Shadow and Betrayal

by Daniel Abraham

  ‘The sledge is this way,’ he said.

  Idaan stumbled, her boots new and awkward, her legs unaccustomed to the slick ice on the snow. But she followed.

  The chains were frozen to the tower, the lifting mechanism brittle with cold. The only way was to walk, but Otah found he was much stronger than he had been when they’d marched him up the tower before, and the effort of it kept him warm. The air was bitterly cold; there weren’t enough braziers in the city to keep the towers heated in winter. The floors he passed were filled with crates of food, bins of grains and dried fruits, smoked fish and meats. Supplies for the months until summer came again, and the city could forget for a while what the winter had been.

  Back in the palaces, Kiyan was waiting for him. And Maati. They were to meet and talk over the strategies for searching the library. And other things, he supposed. And there was a petition from the silversmiths to reduce the tax paid to the city on work that was sold in the nearby low towns. And the head of the Saya wanted to discuss a proper match for his daughter, with the strong and awkward implication that the Khai Machi might want to consider who his second wife might be. But for now, all the voices were gone, even the ones he loved, and the solitude was sweet.

  He stopped a little under two-thirds of the way to the top, his legs aching but his face warm. He wrestled open the inner sky doors and then unlatched and pushed open the outer. The city was splayed out beneath him, dark stone peeking out from under the snow, plumes of smoke rising as always from the forges. To the south, a hundred crows rose from the branches of dead trees, circled briefly, and took their perches again.

  And beyond that, to the east, he saw the distant forms he’d come to see: a sledge with a small team and two figures on it, speeding out across the snowfields. He sat, letting his feet dangle out over the rooftops, and watched until they were only a tiny black mark in the distance. And then as they vanished into the white.

  about the author

  Daniel Abraham has had stories published in the Vanishing Acts, Bones of the World, and The Dark anthologies, and has been included in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology as well. His story Flat Diane won the International Horror Guild award for mid-length fiction. He lives in New Mexico with his wife and daughter.

  Find out more about Daniel Abraham and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.net

  interview

  Were you writing for a long time before you were published? How did it feel to see your first novel in print?

  I’ve been writing most of my life. I’d been actively sending out work for publication for about ten years before I started selling short stories, and then another decade between selling my first short story and the first novel coming out. Seeing my first real book in the bookstores was oddly anticlimactic. By the time it came out, I was writing the third book in the series and working on some side projects. Looking back, twenty years of not having a book out required that I find some real, sustaining joy in doing the work for its own sake. The goal was always to be published, but it was never the endpoint.

  You’ve written short stories before moving on to novels - is there a difference, apart from length?

  There are some structural differences. Stories that can’t be told at shorter lengths become possible as you get longer. And the ones that can be encompassed by five or six thousand words become also become impossible at twenty or a hundred or a quarter million. That said, the immediate issues - how to make the dialogue interesting, how to evoke a location, when to show and when to tell - are pretty similar.

  Can you tell us a little bit about the background to The Long Price series?

  The Long Price Quartet was a couple of things. First off, it was my journeyman project. I went in having written three previous book-length stories, and aware that I wanted to learn better how to do them. It was also my first real experiment with epic fantasy. I wanted to try a structure that could contrast the epic scale of traditional fantasy with the epic scale of a single, normal lifetime.

  Did the idea for The Long Price series come to you fully realised or did you have one particular starting point from which it grew?

  It was originally a short story that I thought was complete in itself. When it became clear that the story was going to be much, much bigger, it took some more work. That first story became the prologue of the first book, almost unchanged from its original form.

  How extensively do you plot your novels before you start writing them? Do you plot the entire series before you start writing or do you prefer to let the story roam where it will?

  I outline along the way, but every outline is provisional. For the whole project, I knew the overall shape I wanted, and what the last scene would be. As I approached each individual story, I’d figure out the ending I was aiming for. It’s sort of like longdistance driving. I knew I was going from Los Angeles to Chicago, so I knew where I was going, but I didn’t plan out each individual turn and stop along the way.

  Do you have a set writing routine and if so, what is it?

  I have the intention of a set routine. I drop the darling child off at daycare, and head over to a print shop that my parents have behind their house. I spend from about eight thirty to lunchtime working, break for a sandwich, then back for another session until mid aftemoon, when it’s time to retrieve the kid. In practice, the world intrudes. But that’s what I aim for.

  Some authors talk of their characters ‘surprising’ them by their actions; is this something that has happened to you, or do you know from the start where each character will end up?

  My experience isn’t so much the characters surprising me, as much as I have a good idea of how everything fits together, and I’m o~en a little wrong. I could be wrong about this, but I think the difference is more about how a writer thinks through a story. My first draft is how I think the story through. Other people think it through by writing detailed outlines. I suspect it’s the same process with differences in style more than substance.

  What was the inspiration behind the names of your characters and your setting? There’s a very Eastern flavour to the books; was it your intention to rebel against the Fantasy’s traditional Western setting, or did it evolve during the writing?

  That was there from the start. I wanted to do something to reset people’s expectations. I wasn’t trying for a traditional epic fantasy, and I thought that would be one way to alert readers that this one might be a little different.

  The poses concept is really interesting. What inspired you to develop it as an integral part of the characters’ communication with each other?

  I stole it from a Walter Jon Williams short story. It’s okay, he knows I took it, and he’s cool with it. He had a far future setting in which people used mudras as inflection. I thought it was a brilliant touch, so I took it and expanded on it so that it stood as almost a second language. And then S. M. Stirling took it from me for use in a novel called In the Court of the Crimson Kings. But it’s okay. I know he took it, and I’m cool with it.

  Do have a personal theory on why Fantasy is so popular these days?

  I do. It’s pretty involved, but the short form goes like this: Fantasy is, at heart, involved with nostalgia and the (sometimes imperfect) healing of the world. We are in a place as a world community in which nostalgia and healing are profoundly comforting ideas.

  Do you see any particular trends in recent SF/Fantasy?

  A couple, and they bother me. First off, I think there’s a strong trend toward emotional darkness. I can even make an argument that I’m part of that. I think it’s a mistake to equate violence and ‘grittiness’ with realism. The other is the infinitely postponed conclusion. I believe that good stories end.

  Do you find it frustrating that so much excellent work is currently being produced in SF & Fantasy but that by and large it is still ignored by the literati?

  Not really. I know a lot of folks who are, but I really don’t understand what
the brass ring is that we’d be reaching for. It isn’t fame or money, or even cultural influence. J. K. Rowling has proven that. If recognition by an elite doesn’t get you anything other than recognrtion by that elite, that’s an argument that the elite is becoming inconsequential. That we are part of a living, vital, popular literature is why folks like Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, and Margaret Atwood have started borrowing our ideas. Literature qua literature is in real danger of going the way of professional poetry.

  Do you have any particular favourite authors who have influenced your work?

  No end of them. David Eddings as read by my sixteen-year-old self. George R. R. Martin. Dorothy Sayers. Camus, WalterTevis. Scott Westerfeld. Enrique Anderson Imbert. Robert B. Parker. Jane Austen. I could go on for days, really.

  What do you enjoy reading in your moments of leisure? Do you stick to the SF/Fantasy market as a rule or enjoy other genres too?

  I usually read something other than what I’m writing at the moment. So when I’m busy with epic fantasy stuff, I’ll read mystery or horror or mainstream literature or history or science. I enjoy the genre, but I read like an omnivore.

  Do you chat about your books with other authors as you’re writing them, or do you prefer to keep in your own head until the first draft is complete?

  I’m lucky that I live in a community with a lot of working writers. The group I hang out with talks about our work with each other, up to and including having planning sessions to work through structural issues and brainstorming plotlines and characters for work at the very beginning of its life. I don’t think I do my best work in isolation. Having other minds to spark against makes me better.

  What would you do if you weren’t a writer?

  I have fantasies about going back for a Masters degree in Public Health. I’m too old now to go to medical school, but public health is where MDs go when they burn out and want to do something that actually makes a difference. Epidemiology in particular turns me on.

  So, what’s next for you?

  Well, I have a new fantasy series that I’m getting ready to pitch, an urban fantasy series that I’m writing under pseudonym, a mystery series I’d like to spin up, and some short stories I’ve promised to write. I think I have enough to keep me off the street corners for a while yet.

  if you enjoyed

  THE LONG PRICE look out for THE COMPANY by K. J. Parker

  Chapter One

  The boatman who rowed him from the ship to the quay kept looking at him: first a stare, then a frown. Pretending he hadn’t noticed, he pulled the collar of his greatcoat up round his chin, a perfectly legitimate response to the spray and the cold wind.

  “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” the boatman asked.

  “Wouldn’t have thought so,” he replied.

  The boatman’s frown deepened. He pulled a dozen strokes, then lifted his oars out of the water, letting the back-current take the boat the rest of the way. “I do know you,” the boatman said. “Were you in the war?”

  He smiled. “Everybody was in the war.”

  The boatman was studying his collar and the frayed remains of his cuffs, where the rank and unit insignia had been before he unpicked them. “Cavalry?” the boatman persisted. “I was in the cavalry.”

  “Sappers,” he replied. It was the first lie he’d told for six weeks.

  He felt the boat nuzzle up to the quay, grabbed his bags and stood up. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Two quarters.”

  He paid three - two for the fare, one for the lie - and climbed the steps, not looking back. The smell was exactly as he remembered it: seaweed, rotting rope, cod drying on racks, sewage, tar. It would’ve been nice if just one thing had changed, but apparently not.

  As he walked up the steep cobbled hill, he saw a thick knot of people blocking his way. Never a good sign. It was just starting to rain.

  It was as he’d feared. The short, fat man in the immaculate uniform was almost certainly the harbourmaster; next to him, two thin men who had to be his clerks; the old, bald man had the constipated look of a mayor or a portreeve. Add two guards and a tall, scared-looking youth who was presumably someone’s nephew. At least they hadn’t had time to call out the town band.

  No chance of slipping past. He didn’t look at them directly. At ten yards, they stood at sort-of-attention. At five yards, the presumed harbourmaster cleared his throat. He was actually shaking with fear.

  “General Kunessin,” he said, in a squeaky little voice. “This is a tremendous honour. If only we’d had a little more notice . . .”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” he replied; his polite-to-nuisances voice. “Listen, is there somewhere I can hire a horse and two mules?”

  Looking rather dazed, the harbourmaster gave him directions: through the Landgate, second on your left, then sharp right—

  “Coopers Row,” he interrupted. “Thanks, that’s fine.”

  The harbourmaster’s eyes opened very wide. “You’ve been here before then, General?”

  “Yes.”

  One thing that had changed in seventeen years was the cost of hiring a horse in Faralia. It had doubled. All the more surprising because, as far as he could tell, it was the same horse.

  “Is this the best you’ve got?” he asked. “I’ve got a long way to go.”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  The horse shivered. It wasn’t a particularly cold day. “Thanks,” Kunessin said. “Forget the horse and make it three mules.”

  The groom looked at him; cheapskates aren’t welcome here. Kunessin smiled back. “How’s your uncle, by the way?” he asked pleasantly. “Keeping well?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Two things, then. “Not that one,” he said, “it’s lame.” He counted out two dollars and nine turners. “Thank you so much,” he said.

  The groom handed him the leading reins. “Do I know you?”

  “No,” he replied, because at six and a half turners per half-dead mule per day, he was entitled to a free lie. “I’m a perfect stranger.”

  Climbing the hill eastwards out of town, his feet practically dragging on the ground as the mule panted mournfully under his weight, he thought: hell of a way for the local hero to travel. And that made him laugh out loud.

  Because he took a long loop to avoid Big Moor, it took him two and a half hours to reach Ennepe, at which point he got off the mule and walked the rest of the way, to save time.

  No change, he thought. Even the gap in the long wall was still there, a little bit bigger, a few more stones tumbled down and snug in the grass. Seventeen years and they still hadn’t got around to fixing it. Instead, they’d bundled cut gorse into the breach and let the brambles grow up through the dead, dry branches. He smiled as he pictured them, at breakfast round the long kitchen table: one of these days we’d better fix that gap in the wall, and the others all nodding. Seventeen years; seventeen years slipping by, and they’d never found the time. For some reason, that made him feel sad and rather angry.

  Walking down the drove, Stoneacre on his left, he could see Big Moor clearly in the distance. Seventy-five acres of bleak, thin hilltop pasture, a green lump. It cost him a good deal of effort to avoid looking at it, but he managed.

  At the point where the drove crossed the old cart road (now it was just a green trace in the bracken; by the look of it, the lumber carts didn’t come this way any more), he saw a boy sitting on a fallen tree, staring at him. He pushed his hat back a little, to show his face, and called out, “Hello.”

  The boy’s head dipped about half an inch. Otherwise he didn’t move. Kunessin understood the look on the boy’s face all too well: the natural distrust of newcomers, at war with the furious curiosity about a stranger, in a place where strangers never came.

  “There’s a stray ewe caught in the briars up at the top, just past the deer track,” he said. “One of yours?”

  The boy studied him for three heartbeats, then nodded a full inch. His lips moved, but “than
ks” didn’t quite make it through. He stood up, but didn’t walk.

  “You’ll be Nogei Gaeon’s boy,” Kunessin said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m on my way up to the house now. Is he likely to be in the yard, this time of day?”

  Desperate hesitation; then the boy shook his head. “He’ll be up at the linhay,” he replied, “feeding the calves.”

  “Over Long Ridge?”

  The boy’s eyes widened; he couldn’t understand how a stranger would know the names of the fields. “Thanks,” Kunessin said. “How about your uncle Kudei? Where’d he be?”

  The boy gave him a long, frightened look. “You from the government?”

  Kunessin grinned. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” he said. He left the boy and carried on down the hill until he reached the top gate of Castle Field, which led into Greystones, which led into Long Ridge. The hedges were high, neglected, and they shielded him from the sight of Big Moor.

  (Well, he thought, I’m home, as near as makes no odds; the last place on earth I want to be.)