. Malaika would know how to do that, so he’d not be surprised. Then he wouldn’t have any hurry, ‘cos crossing before the end of the week’d just leave him wandering around in the dark, like us last night. So prolly he’d be coming through, but later.Unless he was taking longer to find Liam than he expected. Umm. Or unless he was really worried about us being on our own on this side. Megs was off staying with her sister and she wasn’t sure how long that would go on for, but surely not more than a week. Well, not for sure. Maybe… then I saw the line of movement in the grass further down the hill. Men popping up out of the grass as if they were growing there. No. not men. I’d seen that happen in a DIV before. They were Warg.I ran back to the hut. This time it was my turn to wake someone with a hand over their mouth. He nearly broke my arm.“Sorry,” he said, “habit. What’s up?”“There are a group of Warg further down the hill. They’ve just changed into men, so they’ll be walking slower, but we haven’t got much time to get away before they get here.”“They’ve changed into men? What were they before?”“Wolves.”“Ah. And they can change back I’d guess. How many are there?”“Dunno exactly. Maybe ten. Maybe more.”“So we try to run.”“I think they might have come looking for us. The ones we dealt with before were probably the ones who set the house on fire. They must have known we’d come back through the Gate to here. They probably think they can catch us sleeping. They’ll have changed into men ‘cos they’re smarter like that, but some of them’ll change back into wolves to sniff us out. Then they can run much faster than we can.”“Okay, so we don’t try to run. What do we do?”“Maybe I can mind-ride a bird and find us some runners that we can use to escape on.”“How long will it take for them to get here?”“I dunno. But I can’t think of…”“Shh! Listen.”There was a sound of voices from outside. Brendan moved to the door and peeked out.“You have got to be kidding!”“What is it?” I asked, but he’d gone out of the door.I followed him, but could see what he was talking about as soon as I got out. There were people coming through the Gate. They were old people, old ladies, five of them. Brendan was running over to them, so I ran as well.Most of them had the washed out look that a journey through the Gates gives you and one of the old ladies was swaying, propping herself up on a walking stick. She looked like she was going to fall over, so I held her arm to steady her.“Ee, thanks pet. I’ve never liked coming through them Gates, they always gives us gip.”“What are you doing here?”“Well, we got the e-mail from young Niall, down the Community Centre like, and he said that Maldon was acting up again and that you two would be on your own over here and could we come through and look after ye like. So we’ve all come, all the lasses.”They must have all been in their sixties and seventies; maybe eighties. What was Niall thinking of?“But there are wolves coming! Lots of them! We’ve…”“Howway bonny lass, divn’t fash yourself.” She patted my hand. “These are nowt but cubs and there’s only fifteen of them. We’ll take care of them for ye.”“But you’re …” I started to say, when something broke from behind a bush, streaked towards the old lady and leapt. She raised her walking stick towards it without looking, there was a flash and something hit the thing so hard it flipped over twice and landed on the ground with a thump.“Experienced pet. That’s what we are. Experienced. Howway lasses,” she called to the others, “See them off.”She looked me in the eyes and I could see that hers were twinkling. They really were. She was enjoying this. Her face was getting firmer. Less wrinkly.“I’m Jessie Loftus, and we’re what’s left of the Wolves cohort. Nice to meet ye hinney.” Then she went off to chase the wolves away.Bren…Adam, looked on with a big cheesy grin on his face. “They’re from Wallsend.” He told me. “Made on Tyneside, built to last. They can probably deal with werewolves over there as well.”Then he looked puzzled and asked, “Hey, did Alistair really write a cohort of Geordie grannies into his books?”“I’ve never heard of them.”He didn’t look so pleased at that.“It’s changing the story,” he muttered.

Some of what it is all about

A review that I had of the book (it wasn't a great one in many ways and wasn't entirely compehensible) did give the memorable line, 'The reader gets to simultaneously experience the birth of a mind and the creation of a god.'
I nearly put that in my PD for the semester. It wasn't exactly what I saw as happening, but was close enough for jazz or government service. This might have been the bit that started that line of thought.
“Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it – an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis – it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.”“That was written by Simon-Pierre Laplace,” David told me. “Philosophers refer to the thing that could do all that as Laplace’s Demon. Some think that it’s a good description of God. You do realize that is one way of looking at the thing they are trying to build, don’t you?” he asked me. “They’re building a God-game where the humans won’t get to play the God.”

Sneaky post just to see what happens

I've posted a few things recently that I've then announced on Facebook to let people know that I have a blog and that there is stuff on it. I've then been surprised to find that I get lots (for me) of pageviews once I've done this. This one is something that might be new to most people and that I'm not announcing first. I really just want to see what the difference is and if I get more hits by telling people that there is something to see first - which does make sense.
Anyway, this is a part of the first book which I have posted before, but which might be new to a lot of people. It's the first time that we get to meet Phoebe. She's the most difficult character for me to write, as she's a 12-year-old girl and I've never been one of those, so it's hard to know if I'm getting it right.
She's from the year 2020 and speaks a teenspeak that includes a lot of new words. That makes her very hard for a lot of people to understand. I planned that, honest. I love working out the invented argots of books such as Clockwork Orange. While I didn't want to go as far as Burgess, I did want the reader to feel a bit hung out and have to play jigsaw puzzle with the story, having to work out what things meant.
She finds herself in another body, which looks like this:
Which, when you are a teenage girl who thinks she's rather plain, is a major plus.
She thinks she knows what is going on here, but she doesn't.


PhoebeI woke up in a bed. I’d expected something more dramatic. The Seekers would come to the Land through a Gate and I thought I’d be a Seeker. I couldn’t remember what Sylvester had said, but it looked like I was already there. Something felt bad though. I had a bit of a headache and a cramping pain in my stomach. I had to pull back the bedclothes before I could see what it was. Blood on my pajamas, down between my legs. Yada.I knew what it was, of course, even though it was the first time. Auntie ‘Lexie had told me all about it, and Dad had been getting me books and stuff about it for just forever – to help me prepare. My friend Sara had already had hers and all the girls had been talking about it, you’d guess, innit? Didn’t mean it wasn’t just mecha gruse. It was; well, for a second.Then I thought I could tell Dad and he’d let me have the party he’d promised for it. He’d said it was a change I should celebrate. I think he read that line in a book. Then, of course, I realized Dad wasn’t here, I was well off the range of a GPS tracker, and I couldn’t have a party until I got back. Which made me wonder.A girl couldn’t get into the Land until she’d started her periods; everyone knows that. So maybe this wasn’t real, and they’d just given me one to make me feel like I was ready, even though I knew I really wasn’t. And (far, far away ikky) even if this was my first time, it wouldn’t be hers. It’s tres freak to feel you’re having someone else’s period, believe me if that’s never happened to you before, and my day was about to go glom when a Duergar came in through the door.I nearly leapt out of bed and danced around the room! This wasn’t like watching them on a DIV; this was real. Right there in the room with me, carrying a tray. She looked me up and down (mostly up of course) and saw the bloodstains. She nodded and said, “Ah. Me thingim allsame. Me bringim this one for Mma. Makim you better mor. You go cleanim youseleva en dringim thisfella.” She nodded at a door and passed me a cup of something. I got up and sort of hobbled to the door, trying not to let my legs touch. Yada. Big, big ya.You had to slide the door to the bathroom. I remembered and didn’t try to push it.  The bathroom looked just like the ones you see in the DIVs. There was a big, deep, circular tub made of wood, set into the floor, full nearly to the brim with steaming hot water.I knew you had to scoop water out of the bath and wash yourself first, so started to strip off the pyjamas. I jumped when I saw the dark skinned woman out of the corner of my eye, but sussed I was looking into a big, steamed-up mirror. Then I nearly squealed. I was Malaika!  There’s a line in Book One where someone asks if Malaika is good-looking, and the answer is she’s too busy being gorgeous to have time left for just good. And there she was looking back at me. From the steamy mirror. With no clothes on.I really had to look away. I mean, Malaika is tres, tres hot, with a bod to just die for or from, but I was like staring at it. I felt myself blushing hotter than the bath water. It would take a while to get used to that being me. I took just a small peek again and thought, ‘Oh I wish!’I could get used to it. I could suffer that.I mean, I have got brown hair and brown eyes and when Dad tells me I am going to be a stunner at sixteen and he’s going to buy a club to keep boys away he always sounds like he means it. That’s my dad though. He once told a friend of mine he was really Tony Blair, and he’d escaped from prison by digging a tunnel with a bent teaspoon.We didn’t completely believe him, but that was ‘cos we didn’t know who it was. We had to go wiki the name up on a pokkecom to read the history, and find out Blair was still in prison. Well, we were only eight at the time. What did we know?Anyway, the point is; it isn’t impossible I could look nearly as hot when I’m older. But that nearly would be just like Earth to Moon near, not Earth to Sun near. Sort of comparatively nearer than Sara could get, ‘cos she’s blonde, but not close enough to whisper in an ear kind of close. I’ll never pwn boys.I grabbed a towel and covered myself a bit and took another look at my new face. I pushed a strand of hair back behind my ear and grinned and just … Like wow.I had a drink from the cup before starting to wash and the effect was like magic. (Duh!) The headache and cramp just vanished. The stuff must have been chia, but it tasted like the milky tea Dad always makes for me. I still wasn’t keen on getting into the bath after washing – I didn’t think the bleeding had stopped too and just didn’t want to lay there in it; far, far away gruse – so I towelled myself dry and went back to the bedroom.The Duergar had gone out, but there was underwear and a set of loose, dark grey cotton pants and a top laid out on the bed. Apart from a sanitary pad, it was all senior Mage clothing. I had a feeling I had to get ready for something formal going on.Then it came to me. I was being dimmy this morning. Naturally, the Seekers would be coming, and I’d have to go and take part in the Opening. All this would have to start with Brendan going through his Initiation, even if I wasn’t doing one. Of course, he’d pass and the Light of the Chosen’d shine from him, but it all needed to happen so Senior Niall would know he was capable of great things. I dressed as quickly as I could.Good. She’s accepted who she is. Maybe this time things will work out as I want them to.
Getting to the hall from my bedroom was a piece of good luck. I turned the right way down a corridor, went down some stairs and through a door that lead into the Main Hall. Adults and kids sat at tables, eating and chatting. I went to a serving table and helped myself to a bowl of muesli, some kind of red fish and some chia, then looked for somewhere to sit.“Lai! Hey, over here!” Oops, Aki, Malaika’s best friend in the Land. How was I going to carry this one off?I sat down beside her and she looked me in the eye. “Ah yes, Gramma said it was so. Sorry to tell you friend, but it shows. Drink lots of her special chia and don’t bite off any heads, some of them never use shampoo and they will taste foul.”The accent was dead right and it was just like being with Eriko Yamamoto. I nearly asked for an autograph.I grinned and sat down next to her. “We have to go to the ceremony today, innit?” I asked, “What time should we set off?” I thought this was a bright thing to say, ‘cos I wasn’t sure how I’d get there by myself.“Ah, that’s so, eh?” replied Aki, carefully looking at anything in the room except me. “I do have a small favour to ask of you there. Nothing that will be too much for my very best friend in the universe to understand, of course, but I have agreed to go with someone else.” She gave me a quick look that had triumph in it, and I guessed. Well, I’ve read all of the books is one thing, and I’m a girl is another. It could only be one person.“Daniel!”“Yes, but keep it quiet please. We are going to set off early and walk part of the way there. He thinks we are going to pick medicinal herbs, but I have no such plan.”My eyes must have widened, ‘cos she tapped me on the nose.“Talking child! Talking! Well, mostly talking. He may be the cutest thing here, but he has a terrible problem with commitment. He is going to say some important things today, though he does not know this yet.”She gave me a look asking if it really was okay with me, so I told her, “Tres, tres okay.” That only got me a puzzled look. Stupid! The books never use modern teenspeak. She wouldn’t know that expression.“I mean, no problem.”That was something Malaika says all of the time, though only olds like my dad ever say that now. I ate and Aki sort of drifted away into thought, so nothing much was said through the rest of breakfast. I made some mental notes. Some things I say, people here wouldn’t. Some things I knew, ‘cos they happened in the later books, people here couldn’t. Lots to remember.No one knows how things turned out between Aki and Daniel, and if they ever got over the row, ‘cos the last book never got written. I think they would, but Alistair Cameron always said there’d be surprises at the end of the story, and he wasn’t going for a happily-ever-after kind of finish.Though, with me only being here for today, I wasn’t going to be around for the argument and couldn’t change things much anyway. Mind, I was a bit impressed to know they got together on the day Brendan entered the Land. That isn’t written down anywhere and I’d thought it was much later. When I finished my breakfast, I put the bowl away, wished Aki a good day, and headed out.
There was a large cloak room just before the front door of East Gard’s Hall, the place I’d woken up in. The two long walls had lines of hooks with cloaks on them. I found a hook with Malaika’s name and picked up the cloak.I knew about this bit and was half looking forward to it - half afraid I’d wee myself. I put on the cloak and fastened it with the shiny brass clasp. It slightly hugged my shoulders when wrapped around me, but I could throw it over my back and get it out of the way. Tell the truth, I wanted a mirror, to see how it looked on, ‘cos Malaika looks serious good in a cloak, but there wasn’t one around.I walked out through the door. It was like the DIVs.  There was a gravel driveway going to a gate in the distance, with gardens on either side. I knew people did drive up that gravel, in carriages pulled by draft beasts or riding on runners, but I was going to use it for my runway, just like I’d seen Malaika do. I wondered about flying wearing a sanitary pad. Maybe I should be using tampons? No one tells you that sort of thing, do they?It’s lucky there’s a long bit about this in Book One, where Brendan and the other Apprentices are taught to fly - you don’t see it in the DIV though. I was still quite little when Dad read it to me, and I can remember practising take-offs in my bedroom with a towel over my shoulders.Well, no one was watching, so… I re-slung the cloak and held it out like bat wings. It wrapped neatly around my arms and gripped them, like it was holding them up. It was much longer than my arms, but the end part still stuck out like there was something underneath it. I walked forward to let it billow out behind me and then ran, flapping, just like I did when I was little. You see some of them just sort of leap and take off in the DIVs, but I wasn’t ready for that yet, so I took a long run-up.I was feeling far gone harpic, but suddenly the cloak took over the flapping and I was struggling to run fast enough. I think I might have shrieked when the ground fell away from me, but the cloak just kept on doing the flying, flapping my arms for me. In less than a second, I seemed to be higher than the trees. Two seconds later I knew for surely, ‘cos I was at the end of the driveway and was flying over the trees.It still felt a bit low, so I just thought about going faster and the cloak flapped harder. I angled myself a little steeper and shot up into the sky. It tells you in Book One that East Gard is at the top of a steep-sided valley on the road to the coast. Well, in a few seconds, I was high enough to see that. I was heading north, with the road running west and east below me. The cloak felt to be stuck to my back and down my legs as far as my ankles and was holding all of my body up. I felt like I was lying on some enormous swing fastened tight to the sky, and falling out of the sky was like...like no chance; I was far away secure. I stopped pumping my arms for a minute and did a gliding turn. And there was the city, with its wall and castle. There was the river, with the bridge and boats.I can’t describe the feeling that filled me then. It was like last year when Sara and me went on a roller coaster. We squealed and screamed all the way through the ride; not ‘cos we were scared, but just ‘cos we were so excited. I squealed and screamed again now and pumped myself higher and higher into the air, then swooped down and up again until I looped overhead in a circle. Then I corkscrewed down towards the ground, pulling out into another rising glide.I don’t know how long I flew. I was a bird, I was just pure flight, and I was strong. The cloak was doing all the work. It lifted me up into the sky with just me thinking about moving my arms, but when I pulled hard I felt myself rocket through the air. And when I glided… I could just close my eyes and feel the wind against my hands, knowing the littlest movement of my fingers would send me swooping in a great circle.The world was beneath me and I was above all of it. I could see forever and there was nowhere I couldn’t go. I felt… I felt…there’s no words for what I felt.I got up above a cloud and wanted to just fly all day exploring the top of the clouds. I think I would’ve done too, ‘cept I flew over a gap in the clouds and saw the city again. Black River Bridge! I knew what it looked like from Jack Hughes’ illustrations in the Encyclopaedia of The Land, and I couldn’t wait to walk on its streets for real. And I’d get to meet Senior Ferguson, my favourite character in all of the books, more even than Brendan Earle really. I just had to go there!I swooped down to be well below the clouds, and then started to fly with what Book One called, ‘the slow, steady beat of someone going somewhere distant’. I aimed for the north of the city, following a road to where the meadows were and where the Seekers would be brought for the Initiation. I could land there, check the time and maybe wander a little before the ceremony started. 
Aron the VishThe Mage did not see us. Not too high above, but thoughts elsewhere, I gauged. She did not see the Shedu either, as it flew behind and towards her - her eyes were on the City whence she travelled.We saw the evil beast from afar, and the Duergars called to her in warning, but to no avail. The Duergars depend overly on their Mages, and think for themselves in small matters only. We Vish have always looked to ourselves, in everything.I had my bow strung and an arrow nocked, while they still wrung their hands. A truth I would never tell them is I led the target overly far. My arrow took it in its throat - I had meant for the chest. It fell, silently, horned head flailing, blood-red talons clutching at the arrow, leather wings flapping like torn sails, cloven-hoofed legs kicking as if to run itself back into the sky. Then it crashed to ground nearby.I regained my arrow and we threw the corpse off the road and into a ditch. Big, the thing was, and heavy enough to need all of us. Its skin, so close, was more brown than red, the dart on the end of its tail sharper than the barb on my arrow and its horns shorter than I’d expected. I had not seen one so near before.The Duergars wondered aloud at one so close to the City and so far from Maldon’s lands. They speculated on the identity and importance of the dark-skinned Mage it had pursued, and why a Shedu would come for that Mage.  Mayhap they told someone of this at our next stop, but it was below me to boast of the deed. It is not the Vish way. It was enough to know I had saved the girl’s life. I need no thanks from a Mage, even one coloured as I am.Bugger!

A nice meal and a glass of wine.

I've been looking at my page views and they are exciting. I know it's 'cos I'm posting up on FB that people know I've posted (I'm also doing that on Twitter and getting nothing, which just cements a view of the usefullness of Twitter that I've had for a while), but It means people are looking at bits of my books and then coing back to look at other bits.
This bit needs a touch more explanation than the others. Adam, who is 24 and an English teacher in Japan, has entered the virtual world (think Matrix) of The Land. He's also entered the 11-year-old body of its hero, Brendan Earle. It means that he's a little kid and that all of the (literally) film-star-georgeous girls around him don't pay him any attention.
He's with Phoebe McLeod, who is 12, but is in the body of 18-year-old Malika Zinta. She looks like this:
and is rather pleased. Adam is the only one who knows that she's really only 12, just as she's the only one who knows he isn't 11. The middle of a really long story is that they've had to go back to a non-fantasy part of the virtual world and have been left alone. It's the first time they've had the chance or need to actually talk to each other. This is what happens.
PhoebeWe had time to get some shopping in after the film. I was getting hungry, so Adam said that he’d do something quick. We went to a big market to get some salad stuff and meat. I couldn’t believe the meat. It was hanging up in the air! I asked him about the Food Laws, but he said there weren’t any here and anyway, this meat wasn’t real, was it? That sort of made sense, so I supposed it was really like in vitrio, and like, you know where that comes from, don’t you?Then we went to a supermarket in China Town for rice and things. Before we went back he insisted I go into a wine shop and buy a bottle of red wine. He picked out what sort he liked, but I had to get it, natch, him being underage.We took the Metro back out to the house. When we got in, the place was lifeless, so I asked him if we could stream some music. He pointed at a rack with loads of thin boxes and told me to take my pick, then went into the kitchen to cook.I didn’t know any of the names of the groups written on the boxes and I couldn’t work out how you started them, so I followed him into the kitchen with one.“Are these some kind of mem for music?” He was washing some rice in a pan. “Ah, right. Hang on a minute and I’ll show you.” He finished the rice and put it on to cook, then came through to show me the machine.“That’s what they use to play music? It’s huge!”“Yeah, well, this is a long time ago. You press this and put the disk in here, and then…” He pushed the sliding thing that had opened up and it closed. “… it’ll play by itself.” He looked at the box. “You want to listen to Nick Cave?” He looked surprised.“I dunno. I’ve never heard of any of these bands. Are they all real?”“Yeah. What do you listen to?” He pressed a button and the noise stopped. “Last Chance Divas, er, Playthings, Water On The Brain, FacePlace, that sort of stuff. Is there anything like that in there?” When he said ‘no’ I could hear he meant ‘Thank God!’“So, is there anything in there that I would like?“Er, try this. You’ll know this song.”He picked out another of the boxes and put the disk in the machine. “You can change tracks by pressing this button here. I’m going to get started on the meal. It shouldn’t take long.”Then he was back out in the kitchen. The machine started playing ‘Landslide’, but not like FacePlace do it. When it was done, I got it again. The words were written in the box, so I could sing along.When that one was done I played some of the others. There was one about a soldier who goes off to a war and gets killed. Just listening to it I was nearly crying, it was lovely. It was called ‘Travellin’ Soldier’. I’d never heard music like that before, but I knew that I’d look to see if you could still stream this when I got home. Two more songs in and Adam was coming out to set the table, so I gave him a hand. He poured himself a glass of wine. Then he saw me looking.“Well, I am eighteen now.” He laughed.“I’ll get another glass, but I think you should take it easy till you know how well you can hold it.”Then he brought in the food. There was a salad, the rice that had been cooked with coconut, by the smell, steak that had been cooked brown on the outside and was still red in the middle – I knew ‘cos it had been sliced thin – in a sauce that tasted a bit of soy, but had something else in it. There was some of that French stick bread, but it was brown. We sat down to eat. It was really delicious. I was hungry anyway, but it really was good. I tried the wine. I’d never had that before, so I did just sip it, but it was lovely too. I’d stopped the music when he brought the food in, but he went over to the machine and started it again to play in the background.“I heard you singing from the kitchen. You’ve got a nice voice. Do you like this?”“I think it’s Malaika who has the nice voice, but thanks anyway. Yeah. I like the way they do ‘Landslide’ and the one about the soldier.”“Okay,” he said, and moved through the tracks to another one. “Try this.”Then he sat down and started to eat.“How do you like the wine?”“It’s delicious, but mecha. And I know I’m s’posed to say this to be polite, but the food is really good, I mean really. I don’t think that’s ‘cos it’s meat. When you said you’d cook I thought you were just going to heat something up. How do you know to do this without a recipe book?”“Family tradition. Mam loves cooking, but so do her brothers, Steve and Simon. They were never around much, but whenever they turned up they’d always spend a lot of time with me. Steve was a captain in the Royal Engineers before he retired and Simon’s taught English all round the world. He’s out in the UAE working in a university near Masdar now. Between them they’ve been everywhere.Even after mam married Alistair, they’d still come to visit and they’d always do the cooking to show us something else they’d eaten somewhere exotic. Mam taught me to do ten things well before I went off to uni. For the rest, she reckons anyone who knows how to read knows how to cook. If I’m honest, I admit to occasional episodes of culinary dyslexia, but mostly I can feed myself. This is something I used to do before the food laws came in. How about you? Does your mother get you to help with the cooking?”“Mum died when I was six.”Like everyone else, he did that double take people do when I say that.“Sorry, I didn’t even think. I’m so used to it being just me.”“No, that’s ok. I’ve had time to get used to it.”“How did it happen?”He wasn’t looking at me when he said that, but I knew what was going through his head. I’ve done the same thing before. It’s like a tooth coming out. There’s a hole that hurts when you put your tongue into it, but you keep putting your tongue into it. You don’t really want to, but you can’t stop it. You always want to compare.“She was in hospital for appendicitis and she got one of those super bugs. Her case was in that class action that got brought against the government. If you don’t mind, how did your real dad die?”“Hit by a bus. A number nine bus. Mam always says he’d have appreciated that touch. He had that sense of humour.”“Yeah, my dad’s like that. He says that if you go to the gallows you should have a joke for the hangman ‘cos you get points for it. His is: ‘Hello mate, I wonder if you can help? I got a Viagra stuck in my throat and I’ve got this awful stiff neck.’”He laughed at that. Then he poured himself another glass of wine. He was about to put the bottle down when he saw that my glass was empty.“Nothing about this place feels right, does it? I know I should offer you another glass of wine, because your glass is empty, and I know that I shouldn’t because you’re underage; but I can see you’re older than I am, but I know you aren’t used to drinking wine and I don’t want to be responsible for getting you drunk, but I don’t know if the programme will let that happen, because you are under age and …” he looked at me and shrugged. “Do you want another glass? You can say no.”I laughed. It wasn’t really funny, but it was as well... I said yes... I didn’t think he was trying to get me drunk, but he was waving his hands around while he talked more than before, so maybe he’d had too much.The music stopped so he got up and put on another disk. “This is The Lighthouse Family. They're good at what they do and I think you'll like them.”I listened while I ate a bit more and decided I did. I liked everything tonight. We chatted until we’d finished what was on the table, and then he went out and brought in some really good chocolate cake. It went so well with the wine. It was all super, super yummy.  When we’d done, he put the dishes out in the kitchen, promised he’d wash them in the morning and made some coffee. I usually don’t drink coffee, but it just seemed like the right thing to do, so very not twelve, so I had some with lots of sugar and milk and we sat down on the sofa and talked and joked and I giggled.It wasn’t really freak, but it was too. We’d been in the Land for a week nearly and hardly said anything. There was me thinking he was so unfriendly and stuff. That night we just sat and told each other things about ourselves. I told him about Dad and Auntie ‘Lexie, who isn’t really my Auntie. She was Mum’s best friend and her bridesmaid. Then she got married and moved away. She came back just a bit after Mum died, ‘cos she’d got divorced.The guy turned out to be a nutter. He came round to try to get her to go back and was shouting and pushing her around. We arrived at her house, ‘cos she’d invited us for a meal. We found the front door open and heard this shouting inside, so Dad went in, saw the guy and hit him. Just once. He always says that in the ring you don’t threaten and you don’t hesitate. Then he dragged the guy to the door (he wasn’t in any condition to argue or walk) and told him what would happen if he ever saw him again.He wasn’t angry. Dad rarely gets angry, but I think the guy knew he meant it. ‘Lexie never saw him again. Never ever, ever. When he’d gone, Dad just moved furniture around, told ‘Lexie he’d put the meal out while she got ready (her mascara was all over her cheeks) and then acted as if nothing had happened. I was remembering it all as I told it and I felt a bit teary. “That’s my dad all over. He’s an impossible act to follow.”“Get on,” he said, “You’ve pulled off being eighteen, won battles and filled in a skin this morning. I’ve spent most of my time unconscious while you’ve been saving a world. I’d call that pretty good.”Well, like, he wasn’t going to tell me that I was making a mess of things, was he? But I thought he meant it, and I blushed. I think that might have been the wine. But I liked the wine. Super, super yummy. So I got up and filled both of our glasses again. The room was swaying, but that was fine, it was only a little.I decided that I really liked his taste in music too, so when the music stopped I told him so and asked him to choose some more through the week for me. He put on a band called Deacon Blue. They were great too and Scottish!It was freak, ‘cos he was a little kid and he wasn’t and I felt I was doing something dangerous sitting on the sofa with him and I wasn’t. Like, he wasn’t Max and I didn’t fancy him, but I started thinking that he was ok. Y’know, okay. OK. Maybe nice even. Drinking wine alone in the house with him… I knew I was going to have to think about that a bit more, ‘cos it didn’t feel like nothing, but I’d have to do it tomorrow, ‘cos I was starting to get tired.This was a dream, but it wasn’t. So many, many things that had never really happened to me before. I’d never had a boyfriend before and I’d never sat down with someone, drunk wine and talked like an adult, well except with Dad, ‘cos he’s Dad and that’s what he’s there for, but we didn’t drink wine, of course, ‘cos he wouldn’t let me. Natch, he’s Dad.And ‘Lexie. I told Adam I thought they wanted to get married, but they didn’t want to say anything yet. Maybe ‘cos Dad was worried how I’d get on with ‘Lexie as a stepmother. That night was the first time I realized that it would be fine with me. I mean, not just ok, but fine. Mecha.I can’t remember what we talked about exactly, but we both giggled a lot. I did tell him thanks once, ‘cos he didn’t do what a lot of the Elders had done when they were talking to me and keep looking at Malaika’s chest. That’s so, so rude.I was getting too tired to talk much more though, so I said good night and went to bed. I think I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.
AdamWho was it who said, ‘I can resist anything except temptation’? It was a bloke being honest, that’s who. I knew that nothing was happening, and I knew that was nonsense. I was sitting down drinking wine with one of the most beautiful girls I’d ever met and we were at the trading confidences stage.There must be a name for it, it must be some kind of syndrome, where you go through a traumatic experience with someone and that makes you close to them. I think it might just be called life, though. Nothing might be happening now, but a week of this and nothing would only be happening by a great effort of will. I wanted out. This was all too crazy and I didn’t need five million years of evolution pushing me to do things that I knew were even crazier.There’s a classic Japanese anime, ‘Tonari no Totoro’, which is more magical than anything Alistair could ever have come up with. Two young girls meet a gentle monster called Totoro. After their first experience with it, they wake up and find evidence that the impossible things they did with him the night before actually happened. They dance in a circle singing ‘Yume kedo, yume ja nai’. It means ‘It was a dream, but it wasn’t’. Maybe you need to see the film to understand it. I understood it. My head was starting to go round in a circle, singing, ‘This isn’t real, but it’s too damn real’.Phoebe was getting very giggly over Deacon Blue being Scots and singing about Glasgow one minute. The next, she was patting my hand and thanking me for not looking at her breasts (no, not hers, Malaika’s) all the time, like the old neeps back at the Gard. While I was busy thinking how little she’d noticed, and wondering what neeps were, she wobbled off, saying she was tired. Yup, I thought, and emotional.And so was I. Getting drunk on that much wine. What was the thing going to do next, make it rain?  I listened to music for long enough to let her clean her teeth and get into her room and out of my range. Lorraine McIntosh’s voice was still soaring like some seagull over Ricky Ross’s lyrics. I switched off the CD player. The silence followed me up the stairs. I’d been listening to ‘All I Want’ from an album called ‘Walking Back Home’. Why did I set myself up like that? The music described my mood and the words said it all.Hah, Barbara Cartland meets the Keystone Kops. The only thing that could have been more ridiculous than watching this non-event would have been watching him make a pass.

A nice walk in the park

I want to try to keep up the momentum with the blogging, but I wanted a change. This comes from the first book and gives one of the big ideas of the book. It's a nice walk and a talk about fairy stories. Hardly any violence at all.

We walked out and locked the door. I noticed we were both looking around for any signs of the guys we’d duffed before, but I dunno what we’d have done if we’d seen them. We started to walk. I didn’t know where, but when I asked, he said we’d go to Jesmond Dene.It turned out to be a really nice park in a narrow valley. We walked across an old metal bridge and down a steep path, got an ice cream each from a café at the bottom and just wandered.“So what do your friends call you then? Fee, is it?”“No, my dad calls me that; my friends call me Feev, like in fever.”I'd already seen the joke in that, but he couldn’t think of anything more to say about it, so we walked on in silence for a bit.“Look,” I said, “Maybe it’s none of my business, but how come you don’t know anything about the story here? I mean, you can tell me to butt out, but you can see why I’d be curious, can’t you?”He nodded his head, thought about it for a few more steps and then shrugged.“Aye, why not. Haru’s always saying I should open up more about it, it’s no big deal if I just stop letting it be. So why not? Do you mind if we keep on walking while we talk?”I didn’t mind at all, so I nodded my head and we walked on. I was beginning to think he’d changed his mind, when…“Mam, my mother, Sarah, married Alistair about two years after my dad died. I was about, well, it was three days before my ninth birthday. She’d known him from work for a long time, but she didn’t really notice him until after the death. He was kind to her, she always said. I didn’t take to him much. I’m not sure if that’s why we didn’t get on, or if we never would have. It doesn’t make much difference now, but I do wonder if we would have wound up liking each other if I’d given him a chance. Mind, he didn’t need much excuse to have nothing to do with me.”He walked a bit further, thinking about it.“Nah, he would probably never have liked me anyway. I reminded Mam of Dad, and Alistair never liked that. We all agreed I should go to a boarding school.” He laughed, but it wasn’t happy. “Mam sent me, for a better education. Alistair packed me off. He’d have used a cardboard box and sellotape… By the time I was eleven, we’d settled into a sort of truce. He didn’t take much notice of me and I didn’t get in his hair. Neither of us liked upsetting Mam and that’s what arguments always did. I think I’d have come around when his first book was published, but then I found he’d put in my mates from school and they were all the worst characters. I mean, Mark Hadaway - famous around the country as a bully. He was my best mate.So, I refused to read Book One. I think I would have changed my mind after a few months, but it was clear Alistair didn’t really care. The book went straight to the top of the best-seller lists everywhere and he got a lot of very good reviews. I don’t think he reckoned he needed my good opinion anymore.” He threw the stick of his ice-cream in a bin.“Didn’t he talk to you about the book before it was finished?”He laughed. It sounded sour. “I didn’t think Alistair so much as read books before he suddenly came out with the news that he was having one published. Mam and him used to talk about it a lot, apparently, but he didn’t want people to know he was writing.”“Really, why not?”“Well, you have to remember he didn’t know it was going to become the instant classic, did he? I think he dreamed it would, but he couldn’t let himself believe it. And he wasn’t the sort who would want people to know he’d written a flop.Mam told me he was working on it for about two years and sometimes it just wouldn’t progress at all. I think a few times he was worried he’d never be able to see a way of finishing it.And he really wouldn’t have wanted to tell everyone he was writing a book and then not be able to show it. I think that probably put me off more. I was a boy of eleven when he was writing it, but he never got me to check if it was interesting for me, or seemed realistic or anything. I suppose I just thought if he didn’t care whether I read it or not, I wouldn’t.”“Y’see, there’s always been this idea on the fan pages that you were the one he based the character on, like obviously he would use his own son as a model…”“I never was his son though. That’s why I’m still a Ward. He planned to adopt me at one stage, Mam said, but then it never happened. She wouldn’t talk much about why...”“Well, maybe he did use you as a model, sort of, y’know, like by looking at you?”“Would that be why a boy born on Tyneside would have this Irish accent then?”“Oh.”We walked on a bit further. The Dene was really pretty. I would love to be able to go there regularly. There isn’t anything like it near home. Parts of it made me think of the Land and I said so.“Yeah, since I got here, I’ve thought he might have taken ideas from around the area as background or locations for over there.”We went back to just walking in silence. There were more things I wanted to ask him, but he looked like he was thinking hard, so I kept quiet, waiting to see if he would speak again.“I think he painted himself into a corner with the Brendan Earle books. All I know about what’s in them comes from talking with Harumi, but I know he didn’t like the image that went with being the famous children’s author.”“How’s that?”“Well, Alistair was always worried about his image. When Brendan Earle first made it big, he was more surprised than anyone and just couldn’t believe it was going to go on. I mean, he’d worked hard to get the position he had. University and long hours and being polite to the right people and then along comes this thing, this life-changing, unexpected thing. Well, I think he couldn’t trust it, because it was too easy. I think a lot of the things he did until the second book came out were to try to get people to like him, so, when the second book flopped, they wouldn’t savage him too much. Something like that.He started doing all those things for charities. He’d never done anything like that before. He visited that girl in hospital, but I know he hated it, I heard him say so. The second book went mega, but by then everyone had this fixed image of him. So he was scared of what the tabloids would do if he stopped being nice. I think he wanted to ditch Mam and me, go off somewhere and be rich and powerful, but there was always the next book to write and the thought that it could bomb if he wasn’t still the nice children’s book writer. And, look, you might not want to believe this, but he hated Brendan Earle. And all the people who read about him. ”“Oh, no, you can’t get me to believe that!”“True though. After a bit he believed he could write something else, but no one was interested. And that burned him up. Alistair won the Smarties Prize for Children’s Literature. Got that? The Smarties prize. But after the second book he was always sure he could do something serious and be in with a chance at the Booker. He just couldn’t stand the idea that he had Smarties on his shelf. So demeaning.”“But he cared about Brendan, you can feel it in the books!”“Oh come on! Even I know every book got darker and more characters Brendan cared about got chopped. I’ve never believed that was realism. He was getting back at the poor bugger for making his life miserable.”I didn’t want to believe it, so this time we walked on in silence ‘cos I didn’t want to talk any more. Except…“But there are all these good things in the books and they’re all so well written and they really understand what it feels like growing up and being a teen and stuff.”“Oh that? Yeah, I suppose so. Haru always says that he’s one of the most proficient writers at updating all of the whatsits, the great archetype themes that run through folk tales. Someone else said that about him. It was what made him think he could write more seriously. His stuff always got good critical reviews… But that’s not the same as liking your reader, is it?”“This Haru, she’s your girlfriend, is she?”He nodded.“What makes her the expert on all this?”“She’s taking a Masters in Evolutionary Psychology at Kyoto University. Don’t get me wrong. Harumi thinks Alistair was a genius and she can’t let up on trying to get me to read his books. I would have started, but I wanted to read this book on the psychology of fairy stories first. I was reading it on the zeppelin coming over and then I promised her I’d start on Brendan Earle, Book One.”“Fairy stories! Brendan Earle is nothing to do with fairy stories!”“No, but she’s talking about psychology. She’s talking about the themes in the stories and what they represent. And anyway, they’re not that different with all that magic and stuff, are they?”“But Brendan Earle is all about growing up and dying and…”“Yeah, but the folk stories are all about growing up and…”“No, they aren’t! They’re about gingerbread cottages an’ wicked witches and things. Baby stuff!”“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Think it through. Gingerbread cottages is Hansel and Gretel, isn’t it? So, you have this little girl, separated from her parents, right? Biggest fear for little kids and a worrier for older ones who don’t know if they can make it on their own. She learns to trust her older brother, because he can think things through better than she can. Then the cottage is the ‘stranger-danger’ thing, don’t trust people who give you sweeties and while you’re on the subject, think about how dangerous it is to get fixated on the short-term thing that seems good right now. In the end she has to stand up for herself and defeat the thing that scares her and save someone. Haru reckons the same themes got used again for a big horror film from the turn of the century.”“What was that, then?”“You probably wouldn’t know it. It was called ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.”“I do know that. Sara’s brother downloaded the DIV for us. He wants to be Quentin thingy when he grows up and he said it was a genre classic or something. I couldn’t sleep after watching that! But it’s nothing to do with Hansel and Gretel, it’s about Hannibal Lecter, he eats… Oh.”“Getting it? One girl’s dad is dead and the other one is kidnapped away from her mother. Separation from…Clarisse is guided by her older male boss who’s very smart. Now you say Gretel gets a wicked witch and Clarisse gets a cannibalistic serial-killer. But what would you call a woman who cooks and eats kids? There’s even a chicken bone in the film.The folk stories are about the dark stuff that’s always inside kids’ heads. That’s why people are still telling them after so many centuries. And you can turn one into a thriller, because that stuff’s still there inside adults’ heads too.”I felt an idiot for not having seen it before. We crossed over a pretty little bridge and started walking back down the way we’d come.“But anyway,” he said, “none of that explains why we’re still here or gives us any clues about how we get out.”“Yeah, sort of destroys the idea that you’re supposed to live out the story and write the final book. Mind, that never made much sense, unless they started the action at the end of Book Six. Who was going to sit through years of this game and not just cheat?” We both thought about this one for a while.“You’re right. It looks more as if they’ve had some kind of glitch.”More silent walking as we thought this through. This walk was in a nice place, but wasn’t doing much to cheer me up. He must have thought so too.“So, what we can do is head for the Quayside and I’ll show you some of the sights. Then we can wander up into the town centre and check out the cinemas. I’ll cook tonight, so we can go to the Grainger Market for shopping. If you like, we can drop into a bookshop.”“Not really. Unless they’ve got books on how to escape from defective computers, I think I’d rather go to see a DIV.”
AdamJust as well we got started on Hansel and Gretel. If I’d had to explain ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ or ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ I think she’d have slapped my face. LRRH is pure porn.

The last piece of violence for this week

It's not having a karate class to go to this weekend or last that does it. Hanging around, nothing to do, the mind starts naturally gravitating to thoughts of murder. So anyway, here's the introduction to the most deadly killers in the whole of The Land: Laurel and Hardy.

Cully reached a thumb into his nostril and scraped out something like a green cornflake. He examined it in the lamp-light with pretended interest to keep the fat one waiting, then flicked it into the road.“So, who are you that I should help you look for someone?” he asked. His mates were watching from across the street and looking forward to seeing some fun here. Wouldn't be friendly to disappoint them, would it?“We, sir, are in the employ of the great Mage, Maldon.”A claim, thought Cully, that could be made by half this continent. Cully himself had once listened to a midden-cleaner boast of how he had carried Maldon's own dung to the compost pile. He'd punched him out for going on about boring shit, a line that had got a good laugh from the lads.“Oh yeah. An' what do you do for him, then? Lead his armies into battle, eh?”“No, sir, we undertake a variety of tasks for him. Most recently we were employed in extracting teeth from someone at his orders.”“Yeah,” said Cully, “I've heard of that. Dentists is it?”“No, sir, Stanley and I are torturers. We hurt people professionally.”Something in Cully's hind-brain tried to warn him that the fat man wasn't taking the piss and that that statement was too ridiculous to be anything but the truth, but his mates were watching and the fat man and his thin, stupid-looking mate were just too funny to be any kind of threat, so he ignored it. And laughed.Later, the lads agreed that the sequence of events must have been something like this, though it happened too fast for anyone to be sure. The fat man had given some kind of nod (Little Davy said it was a hand signal, but the others said bollocks). Then the little one, who wasn't holding a knife or anything, must suddenly have been holding a knife, but then definitely wasn't holding a knife again, 'cos they never saw it. Somewhere in there Cully's face picked up an expression of almost comical surprise, while his throat started wearing a smile that went from ear to ear. They checked that later and it really did, that wasn't just something they said when they told the story. Then the fat man and his thin friend had turned and come over the road to ask them all to help with looking for a man and a girl. And Cully bled his life out through his throat and they all watched, too stunned to do anything about that.“Good manners, Stanley.” said the fat man, ambling along the road and raising his hat to a pretty young Mage girl, who smiled indulgently to him. Probably because she hadn't seen what had just happened. “They are what separates us from the animals.”“Yes Olly.” replied the little man, probably not understanding, but always keen to please his big friend. “They really are. Should I clean that one up Olly?”“No Stanley. His friends can do that. It will give them something to think about.”Stanley didn't understand that at all. Getting rid of inconveniently dead bodies was usually a thing Olly entrusted to him and which he was very good at and did without much thought. Often, he would cut them up into smaller bits so as to be able to move and hide them more easily, but generally the hardest part was keeping the blood off his clothes. Olly always complained of the mess if he got blood-stained.

From violence avoided to violence not quite seen

There is a lot more death in my second book, which has got the working title of Virus. The deaths are all due to war and murder. It's a much more cynical book than Brendan. It doesn't view violence as something that is glorious or attractive. I'm of Ferguson's point of view that it's to be avoided if at all possible. This next scene is the reason why. It isn't pretty, but I think that makes it more realistic. It comes purely from imagination, so it's probably wrong, but I hope it feels right.

There was a smell. Danny had smelt nothing so bad before in all his life, but somehow knew what it was. Something in the DNA told him. It was the smell of death. Over the hill were rotting corpses. Dead meat. He knew it.Over the hill were rotting corpses. A level plain full of them. The Warg must have assembled in thousands and been moving together. Something had killed them. Killed them all. Full human, full wolf or some caught in mid-change. A species lay across the grass, black birds picking at them.He looked at a corpse nearby. A raven, almost absently, pecking the face. He realized that one of the sounds he could hear, behind the cawing, behind the sound of the wind and the fluttering of wings, was the sound of eyeballs being plucked from sockets. The thought seemed to flutter inside his head, resisting the effort to chase it out. He didn't even want to think about that being a sound an ear could hear. He didn't want to know what that sound was. But he thought he would hear it in nightmares for the rest of his life. Chase the bird away? Pointless. There were thousands of them.A cluster were packed around the open guts of a young female Warg. Blue-black feathers stained with a red itself curdling into black. Heads bobbing, pulling, mindlessly stabbing at each other in arguments over scraps in the midst of a myriad dead. Steam rose in the cool morning air from some bodies too fresh to be cold. The place stank already, but a day more and it would gag the breath from everything for miles.Ahead of him a scene from a nightmare, behind the sound of someone vomiting their guts, Davy looked and searched in vain for words. He couldn't tell anyone what this was like. Nothing he could say would cover it. Within clear view was a Warg family. Half changed father, wolf changed mother and two cubs. The parents had obviously tried to shelter their offspring from whatever had killed them. Small holes were dug into the bodies. Guns? Had someone shot them? Offspring, what kind of a word is that? Something killed them and their kids. These aren't enemies any more. These are victims. This isn't war. This is murder. Behind him, someone was muttering. “Shit, shit, shit.” It didn't work for Davy. It wasn't enough. He couldn't even curse his feelings into sound. Nothing matched this.Alice spoke. “What could kill all of them?And they saw it. Across the plain. A figure on a horse picking its way through the piled dead. Even at a distance the flash of gold from the face told them of the mask it wore.“Maldon.”They should have disappeared, fled, done it by reflex and done it immediately. But reflex was dulled by shock. They stood and looked.“How could he do all this by himself?”At that moment, the figure on the horse turned its head and saw the group of young Mages. Simultaneously, every raven on the field stopped and turned its head in the same direction. A caw erupted from every throat on the plain and there came a clatter of wings.Only one of the cohort made it from the field alive. Blind in one eye and bleeding from more jagged rips in her flesh than anyone could count, she limped into Ferguson’s camp and stammered out a tale that stunned.

New writing

This is from the new book, 'cos I find I'm interested in it.... Good sign?

The tram stopped at the next station and two skinheads got on at the further end of their carriage. Ferguson still leant against the pole, balanced and relaxed, but his eyes tracked them aboard, monitoring the potential of the threat. The two were barely through the door when they started insulting and intimidating those around. One skinny guy reading a book had it snapped out of his hands. The mini-skirted girl, standing in the aisle, clutching the strap, had her butt slapped, the teenaged boy standing next to her was dared to do anything about it. Adam thought he'd have to step in and do something to these two, but it was Ferguson who made eye contact first."Aye, and what's it to you then, eh? What to do somethin', eh? Think yer hard, do ye?"The skin was some five metres away and barking, an 'aimed and fired' feel to his movement down the carriage.. An old lady close by shook at every shouted question. "As it happens, yes, I am." Ferguson sounded almost bored.  Stating a fact, thought Adam, not making a boast. Too big a dog to be threatened by these puppies. Something about that registered with the skins and they slowed, out of range.  "But you're missing the point. I don't need to be. You see, you've just made about twenty people decide they really don't like you. And ten of them are behind you. Do you get that? That's ten people who only have to kick you in the back of the knee to take you down to the ground. In fact, they only have to drop a bag behind you to let me push you into and you'll trip over. Do you know what it's like to be on the ground when a lot of people decide you really deserve a good kicking?"The skins had stopped moving along the carriage while he spoke, some instinct measuring the distance they'd walked and the bodies they'd passed. The furthest back looked behind him, snarling at a couple of smirking faces. "You've just offended someone wearing high heels. Do you know what happens when someone wearing high heels stamps on your chest? They're not called stilettos for nothing you know, those heels. Punch a hole between your ribs and carry in whatever she walked in last, those. Dirt, chewing gum, dog shit, all of the above. Not good for the health at all."The voice, thought Adam, was wholly devoid of threat. It viewed the scenario of a man having his chest punctured with a stiletto heel as being one of mild interest, but no concern. You had to think it through to get the menace. The two skins were thinking; fast. Nearly as fast as the other passengers, who were starting to enjoy the images now playing in their heads.The mini-skirted girl looked as though she relished the idea of stamping on someone, and the skin who'd slapped her arse was feeling painfully aware that it was probably him."Doesn't need much y'see lads? Someone swinging a handbag at your head can keep you busy while someone else kicks your crotch."The old lady with the handbag felt its weight and the truth of the statement simultaneously, whilst the teenage boy who'd been cowed thought about the pure pleasure he'd get from kicking the balls of the guy who'd done it to him. The people of the carriage hadn't liked the picture of themselves revealed by the thugs' intrusion and welcomed the chance to rewrite the story."Numbers, isn't it, eh? When it's two against one, the odds are good for you. But when it's twenty against two, you're fucked and no mistake. And it's twenty against two now, isn't it boys?"The two were now back to back and looking at a carriage full of people who just needed a nudge to set them off. The air of menace was something you could feel against your skin. It licked the carriage and savoured the salt. There was a tang of blood heated and a promise of blood to be spilt. "Get your backs to the doors, boys. You're getting off at the next station now, aren't you? And you don't want anyone behind you, do you?'The skins shuffled, eyes darting here and back, and wedged themselves against the doors. Every eye in the carriage was on them, waiting, Adam felt, only for Ferguson, the undisputed master of the situation, to give the word and a massacre to start. "Oh, by the way. If anyone has a camera phone, it would be a nice idea to get a picture of these young lads before they get off. Just in case they were thinking of doing something thoughtless when they're on the platform and we can't reach them."Half the carriage reached into bags and pockets and pulled out phones. Would that have been right for 2007, wondered Adam, while the skins covered up like celebrities caught by paps. Did they have cameras on phones then? He couldn't remember. Didn't they have CCTV on trams in those days? The Metro train pulled into the station; the doors opened and spilled two scowling thugs to the platform where they were soundly abused till the doors closed again and the tram pulled away. It didn't matter, thought Adam. I've either seen or been shown how this man got to be the general of the good guys. Around him the passengers were sharing the laugh of the little drama they'd just been part of. One station and Ferguson had inspired them, united them, and without doing more than speak, shown them their power. They'd loved it and would remember how he'd done it. Adam could see thoughts written clearly across faces. The teenage boy and the mini-skirted girl were laughing together; something the boy wouldn't have believed a possibility when he'd first seen her. He might have a phone number before he got off. He, they'd, long for an excuse to play out the same scene again, themselves as bigger heroes the next time. Adam felt Ferguson's eyes on him. "Shock and awe. Do it well enough and you don't need to fight. Have bad luck and you still get kicked in the cobblers. Worse if you're the general. Someone here could have gone off half-cocked and those two would have pasted them against the wall. They weren't just pretending to be hard. Then either we'd have had a blood-bath when the others turned against them, or I'd have had to try to batter the pair of them. And still feel responsible for the one who got clouted.""Yeah, but you could, couldn't you?""Probably. I have memories and a skill-set for this. I can be a pure predator. Quite implacable, cold-blooded, calculating and utterly controlled. I know I can reduce a person to a target, an enemy, something that is not human, that is just a threat to be removed. And by removed, I do mean killed." He nodded to himself. "As a skill, that one is quite inhumane and probably quite inhuman." He looked at Adam, wondering if this was anything more than words to the younger man. The lad was good at his martial art, admitted, but Ferguson had experience of martial artists redefining violence as what they had answers to. They were rarely the same as the kill-or-be-killed situations he'd such vivid memories of being in."I also know that the best of fighters can go down to a lucky punch. And that's more than two reasons why I don't want to have to push it to the wire. Better to talk it down.""Yeah, but with your level of skill you can surely control the situations..""Yes, I'm a lot more competent now, but a lot less confident that I can predict how things will go. Look, I once saw a guy get stabbed in the upper arm during a fight. Reason says he shouldn't have been able to use that arm for anything. Maybe he should have fallen to the floor in pain and died when the other guy stabbed him again or just kicked him to death. In reality he was high on adrenaline and picked up the guy who'd stabbed him and broke his spine for him. Tell me that I could deal with him by applying a wrist lock. I've heard of a soldier who once took thirty bullets and still loaded two other guys onto a helicopter. Tell me you could apply a technique as painful as thirty rifle bullets. Either of those two would go straight through whatever you were doing and kill you while you were thinking about what to do next. Those are stories I can tell you. There are others that don't have as clear a beginning, middle and end, but they all add up to what it says in the Bible. The race does not always go to the swift, nor battle to the strong. If you want to win, you throw away your ideas of being fair. The ending I got there was the one I hoped for. But if it didn't go that way, I wanted someone kicking them from behind and others kicking them when they were down. I was never aiming to be the Hollywood hero who takes them out on his own. When I was in the regiment, I didn't just want people who would fight another day on my side. I really wanted people who would be ready and able to kill another day. That's a very different thing. If you were on my side and you knew you had a boxing match on Tuesday, I really wanted you to shoot your opponent on the Monday before, in the back, somewhere there were no witnesses. That's not a joke. Otherwise when the really serious shit went down you might be laid up, or just slowed down and that could mean I got killed." He looked hard at Adam. "Now are you starting to get an idea about why I got out?" "But that's not how you've been fighting your war.""No, but it's not because I'm being nice. The kids I've got probably couldn't kill if I'd told them to. I've used the tools I've had to achieve the ends I could. In many ways I was lucky not to have the bombs Maldon used on us early on. I might not have been able to win an argument with myself about using them, or not, on his side. There's a thing Theodore Roosevelt once said, 'The unforgivable thing is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly'. Can't fault him on that. Anyway, we're here."