Today and tomorrow I am at Phoenix Comicon! Watch this spot for pictures.
Merchant and Shannon are the owners of a steam ship line and a coal company and other things in Senta and the Steel Dragon. Hence they are at work in the background of the story, though the appear in The Drache Girl. Their names come from Moet and Chandon Champagne (like in the Queen song).
Two men dressed in expensive evening suits entered the lounge and made their way across the room to stand next to the former naval officer. Both were in their late fifties, the first with thinning grey hair and a thick black mustache. The second man was clean shaven, with jowls that shook when he talked, and had a thick pile of white hair.
“Two glasses of fortified white,” the first man ordered from the bartender. Then he turned back to his companion. “I’m telling you now Shannon, you won’t be sorry you came and you won’t be sorry we brought our crew with us. There’s no time to waste.”
“I know,” said the jowly man. “I just hate traveling in Hamonth. It’s bad luck, you know.”
“No. It’s bad luck to start a journey in Hamonth. We’re already at sea. Did you ever hear that it was bad luck to start a journey in Kafirius?”
“No.”
“Well, there you go. If anything, it’s good luck. We’ve got to move quickly too, you know. The latest report is that the railroad will reach Port Dechantagne by the end of Festuary.”
“That soon?”
“Yes. Say,” the first man tapped Staff on the shoulder. “Don’t I know you?”
“I don’t think so,” replied Staff, keeping his eyes on the piano player.
“But you’re a navy man, right? An officer?”
“I was.”
“Did you serve in Birmisia?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. Allow me to make an introduction. I’m Alastair Merchant, and this is my partner Wendell P. Shannon.”
“Merchant and Shannon,” said Staff, turning to shake hands. “Like the shipping lines.”
“The very same.”
“Radley Staff, late a commander in His Majesty’s Royal Navy.”
“A pleasure to meet you. We’re on our way to Birmisia to conduct a little business and we could use a man who knows the lay of the land. Somebody who’s been there, knows how things are done. Say, I’ll bet you even know the royal governor.”
“We’ve met.”
“Fantastic,” Merchant turned to Shannon. “It looks like fortune has smiled on us again.”
If you’ve been watching, you will have noticed that there are several page tabs at the top of this page, and I’ve been working on adding things to the site.
Under books, you can find a list of all my books. I’ll soon have links up so that you can get someplace to purchase them in the format you want at the touch of your mouse.
I’ve been blogging almost four years, but this hosting site is less than a month old. I plan to have it looking all posh (a word that means absolutely nothing to us Americans) by the end of the first month.
Hsrandtuss was startled awake when whatever he was lying on bounced.
“Girls, leave me alone. My head hurts.”
Cautiously opening one eye, he saw that the thing he was lying on was the hard ground and it had bounced because the dragon had fallen out of the sky to land less than a score feet away from him. He slowly rose to his feet, his tail dragging the ground as he staggered toward the little god.
“Hail mighty Yesse… nnar!” he said, stopping midway through the dragon’s name to hiccup.
The dragon waved him off, having eyes only for the young soft skin. He spoke to her in the hoonan language.
“Sszaxxanna, blast it! Where in name of Setemenothiss are you?”
“Here,” she called, sliding up next to him.
“What is he saying?”
The dragon had continued to talk to the sleeping priestess.
“He says ‘wake up’ and ‘time to go to hoonan city-state’.”
“You can’t leave yet,” said Hsrandtuss. “We will have an even bigger feast for you tonight.”
The dragon’s tone changed to an urgent, beseeching sound.
“He says ‘get up, please’ and he calls her ‘favorite domestic animal’,” Sszaxxanna translated.
Hsrandtuss paused for a moment in thought. Well, not what he expected, but it made a certain amount of sense, considering the place on the food chain of dragons and soft skins. He stepped up beside the dragon’s massive head.
“Is there something wrong?”
The dragon’s face hovered above prone hoonan, its long forked tale running over her from head to feet.
“Yes, there is something wrong!” boomed the dragon, waking the last of the sleeping lizzies. “I can smell something foul.”
His tongue flicked around her head again.
“There’s a sickening smell around her ear. I think she’s been stung or bitten by something.” His great head swung toward Hsrandtuss. “Is there some kind of creature that attacks the ears of mammals?”
The king thought hard. There were plenty of mammals around—small ones like opossums and weasels, but he didn’t know much about them, especially not what kind of parasites fed on them.
“It was Hkhanu!” shouted Sszaxxanna. “He came in the night and poured poison in the youngling’s ear. I wasn’t sure that I truly saw it, because I was half asleep, but now I remember.”
“What?” wondered the king.
“Ssu! Come here!” Sszaxxanna called another female over to her, a small one, only recently caught and civilized. “You saw the witch doctor too, didn’t you? You saw him pour poison into the poor soft skin’s ear.”
The young female nodded emphatically.
“I can’t believe it,” said Hsrandtuss.
Sszaxxanna grabbed him by the shoulders and gave him a shake.
“The guilty must be punished,” she said.
“Yes. Yes. The guilty must be punished.” He raised his voice and shouted. “Warriors, to me! Warriors, attend your king!”
Within seconds a group more than twenty large males surrounded him.
“To the temple! Bring everyone inside down to the fire pit! Justice must be seen to! Do it now!”
The warriors, bolstered by even more of their ranks who had arrived as the king was talking, moved up the path to the top of the hill, and into the great and ancient stone temple.
“What can we do?” wailed the dragon. “Is there a medicine for her?”
“We will force the perpetrator to tell us,” said Sszaxxanna.
“Yes, of course,” said the king. “In the meantime Sszaxxanna, get the healing women to have a look at the human and see if there is anything they can do.”
With a nod, the female left, pulling young Ssu along with her. She returned several minutes later with two old females who began to prod and probe the soft skin’s ear. The dragon sat back, wringing his hands like an egg keeper in cold weather. The women were still examining their patient, when the warriors returned dragging along Hkhanu’s six acolytes and four females. Hkhanu himself was with them too, but apparently none of the warriors was brave enough to actually lay hands upon the old witch doctor.
“You are in trouble now, Hkhanu,” said Hsrandtuss. “You must answer for your crimes.”
“How dare you send your warriors into the temple!” The old lizzie was so angry he was literally spitting. “How dare you treat me like a common zsrant!”
“What did you do to her?” roared the dragon, and with a single bound, he landed amid the warriors and priests and snatched up Hkhanu in his scaly hand. “What did you poison her with?”
For a second, old Hkhanu looked frightened, then he looked confused, but then he puffed himself up. “You are a false god,” he said.
Something shot through the witch doctor’s chest so quickly that it was as if he had been struck by lightning. It was the barb on the dragon’s whip-like tail. Lifting up his tail, the body still impaled upon it, the great steel beast slashed twice with the claws of his left hand, and Hkhanu fell to the ground in a dozen pieces.
“Line them up!” called Hsrandtuss, taking a spear from a nearby warrior. “Line up these so-called wise elders.”
The prisoners from the temple were put in a line and pushed down onto their knees.
“What did Hkhanu do to the soft skin priestess?” he asked the first acolyte.
“I don’t know anything about…” The answer was cut short as the king drove his spear down into the captive’s chest.
He received a similar answer from the second in line, and gave him just as quick a death as the first. The third in line, clearly seeing where this was going, started talking before the king had even come close to him.
“He did it! Hkhanu poisoned the hoonan. He used a secret poison. No one knows the cure.”
Hsrandtuss turned toward the dragon. “Great Yessennar, I place my people completely at your command. We will do anything to help your little one. But I do not know what that could be.”
“Take her to the human city-state,” said Sszaxxanna. “The soft skins have powerful magic. Maybe they can help her.”
“Yes, I’ll do that,” said the dragon, taking the girl’s limp body gingerly in his hands. “My thanks, Mighty King.”
Hsrandtuss watched as the dragon shot into the sky faster than anything he could imagine. Then with one wave of his wings, he zoomed northward. Hsrandtuss truly hoped the young soft skin would recover. He didn’t know if Hkhanu had anything to do with her mysterious illness or not. It all worked out well though. He would have no trouble with the temple. He would in fact, rededicate it to Yessennar and choose a new priest, one that would cause him no trouble. He glanced sidelong at Sszaxxanna. She was a wily one. She smiled back at him. Yes, he might well have found a new matriarch.
“Come, get the other females,” he said to her. “I need oil rubbed on my back.”
“Yes, Mighty King.”
Mighty King. Hsrandtuss definitely liked the sound of that.
Nineteen days of school remaining! Although I’ve lined up a summer school job, it is only part time, so it should leave me plenty of time to write.
I will be working on my four works in progress, and hope to finish at least three of them by the end of the year.
At the same time, I’m going to be working on new editions of my existing books. I really feel like I need to step up my game with copy editing, book covers, etc. I will be hiring out as much of this as I can afford in upcoming books and I hope it will pay off.
City of Amathar 