by T. O. Munro
Each time one of the fleeing Karibs looked back at the alien child, they would stop absolutely still and she would catch up with them and tag them and run away, and it would be some moments before the tagged Karib youngster unflexed their limbs and resumed the chase.
“You see what I mean, Odestus?”
Odestus nodded, dry mouthed. “I’m sorry, I should have come sooner. Is it just with the children?”
Vlyndor shrugged. “Small animals too. It seems to be a matter of size, but she is growing and she is changing.”
“Send the others away, call her over.”
Vlyndor issued a number of clicking commands and the little group dispersed. The three Karibs ran towards their houses. The other child strolled more reluctantly towards Vlyndor and Odestus. The wizard watched her carefully. She was a human child, a girl of perhaps seven or eight years of age. Her hair was scraped back over her skull and she wore a reed tunic like Vlyndor’s but otherwise she would not been out of place amongst any gang of street urchins in the Salved kingdom.
She stopped on the way to them, her attention seized by something on the ground. She bent down to pick it up, a tiny object perched on her finger. She looked at it intently, cupped it in her hands and then came running over to show them. As she drew closer Odestus could see the strange ridged quality to her hair as though it had been carved upon her head, in thick braided bands, bands which even now seemed to flex barely perceptibly. The ends of each band were tapered into blunt lozenge shapes which lifted slightly with a non-existent breeze. That was new too.
She held out her hands and looked up at Odestus with eyes of such piercing blue. “Look Uncle Odestus,” she said. “Look what I brought you.”
Odestus had to blink before he could break the eye contact and look at the object in her palm. It was a tiny perfect stone butterfly.
“It’s very pretty,” he said.
She giggled with childish pride and threw it up in the air. Then she tried to catch it, but it fell faster than she expected, its solid stone wings unfit for the business of fluttering. When she missed its fall, it crashed to the ground and shattered into many pieces.
She started to cry.
Odestus drew something from his pocket and handed it to her; it was a black gauze eye mask. “Persapha,” he said. “I want you to wear this always from now on. It was your mother’s.”
Afterword
Niarmit’s story began life a long time ago. Plotting it out in my head helped to fill dull moments of exam invigilation and provided a welcome relief from other exam hall diversions, such as counting up left-handers and right-handers or playing chicken with other invigilators as we walked down the narrow aisles between the desks.
Changing work pressures and patterns, together with some seemingly unresolvable plot problems led to me set the story aside for a ten year hiatus. I restarted with the support of my youngest daughter for whom each instalment became a rather atypical bedtime story. Tess remains the book’s first and best beta-reader.
However, it became clear some 100,000 words into the story and about a quarter of the way through the plot that the “book” was heading for a trilogy.
At 160,000 words, this second book has been longer than I might have expected at the outset, but I did not feel that I could have put a break in any earlier. John Finnemore is a comedian and a writer who I greatly admire. He once said that a good cliff-hanger should be about resolving all the key questions in the one story and in so doing set up new questions for the next. I hope you have found some pleasure and some resolution in this middle part of the trilogy.
“Master of the Planes” should, all being well, follow before the end of 2014.
In the meantime, the interest and support of readers is a great motivator to pick up the pace of writing. All feedback is gratefully received.
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Table of Contents
A Map of the Civilised Part of the Petred Isle
Prologue
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
