by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler
“Likely they are.” The captainHe eyed the end of the street, where the harbor lay. He chewed the inside of his lip and straightened the guard’s uniform. “I’llm going to scout ahead in case they are waiting for us.”
“Don’t be silly,” Katin whispered., “You need to be aboard to get us homeI can go.”
“Mostly you need Porit for that.” Captain Stylian eyed the end of the street, where the harbor was just visible. “Besides I can tell the state of the ship, and you won’t know what to look for.”
It was sensible, though she still wished he would not go. “Both of us? As if we are patrolling?”
He shifted his weight, looking again to the end of the street. “Agreed. It will look more natural with a pair, I think.”
Katin lead the way before Stylian could change his mind. He caught up with her a moment later andAs they strode down the street toward the harbor.,
Tthe captain rested his hand upon the hilt of the tube weapon. “Do you know how to work this?”
“No idea.”
He inhaled sharply a moment later. “Thank the sisters. No one has noticed our absence yet.”
Ahead of them lay their ship, tied to the same dock they had first arrived at. Only a single guard stoodwaited at the foot of the gangplank.
The captain’s breath eased out in relief. “Thank the Sisters. No one has noticed our absence yet.”
Better than merely standingthat, the guard lay on his back on a mat, withhe had his face tilted up to face the moon in an attitude of prayer. Their arrival coincided with the midnight moon reaching its fullest brightness. Though Katin and Stylian were exposed walking down the street, the guard would be night -blind from staring at the bright orb overhead.
Stylian turned briefly to wave Poritthe crew forward.
They crew responded instantly and hurried as one down the street to their ship. Katin quickened her own pace. The sound of their footfalls changed wWhen they hit the wood of the docks, andtheir footsteps echoed back against the houses behind them. The guard looked down from the moon.
He blinked, staggering to his feet. “Alarm!”
As his voice rose into the night, Katin recognized him—not a guard at all, but Proctor Veleh. Behind them, metal clattered as a half dozen soldiers appeared on the dock, cutting off their retreat.
Katin sprang forward and shoved the tube against the Proctor’s chest. Her bluff had worked once,; perhaps it would again. In Setish, she shouted, “Stop! Or the Proctor is a dead mandies.”
The soldiers slowed at the end of the pier, their weapons raised to point at the sailors. There were far more sailors than soldiers, but every single one of the guards had one of these cursed tubes.
The proctor looked past her to the sailors and appeared to be counting their number. “I confess surprise. I had not thought to check the prison after your escape from the caves.”
“Tell your soldiers to leave.”
“No. You may shoot me if you like, but you shall not escape judgment under the blessed light of the eternal moon.” Proctor Veleh looked down his nose at Katin.
“As long as we escape here, I’m fine taking my chance on judgment.”
“Even if I stepped aside and let you aboard, what then? You are advocating a heresy, and the Apex Council will find you no matter where in the kingdom you go.”
“We’re from across the sea.” The image of the moon sinking below the horizon gave her an idea. “If your ship follows us, our SevenFive Sisters will drown the moon.”
The Proctor laughed. “You think we do not know that our world is round? The moon does not drown if one goes too far weast. She remains over the capital to provide her blessings upon our people. No life exists outside of her divine sight.”
Katin did not bother giving him an answer. She looked to the captain and switched back to her native language. “Ideas on what to do?”
“This?” Stylian pointed his weapon at the guards.
A tremendous flash and clap rang out in the night. The guards scattered, ducking behind barrels and poles, but none of them fell. Thise sound unleashed the sailors to fall upon the guards. More claps resounded through the night.
Yells, cries of pain, and a brimstone stench crowded against each other. Katin pushed the Proctor hard in the chest, and he stumbled back. His heel went out past the edge of the dock and he tumbled over.
“Move! Move!” Stylian bellowed, and like wharf rats, the sailors obeyed their captainswarmed aboard the ship.
Scrambling and cursing, Porit was the first past Katin, haulinged a wounded sailor up, throwing his arm over her shoulders. The others followed, leaving behind the bodies of the guards, but not their fellow shipmates.
As soon as the last one was aboard, Captain Stylian gave the order to cast off. Katin retreated to the railhelped with the wounded, attempting to serve some purpose by watching for pursuit as they pulled away from the dock.
She glanced back once.
Her last image of the city was of Proctor Veleh splashinged in the water at the base of the dock. The blessed light of the moon shone upon him.
#
They sailed due east under full sails for hours. Porit told the captain to take the course that would put the most distance between them and the land and she would get them home from there. Katin stood with her hands tucked underbeneath her arms. Between her fingers she rolled the barrell of the weapon as if it were a prayer bead, begging each of the sSisters for aid in their escape.
The prayer was automatic, but the beliefcomfort did not follow. Katin had been to her homeland and discovered that it was not the thing of legends. There was no safe place for her people. Not at home, not here.
The captain came to join her at the rail, still in his borrowed uniform. He sank down on a coil of rope with a groan.
Katin tore her gaze away from the thiwanning moon. “Are you all right?”
“I may have lied a little about faking my illness.”
She snorted and went back to watching the path behind them.
“Thinking about your sSisters’ birthplace?”
She rolled the barrel another turn. “The Apex Councillor said that they would send ships after us.”
“You mean the fellow at the dock? Even if they got a crew up and running as soon as he was out of the water, we’ve got a significant head start on them.”
“No. His boss. And I don’t mean just us, I mean Marth. I think they’re going to invade.” She held up the gun. “I keep thinking that our country will need to work to catch up with their weaponsThe map of the Center Kingdom had no borders. Remember? They’ve conquered the entire continent. Bringing everyone under the light of the eternal moon.”
He grupointed and stared up at the skyweapon in her hand. “I guessWith those . . . Maybe the sevenFive sSisters may have lead us here to give us warning.”
Katin turned to stared at him. “That’s the third time you’ve spoken of the sSisters tonight. You don’t have to act like you believe in them.”
“To my surprise . . . I’m not. Not pretending, I mean.” The captain pointed at the cluster of stars in the sky. “You told me that every story has some truth behind it. Finding the truth here . . . ? Makes me trust the parts I haven’t seen the truth of yet. Feel like they must have been watching over us, you know?”
Katin followed his gaze up, to where the sSiste
rs traveled their path across the heavens. The trail of stars behind them might even hold Lesid. Maybe the truth was that the SevenFive Sisters had fled their homeland, or maybe they had been blown off course, or perhapsmaybe they were guardians who looked over her people. And the light of Mondeusa lay behind them, casting silver across the sea.
Brightest light in the darkness, it consumes all who enter. . . . Not all. She had passed through the light of the moon and returned.
The moon threw its silver light in a band across the sea them, chasing her home.
Also by MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL
Free Short Fiction
Links to more than twenty short stories, novelettes, and novellas are collected here.
Novels
Shades of Milk and Honey
Glamour in Glass
Without a Summer
Valour and Vanity
Of Noble Family
THE MAKING OF I.E.DEMON
WRITING EXCUSES 7.35
BRAINSTORMING WITH DAN
(Listen on WritingExcuses.com)
Dan: My friend George Scott who runs Peerless Books in Alpharetta, Georgia, has a very cool charity called Books for Heroes, where he sends books overseas to soldiers. They’re doing a short story anthology connected to that, and he asked me to participate, which is awesome. It’s specifically military thrillers, which I’ve never written before, and I don’t really know what to do. I asked him if I could throw in some supernatural elements, and he said yes. I was telling Howard about this idea last week, and he gave me the coolest title ever, “I.E.Demon.” Which I think is such a cool, Afghanistan—
Howard: IED is improvised explosive device.
Dan: I would like to use that title.
Brandon: Improvised Explosive Demons.
Howard: Just I.E.Demon, not Improvised Explosive—
Mary: It’s Internet Explorer Demon, which is much more destructive.
Brandon: Okay. We’re brainstorming I.E.Demon for you.
Dan: I have that title, and I have a couple of ideas, and I have nothing else. We need to turn this into a story in the next fifteen minutes.
Mary: What are the couple of ideas you have?
Dan: One, for example, is to just go right with the IED, the little bomb that is hidden in the road, that they can trigger and blow up a passing convoy of soldiers. If that is a demon, then let’s say the Taliban has run out of resources. They don’t have actual bombs anymore, so they’ve made a pact with horrible dark forces from beyond, and they’ve got a demon buried under this road, and when a tank drives over it, they chant and it explodes, and out comes a demon and starts eating people.
Howard: An alternative to that is the demon is being provided by Halliburton as armor. It’s under the Humvee. There are demons riding under the Humvees whose job it is to absorb the killing blow of the explosive.
Brandon: So they’ve got good demons?
Howard: Not necessarily good demons—if the IED goes off in the wrong way, you end up with loose demons who are injured and angry.
Brandon: Right, okay. On one side, the Taliban is demonic consulting. On the other side, it is the US military who is using them as armor.
Howard: I’ll be honest with you, the first idea was the first one I went to. At risk of kowtowing to political correctness, portraying terrorists as demon worshippers—
Mary: Yeah, that is problematic.
Howard: Portraying Halliburton as demon mongering is just funny.
Brandon: It is a charity to support soldiers, correct?
Dan: There’s a definite element of fan service in the anthology.
Brandon: There is that. If you’re considering where it’s coming from, painting these soldiers as using demon technology—
Howard: The way I’d roll with this is—a common theme in military fiction is your equipment was built by the lowest bidder. The idea that somebody built armor and got the lowest bid—
Dan: They undercut Halliburton.
Howard: —so the soldiers don’t know what’s in here, so you have them fighting a runaway demon as a result of the IED going off.
Brandon: Now that’s cool. I love that idea.
Mary: That is a great deal of fun. The lowest bidder—
Howard: Do you want me to write it for you now, Dan?
Dan: Yes, please. That’s awesome.
Mary: I’m also going to point out that Partials has a fair bit of military—
Dan: That’s true. There’s a lot of military fiction stuff in Partials.
Brandon: Here’s the question I want to ask you, Dan. Do you want this to be alternate history or alternate earth? Demons are common—or maybe not common, but known of—so if we go with Howard’s concept, the lowest bidder, you’re not sure what weird magic they use in this armor.
Dan: Yeah, I can see that. It could be a world in which the lowest bidder is the one who happens to have discovered demon summoning. Or like you’re saying, it could be an alternate earth where the low bidder is the one who didn’t use the right kind of chalk in the circle, and so the demons are a lot more likely to break out.
Brandon: You don’t normally build armor out of demons, but it could be an alternate universe, where—“Wait a minute, they built our armor out of demons,” rather than—
Howard: How long is the story?
Mary: That’s a good question.
Dan: At least 2,000 words, probably not more than 5,000 or 6,000.
Howard: Okay, so what you’re talking about is a short story. The idea that we have thrown in, that your vehicle armor has occult properties that are problematic when it gets hit in a certain way, is a sufficient idea to carry a story of that length. It’s not too big. I would move away from an alternate universe and put it in our universe, so that you can leverage as many of the things as you can that the soldiers who are reading the anthology are familiar with, so that when there’s an element that’s new they recognize it as new. They’re your target audience. You still make them out to be the heroes because now they have to go kill the runaway—
Mary: Better than kill. The IE is improvised explosive, so what if they repurpose the demons?
Dan: Oh, that’s clever.
Mary: They’re trapped. They’re behind enemy lines. Their armor has failed because the lowest bidder used—
Howard: The Humvee is upside down and the demon is loose.
Mary: One of them realizes they can use the demon as an improvised explosive device to defeat the enemy.
Brandon: They bind it to the rocket in their rocket launcher and say, “All right, let’s just send that baby that way. We can’t contain him.”
Howard: If you want to lean toward humor, the TLA—the three-letter acronym—is huge. I.E.Demon, and you end with R.P.Gremlin, where rocket-propelled grenade is RPG.
Mary: I was only coming up with role-playing game.
Howard: Rocket-propelled gremlin, where they’ve trapped the demon, bound it to a grenade, and fired it into the enemy, where it bounces around and wreaks havoc, and they get away. I don’t know how you want to wrap that up, but there you have a little bit of symmetry with the title. Yes, I went for the easy joke.
Dan: That’s actually very clever.
Brandon: I like the gremlin thing also, potentially. It’s a way you could go, with the demon as a makes-things-break demon rather than an I’m-going-to-slaughter-you-all. I think that might play into—for soldiers in the field, you’re out here, and your stuff keeps breaking, and you think, “Can’t we get anything to keep working? We can’t.”
Mary: Because gremlins have been part of the military for a long time.
Brandon: If they find out that indeed this gremlin was bound.
Howard: That’s how the demon was supposed to work. We’re playing with demon and gremlin interchangeably. You can, for purposes of your quick mythology primer for the soldiers, make gremlin a demon subtype. They bound a gremlin into the armor, because the whole point of the gremlin is that as it
goes over the explosive device and the explosive device goes off, the gremlin in active self-preservation makes it fail.
Dan: Yeah, there we go.
Howard: But he doesn’t make it fail well enough. It’s damaged. The Humvee flips over, the gremlin-demon is now loose, and nothing works.
Dan: Can the demon’s name be Snafubar?
Mary: It’s your story.
Brandon: All right, Dan, I want to hand this back to you. Where do you want us to go with our brainstorming session from here? What is working for you? What is not working for you? Do you want us to start talking about a character?
Dan: I think character might be the next way to go, but let’s look at the considerations of this. First of all, I love the idea. I really, really liked Howard’s idea of using a gremlin specifically for its malfunctioning property. Let’s make the IEDs malfunction as we drive over them, and therefore we’re protected. That suggests to me that we might want this to be an alternate earth.
Brandon: You could just go with the idea of: We have this new device. We wanted the bidding to happen, and they came through and we’ve got this new thing, and they’re working real well, the other armors, and we’re going to get one and then put someone in the team—
Dan: We don’t know how it works, but it does. What that means is that we have approximately 5,000 words to present the technology, to show the attack, the soldiers figure out what’s going on, and then turn it to their own ends.
Howard: It’s actually really easy to do the setup on this. You have a couple of soldiers who are in the Humvee, who are talking about the new armor. Basically one of the guys is saying, “Look, the new armor has never actually been field tested. An IED has not gone off under it yet. All we’ve had is fizzles and whatever else.” And the other guy says, “Yeah, but that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. I don’t know, it’s like magic.” He can say those exact words. “It’s like magic. It rolls over the top and the IEDs fail; that’s what it’s supposed to do.”