Snippet Post 6 Plus Links

New post by me on The Night Bazaar: Don't Be That Guy, about arguing with reviews.

Some people get addicted very quickly to internet attention and sympathy, and are prepared to kill and eat just about anybody to get that attention and sympathy. Don't be one of those people. And don't play into the hands of one of those people by responding to their effort to kill and eat you.


I'm about to start working on the last revision for The Serpent Sea, so here are:

Snippets:

Another snippet post for the Clarion West Write-a-thon. And thanks very much to the people who donated so far!


Moon said, "It's not quiet downstairs." He leaned against the wall beside the opening. The air smelled rich with the rain, the dark earth and loam. "Were you here when they built-- grew this place?"

His eyes still on the drowning gardens, Stone's brow furrowed. "I'm not that old."

Thunder rumbled, not quite close enough to make Moon twitch. "But you lived here."

"For a while. I was a boy when Indigo and Cloud led the court away." From his expression, it was hard to tell if it was a good memory or a bad one. "I was too young and stupid to see it as anything but an adventure."

Then these rooms had been filled with light and life, when there had been so many Raksura here they had had to leave for more open territory. It had to be strange to see it like this, dark and empty, scented of nothing but must and stale water. Moon had never gone back to a place he had lived before. Unless you counted the Cordans' camp, and he hadn't felt anything there except impatience.

Still lost in memory, Stone added, "No one ever thought I'd get a queen, but Azure picked me out of the lot."

Moon frowned at him. "Why didn't they think you'd get a queen?"

Stone tapped his cheek, below his clouded right eye. He said, dryly, "I wasn't born perfect."



And a long one from Wheel of the Infinite:


Rian moved up beside her, looking up at the full moon. There was a mottled pattern of dark and light across its surface tonight. Without referring to the texts that recorded all the permutations and their meanings, Maskelle could only translate it as far as "portentous events." With the approach of the rainy season Equinox and the culmination of the Hundred Years Rite, that was only to be expected. Rian sat down next to her and relaxed into a sprawl.

"This is one of my temples," Maskelle said, "or it used to be." She shifted around to face him. "Why did you come to the Empire?"

He let out his breath and started to pull off his buskins. "It's a long story."
"That's no reason not to tell it."

He wrestled with a recalcitrant knot in the bootlace. She didn't think he would answer, but then he said, "The Holder Lord died."

She frowned. She could see that prying information out of Rian was going to be no easy task, even under the best of circumstances. "You were much attached to him?"

"More so than I thought, apparently." He managed to wrench the buskin off, gasping in relief, and stretched out on his back.

Maskelle gave up any attempt at subtlety. "I can see why it's a long story, if you tell it like this."

He sat up on his elbows. "All right. I'd only been at Markand Hold a year. I was part of a treaty between Markand and Riverwait."

"Part of a treaty? They trade..." She hesitated over the word he had used, then settled for "personal guards?"

"Not usually, but when the Holder Lord of Markand's legion is on the border and he's naming treaty terms and he points at you and says 'And I'll take that one,' nobody has much choice about it."
She watched him thoughtfully. "So Riverwait gave you up to an enemy."

"The Lady Holder of Riverwait gave me up." He looked away. "The Holder Lord of Markand had been coming to her hall for years and I was the first of her cortege. We didn't get along. He chose me as part of the treaty because he knew what it would cost her in honor. She didn't have a choice. Refusing to give me to him would have been refusing the treaty, and Markand would have overrun us within a month."

"But she gave you up."

"I know that part, we don't have to go over it again," he said, some annoyance in his voice. "I spent a year at Markand serving the Holder Lord."

She frowned. "Serving how?"

He sighed. "As a kjardin. A personal guard."
Maskelle sat back, wrapping her arms around her knees. She could imagine it all too readily. From what she had seen of Rian, he would have made no secret of his dislike when the Holder Lord had come to Riverwait on his earlier visits. The Holder Lord of Markand must have been something of a sadistic games-player to demand the favorite bodyguard of the Lady Holder as part of a treaty in the first place. And it must have been an interesting year at Markand for Rian, a virtual prisoner in the guise of a trusted retainer, and of course everyone else in the Holder Lord's court would have known.

Rian was watching her face and must have followed her thought. "I made sure he didn't enjoy it too much," he said. "There are ways."

"I can imagine."

He laid back down and stretched, brows lifted ironically. "I think I overdid it, though."

It was a nice sight; she had always been attracted to lean men with flat stomachs, even if his skin was a little light for her eyes. "Oh?"

"There's an old custom, that when a High Holder Lord dies his best guards and servants go to the grave with him."

"Go to the grave?" Maskelle repeated blankly.

"Continue to serve him in the sunland," Rian explained. Seeing that she was still baffled, he spelled it out. "Get killed during the funeral, so the relatives can prove how much they really did honor the old bastard."

She looked away to conceal her reaction. To a member of a religious order which had debated for ten years on whether it was acceptable to allow cut flowers as spirit offerings, the idea of a living human as part of burial goods came as something of a shock.

Rian added, "It's fallen out of favor. But the priests read the omens and said the Holder Lord needed company on the journey into the sunland. Everybody, the family, the bodyguards, the wives, the clan leaders, the Guild Chiefs, all got together to decide who it would be. Guess who we picked?"

"I see. And I suppose the Holder Lord left detailed instructions about this to his priests before he died." Intellectually Maskelle could appreciate the final refinement of cruelty, but then she had been told often that she seldom did much of her thinking with her brain. The Holder Lord of Markand is dead, she reminded herself. Which was fortunate, because otherwise she would have to go to the Sintane and kill him herself. "How did you get away?"

"I survived the funeral games, which they let me know was very inconvenient for them. The Holder Lord's Heir wanted me put in the tomb alive, the way they used to do it. The guard captain, who was my lord officer, thought they should strangle me, which is also an old custom. But the chief priest decided to be magnanimous and had them give me a drug that would keep me unconscious through the burial rites, so I'd wake up just in time to suffocate."

"Small favors."

"Very small. But they didn't get as much of the drug down me as they thought, and it took so long they were late for the beginning of the rite, which starts in the Hall of the Hold. I pretended I couldn't stand, moaned and thrashed around, and they left me in the funerary chapel attached to the burial mound, with only a couple of guards outside. I was just conscious enough to put a finger down my throat and get rid of the rest of the drug. It almost took too long, but I was finally able to wake up enough to take one of the guards from behind and the other when he turned around. I got out of the chapel just before the procession came into sight. There was nowhere else to go, so I headed for the border into Gidale. The Heir sent hunters after me, so I had to keep going." He sat up, unbuckled his belt, and half-drew the siri to show her the hilt. "See that? This isn't mine, it's the Holder Lord's. I took it from the offering table. It had panthers and stags worked in gold; I sold those in Tirane."

Maskelle grinned in appreciation of the irony, though she suspected Rian had regretted giving up the sword's ornaments. "Why didn't you want to tell me this, why make me pry it out of you?"
He set the sheathed sword aside, though still within easy reach, and laid back down, propping himself up on one elbow. "You're a religious and I've been condemned as a sacrifice by priests, how did I know how you were going to take it?"

"I see." If she was going to do what she knew she wanted to, it was time for a little honesty. "It's not half so bad as some things I've done."

"And what's that?"

"I killed one of my husbands. Well, some people believe I killed all of them, and in a way, that's true."

Being Rian, he frowned and said, "You had husbands?"