There were prodegies and portents enough, One-Eye says. Glen Cook, The Black Company
Another first line that does the job well. You likely come away thinking this is a fantasy, something has occurred that is massive (due to prodegies and portents) and trouble has arisen because the speaker and his people didn't recognize it. That's a hard-working first sentence. I like it.
I'm re-reading The Black Company because Charles mentioned that my writing reminded him of it. What I come away with in this read is that I like how Mr. Cook uses the first-person narrator to sum up much of the activity and conversation, zipping things along well. It's not a really close-in perspective of anyone, but the details he gives us are great. He's telling, but in a way that comes from the pov character.
An example:
The battlefield was ours. The men were looting the dead. Elmo, myself, the Captain, and a few others were standing around feeling smug. One-Eye and Goblin were celebrating in their unique fashion, taunting one another through the mouths of corpses. [Goblin and One-Eye are wizards.]
I really like this spare writing style. Not Hemingway-esque in the slightest, yet it works the same way: Lots of S-V-O sentences; short, staccato phrasing; the right word for the job every moment. The flavor, however, is not like Hemingway, but particular to Cook and other skilled fantasy writers like Gene Wolfe. The workmanship of fantasy and spec fic in general needs to work harder than more mainstream lit because of the requirements of worldbuilding.
And I must say...I feel flattered by Charles' comparison.
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And now, because I am feeling self-indulgent, I'm going to share the revised version of the very rough draft I posted last week. 1509 words.
The Redemption.
In the halls of the Emperor’s Flower Court, the Imperial Consort walked, her figure cloaked in yards of pale and drifting silk so that, to observers, she appeared a willowy cloud. Not even the toe of a slipper was visible as she progressed; nor the soft petals of her fingers. She was the White Lady, and to look upon her was dangerous to mortal eyes. Had she not cracked the earth so it swallowed an army? Did she not command the winds and the waters?
Voices stilled and heads bowed as the White Lady passed, surrounded by a phalanx of Ashtrellan Guard. Glint of starsteel weaponry, echo of bootfalls, and the red armor scattering bloody reflections along the marbled floor as their passage pulled the murmuring court to silence around them. Why the guards, they wondered, for the Goddess-touched? Something was wrong and it brushed their sensibilities with worry.
Enshrined in her veil, the Lady in no wise acknowledged the audience or the strangeness of this particular procession. These were the peasantry, the merchanters, the members and petitioners of the Lower Court who would not view their Emperor’s Consort unveiled except at the festivals of Winter’s End and High Sun. They could never know or even guess the truth of the situation: Their great Lady and symbol of the Goddess' approval a mere hostage, her powers enthralled to evil.
Among the throng she marked a few whose eyes followed her as if seeing the face beneath the shroud, as if familiar with the sweep of her cheekbones, the expanse of her brow, and seeking confirmation of their suspicions. Tightened lips here, a slightly narrowed glance there. She recognized their type if not their faces: Those who were invisible, those who served, unremarked and ignored. Those who knew, or guessed, much. If she had allies at all in this place, it was among these folk.
Thus she ignored them. To bend toward any, casually or otherwise, would mark them in the watchful eyes of others. Even the Ashtrellani who formed her path were endangered by her attention. She must remain ever cautious. Injury and death came too casually in the Flower Court, where even Powers were hemmed in by the shape of their caring-- and their fears.
As was occurring now, with this summons. A moment of choice welled from the cracked face of the mother goddess like tears for rain. The White Lady would be given a choice. Torn sinew could heal; but torn hearts? Torn honor? She stood tall and straight and followed the sun-rubbed epaulets of her guard captain…and dreaded the moments ahead.
Memories of old terrors and a loathing beyond description distracted her mind from the present. For a moment the vision of battle filled her senses. She heard the clangor of starsteel against brass, against mujir and the softer target of flesh; smelled the odors of blood, feces and the tang of sulfur. Groans and cries bit back behind clenched teeth. The snarl of fossavahrenin digging their claws through lacquered armor as if it were air and the shouts of their Brethren upon their withers, bows drawn again and again.
All of them aiming at her, at her heart as she stood beside the Emperor their enemy, her hand upon his -- not from love or accord, but clutching the Emperor's upraised hand, the ring brighter than sunfire as she wrestled for control of elemental flame, stealing the incipient volcano of molten heat before many thousands of her people died in a lake of magma. The ache in her throat as the mountain came down instead, pouring down like waterfall upon the Pleinimir Pass for so long she'd thought herself deafened by the sheer volume of it; and then the mist of broken stone as it settled in silence, damning her to an unwanted fate: Oathbreaker. Betrayer. Forsworn.
She scented that broken rock even now, as her feet hushed along the polished floor in a land far removed from that battlefield.
But the dead, she remembered them every moment of every day. Her clan laird, her friends, her kin.
They awaited her, even now, to redeem her broken honor should she fail once more.
The old memories and guilt dragged upon the Lady's mind, heavy as the gossamer veil enshrouding her was not. Betrayer, said her sense of honor. And irony that she, who had betrayed her honor and her people, now was hailed as the savior of another for that very thing. The essence of political spin and a larger betrayal still. If not for obligation, she would gladly die. Perhaps today would see her wish fulfilled.
You must live, whispered the earth dragons like distant thunder. For us. For him.
For a moment, she lost her center and nearly stumbled as the voices of the vahrein, the world spirits, invaded her senses. She smelled the rock again, not broken but living, the scent of mujir, the blood-of-stone, earth dragon blood that her people shaped into the immutable weaponry of the sacred warriors of the Goddess.
A promise. A gift she did not deserve.
Time is upon us, added the mistral wind, dancing down the corridor, chasing the ghosts of leaves. He is dying.
Not yet, not quite, the White Lady sent to them so it thrummed in the foundations of the palace and through the bedrock of the land—and, most of all, so that it hummed in the minds of the prisoners in the oubliette, their spirits frayed and nearly torn asunder. Among them, the one whose life was to be forfeit for her sake should she falter.
She prayed that the bones, the oracular bones, had told her true. That her honor had not given way once again to the will to live-- or the will to die. That she had seen the path rightly. And, thus occupied in her thoughts and her worries, the White Lady traversed the long halls of ivory and gold to halt before the towering doors of black-washed silver and ruby, the colors of the Empire and of the man who espoused her as a hostage and a false promise to his people.
Her feet whispered to a hush. Her escort drew up with the echo of boots and spear butts against stone. Footmen in formal coats black as night and pocked with diamond stars threw the doors open wide and theatrically. The panels struck with a hollowed boom.
Like a death knell, she thought, and strode forward before the echoes had stilled, many eyes upon her yet again as the High Court turned as one, their speculative eyes like wet gems in the sunlight dropping hawklike from crystal dome.
In this, the High Court, she let her Powers loose so that her silk veil melted away like mist, fading with each soft footfall. Let this display of who she was-- what she was-- remind their greedy souls of consequences. It shall pleasure me to lesson them, even as their master learns to regret his summoning of me.
Behind her, the Ashtrellani fell out, joining their red-lacquered brethren along the walls. Before her, a long hall, its center path a spill of empty sweeping toward the raised dais, the occupied throne. Her footfalls tolled like bells now, announcing her progress. Banners and flags snapped in an unfelt wind. The floor patterns spun and scattered as if whole flights of fireflies spun from the Lady’s touch, rippling in widening circles as she approached the mere candleflame of power that was the Lord of the Zahoran Empire.
Upon his silver throne, the Emperor watched her approach. He had expected his summons to force her to arrive as a supplicant might, form shaping thought. But she did not fear him. Her thoughts roiled, bitter acid.
Then, with three steps between herself and the lord of her life if not her heart, she paused. Tessellations settled into patterns of her homeland, a thread of text that not one of them would read as the promise it was: Ne-vahr rhoul, the promise of blood. She felt the vahrein brush against her, whisper a confirmation: He waits. And was not certain of whom the land spoke, her enemy before her, or the one whom she would save this day.
She did not know and could not guess. She could only choose.
Sunlight knived through the air, spangled on the rainbow tiles of the dias, the gems on the throne…on the quiescent ruby of the Fire Ring against a pale hand. To the right of the throne, the Seneschal, he who in truth deserved the title of Betrayer, met her gaze. Dark eyes and hair, thin and bloodless smile. Hands like spiders gripping the back of the throne. In memory, however, they were graceful, so graceful…
And she smelled the purple bell flowers of the Plains of Aum, and leather, and the acrid blood-of-stone: The land itself reminding her of her duty with the scents of her home.
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