Zurfina is definitely one of the most important characters in the Senta and the Steel Dragon series.  She, Senta, and Bessemer the dragon are a unique little family that share most of the magic that occurs in the story.

She’s really fun to write because in a way she’s so one-sided.  Iolanthe may seem one-sided (evil and bitch), but she’s really more complex.  Zurfina is just incredibly, horribly, terribly, self-centered and selfish.  The more you learn about her back-story, the more you find out that she has at times suffered because of it, but delving even deeper, you find that she has really always been that way.

Zurfina does whatever she wants, and her answer to anyone who doesn’t agree is either to hide from them or destroy them.  The affairs of even her closest companions are only of cursory interest to her, and usually only if it affects her in some way.

One of my favorite parts of The Voyage of the Minotaur is when Zurfina pierces Senta’s ears.

The dragon half-heartedly snapped at her finger, which she pulled out of the way.

“Don’t tease our boy, Pet,” said Zurfina, appearing behind her.

“He doesn’t want that chain on,” said Senta.

“We can’t let him loose right now,” said the sorceress.  “He’s liable to fly off into the forest and not come back until well after we’re gone.”

“He can’t fly very good.”

“That’s just what he wants you to think.  Now bring him inside.  I have something for you.”

Senta opened the door of the animal carrier, but the little dragon just looked at her.

“Go on,” she said.  “Get in.”

The dragon made a noise more like a cat yowling than a reptile.  Senta reached out and rubbed the scales on its belly.  The dragon bit her on the wrist, not hard, though its needle sharp teeth still drew blood.

“Ow!”

The dragon made an apologetic noise and then crawled down into its chamber.  Senta closed the carrier and then sat down.  The ship was starting to spin around her.  She looked down without real comprehension at her wrist and watched as the blood flowed freely down her palms, down her fingers and dripped into a puddle on the deck.

“Cheeky twonk.” said Senta, woozily.

“Oh good grief,” said Zurfina.

She bent down and pulled the large, black ribbon from Senta’s hair and tied it around the girl’s bleeding wrist.  Then she picked her up and heaved her over her shoulder.  Leaving the dragon in his carrier, sitting on the deck, she carried the girl to the hatch.  Senta couldn’t pay any attention to the direction they were going, once below deck.  It didn’t really matter.  Every time they went below, they went to a different door.  Once inside the door though, they were always back in their own cabin.  Senta wouldn’t have been able to find her own cabin without the sorceress, but Zurfina was usually there to guide her.

The cabin was spacious.  It was large enough to hold two comfortable beds and had its own bathroom.  It also featured a great many pictures on the walls—a few were photographs, but most were painted, and all were of Zurfina.  The biggest picture was taller than Senta, and was a portrait of the sorceress sitting on a blue day couch, naked except for a pair of dark silk stockings, a silver necklace with a large, dangly pendant, and a black feather boa around her neck.  The painting hung just above one of the beds.

Zurfina tossed Senta onto the bed just below the great nude painting.  She walked to the other bed and opened a huge wooden trunk at its foot, rummaged around for a moment, and then approached the girl with a small brown bottle.  She unwrapped Senta’s wrist, took the stopper out of the bottle, and poured some of its contents onto the bite marks, which had immediately begun to bleed again upon being exposed to the air.  The liquid from the bottle was cool and clear, but it bubbled and fizzed on the blood.  After a moment, Zurfina poured on a second dose, and it washed away the blood, leaving not a single bleeding hole, not a blemish, not even a scar.

“That’s the fourth time this week,” said Zurfina.

“He didn’t mean to bite me,” said Senta.

“No, he didn’t,” said the sorceress.  “He’s just too little to help himself when something that looks like food gets near his mouth.  Just imagine if someone who looked like a giant teacake was waving her hands around your mouth.  It would be hard to resist, now wouldn’t it?”

“Now I’m hungry,” said Senta.

“You’ll be very excited to hear then that we are having dinner with Miss Dechantagne.  You’ll be able to watch her from up close,” Zurfina smirked.  “Believe me.  That will be even more fun.” She sat the small, brown bottle on the floor by the bed.

“Yay,” said Senta.

“Have a crumpet to tide you over.”  Seemingly from nowhere, the sorceress produced a small plate with a steaming crumpet covered with melted butter and strawberry jam, and a small glass of milk.  Senta ate the crumpet quickly, and wiped the excess butter on her dress.  Then she drank the milk.  When she was done, the plate and glass went mysteriously back to wherever they had come from.

“Now,” said Zurfina, producing a large sewing needle.  “I’m going to pierce your ears, Pet.”

“Is it going to hurt?”

“Yes,” said Zurfina, grabbing the girl’s earlobe and sticking the needle through it.

Senta screamed.  The sorceress didn’t wait for the girl to stop screaming.  She took the needle and plunged it through her other earlobe.  Then, while the girl’s crying lessened to a weeping, she pulled out two hoops of gold, about an inch in diameter, and placed one in each of the girl’s ears.  Retrieving the brown bottle from the bedside, she poured a bit of the clear liquid on each of the tiny holes she had just made.  Senta took a deep, sobbing breath.

“All right, stop crying.  It doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

The girl stuck out her tongue.  Zurfina returned the gesture.

“You’ll thank me later,” she said.  “This will improve your eyesight.”

“Maro just got glasses,” said Senta.

“Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

Of course the real reason she pierces her ears isn’t to improve her eyesight, but to ensure that Senta looks like a little clone of her.

Augustus P. Dechantagne is arguable the least important of the three Dechantagne siblings– the real movers and shakers in the book.  That being said, he fulfills two major roles in the plot.  The first is that he is a suspect in the series of murders of young women.  The second is, as interpreter with the natives, he is responsible for the lack of understanding of the aborigines by the colonists that results in one of the main action points at the end of the story.

Augie is a lot of fun to write because he is a fun guy.  He doesn’t worry about whether people like him or not– not even his sister.  He’s mostly interested in drinking, smoking, and chasing women.  He catches most of them.  After all, he’s young, handsome, and rich.  His big flaw is that he takes nothing seriously, and while a capable soldier, he doesn’t care much for planning ahead.

My favorite Augie scene is probably when his sister Iolanthe beats him with his own pants.

“It’s been two days, Captain.” Augie suddenly interjected.  “What’s the news on the murder investigation?”

Iolanthe looked at her brother and narrowed her aquamarine eyes as she thought about the events of the previous morning.  She had stepped into Augie’s apartment on an errand to discuss the supplies to be purchased upon arrival at Enclep, and found him lying naked on his bed.  The room had reeked of alcohol.  Iolanthe had grabbed the closest thing she could find, which were a pair of Augie’s trousers and beat him about the head and shoulders with them until he fought back.

“Kafira’s cross, Iolanthe!”  He had shouted.  “What?  What do you want?”

“Go get cleaned up and dressed, Augie.  I need to talk to you.”

Augie had jumped up and grabbed a pile of clothes, and as Iolanthe still whipped him with his own pair of pants, he had dashed out the hatch and down the hall to the water closet, which on the ship was called ‘the head’.  While she had waited for his return, Iolanthe had looked around the tiny room in disgust at the mess.  There had been clothes strewn everywhere and open and empty bottles of whiskey on every horizontal surface.  Then she had noticed something in the corner.  It was a pair of women’s bloomers, and peeking out from under them was something strange.

Iolanthe had bent down and picked up the bloomers, holding them at arm’s length, then retrieved the item of clothing beneath them, and examined it carefully.  It was a man’s shirt, and on its front were two handprints, in what appeared to be blood.  It was as if a man, his hands drenched, had wiped them on his front.  Cognizant of the fact that a murder had been committed the night before, and mindful that Augie had been present at the site of a previous murder in the great city, she had quickly decided that this was a piece of evidence that could not be allowed to be found here.  She had rolled up the shirt inside of the bloomers and then exited Augie’s cabin and walked through the hallway to the hatch on deck.  Once there, she had quickly determined that she was alone on deck, and then had tossed both items of clothing over the side, watching them until they landed lightly upon the water and then trailed away into the distance.  She didn’t believe that Augie could be guilty of murder, so any time spent investigating him would have been a waste, but murderer or not, it was in bad taste to bring it up at dinner.

“I’ve left the investigation in the capable hands of Lieutenant Staff,” said the Captain, and turned to look at his subordinate.

Bessemer is the steel dragon of the series Senta and the Steel Dragon.  He is of course named for Henry Bessemer, the real life inventor of the Bessemer process for making steel.  Like Senta, Bessemer changes quite a bit during the series.  In book 0, he’s literally an egg.  In book 1: The Voyage of the Minotaur, he is newly hatched and by the end of the book, has grown to a little bigger than the average house cat.  He speaks only a few words, his first two being “Fina” for Zurfina, and “Pet,” his and Zurfina’s nickname for Senta.  Still, he manages to add a little fun and adventure to the story.  I really enjoy when Senta uses him as her baby doll.  This scene was also my chance to start to define exactly what a dragon in this book could do.

They walked out onto the deck together and stood for a moment by the railing.  The warmth of the sun on his skin reminded Terrence of the sun on his body in that other place—the place where Pantagria awaited him.  Something startled him as it leapt up onto the railing next to him.  Judging by the shocked squeak that Yuah let out, she was just as surprised as he was.  Terrence thought at first that it was a sea bird or one of the large flying reptiles common in the skies above Greater Brechalon, but it was Zurfina’s small steel dragon.

“Gawp!” it said.

The steel dragon was a magnificent little creature.  About four feet long from the tip of its snout to the small barb at the end of its tale, it was completely covered in scales that were perfectly meshed together.  All four of its feet had grasping claws that enabled it to crouch on the railing and keep its balance despite the rolling sway of the ship.  Its head was just as covered by its armor as any other part of its body, but it had the beginnings of horns growing from the top and sides of its face, though they looked less like horns than they did metal spikes.  Something that Terrence had not noticed before was the dozen or so cat-like whiskers around the little dragon’s long, thin snout.  Its wings, which were folded neatly on its back, were also covered with shiny steel scales, far too heavy to carry the creature in flight.  They were however as beautiful as the rest of the beast.  This would have been a terrifying monster indeed, had it been ten times its size, and had it not been wearing a baby bonnet.

“Baby!” called a child’s voice and Zurfina’s young ward ran toward them.

“Gawp!”  The dragon said.  It leaped over the railing of the ship, opening its wings and soaring into the sky, disproving Terrence’s assumption that the beast was too heavy to be supported by the air.  It flew several hundred feet up, circled, and suddenly dived down into the sea.

“Baby!” called the girl again, looking over the side at the waves.

The dragon shot back out of the ocean and beat its wings forcefully until it once again reached the ship’s deck.  It settled down about twenty feet away.  Its sharp teeth now held a small silver fish with golden fins—Terrence thought it was a perch, though he was no fisherman.  The large reptiles that roamed above the seas near home often scooped up fish from the ocean then maneuvered them into position so that they could swallow them whole.  The little steel dragon again defied Terrence’s expectations, by setting the fish on deck, placing its front right foot on it, and then ripping off the fish’s head and chewing it before swallowing.

The girl ran over and grabbed the dragon by the neck with her hands, and pressed her face to the side of its face.  For its part, the dragon didn’t seem to mind.  It simply pulled away, bent down, and took another bite of the fish.  This time the soggy baby bonnet that the creature wore, slipped down over its eyes.  The girl pulled it back into place and gave the dragon another hug.

“Do you think that’s safe?” asked Yuah.

Terrence grunted noncommittally.  “Let’s go on back.  I’m starving.”

One of the best things about writing the series Senta and the Steel Dragon is that Senta is really a different character in each book.  She starts at age 8 in book 1 (age 6 in book 0), and progresses to age 17 in book 5.  In The Voyage of the Minotaur, she really is kind of a goofy little kid.  One would hardly suspect from this book, were it not for the title of the series, that she was the main character.  Still, she has several great scenes in the story.  Arguably the best is this one, in which she encounters Mr. Maalik Murty.

She didn’t know how long she lay there, but eventually she had the feeling that someone else was there with her.  She opened her eyes to see a pasty-faced man with a very round face and horn-rimmed glasses looking down at her.  His hair was slicked down and oily looking and he had a pinched expression on his face that made his mouth look unnaturally small.  She looked at him for several moments and he looked back and blinked several times.

“Hello,” said Senta.

“Hello,” he replied.  “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know.”

The man smiled without showing his teeth.  His smile reached from his chin to the middle of his nose.  His eyes, magnified by glasses, stayed the same.  He had no facial hair or sideburns, but he had several small cuts on his face as if he had injured himself while shaving.  His suit was charcoal colored, and slightly shabby; something that Senta wouldn’t have noticed a few weeks before.

“Do you want to try getting up?” he asked.

“All right.”

Senta sat up and immediately threw up at the man’s feet.  Most of the vomit splattered across the wooden deck, though a bit of it ended up on his shoes and pants cuffs.

“Gawp,” said the dragon within his carrier.

The man’s mouth twitched to one side, but all he said was, “Feeling better?”

Senta nodded.

“Good,” he said.  “We should get you somewhere where you can get washed up.  Do you know how to get to your cabin from here?”

“No.”

“Then, I’ll take you to my cabin.”

“Um, I don’t know.”

“You wouldn’t want anyone to see you with vomit all over your shoes, would you?”

Senta looked down and, sure enough, she had gotten vomit on her own shoes too.  The man took her by the hand and pulled her to her feet.  She was still pretty wobbly.  He began to walk slowly along the deck, pulling her along with him. 

“Gawp,” said the dragon, louder.

They went in the doorway just behind the one through which Senta had exited, and walked down the corridor.  Senta started to feel a little better.  At the end of the hallway, a set of narrow steps led down to the lower deck.  Senta didn’t really want to go down, but the pasty-faced man had her hand firmly in his.

“Senta!”

Senta and the man both turned to see Miss Lusk walking down the hallway toward them.  Though she was the shortest of the women that had been at the dinner party that evening, Miss Lusk was almost the exact same height as the oily-haired man.  Her hat, which was a large straw affair covered in pink chiffon with a flower accent, made her seem a bit taller than him.

“Where are you going, Senta?” asked Miss Lusk.

“We were just going to get her cleaned up,” said the man.  “The poor thing got sick on deck and lost her dinner.”

“Good evening, Mr. Murty,”

“Good evening, Miss Lusk.”

“It was very kind of you to help out with a sick child.”

“Oh, it was nothing,” he replied.  They stood looking at each other for a very long moment.  Senta looked from one to the other.

“Well, we’ll go on and get the child cleaned up,” said Mr. Murty.

“I think I should take it from here.”

“Oh?”

“I’m sure it wouldn’t be appropriate for you to take the child below.”

“Wouldn’t be appropriate?” he asked.  “Why not?”

“Taking care of children isn’t a man’s job.”  Miss Lusk took Senta’s other hand and pulled until the child had both arms stretched out in either direction.

“I really don’t mind.  I love children,” said Mr. Murty.

“You’ll make quite a father one day, I’m sure.”

“Let me take her.”

“I’ll take care of her,” said Miss Lusk.  “I am a woman.”

“Yes, I keep forgetting,” said Mr. Murty, letting go of Senta’s hand.  “Um, what with your, um, mathematics skills and all.”

“Good night, Mr. Murty!” Miss Lusk hurried down the hall with the girl in tow.

One of the primary characters in The Voyage of the Minotaur is Iolanthe Dechantagne.  She is the driving force behind the expedition to start a new colony, and she is very clearly the dominant sibling, basically ordering her brothers around.  She’s always fun to write because she really is horribly bitchy.  She’s one of my favorites, though readers often love to hate her.  They frequently comment on her mistreatment of Yuah and Augie, but they often ignore the fact that on several occasions she commits, if not murder, well, certainly some pretty ruthless acts of violence.  Here is one example:

Iolanthe released the brake and pressed down with her foot on the forward accelerator.  The carriage slowly rolled forward.  The steam built up, and soon the vehicle had returned to its former vigor.  She tried to drive around the block of the Great Church of the Holy Savior, and get back onto the main road to return to the Old City, but the roads in this area did not seem to follow the normal grid pattern.  And there seemed to be nowhere to turn around.  After half an hour of trying to negotiate the unfathomable maze, she found herself at a dead end.  She pulled the brake lever and sat trying to figure out at which turn she should have made a left, and how to get back to that point.

Suddenly a figure approached the left side of her carriage.  It was a dirty man, wearing dirty clothes, with a dirty bald head, and a big dirty nose.  He stepped in close to her and ran his eyes down the length of her form.  Another similarly dressed man stepped up behind him. 

“Well, this is nice, ain’t it?” said the second man.  “We can have us a little fun.”

“Yeah, fun” said the first man, pulling a long, thin knife from his belt.

“Careful though,” said the second man.  “She might have a little pistol in her handbag.”

“Does you have a little pistol in your handbag, dearie?” the first man asked.  He casually waved the knife in his right hand, as he pawed at her ankle with his left.  Then he stopped when he heard the sound of two hammers being cocked, and looked up into the twin twelve gauge barrels.

“I don’t carry a handbag,” said Iolanthe, pulling the shotgun to her shoulder.  She pulled the first trigger, disintegrating the head of the first man, and sending a fountain of viscous remains over everything within twenty feet.  The second man had no time to react before the second barrel was fired at him.  He was far enough away however, that though he was killed, people who had known him would still be able to identify his body.

Iolanthe pushed the lever, opening the shotgun’s breach with her thumb, and tilted the weapon so that the two used shells dropped out onto the carriage floor.  She opened the glove compartment and pulled out the two replacement shells, stuffed them into the shotgun, and snapped the breach closed.  She then returned the still smoking weapon to its place behind the seat.  Reaching back into the glove compartment, she pulled out one of the handkerchiefs and wiped some of the blood and jellied brains from her face. 

Looking down at herself in disgust, she said.  “I’ll never be able to wear this dress again.”