“Of course I gave him the rope,” said Iolanthe.

Yuah shuddered. No matter how close she had come to Iolanthe as a compeer, she had never forgotten that her sister-in-law and former employer could be merciless. It still seemed like being given a cold slap, to be forced to come face-to-face with that realization.

“Why did you give him the rope,” asked Saba.

“I thought about giving him a pistol. It would have been a much more appropriate way to do it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t count on Mercy not to shoot me instead of himself.”

“He means, why did you help him kill himself,” said Yuah.

“She knows what I meant.”

“I don’t really need to explain it to you, do I Saba? You have lived with us since you were born. This family has been knocked down again and again, and I have done everything to build it back up. After three generations of incompetence and stupidity, I have made the Dechantagnes a great family name again. I will not let it be linked forever with treason. Can you imagine a public trial and then an execution? No, I will never allow something like that to happen.”

“He was your husband, though.”

“Yes. He was. And at least he had the decency to take the honorable way out.”

Yuah couldn’t take any more. She stood up and walked out of the parlor, down the hallway, and into the library. She stopped inside the door and took a deep breath. Terrence was sitting in one of the overstuffed chairs with a book in his lap. A pair of reading glasses was perched on the end of his nose, but he wasn’t really reading. She stepped over to him and placed her hand lightly on his shoulder.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

Jerking her hand away from his shoulder as though it had been burned, Yuah turned and rushed back out of the room. She leaned against the wall and placed both hands over her stomach. She could feel the cane strips in her corset but couldn’t feel the life growing inside of her. Continuing down the hallway, she stepped into the kitchen. One of the lizardmen was sweeping the floor and a black-haired teenaged boy sat eating a sandwich in the corner.

“Can you drive me now, Marzell?” Yuah asked the boy.

It might have been difficult to find humans in Birmisia who were willing to work as servants, but it was surprisingly simple to find young men willing to serve as drivers for one of only two steam carriages on the continent. Terrence had given out that the position was open and had faced an avalanche of applicants. He had narrowed the selection down to three boys, and had let Yuah choose her favorite. She had chosen one of the Zaeri boys from Freedonia. Marzell Lance was a serious young man of sixteen, with a shock of perpetually mussed black hair and brown eyes. He always seemed to be hungry. Though he had proven he could not only drive, but maintain the steam carriage, that was not why he had been chosen. He, like so many coming from Freedonia, had arrived alone. His sister, the only member of his family with him, had died on the ship.

Marzell jumped up and held open the outside door. Yuah walked through and he followed. The steam carriage was parked near one of the sheds. It looked as pristine as it had when it had arrived on the ship from Greater Brechalon. The minor damage caused by Yuah’s accidental diversion into a snow bank had been repaired, and from the rich black leather of the seats to the shining copper bonnet, it was clean and polished.

“I’ll have to fire up the boiler, Ma’am,” said Marzell.

“I know. That’s fine.”

Marzell held out a helping hand for Yuah, as she stepped up into the passenger seat. As she sat with folded hands in her lap, he stepped around to the back to light the boiler. He shoveled in several more scoops of coal for good measure as well. Then, popping back around to the driver’s side, he climbed in.

“If I had known you were planning to go out, Ma’am, I would have fired it up earlier.”

“I know. It’s all right.”

“Where did you want to go, Ma’am?”

“Please stop saying ‘Ma’am’. I feel old enough as it is.”

“Yes, Ma’am. Where did you want to go, Ma… Mrs. Dechantagne.”

“Take me to Miss Hertling’s home, please.”

The Drache Girl (2010)

The Drache Girl had been written for almost three years by the time I published it in 2010.  It required more revision to stand alone than had The Voyage of the Minotaur, but less than The Two Dragons would.  I struggled with the title and originally chose The Sorceress’s Apprentice.  Several friends (and my wife) thought that people would confuse it with the Micky Mouse portion of Fantasia, so it became The Drache Girl, a term already established in the first book.

His Robot Wife (2011)

I had never planned on writing a sequel to His Robot Girlfriend, but it was the only thing that I’d written that could be called a hit.  It was being downloaded thousands of times a month, and my other books were languishing.  So I came up with a short plot and wrote His Robot Wife.  I’m generally happy with the writing, but I don’t think it one of my better stories, especially regarding the plot.  Still, it was and is my best seller.

Women of Power (2011)

One of the sites where I had my free books was Feedbooks.com.  I found that there were dozens of people writing what amounted to fan fiction about superheroes and publishing them in chapters like comic book without the picture.  I thought this looked like fun, but I didn’t want to use established characters that belonged to someone else.  So, I wrote the first three chapters of Women of Power and posted them like everyone else.  Then I stopped for a while and wrote His Robot Wife.  When I was done, I quickly hammered out the rest of Women of Power.

Blood Trade (2011)

I belonged to a writers group (still do, though there aren’t many of us left) who met at Borders.  They would usually place us at a couple of banquet tables in a back corner.  One time they put us right between two counters of Twilight and related vampire love stories.  A fellow writer said, “Wes, you should write a vampire book.”  I said, “Nobody would buy my vampire book.  The vampires would all be really evil.”  Nevertheless, that stuck with me until, sure enough, I started my own vampire book.  I had got to about chapter five when I noticed it was getting darker as I went.  So I went back to the beginning and went all dark.  Sure enough, I was right.  Few people buy it.  But it is my favorite vampire story.  I often tell people I write for myself.  This is a perfect example.

Brechalon (2010)

I was still hoping to have Senta and the Steel Dragon published by a traditional publisher, so while I was waiting to hear back, I decided that a prequel written as a kind of bonus material was in order.  I whipped through it in short order, even though it was a challenge in some ways.  Writing about characters in their earlier days without giving away too many of their secrets can be difficult.  It was a skill that served me later.

The Voyage of the Minotaur (2010)

Senta and the Steel Dragon had come back rejected from several publishers.  One thing that they all agreed on was that it was too long.  It was already split into three parts, originally named Expedition, Colony, and Dominion.  I took the first third, did some minor modification to and finished The Voyage of the Minotaur.  By this time, I had quite a following due to His Robot Girlfriend, so I decided to publish Voyage myself.

Tesla’s Stepdaughters (2010)

In 2010, I was playing a lot of Rock Band III with my son on our Nintendo Wii.  I created a virtual band in the game with little steampunk outfits.  By the time I had played through the game, I had thought up a fantasy backstory for them.  This coupled with my desire to try a mystery gave me the whole story of Tesla’s Stepdaughters.

The Dark and Forbidding Land (2010)

I decided that if Senta and the Steel Dragon was going to be a series rather than a simple trilogy, I had spaced my stories too far apart.  So I wrote The Dark and Forbidding Land to fit between The Voyage of the Minotaur and an already written The Drake Girl.  It proved more difficult than I thought to fit the pieces together, but I ended up quite happy with the result and in some ways, DFL is my favorite Senta book.

The room was large, though obviously not as large as the huge chamber we had visited before. The far wall was about one hundred fifty feet away, and the room was equally as wide. We had entered through a doorway in the middle of the wall, and there were no other entryways or exits visible. The room was well lit, though I could not determine the source of the light. Indeed, it seemed that the light came from everywhere, as though light were a thing that could flow around solid objects like the air. The walls, floor, and ceiling were smooth and dull grey, as were the fixtures in the room’s center—four large geometric shapes.

As the three of us slowly walked into the room, we were drawn toward the four geometric shapes in the center of the floor. They were each about the same size, perhaps twelve feet across. Closest to us was a sphere. The others were a cube, a pyramid, and a dodecahedron.

“What are these for, do you suppose?” I wondered aloud.

“Perhaps they are not for anything,” growled Malagor.

“Why are you so grumpy?” I asked. “Still hungry?”

He growled again in confirmation.

“This is unlike anything I have ever seen relating to the Orlons,” said Norar Remontar. “The lighting has an interesting quality.”

He reached up and laid a hand upon the surface of the sphere, and a large portion of the wall to our left suddenly became a huge picture screen. A forty-foot image of a great plain appeared, with tall grass billowing in the wind like waves on the surface of the ocean. Here and there, grazing herbivores roamed in search of a particularly interesting bit of flora. To the far right of the image, two stummada sat looking around lazily. At their feet were the remains of a large animal.

“Wow,” I said.

“This is most definitely not an Orlon site,” reiterated the Amatharian. “Their technology never reached anywhere near this level.”

“I wonder what else these shapes do.” I stepped around him to the cube.

I placed my hand on the surface, which felt warm to the touch, and marveled as another giant image appeared opposite the first. This image was of a beautiful green field, obviously cultivated. In the distance, to the right was the edge of a great forest of extremely tall coniferous evergreen trees. At about the same distance but to the left, one could see the edge of a strange and marvelous city. It was made up of ivory colored buildings with reddish roofs— each roof topped by a carved animal figure. In the foreground, as well as around the city, were the inhabitants.

The people living in the strange city, playing around it, and working in the fields looked remarkably like a child’s teddy bear. They were covered with light brown fur, had very large round ears on the top of their heads, and large expressive eyes above their small snouts. They came in a variety of sizes, probably males, females, and children. Some of the small ones seemed to be playing tag just outside the city. Larger ones were working in the field, pulling up green vegetables of some kind. Still others, of several sizes, were busy within the confines of the city, though just what they were doing was impossible to tell at the present magnification on the image. They were probably doing the same things that humans on Earth did in their own cities.

“I do not know that race of people,” said Malagor. “I wonder who they are, and where in Ecos that place is.”

“Or when,” I offered. “For all we know, that may be a stored image of the ancient Orlons, or even their ancestors.”

Norar Remontar and I were both fascinated by the images, and we began moving around the shapes, placing our hands here and there and watching the scenes produced on the three blank walls of the room. Most were of wild places with nothing but plant life and an occasional animal, though the locale of each was noticeably different. There were scenes of deserts, of forests, and of jungles. Finally I placed a hand upon the sphere at a point as yet untouched and a picture of a hillside replaced an earlier scene on the wall opposite the door. Standing on the hillside were two Amatharian men.

“Bentar Hissendar!” shouted Norar Remontar.

“You know him?” I asked the obvious.

“He is a friend and kinsman of mine,” the Amatharian replied. “He works within my uncle’s trading group.”