The sorceress Zurfina gets a bit more spotlight than usual in book 4 of the series.  In The Young Sorceress, she magically transports herself to Freedonia and helps Zaeri writer Isaak Wissinger escape  the ghetto.  We get to ask ourselves is Zurfina acting out the role of a hero, or is she just manipulating things for her own gratification.

Isaak Wissinger sprang suddenly from his cot, motivated by a particularly enthusiastic bedbug.  He was immediately sorry, as the pain in his back was exacerbated by the sudden movement.  He looked back down at the vermin filled, inch thick mattress, a few pieces of straw sticking out of a hole in the side, sitting on an ancient metal frame.  It was a sleeping place not fit for a dog.  Then he laughed ruefully.  That was exactly how he and every other Zaeri was thought of here—as dogs.

The Kingdom of Freedonia, like the rest of the civilized world was divided in two.  There were the Kafirites, who ruled the world.  And there were the Zaeri, who had long ago ruled it.  Two thousand years ago, Zur had been a great kingdom, one which along with Argrathia, Ballar, and Donnata ruled the classical world.  Then a single dynasty of kings, culminating in Magnus the Great, had conquered the rest of the known world, and made Zur civilization the dominant culture.   Zaeri, the Zur religion, with its belief in one god, had replaced the pagan religions of the civilizations that Magnus and his forebears had conquered.  Even when Magnus’s empire had splintered into many successor kingdoms, the Zaeri religion had remained dominant.

Then a generation later, a Zaeri imam named Kafira had begun teaching a strange variation of the religion in Xygia.  Kafira had taught the importance of the afterlife, an adherence to a code of conduct that would lead one to this afterlife, and a general disregard for the affairs of the world.  Her enemies had destroyed her, but in so doing they had made her a martyr.  From martyr, she rose swiftly to savior and then to godhead of a new religion, one that had spread quickly to engulf all that had been the Zur civilization.  In the following millennia, the Kafirites had converted the remaining pagans to the creed of their holy savior, thereby making it the only religion in the world of man—the only religion in the world of man save those who held onto the ancient Zaeri belief.

Now here in Freedonia it was no longer safe to be a Zaeri.  First it had become illegal for Zaeri to be doctors or lawyers, then actors or publishers.  Then laws had been passed which made it illegal for Zaeri to own businesses or property.  Finally entire neighborhoods became forbidden to Wissinger’s people and they had been pushed into ghettos, segregated from the other Freedonians.

Wissinger spent the day picking up garbage on the street.  That was his job here in the ghetto.  He had been an award winning writer when he had lived in Kasselburg, but here in Zurelendsviertel he walked the street, a silver zed pinned to his jacket, picking up refuse.  At least people didn’t treat him like a garbage man.  The other Zaeri knew him and respected him.  They asked his opinion about things.  They called him “professor” when they spoke to him.  It was not like that at all with the Freedonian soldiers who occasionally made a sweep through the ghetto.  They would as soon kick an award winning writer to the side of the road as they would a street sweeper.

Back once again in his room, he pulled his tablet and pencil from its hiding place behind a loose board and continued writing where he had left off the day before.  He could not live without writing.  He wrote down what had happened that day, what he had seen, what he had heard.  He wrote about the death of Mrs. Finaman, brought on no doubt by lack of nutrition, and he wrote about her husband’s grief at the loss of his wife and his unborn child.  He wrote about the sudden disappearance of Mr. and Mrs. Kortoon, and the speculation that they paid their way out of the ghetto.  And he wrote about the disappearance of the Macabeus family, and the speculation that something sinister had happened to them.

That night on his uncomfortable cot, Wissinger had a wonderful dream.  He dreamed that a beautiful woman was making love to him.  She licked his neck as she rubbed her naked body against his.  She whispered to him in some foreign language—he thought it was Brech.  When he managed to pull himself out of the fog of sleep, and he realized that it wasn’t a dream, that the woman was really here with him, he tried to push her off of him.

“Don’t stop now lover,” she said, a noticeably Brech accent to her Freedonian.  “I’m just starting to really enjoy myself.”

Wissinger pushed again, and slid his body out from under her, falling to the floor in the process.  She stretched out, lying on her stomach.  He stared at her open-mouthed.  Her long blond hair didn’t quite cover a fourteen inch crescent moon tattoo at the top of her back.  Another tattoo, an eight inch flaming sun sat just above her voluptuous bottom. 

“Who are you?  What are you doing here?”

“I would have thought that was obvious,” she replied in a sultry voice.  “I’m here to warn you.”

“You… uh, what?”

“I’m here to warn you.”

She rolled over and stood up, revealing six star tattoos all over her front.

“In a short while, maybe a few weeks, the food supply to the ghetto will be reduced.  It will be reduced a lot.”

“They barely give us enough to survive on as it is.  They can’t cut it back anymore.”

“They can, and they will.”  She stepped closer to him.  “They are going to try and starve the Zaeri to extinction.”

“They won’t be able to.”

“No, it’s true, in the end they won’t.  But they will try and many will die.  Even worse things will follow.  Do you know how to get out of the ghetto?”

“I can’t leave.  People need me here.”

“No they don’t.  People like you, but they don’t need you and they won’t help you when things get very bad.  You have no family and when it comes to eat or starve, you won’t have any friends either—no one will.  I ask you again; do you know how to get out of the ghetto?”

“They say a Kafirite named Kiesinger will get you out if you can pay, but I don’t have any money.  I didn’t have any before I came here.”

“Here.”

The woman handed him a small leather pouch, though he had no idea where she could have had it hidden.  He looked inside.  There was a small roll of banknotes and twenty or so gold coins.

“Brech marks?”

“Gold is gold.  I don’t know if the banknotes are worth much, but they’ve got to be better than Freedonian groschen.”

“No doubt,” said Wissinger.  “Why?  Why are you helping me?  I mean, me in particular.”

“You need to survive.  You need to leave Freedonia and make your way to Birmisia.”

“Birmisia?  That’s on the other side of the world.  How could I get there?  What would I do there?”

“Live.  As for the how, we’ll deal with that later.  Now you’ve wasted all my time talking when we could have been doing something far more satisfying.”

“You’ve only been here a few minutes.”

“Yes, but I have much to do.  Go see this man and get out of the ghetto.  I’ll find you again at a later date, hopefully in a more hospitable mood.”

“Who are you?  What are you?  Are you my guardian angel?”

The woman smiled.  “That is exactly what I am.”

Then with a wave of her hand, she disappeared with a pop.

Despite the fact that the series carries his name, Bessemer the Steel Dragon usually plays his part in the background of the story.  In The Young Sorceress, this changes quite a bit.  He not only gets to play a big part in the plot, he gets to engage in some violence.  In this bit, Senta has to wait for him while he eats.

“I don’t like sitting here with them staring at me like that,” said Senta, as she brushed her hand through her hair, blond once again. 

She was perched on a large rock twenty feet from Bessemer, who was stripping great pieces of flesh from the body of an adolescent paralititan.  Fifty feet from them, two large tyrannosaurs watched, their ugly black heads bobbing up and down as they shifted from one foot to the other.

“Piss off, you!” Bessemer shouted at them.  “This is my lunch!”

“I don’t think that’s going to do it,” said Senta.

The steel dragon turned toward the two monsters and roared, a massive gout of flame shooting more than half the distance toward them.  The dinosaurs roared back, but then turned and stalked off across the great field toward the herd of triceratops in the distance.

“I guess you showed them,” said Senta.

“It’s not the size of the dragon in the fight.  It’s the size of the fight in the dragon.”

The young sorceress thought that his philosophy must be correct, as either one of the black and red predators was easily twice as big as the dragon.  Then again, maybe it was the fire.

“You’re not frightened of them?”

“I used to be.  I suppose if one actually got a hold of me, I’d be in for it.  That’s not going to happen though.  And when I get a little bigger, there’ll be no creature on this entire continent for me to fear.”

“There’s always the other one—Hissussisthiss.”

“Yes, there’s always him,” said Bessemer.  “I wonder about him sometimes.  He must be lonely with no other dragons around.”

“Are you?  Lonely, I mean, with no other dragons around?”

“I’ve got you, don’t I?”  He took another big bite of dinosaur meat and chewed it.  “Someday I think I’ll meet other dragons.  There are bound to be some around somewhere.  Humans can’t have wiped them all out.”

“What makes you think it was humans?”

“You know it was,” he said.  “You lot are always wiping out other creatures.  Look at the stories.  Rendrik of the North, and those other barbarians—they were out slaying dragons all the time.”

“I suppose,” said the girl.

“Maybe they are all gone.  Maybe humans did kill them all off.  Maybe it is just me and that great green brute.”

Senta just shrugged.  She didn’t have any answers for herself; certainly none for the dragon.

I had a lot of fun with Senta in The Young Sorceress.  I just read it again and I enjoyed it more than I remembered.  I tried a couple of things in this book that I don’t think worked as well as I wanted them to, but that being said, I think it works well within the overall story arc.  I had written The Drache Girl and The Two Dragons almost 4 years before The Young Sorceress.  In The Drache Girl, Senta is a happy-go-lucky kid.  In The Two Dragons, she is a sorceress whom everyone is afraid of.  In this book I get to show how she changed.  Here she deals with two would-be attackers.

She strolled north toward the park, walking between the warehouses rather than following the road because she wanted to avoid lookie-loos in general as well as a few specific individuals.  She was just about to exit the narrow passage between one of the governor’s warehouses and a private one when two men stepped into her way.  They were both at least six feet tall and broad shouldered.  They both looked to be in their early twenties and they both dressed poorly. 

“It looks like we’ve found our little bird,” said one of the men to the other.

“I think you owe us a good time, little girl,” said the other.

Senta took the last bite of sausage and threw the stick on the ground.

“How about it?  Are you going to show us a good time?” the second man continued, though the first man’s face showed the first hint of confusion.  Why wasn’t the girl showing any sign of fear?

“Here’s a good time for you,” she said.

Reaching out, she touched the second man with her index finger.  He let out a bloodcurdling scream and dropped to the ground clutching his crotch.  He continued to scream and scream.  The first man looked from his friend to the girl and back, panic slowly crawling up his face.  At last his gaze stopped on the girl.

“Here’s an oldie, but a goodie,” said Senta.  “Uuthanum.”

A blue cone spread from her finger to engulf the man.  His skin turned blue as frost formed on his skin.  Within a few seconds, he was frozen solid.  The sorceress stepped over the prone man, still screaming and holding his privates, and around the standing man, still completely stiffened.

“How much fun are you going to have now, I wonder?”  Then she continued on her way to the park.