Snippet Post 4 Plus Links

I spent most of yesterday with a friend at the doctor's office, waiting for appointments that went unexpectedly long. It's weird how tiring it is to sit around in a waiting room. I brought my laptop and worked, but it didn't exactly involve heavy lifting or ditch digging, so I have no idea why it wore me out.

Links:

I did a guest post on SF Signal on my NASA tour: Martha Wells: NASA Up Close and Personal, for SF/F Writers and Editors


Diversity in YA Fiction: the Diversify Your Summer Reading Challenge!


Snippets:

This is another longish snippet post for the Clarion West Write-a-thon:

One from The Serpent Sea, second book in The Cloud Roads series. More Raksuran gender politics:

Another queen glided down from an upper balcony to land in the hall. Her scales were silver-gray, with a web-tracery of brilliant green. Moon expected to see her turn to go down one of the passages, but instead she furled her wings and started toward them.

Her pace was deliberate and she lashed her tail lazily. Sounding bewildered, Song whispered, "What is she doing--" and Vine and Chime shushed her. The queen had the attention of the whole hall, everyone staring. At least the Raksura who lived here seemed to be just as taken aback by this as they were. Willow actually looked alarmed.

The queen came closer, focusing on Moon and ignoring the others. She stopped only a pace away, her gaze a threat and a challenge. Moon's shoulders tensed, his back itching to lift spines he didn't have at the moment. Then she said, "What a pretty thing. I'm surprised your queen leaves you unguarded."

Moon pushed to his feet, the movement slow and deliberate. She was a little shorter than him, which meant she was younger than Jade. He said, "Maybe she thought this was a civilized place." Behind him he heard a startled snort, possibly from Floret.

Startled, the queen lifted her spines sharply. He realized she had expected him to be too intimidated to respond. Compared to Pearl, she just wasn't that intimidating. She snarled, "This is a civilized place. But if you're foolish enough to challenge me, don't think I'll spare you."

Behind him, the others stood now, and they had the attention of the entire nervously silent hall. It occurred to Moon belatedly that he should have ignored the queen. He hadn't been introduced yet and no one from Emerald Twilight was supposed to be talking to him, so the breach of etiquette would have been all on her side. It was too late now. He tilted his head. "If you want to fight, then attack me." As a queen she could keep him from shifting, or at least try to; but if she leapt on him while he was trapped in groundling form he doubted it would reflect well on Emerald Twilight.

She leaned toward him and hissed in fury. "If I thought you were serious--"

A dark shape dropped from an upper balcony, landed lightly on the floor just a few paces away. The queen flinched back from Moon, and the others twitched away, startled. Song shifted to her winged form, then shifted back when Balm hissed at her. Moon didn't move; the newcomer was another consort.

He was nearly half a head taller than Moon, his shoulders broader. His black scales gleamed in the soft light with a faint red undersheen, and his eyes were a dark deep brown. He dropped his spines and folded his half-furled wings, his hard gaze never leaving the young queen. Then he shifted to groundling.

He had even handsome features, dark bronze skin, and was lean but strongly built. He was dressed in dark clothes and wore a gold band around his upper arm, over the silken material of his shirt, that was studded with polished red stones. Small gold hoops pierced his ears, all the way up the curves. He tilted his head at the queen and said, dryly, "Ash. What are you doing?"

She flared her spines. "Since when do you greet unwanted guests?"

He didn't respond to that obvious attempt at distraction. "Must I speak to your mother of this?"

Ash hesitated, half-snarling, then turned abruptly away and strode out of the greeting hall toward the outer platform.

The consort turned to Moon, eyeing him thoughtfully. Then he stepped closer. It should have been threatening, but Moon had to still the impulse to lean toward him. There was something about him, that ability to draw you in, the same power that Pearl had. With the consort it was easier to resist, and Moon couldn't tell if he was doing it consciously or not. He touched Moon under the chin, a light pressure that made Moon lift his head slightly. It was a challenge, but Moon didn't growl, didn't twitch away; he might still know little about how Raksura behaved, but he knew this wasn't that kind of challenge.

Then the consort said, "You're feral."




And one from City of Bones:


Khat dropped down onto the cracked sandy brick of his home roof from a projecting ledge on the next house. He had hoped to make an inconspicuous return, but Ris was climbing up the ladder through the roof trap and immediately called down one of the vents, "It's Khat, and he's been beaten up again."
Ignoring him, the krismen found a pile of old matting and flopped down onto it. He didn't want to go down into the house until exposure to the city deadened his sense of smell again. His own odor was bad enough, but the nearest bathhouse was several courts away, and he didn't feel like walking that far, even to get rid of the dried blood.

Ris came over and peered curiously down at him, taking care not to come too close. "What happened?"

An arm flung over his eyes, Khat said, "Go away," in a tone that didn't invite argument.

The ladder rattled, and Sagai's voice seconded him. "Go home, Ris."

Khat lowered his arm to look up at his partner, who winced at the damage. He was lucky Sagai was not the kind of person who said "I told you so."

Disregarding Khat's protests and threats, Sagai examined the knot on the back of his head. "Not so bad," he pronounced finally. "Better than usual, I think."

"What's wrong down there?" an irritated neighbor asked suddenly from the overhanging window of the next house.

"Nothing," Sagai called back, a growl in his voice. "The day's excitement is over. Go to bed."
The neighbor withdrew, grumbling.

"Now," Sagai said in a softer tone. "What happened?"

Khat sat up on one elbow and told him all of it, leaving out nothing except his first encounter with Constans. He wanted to think about that a bit more before he talked about it, and told himself he would mention it to Sagai later.

Sagai was far more interested in relics than in Warders, anyway. "A new Survivor text in Ancient Script? Intact?" he asked, his eyes gleaming with the light of discovery. Finally someone was giving the find the attention it deserved. Relics weren't a trade, they were a passion. It makes us unique, Khat thought. Did peddlers get passionate over pots? Sagai said, "What I would give to see it, to handle it ... You read much of it? What was it called?"

"On the Motion of Thestinti. I read bits and pieces. It was confusing; I couldn't follow what it was trying to say. And I didn't want Riathen to realize I could read it." He wished his partner had been with him, for that at least. Sagai, who had studied Ancient Script in the Scholars' Guild in Kenniliar, was better at deciphering the intricacies of it than Khat. "What does thestinti mean?"

"That's a difficult one. I don't suppose you remember the intonation markers?"

"No, I was a little distracted at the time."

"Hmm. It could mean walls, barriers..."

"I don't think it was about architecture," Khat said. "I could read the words, but they didn't make sense to me. Something about 'to enter and leave by the western doors of the sky' and 'to know the souls of the Inhabitants of the West.'"

"And there was no dynastical seal, I assume?"

"No, not one of the Recognizable Seven, anyway. I wasn't looking for one of the Hundred Hypothetical." Amateurs were always claiming to find new dynastical seals; the Academia kept a register of them, and some scholars worked their whole lives to verify them, though none had been added to the Recognizable list in decades.

"Perhaps it's a philosophical work. You said the Warders believed it related to their power. The Walls of the Mind, maybe. The Academia would be interested. Thousands of coins' worth interested. An intact text of Ancient Script and a piece of an arcane engine that can actually be associated with a Remnant. Why, it might lead to a proof of Robelin's theory about the Remnants' housing arcane engines. Treasures beyond price! I can hardly believe it."

Khat didn't want to dampen his partner's excitement by pointing out how unlikely it was that either of them would ever have another chance to closely examine the text or the engine relic again. "I doubt Riathen wants to sell them."

"No." Sagai sighed, and looked away over the dirty rooftops to the east, past the low clusters of mud-brick houses to where the tier's rim dropped away and the Fringe desert and the Waste stretched out forever, the black rock featureless in the distance. The breeze was up, and the night that was never quiet inside Charisat was at least calm, with the rumble of handcarts from the streets and the shouting and scuffling from the more combative denizens of the nearby courts seeming far away. "He will hide them, and fight for them, and worship them, perhaps. And never think to sell them to the Academia, where the scholars could glean far more knowledge from them than he ever could."