Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  The enemy soldiers were collecting themselves on the ground, regrouping; there were some twenty men altogether, and five dragons, none of them very substantial, and all were looking warily up in his direction. “We must withdraw to cover again,” Laurence said. “They are putting together a chain-gun there, and your bracework is unarmored; you cannot take a shot from that gun—”

  “If you are quite certain they do not mean to surrender,” Temeraire said, “I will not let them finish it; even if they are so very small, I suppose they are larger, and better armed, than Perscitia and the others; I cannot consider that I am going against the natural order of morality to defend—”

  “You are not!” Laurence interrupted. “But their small-arms fire will pierce you if you come close enough to bowl them over again: you can see they have taken up defensive positions.”

  “I do not need to come very close,” Temeraire said, and wheeling away into a wide circle, gathered his breath, in steady gulps, swelling out his chest; he dived toward the strike force, and opening his jaws, let the shuddering thunder of the divine wind come bellowing out of him, the smaller trees ringing like struck bells as their branches trembled and clashed against one another. The men in the front ranks collapsed, blood dripping from their faces beneath their helmets; the dragons crying out fell to the ground. The gun emplacement fell, its nose crumpling against the ground, explosions of white dazzling electrical light bursting along its sides, cartridges detonating like tiny bombs; and as Temeraire swept over, he lashed out with his hind legs, smashing the rest to pieces.

  “My God,” Laurence said, in something between astonishment and dismay; he had never heard of the like, an entire heavy-armor strike force brought low by one dragon. Temeraire was wheeling back up again, away from the wreckage; Laurence twisted around to look down at the smoking rubble and the soldiers sprawled raglike in the remnants of their gun post. Certainly Temeraire had possessed the advantage of surprise, but the sheer magnitude of destruction was extravagant.

  “Now do you suppose they will surrender?” Temeraire said, circling back.

  “If they remain capable of it,” Laurence said.

  They landed again behind the emplacement, and Laurence secured the few surviving soldiers one after another: they were all of them in a bad way, ill and most of them visibly concussed, pupils wandering and eyes bloodshot, confused; he supposed there was some sort of brain damage there, and shuddered to see it. The dragons all huddled, flinching away from Temeraire, flattening themselves to the ground instinctively when he leaned toward them. Laurence began to think that perhaps the old breeders had not been entirely so absurd as he had always been taught to think them.

  Temeraire nosed at the smoldering buildings anxiously, and abruptly a blue dragon—not half his size, though larger than any of the soldier beasts—thrust a head out and said, “Oh! Thank goodness you are here; have you cleared out those wretched soldiers, then?”

  “I have, naturally,” Temeraire said, preening a little. “Laurence, this is Perscitia; I dare say she can tell us what has happened to your ship: he is that Navy officer,” he added, turning to Perscitia, “and he is not so dreadful as I supposed he would be: he knows a great deal about fighting—not, of course, that fighting is anything so very splendid, at all.”

  “I should say not,” Perscitia said. “Only look at what they have done to all our instrumentation, and our equipment! I suppose everything is ruined that we did not have under cover; it is beyond bearing. As for his ship, if you mean the Navy vessel that was up there—”

  “Was?” Laurence said sharply.

  “Oh, it is still up there,” Perscitia said, “but they have surrendered: the Bonapartists brought a cruiser.”

  That was ominous indeed. “If they have a cruiser, they will have more than one landing strike force,” Laurence said to Temeraire urgently. “Have you other installations critical to keeping up the shield?”

  “There is the secondary generator, on the southwest continent,” Temeraire said, “but our six Longwings live directly by it, so I don’t suppose they will have had any luck, unless there are a great deal more of them than there were here.”

  Perscitia was already orchestrating a small army of robot hands, which had trooped out of the building behind her, to resurrect the communications; very shortly a message had been received confirming that the strike force had been sent, and dispatched in what Laurence gathered was a somewhat gruesome manner. “But they would not listen,” one of the Longwings, named Lily, said, sounding quite bewildered that a fully equipped Bonapartist heavy armor strike force should have dared to persevere in the face of ground resistance, “and those guns were terrible—Temeraire, Excidium is badly hurt; we must have the full medical unit here straightaway—so once we realized how dangerous they were, we went aloft and spat on them from there; I am afraid it was quite indiscriminate, and they are all of them mostly dead. We ruined a great deal of our own gear, too, and we cannot touch anything or go into the encampment, but fortunately the housing was not harmed, so the shield is perfectly secure at present.”

  “So there is no need for any more fighting, at present?” Temeraire said—sounding, Laurence thought, rather wistful.

  “No,” Lily said, with a like tone of regret.

  “Sir,” Laurence said, “I entirely appreciate the Navy’s interest in this matter, but having spoken with the governor, I cannot offer you the least hope of persuading the dragons to relinquish the planet; nor do I consider it even a desirable course of action. We should have to divert at least a first-rate to adequately defend the system from orbit.”

  “And you in all seriousness expect me to believe that a handful of untrained, largely unequipped dragons, the better part of them from antiquated and oversized breeding lines, are going to be a sufficient ground defense instead?” Admiral Roland regarded him with marked skepticism.

  “I might point out that they have already turned aside two incursions,” Laurence said, “although I grant you, we cannot rely on the Bonapartists not to find ways to address their advantages; but supplying their want of equipment and training will surely be the more efficient solution—not to mention,” he added, “that any alternative should certainly involve having to remove them by force ourselves.”

  He went outside after his conversation—he suspected his suggestions had been better received for lack of any really palatable alternatives, than for his own qualities of persuasion—and found Temeraire loitering outside, in as innocent a manner as a dragon the size of a dreadnought could manage, which was not wholly successful. He looked at Laurence when he had come out and said, with an attempt at coolness, “So I suppose that now we have settled the Bonapartists, you mean to press us again to let you quarry the planet.”

  “As it happens,” Laurence said, “to the contrary: Admiral Roland wishes me to inform you that the Navy will send you some proper armor: we hope that if we can make you a sufficient bar to possession, the Bonapartists will be induced to give up their attempts to seize the planet, and you may proceed with your development as you like.”

  “Oh! That is very handsome of her,” Temeraire said, sitting back on his haunches. “That is quite more than I had looked for; we will be very glad for the armor. I suppose I do not need to bargain with you, then.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Laurence said.

  “Well,” Temeraire said, “I have persuaded—that is, we have all talked it over together, and we think if you will give us some better tools, that there is no reason we might not extract perhaps a ton of trinium every year: Perscitia is of the opinion it would be quite manageable, without doing anything untoward, or making a ruin of things. So, if you like—we will give you the trinium, and you will give us more armor, and perhaps some more silken hangings, and send us some more elephants: we hope you may find it a reasonable exchange.”

  “Good Lord,” Laurence said, “I should say so; but—” He hesitated; of course for the Navy’s sake, he ought merely to take it, straight
away; a ton of trinium a year would represent nearly a quarter of the entire Commonwealth’s supply. “But I think I must tell you,” he said, reluctantly, “that such a quantity of trinium will certainly encourage the most hostile intentions on the part of the Bonapartists: they will be far less likely to leave you unmolested. You will require more armor and more weaponry as well—a secondary shield at the least, and you must prepare for regular incursions; not merely attempts at invasion but raids, to seize whatever trinium they might lay their hands on; you may also be sure that they will fund piracy against you as well. You will have to devote considerable effort to meeting their offensives, and to training as well.”

  “Pirates? Are you sure?” Temeraire said, his ruff pricking up, before he hastily cleared his throat and said with a tolerable attempt at carelessness, “But that does not matter: we have agreed we think it very poor-spirited of us to refuse to mine the trinium, only because we were afraid, which we aren’t at all; and certainly we must be prepared for them to make attacks in the future, regardless. Even though, naturally, under most circumstances we would prefer by far to devote ourselves entirely to scholarly pursuits, one must be prepared to make sacrifices.”

  “That is very handsome of you,” Laurence said, beginning to be amused. “Well, if you are quite certain, I can assure you that Admiral Roland will be delighted to accept, and I am confident there will be no difficulty in making you a fair exchange, nor in equipping you suitably.”

  Temeraire rubbed a talon over his forehead, pleased, and then cleared his throat, a peculiar deep rumbling noise. “But I suppose you will be leaving again, straightaway,” he said. “Once your ship has been repaired.”

  “That, I am afraid, will be some time,” Laurence said. “The Reliant’s systems have been thoroughly compromised: she will have to be hauled to dry dock and purged. I have been seconded to you as a military advisor for the moment, if you will have me; Admiral Roland thought I might be of some use to you.” He had known, as he sought the assignment, that it was unwise: having allowed himself to be grounded, as it were, he might well not receive another ship. But aside from a sense of duty—he had felt the need they had of such an advisor, even before Temeraire had outlined to him their intentions—he found he could not leave this world without reluctance; there was work to be done here, and in an honorable company.

  Temeraire’s ruff flared momentarily. “Oh, yes,” he said, “—that is, I am very glad to hear it, Captain; your assistance has been very useful to the colony; do you suppose,” he added, abandoning his pretense at formality, “that we might take a survey together, of our settlements? I should like at once to take consideration of our defenses.”

  “With all my heart,” said Laurence.

  This is a deleted sequence from the fourteenth and final Wheel of Time book, A Memory of Light. As such, it contains some minor interior spoilers for that book—and it might not make a ton of sense to you if you haven’t read the Wheel of Time.

  However, if you have read the Wheel of Time (particularly the final book), I’d suggest that you read this sequence now and go no further in the introduction. The commentary here will be more meaningful to you if you’ve read the sequence first, I believe.

  I pitched this series of scenes to Team Jordan with the knowledge that the scenes were on shaky ground from the start. We knew Demandred was in Shara, and we knew some of what he’d been up to. I wanted to show a glimpse of this. However, Robert Jordan—in interviews—had said that the stories were never going to show Shara, at least not in any significant way.

  I felt that he hadn’t ruled out the possibility of a glimpse of Shara—he had only implied that nothing major would happen there on screen. Team Jordan agreed, and I set to work writing these scenes. My goal was to show a different side of one of the Forsaken. Demandred had been building himself up in Shara for months and months, overthrowing the government (Graendal helped with that, unwittingly) and securing his place as a figure of prophecy and power.

  He had his own story, which could have filled the pages of his own Wheel-of-Time-like series. He had allies and enemies, companions who had been with him for years, much as Rand, Egwene, and company had found during their adventures in the west. My goal was to evoke this in a few brief scenes, at first not letting you know who this “Bao” was. I wanted to present him sympathetically, at least as sympathetically as a man like him could be presented. It would only be at the end of the sequence that the reader realized that Bao was indeed Demandred, and that everything he was doing here was in preparation for destroying the heroes.

  It was also important to me that we see Demandred for what he is—an incredibly capable man with a single overriding flaw. Everything about him, including his ability to feel affection, is tainted by his supreme hatred of Lews Therin. The narrative was to hint that it never had to be that way. He could have made different choices. Of all the Forsaken, I find Demandred the most tragic.

  The sequence accomplished these goals—but it did so too well. In threading this sequence into the rest of A Memory of Light, we found that the Demandred scenes were distracting. The worldbuilding required to make Shara distinctive felt out of place in the last book, where the narrative needed to be focused on tying up loose threads rather than introducing a multitude of new questions.

  Harriet—Robert Jordan’s widow and editor of every Wheel of Time book—felt that the scenes’ evocation of an entire untold series of books was too overwhelming. It didn’t feel enough like the Wheel of Time. If this had been book eight, that would be wonderful—the scenes would add variety to the series. In book fourteen, however, they offered a taste of something that would never be sated, and served only to make promises we could not fulfill.

  My biggest worry in cutting these sequences was that Demandred’s arrival later in the book would feel abrupt. However, test readers didn’t feel this way—Demandred as a character had been a proverbial gun on the mantel long enough that everyone was waiting for him to show up. His arrival felt dynamic to them, rather than unexplained.

  So, in the end, we left these scenes on the cutting room floor. I’m quite fond of them, and do consider the general outline of events within to be canon. However, the specifics of the worldbuilding are not canon. We cut these scenes before Team Jordan’s Maria Simons, queen of continuity, had a chance to go over them with her fine-tooth comb.

  I hope you enjoy this last taste of Wheel of Time storytelling. Thank you for reading.

  — Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson

  RIVER OF SOULS

  Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson

  Bao slipped into the Oneness as he sat with legs crossed, surrounded by darkness.

  During his youthful studies, he had been required to seek the Oneness in the midst of a crashing storm, while being towed on a sled behind a horse, and finally while enduring the pain of a hot coal against his skin. He had once considered that training to be extreme, but life had since required him to find the Oneness during war and agony, during tempests and earthquakes. For today, for this moment, a dark quiet room would do.

  The Oneness was lack of emotion. Bao took all of his feelings—all of his thoughts, all that he was—and pressed them into a single point of darkness in his mind. That darkness consumed the emotion. He felt nothing. He thought nothing. He did not sense satisfaction at this, for there could be no satisfaction in this state. He was the Oneness. That was all.

  The tent flap lifted, allowing in filtered sunlight. Bao opened his eyes. There was no surprise when he saw Mintel. One could not be surprised in the Oneness.

  A thought did hover on the edges of his consciousness. The thought that this man should have been miles and miles away.

  “How?” Bao asked, releasing the Oneness.

  Mintel stepped forward. It had only been six months since Bao had seen Mintel, but the old man seemed to have aged a decade. His face was all folds and furrows, like a tablecloth taken in two hands and crumpled together. Completely bald, he wore a short bear
d, all gray. Though he walked with a cane, his steps were sure. That was good to see. Mintel might have grown old, but not frail.

  “I rode the caprisha through the City of Dreams, my son,” Mintel said, taking Bao by the arm.

  “Dangerous.”

  “I could not miss this day.”

  “I would not have had you lose your soul to come see me.”

  “Not just to see you,” Mintel said, smiling. “To see the fulfillment of prophecy, after all of these years. To see the coming of angor’lot, the True Destiny. No, I would not risk the City of Dreams for my son alone, but to attend the crowning of the Wyld…I would risk anything.”

  “Not a crowning yet,” Bao said. Emotions were insignificant. “Not unless I survive.”

  “True, true. You held the Oneness when I arrived?”

  Bao nodded.

  “You came to me knowing the Oneness already,” Mintel said. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ve taught you anything at all.”

  The bells rang outside, distant. Bao looked toward the tent flaps, outlined faintly with light. “It is time.”

  “So it is.”

  After years of preparation, it was time. Bao looked at the man who had adopted him. “I came here for this, you understand,” Bao said. “For this only. I did not expect it to take years. Attachments are irrelevant. Only this matters.”

  Mintel’s smile broadened, lines spreading from his eyes and mouth. “To want, to receive, to understand.” It had the way of a quote about it, likely one of the proverbs of Kongsidi, the great servant. Mintel was abrishi, after all.