Matt Weber's Blog, page 16

A nobody’s primer on publishing

A friend just finished a draft of a novel (STAR WARS fanfic, for context) (EDITED: Actually original fiction; reading comprehension error) and wanted advice on publishing. I spammed the relevant Facebook thread with this beast, then realized that I might have some followers who might enjoy a highly condensed, ultra-basic take on publishing from someone who hasn’t achieved more than beer-money-level success at it.

===

If it’s fanfic, you’ll probably have to give it the ol’ E. L. James treatment if you want to sell it–not billionaires and light bondage (necessarily) but filing off the serial numbers. I’m given to understand that the people responsible for publishing STAR WARS novels tend to know what they want written; they’re not that interested in spec work. Then again, it’s not like I’ve ever submitted a STAR WARS manuscript and actually heard from an editor that they’re not interested in spec work… so do some research if this is the way you want to go.

If you’re interested in traditionally publishing it, the first piece of work is obviously revision. Then you can send it to agents and/or publishers; most people recommend agents, but there are at least a couple of science fiction publishers that will consider unagented manuscripts (Tor and Daw, anyway; possibly others?). The SFWA should have a list of reputable novel publishers; Query Shark has good advice on query letters; Preditors & Editors has a very comprehensive list of agents, and I think Robert J. Sawyer has a list of agents who represent a lot of science fiction, although his list may be out of date (I last looked at it in 2011 and I think it was a little old then) (edit: it appears to have been updated in 2013).

If you want to self-publish it, I highly, highly recommend listening to the Self-Publishing Podcast and the Creative Penn podcast. SPP is entertaining enough that you can pound through the archive in a few months of listening, and it’s worth it; the hosts have made huge progress since they started recording, and looking at their career trajectories (and at the changes in the landscape) is really instructive. The Creative Penn is less entertaining, but Joanna Penn is a bit smarter about things like rights, derivative works, &c, and her guests are pretty different.

The over-under on self-publishing versus traditional is roughly: Traditional publishers will do a lot for you, but it’s hard to get their attention and (reputedly) hard to get them to do much marketing for you, so you’re responsible for getting your books sold, and you need to sell a lot of them because you’re only making 15%. If you self-publish, you’re responsible for creating or contracting everything–the ebook, editing, cover, product description, marketing, everything–but Amazon (and the other platforms: B&N, Apple, Kobo, Google, &c) will pay you 70% of each sale, so you can do well on a lot fewer sales. Charlie Stross has an essay called “Why I don’t self-publish,” and he’s also published an essay by Linda Nagata called “Why I do self-publish”; the compare/contrast may be interesting. Stross also has a series of essays on the publishing industry (I think permalinked on the sidebar of his blog) that are definitely worth the read.

Not that I’ve been thinking about this for a while or anything. Happy to follow up on anything & everything. (That goes for you too, you legion of loyal readers, you.)

the big syringe

You want to look into the nightmarish hellscape of a writer’s mind? 4am, staring at the ceiling and thinking, what was that like? Finding the way into essentially independently inventing modernist drama. Five or six years of experimenting in prose, and then, damn, WAITING FOR GODOT, and you’re off. Even the supposedly minor works – I re-read ALL THAT FALL the other night — are revelatory. (Seriously. If you don’t know that one? Find it and read it. It’s devastating.) And you stare at the ceiling and just think, what would that have been like, to invent a whole goddamn thing? When the clouds barely part in your own mind maybe three or four times in your life, but for those people there are entire days of sunshine where everything is clear? And maybe, just maybe, his body isn’t completely decomposed yet, and you could dig him up and siphon the talent from his bone marrow and inject it into your face with that big syringe you keep in the kitchen for dosing meat with marinades.

Warren Ellis, from his mailing list.

Deer antler velvet

Featured in my spam queue a couple of times. Apparently people use this to get a six-pack? I wouldn’t kick a six-pack out of bed, but this does not seem like the right way. I mean, maybe if you chased the deer down yourself, and tore the antlers off with your bare hands. But spraying yourself with some kind of tincture made from the largely decorative head bones of an animal not renowned for its intelligence in the hopes of becoming more attractive… I don’t know, the whole thing seems like some weird Kline bottle of self-referential meta-comedy. Wikipedia says “Antlers are considered one of the most exaggerated cases of male secondary sexual traits in the animal kingdom, and grow faster than any other mammal bone.” I mean, this is beyond Freud spinning in his grave; this is like Freud had been balefired. Burned out, not only of the future, but the past. Deer antler velvet has rendered him supernumerary throughout the time stream.

This was going to be about writing, or at least I had some idea that it might become about writing. And it is, obviously, in the same sense that it’s about any damn thing worth doing, which is just to say you won’t find the easy button in the stolen headboobs of an innocent animal that never wanted any part of your weird ambition. Or words to that effect.

I queried a novel today, for what it’s worth. Truly I did. I’d better go to bed.

Little steps

And lo, the realm of Jersey was once again overtaken by the Plague, followed close on by the Snow, whereupon the Small Children were Cooped Up and Like to Explode; and out of the House of the Writer there came a great Silence.

We’re digging our way out, though. Little steps. The current program is: 200 words and one for lack of a better word biz-ops thing every night. (This doesn’t count.) Last night’s was grabbing a few more agents to query for THE EIGHTH KING; tonight’s is writing the query. I’m hoping some of the ops stuff will be less time-consuming (e.g., “query one agent”) so I’ll have time to write more. But, for the moment, little steps.

Numbers

A while back, I ran the numbers on writing THE CRESCENDO during NaNoWriMo. A nice exercise, but of course NaNo is one month out of the year; where I really should have been running numbers is the other 11.

I’m proceeding on the assumption of 1000 words/day on weekday mornings, before work, and 200/day every day, before bed. The morning writing gives me 20,000/month; the evening writing adds let’s call it 6000. If those are real rates, then I can finish a 50,000-word War of Songs book in two months, or the projected 150,000-word DANDELION KNIGHT sequel in six. In reality, I probably lose 10-20% of that to random fatigue and logistical stuff–e.g., tomorrow morning I have parent/teacher conferences starting at 8:15, so I lose my 1000 words unless I can get up early, and by early I mean 4:30. So now we’re looking at 9-10 weeks for a War of Songs book, 7-8 months for the TDK sequel.

This also gives me a comparative timeline for the two paths: I can finish the War of Songs trilogy two to two and a half months ahead of the TDK sequel. And, unless I can find ways to boost my word count, it means the choice of what I do next is the choice of what I finish in 2015.

Best not to think about this too hard just yet. What I really need to do is track my word count for a month and get an actual handle on this.

One weird old trick

Wrote close to 1000 words this morning, wrapped a big scene. I’ve been doing the writing longhand because I’m trying to end every evening with 200 words, which means I don’t want to get pulled into the rabbit hole that is the Internet; but that means the bigger chunks get put in the notebook too, because I don’t want to keep switching back and forth. I don’t seem to be materially less productive in terms of words per unit time. I wonder if this is the one weird old trick that will shoot my productivity into the stratosphere. (I fear it’s the one weird old trick that will cause my writing to get lost in a flood or a fire, or just out of common-or-garden carelessness. There’s an older version of THE CLAIM that’s still sitting in longhand in a blue notebook, waiting to be mislaid or destroyed.)

(“One weird kernel trick” courtesy of Daniel Drucker, who is better at machine learning humor than I am.)

Battery drain

Ha, my first day of “I’m going to check in here daily” and I nearly miss it. I have an excuse; I always have an excuse. One of our cars wouldn’t start this morning. It was at the bottom of the driveway, blocking the one that would start. I think we actually got the kids out earlier than usual, but then I had to get AAA to jump the car so I could drive it to the mechanic &c.

Luckily, the problem appears to have been limited to the battery. As I was standing out in the 2-degree morning, waiting for the tests to finish, Patrick from AAA told me that the cold makes the batteries drain faster. It was an oldish battery anyway, and it got through the single-digit temperatures last winter; the last few weeks probably pushed it over the edge. I don’t think I’ve written more than 200 words a day for the last couple of weeks, so this intelligence comes as something of a ray of hope. Maybe I’m just weak from cold; maybe the spring will bring vitality.

Back to work. Kill the word beast. Even a 200-word word vermin is better game than nothing. (“Kill the word beast” by Molly Crabapple, as always.)

The prodigal

Good morning. It’s been a while. How are you?

Me, I spent a week in London trying to learn to be a software engineer, and another two at home trying to figure out how to get work done while the kids were homebound due to excesses of snow or snot. Other than the trip to and from Heathrow, my London experience was more or less confined to the fifteen-minute walk between my flat in Shoreditch and my job in Shoreditch; so, despite my hopes to tap into the mythic half-forgotten London that animates China Miéville’s New Crobuzon and Alan Moore’s FROM HELL, I spent most of my time pondering the curious popularity of Mexican and fusion Mexican cuisine (falafel with guacamole?) and rubbernecking at some admittedly pretty amazing graffiti:

By “most of my time” above, I of course mean “most of the time I wasn’t learning how complicated it is to write apps,” which is a lesson I honestly haven’t fully grasped just yet.

But now I’m home, and the snow and snot have cleared, and I’m trying to figure out where I’m going. The main issue is finding time to write for an hour a day. I’d like to do more, of course, but if I can do that, I can make progress. But with the office right at home, it’s hard. One really liberating thing about the otherwise horrible commute to Philadelphia was that it gave me a solid block of downtime every weekday. Now all time is potentially uptime, and I need to make choices. So far, I’ve been making them to the detriment of writing. That’s going to have a pretty bad effect on my mood and motivation if it continues.

Beyond that, we have issues of strategy. THE CLAIM is stalled midway through Chapter 8. If I can write 5000 words a week, it’ll be done in two weeks. I’m somewhat resolved that I ought to finish it… but with THE CANDIDATE still unwritten, that decision isn’t as clear-cut as it used to be. With two or even one and a half books done in January, I could still think of the War of Songs as a winter-and-spring project, with the latter half of the year devoted to polishing those books and writing the sequel to THE DANDELION KNIGHT. With THE CLAIM not even done yet, the pull of the sequel is a lot stronger. Before, I thought I was looking at 50,000 words to finish the War of Songs trilogy; now I’m looking at 100,000+, which makes the 100-150,000 likely words of the DANDELION KNIGHT sequel (many of which are already written) a lot more palatable by comparison. And that will close a loop that’s been open two or more years now.

And then we have the business side of things. This website is suboptimal in any of a dozen bleedingly obvious ways; I still need to write a coda to the JaNoWriMo project; I still need to work on list-building, collecting blurbs, getting some of my work free on Amazon. I’m also trying to teach myself about marketing and entrepreneurship, notably through Copyblogger’s free ebook library, but reading time is a bit thin on the ground. Bandwidth is my big blocker right now, and I can’t even scrabble for more by waking up early, because my son is awake at random times between 3:30 and 6:00 and I usually need to help out.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t things I can do better.

I’m going to start, though, by trying to check in here daily, at least on weekdays. This is, at least in theory, where my business lives; I’m hoping that more regular contact with the site will keep my writing head where it needs to be. Nothing this lengthy, I think–again, more along the lines of morning.computer, wisps and stretches.

And I’ve spent about half an hour more on this than I meant to, which means it’s time to bring home the bacon. I’ll be back tomorrow morning. Maybe sooner; who knows?

 

Development diaries, 1-28-2015: The Pomodoro method

Normal day, the first of its kind in two weeks. Didn’t drop off the kids, but started at 9:00 anyway—took some time to walk around in the cold and plan the chapter in my head. It feels like it worked, but it also feels like something else worked. After nearly an hour bereft of focus, I tried the Pomodoro method, or my own adaptation of it: Write without interruption for 25 minutes, read A Game of Thrones for 5. I averaged over 500 words in each of those 25-minute intervals. I think repeated Pomodoros may be conducive to mental exhaustion, though; after five, I’d written almost 3000 words, but then I took an hour break for lunch and exercise that metastasized into another hour of useless Internet meandering. Two more intervals left me at about 4100 words for the day—which would be below quota, if quota meant anything at this point, but is a decent figure. (This, BTW, is why I have so many bracketed word counts in the day’s words—tracking my efficiency.)

This is the first day I’ve approached my SEPTA rate of 1000 words in 50 minutes; actually, I’m almost precisely there. Which makes me think that I have the determinants of my writing speed exactly wrong. I’ve been assuming that I could write fast on SEPTA because of Pavlovian conditioning: train <> writing. But it may be that the important thing isn’t the association, it’s the fact that there’s an endpoint. When I have the whole day ahead of me, with just lunch and evening to structure my time, it’s hard to write hard and hard to limit my breaks. Writing hard for 25 minutes is pretty easy, and five minutes of reading time is fun enough not to be frustrating, which actually kind of surprised me—AGoT is the kind of book it’s easy to get sucked into. Anyway, maybe it’s all down to novelty—and I’m sure the outlining in my head on the morning walk played an important role as well—but I’m pretty optimistic about using this in more time-limited contexts in the future. If two Pomodoros can reliably bag me 1000 words in an hour before or after work, that’s amazing. Apimac Timer has stopped working on my computer, so I used Timer-Tab, which was great.

I’m headed to London next week for my first week at the new job. I need to start modulating my expectations now. A week without kids feels like it’s going to be all free time, even with eight or more hours a day at work, but (a) I may wish to socialize or explore in the evenings, (b) westbound jet lag is the worst, and ( c ) I should sleep while I can. Remind me of this if you find me posting 2000-word updates at 0300 GMT, please. Also, (d)—and I always forget this—although being free of kids and family is fun and liberating, it is also almost always depressing. This may be yet truer in a strange city where I can’t afford to use my phone.

Words 1-28-2015

The riot of battle done, Esker’s wound reasserted itself as he skulked along an alley of the claim. It was not bleeding too freely—it was a small wound, and his blood scabbed fast—but it was bleeding, and not a little, and who knew what might have been on the damned bullet? [[54]] He paused to notch the fabric of his trousers with the swordspear, then rip a long strip from it. He would look ludicrous, but there was no help for it. He packed the wound on both sides, then bound it.

He dug around in his satchel until he found the list of words that Ruth had given him. The annotations were better than he had remembered, split by places to look for from the streets and places to look for inside. On the streets, the recommendation was to look for a “hospital” or “school of medicine” or “department of life engineering,” probably in that order; inside, the words grew more finely focused, “acoustics” and “throat” and “force” and so on.

When Esker stood to go looking for them, he nearly fell. [[186]]

That was clear enough, then. He stood still until the black withdrew from the edges of his vision, then turned to make his way toward the nearest building, a four-story stone mansion with a crumbling red roof. Something nagged at the periphery of his vision, though. He turned all the way around to see a trail of drops. “The Nine preserve me,” he muttered, and forced himself farther down the path.

After what felt like an hour, he reached the end of it. The trail of drops was still visible in the [[dusk]] light, at least to his soldier’s eyes.

Something else was there too, farther back. He should not have been able to see it, not at that distance, not lurking so still; but it was etched on his eyes nonetheless, the hulking arms with tiny hands at the end, the lipless face with exposed gums and teeth.

He made his legs move faster. The black was returning to the edge of his sight. His limbs felt like lead, grudging things hanging from his torso, listening only at intervals to his mind; his throat tightened with lack of breath. There was no question of distancing himself any farther from the blood trail; he needed to be out of sight now, before he lost consciousness.

By the time he ascended the stair of yet another four-story stone mansion, he needed to lean on the door and drag a few ragged breaths into his lungs before he pushed the hanging door aside. He could smell the [[bloodbinder]], hear it breathing.

The foyer of the mansion was spacious, interrupted about two-thirds of the way back by a desk before the front stairs began. The walls were graven with the ancient script, discolored in rectangular spots where portraits or tapestries might once have hung; there was more recent sign here as well, old squatters’ fires, the scattered broken bones of birds, a cheap knife bent at the middle of the blade. Esker looked at the stairs, thinking to put some distance between himself and the ground, but they loomed like cliffs, his own blood the breakers lashing fruitlessly against them. He remembered the cliffs at Piko, white like these stairs, the water blood-dark except for where it foamed—and his own blood felt as icy as that striving water, though he knew the tides that kept it flowing were far from eternal. My heart is the moon, he said, and envisioned it exsanguinated, bled moon-white. Feeble moon. Weak tide.

Foyers have coatrooms, he thought, or closets; little spaces, hidden from the main thoroughfare. He stumbled off to the right and found a low wooden door opening on a long, narrow space. There were metal braces in the wall, he saw with satisfaction, though the rods and hangers must have been plundered long ago. He got over the door, then back into the very back of the closet. He thought he might turn around, so he could at least see if someone or something came for him. Then again, he thought after trying it, best to conserve strength. There was no point in seeing his killer, not when he was this weak. Not when he couldn’t see anything at all.

#

He awoke in a shabbier coatroom—or, not in it; before it. There was a palpable chill in the air, but not, he thought, from sparse blood—it was the chill of ice-kissed air, the fingers of draft that crept through the warmest house (and this was not the warmest house) and gave stealthy caresses at odd intervals. Esker had a sense that the coatroom was not usually unstaffed, and, further, that it was not at present unstaffed; yet there was no one there, only a sense of a presence. [[819]]

The racks were full of coats, though, and it was a right stroke of luck that they were numbered, for they were all the same: Thick wool coats, nearly ankle-length, in the brick-trimmed cerulean of the Jaidari army.

Esker looked around. The building was an odd patchwork of grey stone and wood—some intact, though unvarnished and none too well treated, and some burnt nearly to flinders, leaving gaping holes. Beyond the holes was a colorless, starless void.

He turned to the lobby, which seemed both vast and cramped. There was no one at the reception desk; but if there had been, he had a clear image of who it would be. One of the Salve Rooks, darker and smaller than the Creditors; plain of face, arms short and strong and well acquainted with the big Jaidari pistol and the stained machete that rested under the desk, within their reach. Flor, her name had been. She had dressed like one of the girls, in thin silk or linen, even though she stood her whole shift in the direct line of the cutting cold that roared in whenever the door opened.

He looked toward that door and saw her as she had been the last time he’d seen her, pinned beneath a scorched beam, her hair and half her face burned away.

From behind her slithered a white worm with John Dream’s face.

Esker reached for his swordspear, but it was nowhere to be found. He crouched back in a defensive stance, ready to fight. But the worm only gave him a needle-fanged smile, looking languorously around the lobby as though memorizing it.

“You have an unusual mind, do you know that?” the worm said. “Understand, I don’t mean to say you’re particularly intelligent, still less all that interesting. As intellects go, you’re more than pedestrian. But you’re hard to find.” It had been slithering for some seconds now and Esker could still not see its end, only coils on coils, leaving slime-trails on everything it touched. “Odd rhythms. It’s much easier to tell when you’re asleep—the distortions of the faster oscillations are much subtler. I’ve never spent much time inside a soldier’s mind, especially a sleeping one.” The worm reached its head out and took a nibble of charred flesh from Flor’s cheek. Pain shot through Esker; the whole scene trembled like an aspic. “You’ll remember her that way from now on. What do you think of that?”

“You’re an abomination,” said Esker. “But you didn’t need me to tell you that.”

“A rich charge, that, from a man with this in his mind,” said the worm. “Chilly here. [[1264]] The Tenoc campaign, I suppose. Don’t work so hard to hide it; I can tell when I hit and when I miss. Do you know why I’m here?”

“We didn’t part on good terms.”

“That’s true. But you can help me, maybe. I know you’re in your claim, for all the good that claim-deed did you. The old university. What have you found?”

“Buildings, dirt, and The Tungsten Kid,” said Esker.

“What buildings? Can you recall the letters on them?”

“I don’t read the old script,” said Esker. “It all looks the same to me.”

“You’re certain?” said the worm. It took another bite of Flor; again the world blurred and shook, again Esker’s body burned with agony. “It would take me a long time to destroy your mind this way. More time than it’s worth, really. Out there in the real world, do you think you’re screaming?” The worm smiled. “Ah, that does scare you. You are in the claim. You’re worried that they’ll find you.” It examined Flor’s corpse again. “This looks like someone would really look if they were crushed under a beam and burned to death. She’s not why you’re here. Your real reason for being here will look much worse than anything real. Why don’t you show me?”

Esker knew what the worm was doing, and for a moment, he felt his efforts against it begin to work; there was only a silhouette of the apparition in the middle of the lobby, barely visible.

The worm grinned and brushed him with a coil. Burning pain shot out from his wound, where it had touched; pain like a thousand barbs, taking residence in his flesh, promising more pain if anyone ever tried to pull them out. The apparition roared into life—the beautiful face that ended at a cooked-meat stump of neck, the burned skeleton.

“Now that,” said the worm, “is properly horrifying. What was her name? Ximena. And you were her… her john?” Its laugh was putrid with scorn. “But not just any john. You were in love. And you did this to her?” It smiled and licked its teeth with a pointed tongue. “Or might as well have. I’ll allow it. What shall I do to her? What can I do to her? You’ve already done quite a rough job there, old son. But she wasn’t always like this—”

—and there she was. Ximena, naked, whole, shivering in the chill. Shorter and lighter-skinned than Hasina, the Salve tattoo coiled about half of her face; [[1799]] Esker remembered tracing the tattoo with a finger as she rode him. Remembered moving his hands down from her plain face, over her rich, familiar curves, now so small and silly in this hideous dream.

“Esquer?” she said, meeting his eyes, then looking fearfully to the worm. His heart thrilled to the voice; sweet heat climbed up his spine. He was rock-hard.

“She’s dead,” Esker made himself say.

“I know,” said the worm. “But I can make her die a new way, in your mind. That skeleton image of yours is awfully dry—what do you think of remembering her half-eaten? I can leave some of the bigger organs dangling…”

“She’s dead,” Esker said again. “You’ve built her out of images in my mind. It doesn’t matter what you do. The only person you can hurt is me.”

The worm took on a thoughtful expression at that. “Sr. Sepherene,” it said, “as far as you’re concerned, the only person anyone can hurt is you. You’d like to think you can share someone’s pain, but all you’re doing is telling yourself a story about it. And maybe that story hurts you, and maybe it doesn’t. Luckily for me, though, I don’t care about Ximena. The only person I want to hurt is you.” There was a white blur; the air misted with slime, filming Esker’s skin; making him retch; the worm’s face was suddenly in his. “I think I’ll have that nose of yours. It won’t come off your real body, of course, but you won’t know the difference.”

It lunged. Esker ducked, stumbled back. It lunged again. Its white coils formed a fence around him, cutting him off from running farther into the house. He looked behind him; the only way that wasn’t blocked by coils was out. The void had been replaced by the same dead streets he had fled from, waking. Ximena was gone. He ran for the door.

The worm burst through it like a ram, scattering stone and charred wood for dozens of feet. It reared up on its endless body, looking at Esker from the height of a hill. Then it broke eye contact, looking around, as if taking the lay of the land.

Then a sound came, loud enough to split apart the earth and sky; and a shaking came, hard enough to jumble up the pieces past any recognition; and a light came, bright enough to sear it all into nothingness.

#

He was in the coat closet again—the empty one, in the mansion in the claim. His tongue felt like leather, his eyelids like sandpaper, his limbs like dead animals. Someone was holding his face, sloshing water over his mouth. Someone was mumbling.

“—answer me, dammit, just say something, anything, answer me, come on, answer me, dammit—“

The pale shadow crouching over him came into focus, if only for a moment. “Ruth,” he said.

“Hello, stranger,” she said. “Finally. Now drink.”

He moved a hand up to the waterskin; his arm still felt like something hanging on a hook in a butcher’s shop, but it did the job. He did not spill too much water on the ground.

“Can you shuffle back?” she said. “Just lean your back against the wall. Sit up.”

He did as she said.

“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” she said. “I can’t stay here. There’s food, some dried meat and bread, you can soften the meat up with water, or there’s a little bit of weak wine—“ she showed him another canteen—“and we’ll do our best to get more drops to you in the hospital. The wine is treated with something that will help keep your wound clean, so don’t be shy about drinking it. Do you remember how to find the hospital?”

“I have your list,” he said.

“I saw it on the way here. The fastest way to get there is to go through the Tungsten Kid’s camp. Don’t.”

He actually managed to cough a laugh at this. “It’s all right. I think he and I are really starting to get along.”

“Don’t.”

“I know.”

“The hospital. [[2351]] On the roof—we’re going to throw the drop across the claim-edge. That’s where the other ones will be. Don’t leave the claim, or they’ll know when you come back in.”

“You came.”

“No one saw you leave.”

He reached a hand up to her hair, brushed a stray lock. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I wanted to make sure I told you before I died.”

She took his hand and moved it away. “I don’t hold the ravings of the mad against them, but you’ve got to get yourself together.”

“How did you find me?”

“The blood.”

“Shit—” He tried to get up, failed, tried again, succeeded. But she blocked his path.

“You’re all right for a bit, I think. When I saw them, they were all gathered up around the Kid’s tent—maybe they’re worried about another attack.”

“Another attack.” Memories returned. “You shot the Epseris. When you realized you weren’t going to beat the Kid, you shot the Epseris.”

“Regrettable accident.”

“I heard you give the order,” he said. “‘Finish the killers.’ What else could you have meant?”

“I don’t have time for this,” she said, but his hand was around her wrist. She looked up at him, her eyes grave. “Let me go.”

“Did you mean just the Epseris, or did you mean Ozier and Kem and Inber too?”

“If I did mean your friends, which I didn’t, I wouldn’t tell you the truth while you had a hand on me,” she said.

He released her. He saw the blood rush back into the pale band his hand had left around her wrist; he’d gripped harder than he meant to.

Ruth took a deep breath. “I was born to the Pity Rooks outside of Ostn. When there were Pity Rooks outside of Ostn. Thanks to your Epseris brothers, there aren’t any more.”

Pity-the-sorrowing-daughters-and-wives sends his regards, Esker remembered. Ozier had been on that hunt too. Was Ruth not telling him, or did she not know? “I don’t harbor any love for the Epseris,” he said.

“I don’t care. I didn’t do it for you. I have to go.”

“Why?”

Ruth looked up at him, her mouth quirking, though not quite into a smile. “You want me to stay, is that it? Share some tack and jerky with the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

He made as expansive a gesture as he could inside the closet. “What’s mine is yours.”

“Here’s the difference between foreigners and Rooks,” said Ruth. “Foreigners offer to share food they’ve been given and pretend that it’s a favor. Rooks don’t take back what they’ve given, because they gave it for a reason; and they aren’t flattered by offers to tarry, because the best way for a foreigner to trap a Rook is to convince her to slow down and relax. When a Rook chooses to help you, you’ll get actual help, like food and medicine. Or you’ll get good information, like this: I can’t stay in the claim, or in the viejo, because I’ll fucking die. The air in these places is poisoned. If you hang around it, you’ll die soon or you’ll die later, but you’ll die badly. I’ve already been in here an hour longer than I should have.” She pointed to a patch on her shirt; it was almost entirely black, with hints of grey and white showing around the edges, as though it had been pressed into an ink pad. [[2955]] “This was white when I entered the viejo. I’m leaving.”

She took a step back, then turned. Esker carefully centered his weight directly over his heels, placed his fingertips on the wall to steady himself. “I’ve been in here for days without leaving,” he said. “What’s going to happen to me?”

Ruth turned around. There was real regret in her face, he thought, but beneath it there was something hard. “I don’t know,” she said. “Are you a father?”

Esker shook his head.

“Don’t become one,” she said.

“You weren’t ever going to tell me,” he said. “You don’t tell anyone. You just let people come and scratch for grubs in your cities and spend their money in your stores. What kind of life is that?”

“You don’t listen when I talk,” said Ruth. “Every time I see you, Esker Sepherene, I say ‘Hello, stranger.’ What exactly is it you think you mean when I say that?”

Esker had no answer. Ruth shrugged, turned, and left the closet.

He stood a moment, breathing, thinking.

“Shit!” Ruth cried from the lobby. Esker lurched to the front of the closet to see her hurtling past, pursued by a roil of flame. For a crystalline moment he was nearly offended: Why hadn’t she told him to get out? But, of course, that would have told the enemy that someone was there. A considerate little gesture, really. Maybe. Esker grabbed his swordspear and lazily clotheslined the runeslinger running down the hallway after Ruth. The hit didn’t do much damage, but it did put him on the ground, and even a wounded soldier could put a blade into the base of a downed man’s skull without much effort. He felt the slight chill of a ket attack roll over him; irritated, he threw the swordspear. It missed wildly, clanging against the stone of the hallway. The remaining ’slinger swore and ran.

Esker looked down at the dead runeslinger. “I’m afraid I can’t stay,” he said. He collected the food and drink that Ruth had brought him, then left the building by a back entrance into a yard that might once have held a garden; now it was dirt and dust and a few flower boxes on a fence. He got his bearings, then trudged away from the Tungsten Kid’s camp, hoping that a bit more distance might give him some safety. The prospects seemed rather slim, but he could not think of better.

#

After several blocks’ worth of stalking, waiting, and backtracking, Esker began to conceive of the claim as a band of relatively low danger in between a ring of elevated danger, on the claim-edge where patrols waited, and a center of maximal danger, where the Tungsten Kid resided and his followers concentrated. In a healthier state, he thought, it might be amusing to proceed along the claim-edge, murdering patrols where he found them. Then he thought that, in a healthier state, he wouldn’t think of things in terms of maximizing kills. In any case, he could only rely on his soldier’s protection for so long; his flesh yielded to steel and bullets like any ordinary man’s, and the Tungsten Kid would twig to that soon if he hadn’t already. Best to send the message that he wouldn’t bother anyone who didn’t bother him. It wasn’t a message the Kid was likely to hear, but it was a better survival prospect than declaring war.

Staying in that band of reduced danger, and waiting long and patiently for the streets to clear whenever he saw so much as one of the Tungsten Kid’s gang, Esker whiled away a not altogether unpleasant day picking his way to the claim on the other side of the camp. Soon he saw the ancient script for the hospital, and he dutifully found his way inside and climbed up to the roof. It was a large roof, but he checked the whole thing and double-checked the part closest to the claim-edge, and there was nothing.

At this point sleep was plucking at his sleeve again, as it did when his body was knitting itself back up. [[3646]] He left the roof and made himself find a little room several doors down a small, crooked hallway rather than falling asleep in the main corridor.

No sooner had his eyes closed than the white worm waited for him.

He dodged its lunge, then darted down the hall, taking every turn he could. After a few, he slowed down, listening. He didn’t lay eyes on it, but it felt close; he could hear the sucking of its slime-trail on the floor.

Voices outside Esker’s hiding place woke him. He refused to wait as they closed in; two slashes of the swordspear connected, leaving two of the three men in confusion, and the last one missed his shot. Esker hurtled down the hall in a wake of blood and oaths; when all opposition was out of sight, he wiped the swordspear to make sure it would not leave a trail of another man’s blood, as his wound had done of his own. He ran on, not knowing where to go or what he might do when he got there. Eventually he found a dead end at a bank of huge doors with no handles, nearly flush with the wall. One pair was wedged open, barely wide enough to let his body through. It opened on a dark, square hole—but there was a ladder running down one side, and the barest sliver of light at the bottom. He went down as far as he could go, until he reached a panel that was not quite flush with the wall—perhaps the top of a box of some kind, constructed to be almost exactly the size of the shaft. There was a panel in it. He imagined he could kick it in, or through it, and perhaps he would be on the ground floor of the hospital.

Instead, he waited there a very long time. Only when sleep threatened him again, in the quiet dark, did he move. The panel did, indeed, put him in a box, brushed metal studded with a panel of round buttons. The doors were closed, but with the swordspear as lever, he forced them open and found himself in the hospital again. There were still voices there, roving a bit near stairwells, but he had no wish to go up. He searched until he found an office with a window and none of the Tungsten Kid’s men outside; then he broke the glass and fled.

He wondered how long they would surround the hospital—how long it would be safe to look for the food drop. He wondered when he would sleep again. He wondered when his body would succumb to the poisoned air. He wondered, and he walked.

#

By the next sleep, it was a game. Within the band of reduced danger, he had put some distance between himself and the hospital, and found himself a room on the second story of a building with several identical rooms, each with a green slate board on one wall. Again, the worm waited in his dream; again it attacked, and again he evaded it. But now, as soon as he had evaded it, he did his best to wake, and managed to shake himself out of the dream on purpose.