One of my favorite characters from The Voyage of the Minotaur doesn’t really even exist– at least not in the world of the story.  Pantagria may be a figment of the imagination, or she may be the effect of a magical drug on the brain– or does she exist in an alternate dimension.  Pantagria is who Terrence visits when he uses the magic drug white opthalium.

When I originally plotted out the series, Pantagria only apeared in book 1.  When I decided to shoehorn book 4 into the mix, I had her appear again because I really like her.  Then we get hints about her in book 5, but don’t actually see her.

For those who are hoping to see Pantagria again, she makes a BIG appearance in book 6.

Here is a scen from book 1:

Lying on his stomach on the small single bed, Terrence Dechantagne breathed a heavy sigh as Pantagria rubbed his back.  Her powerful fingertips found every sore muscle, every angry nerve ending, every spot filled with fatigue or stored unease, and kneaded it out of existence.  He could feel her naked buttocks sitting on his and her naked legs on either side of his stomach.  Both were warm, far warmer than a human body should be, as if she was running a fever, but then she wasn’t human.  She wasn’t even real. 

She finished massaging him and got up, walking across the small room.

“How was that?” she asked.

“Good.  Very good.”

He closed his eyes and savored being here, where he felt so good.  This was only the second time in a fortnight that he had been able to find a place for his real world body to lie undisturbed while he “saw” the world in which he truly felt he belonged.  He drifted off into a slumber and wondered in his half-awake state, if he fell asleep here and began to dream, what world would he find himself in then?  Would he dream himself back into the real world?  He didn’t want that to happen, so he forced himself awake again, and sat up on the bed.

Across the room, Pantagria stood in front of a wall mounted mirror.  Her graceful, tanned body was the very picture of perfection.  Her snow white feathered wings were outstretched, almost touching the walls to her left and right.  Their broad expanse shielded her head from his view for a moment.  He stood up so that he could see her perfect, beautiful face.  Only then did he see what she was doing.  She had a straight razor in her right hand, and with her left hand, she was gathering great bunches of her golden hair and slicing through it.  Half of her head was already denuded.  In some places the hair that was left was an inch or two long, in other places, she was left nearly bald.

“What are you doing?” he asked, more shocked by this unusual behavior than he would have been if Iolanthe or Yuah or some other real woman had done it.

“Do you remember when you came to me last time?  It was the night of the dance.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“We didn’t dance,” she said, as she continued to hack away at her hair.

“I didn’t want to dance,” he said.  “I wanted to make love to you.”

“Do you remember what you called me?”

“What I called you?  No.  I don’t remember.”

“You should.  You call me the same thing every time you visit me.”

 “What did I… what do I call you?”

“You called me ‘perfect’.”

“You are perfect.”

“I’m tired of being perfect,” her voice became a growl.  “I want to be real.  I want to be in the real world.”

“You can’t be,” he said.  “I don’t want you to be.  This is all just a dream.  This is my dream.  This is my haven.  This is where I come, because I can’t stand life in the real world.”

She folded her wings and turned around.  Only a few stray bits of long hair remained on her head.  She placed the palm of her hand on his chest and shoved him back onto the bed.

“If I can’t be real because I’m perfect, then I’ll make myself real by making myself imperfect.”  She turned back around and began to use the razor for its original purpose by shaving her head, starting on one side and moving across.  Terrence watched her in stunned silence.  She scraped the razor again and again across her head, leaving numerous small red scratches and a few cuts from which tiny red rivulets of blood flowed.  She shaved her entire head bald.

“Pantagria,” he finally said.  “I don’t think this is going to help you or me.”

She turned around once again, stepped toward him, and placed her left palm on his cheek.

“How do you know?” she asked, and then kissed him on the lips.

“This world isn’t the real world.  It’s all in my mind.  There’s no way to go from here to there.”

She hissed.  “You do!  You do it all the time!”  She swung her right hand across his face.  The blade of the straight razor sliced through both his nostrils.

Suvir Kesi is one of the two wizards in The Voyage of the Minotaur.  I don’t remember where I found the name Suvir, but I liked how it was similar to “severe.”  While not really part of the main plotline, the Suvir Kesi story is important to the characters involved.  Looking back at him, he probably owes a lot to classic comic book villains.  You can see this a bit in his reveal with Terrence.

Terrence let go of him and reached forward to find a door and a doorknob.  He could hear the boy starting to sob as he ran away.  The door was locked.  He took two steps back and kicked, intending to bust open the door, but he had stepped back so far that, though his booted foot hit the door, the force wasn’t enough to open it.  Growling in anger he rushed forward bashing his shoulder against the door.

The door did not splinter, as he had expected it to.  The force of his body broke open the latch.  But as Terrence went sprawling across the floor inside, the door swung on its hinges until it reached the wall behind it, then bounded back, slamming shut again.  The wind was knocked out of Terrence’s lungs, and he heard the gun skittering across the floor.

“Captain Dechantagne?” said Kesi’s accented voice.  “I didn’t hear you knock.”

“You son of a bitch!” shouted Terrence from the floor.  “You poisoned me.”

“Oh, yes.  That.  I had forgotten all about that.”  Kesi chuckled.  “That was funny.”

“I’m going to kill you, you bastard.”

“No.  I’m going to kill you.  But you’ll have to wait a moment.  You caught me right in the middle of something.”

“Mmph.”  The sound was a voice, a woman’s voice, strangely muffled.

“Quiet now,” said Kesi.  “I’m talking with the Captain.”

“Who is that?” demanded Terrence, getting to his feet.

“You know, this is perfect in a number of ways.  It’s almost poetic.  You see, if it hadn’t been for you, I would never have been able to continue this little hobby of mine.  You were so useful, pinning the blame on Maalik Murty.  I was going to frame your brother, but you were right.  Murty was a much more believable killer.”

“You?  You killed those women?”

“Far more than you know.  Uuthanum.”

Terrence’s body was lifted up and tossed across the room like a rag doll.  He hit the wall and then crashed down onto a chair, right onto the spot where Pantagria, or the thing that had been Pantagria, had kicked him again and again.

“Mmph mmph.”  The woman tried to speak again.  She must have been gagged.

“You killed all those women?  The ones in Brech?”

“Yes, I’ve been killing pretty young women as long as I can remember.  It’s just good clean fun.  It’s also been a sort of preparation, though I never realized it until now.”

“Preparation for what?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Why did you poison me?”

“I can’t tell you that either.”  Kesi chuckled again.  “Mostly, because I can’t remember.  Uuthanum.”

Terrence felt himself fly up so hard that he hit the ceiling.  This time, when he hit the floor, his crotch landed right on something hard and pointed.  He doubled up into a fetal position.  Both hands went to cradle his testicles, but instead found the object that had injured them—his own pistol.  He grabbed hold of the grip, but couldn’t force his body to unbend.

“Now, listen to this,” said Kesi.  There was a ripping sound.

“Didn’t catch it?  Listen again.”  Terrence heard the ripping sound again.  The woman’s muffled voice screamed.  It sounded somehow very far away.

“What are you doing?”

“This is the really poetic part of it all.  I’m killing the only woman who ever loved you.”

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.