“It all comes back to family,” said Joanna, “doesn’t it?” and pulled her Mustang down the long, pot-holed gravel drive into the yard at 75313 Porson Avenue, the shabby bungalow rising before them against the night.
“Doesn’t everything?” Antryg unfolded his tall height from the front seat, and followed her up to the porch. “Is that from Ben Universe?” he added, as she picked up the slim package that the postman had left against the screen-door.
She unwrapped it. It was a CD, bearing a black-and-white photo of Zénobie plantation on the front, with the title, Songs of Cosmic Light. Enclosed was a short note from Ben.
“Nothing from my mom, you notice,” observed Joanna with a sigh. “If she’s even still into Cosmic Inter-Connectedness. Maybe one of these days I’ll be spiritually evolved enough to quit hoping she’s ever going to be different from what she is. Was that what was missing from the so-called haunting? Because you didn’t sense the rage that anyone would have had – my mother, or yours, or Ben Hallard – to have their child taken away?”
“I’d certainly like to think I was that wise.” Antryg hunched his shoulders, in their threadbare pea-coat, against the autumn chill. “Actually, it was just that all the manifestations were aural – something which anyone could reproduce. And the girl Galadriel was an anomaly, the only one who wasn’t part of the Inner Circle. So of course I looked in her direction first. As the mage Isar Chelladin wrote, that which is likely, but impossible, should be considered sooner than that which is possible but unlikely. Because we have no idea, really, what is possible.”
“Aristotle said something like that.”
“Really? Perhaps he knew Isar Chelladin.”
Perhaps, thought Joanna, he had. “I wouldn’t have thought it was likely,” she mused after a time, “that my mother would say she was proud of me. But she did, you know. As we were getting on the plane to come back here.”
She smiled reminiscently. Of course, her mother had added, Even though you actually had nothing to do with catching that awful man… But I’m proud of you anyway, dear. Her kiss had been a light, cool touch, perfumed with the mix of frankincense and cannibis that Joanna recalled from her childhood.
She still smiled at the recollection of that scent. In an odd way it was good to know that Starshine Worlds-Daughter wasn’t going to change.
“I guess that’s about as good as I’m going to get, for now. Ben says—” Joanna held the note up to the porch light, then dug in her pocket for keys. “—their Teacher held the Institute’s first Cosmic Conference and—” She angled the message, “—raised enough pure psychic energy to alter the course of the world. That was on the first,” she added. “I haven’t noticed any alteration in the psychic energy of the world.”
Antryg licked a fingertip and held it up, as if testing the atmosphere of the rainy night. “So far,” he said thoughtfully. “So far.”
About the Author
Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in Southern California, she attended the University of California, Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux, France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger, and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara Hamilton.
Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.
Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.
She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.
The Further Adventures
by Barbara Hambly
The concept of “happily ever after” has always fascinated me.
Just exactly what happens after, “happily ever after”?
The hero/heroine gets the person of his/her dreams, and rides off into the sunset with their loved one perched on the back of the horse hanging onto saddlebags stuffed with gold. (It’s a very strong horse.)
So what happens then? Where do they live? Who does the cooking?
This was one of the reasons I started writing The Further Adventures.
The other was that so many of the people who loved the various fantasy series that I wrote for Del Rey in the 1980s and ‘90s, really liked the characters. I liked those characters too, and I missed writing about them.
Thus, in 2009 I opened a corner of my website and started selling stories about what happened to these characters after the closing credits rolled on the last novel of each series.
The Darwath series centers on the Keep of Dare, where the survivors of humankind attempt to re-build their world in the face of an ice age winter, after the destruction of civilization by the Dark Ones. Ingold the Wizard is assisted by two stray Southern Californians, Gil Patterson - a historian who is now part of the Keep Guards - and Rudy Solis, in training to be a mage.
The Unschooled Wizard stories involve the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf, who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers. Because the evil Wizard King sought out and killed every trained wizard a hundred years ago, Sun Wolf has no teacher to instruct him in his powers. With his former second-in-command, the warrior woman Starhawk, he must seek one - and hope whatever wizard he finds isn’t evil, too.
In the Winterlands tales, scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest do their best to protect the people of their remote villages from whatever threats come along: dragons, bandits, fae spirits, and occasionally the misguided forces of the distant King.
Antryg Windrose is the archmage of the Council of Wizards in his own dimension, exiled for misbehavior - meddling in the affairs of the non-mageborn - to Los Angeles in the 1980s (that’s when the novels were written). He lives with a young computer programmer, Joanna Sheraton, and keeps a wary eye on the Void between Universes, to defend this world from whatever might come through.
Though out of print, all four of these series are available digitally on-line.
To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War. As a free man of color, Benjamin has to solve crimes while constantly watching his own back lest he be kidnapped and sold as a slave. New Orleans in the 1830s was that kind of town. In the novels he is assisted by his schoolmistress wife Rose, and his good-for-nothing white buddy Hannibal; two of the four Further Adventures concerning January are in fact about what Rose does while Benjamin is out of town.
I have always been an enthusiastic fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Over the years I have been asked to contribute stories to various Sherlock Holmes anthologies, and when the character went into Public Domain, I added these four stories to my collection.
Quest For Glory is a stand-alone, a short piece I wrote for the program book at a science fiction convention at which I was Guest of Honor.
Sunrise on Running Water is tenuously connected to the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series, in that Don Simon makes a brief cameo appearance. After seeing the movie Titanic - and reflecting that the doomed ship departed from Ireland after sunset and sank just as dawn was breaking…and that vampires lose their powers over running water - I just had to write it. It’s the only story that’s more about the idea than about the characters.
The Further Adventures are follow-ons to the main novels of their respective series. They can be read on their own, but the Big Stuff got done in the novels: who these people are, how they met, what the major underlying problems are in their various worlds. I suppose they’re a tr
ibute to the fact that for me - and, it seems, for a lot of fans - these characters are real, and I at least care about what happens to them, and what they do when they’re not saving the world. They’re smaller issues, not world-shakers: puzzle-stories and capers.
Life goes on.
Love goes on.
Everyone continues to have Further Adventures for the rest of their lives.
*
Novels in the Antryg Windrose Series (out of print but commercially available digitally)
The Silent Tower
The Silicon Mage
Dog-Wizard
Zenobie (Windrose Chronicles) Page 6