1st Draft: Roadkill

     It was pitch black and snowing, with not much other traffic, Because of that, Kenny was making good time. With luck, he would drop his load of closeout furniture at sunrise and have an hour for breakfast before picking up another load for the return trip to Asheville. If he timed his stops right – and didn’t get pulled over - he might just be home by nightfall.
     Beside him was his piss-jug and a gallon of coffee. If the coffee didn’t keep him awake, the bottle of little blue pills tucked into his boot definitely would. Driving a big rig was all a matter of balance: Speed vs. road conditions, exhaustion vs. chemistry. Tilt too far one way or the other, even for a moment, and you’d be on the wrong side of five tons of screaming steel.
     It didn’t help that Ohio had shit for radio stations. Didn’t anyone here realize that a song or two had been written after 1985? And what they did play, they played into the ground, until you could sing even the songs you hated in your sleep.
     Uh-oh - better not to mention the S-word. Not here. Not now.
     The truck’s high-beams pushed against the darkness but couldn’t scratch it. The snow threw itself against his wipers, each flake a crystal kamikaze trying to get in. The road hadn’t been plowed - unusual for a state that was usually on top of the weather - but at least the snow was still fresh powder. In a few hours, it would be an ice rink, but Kenny would be long gone by then.
     Awake. Wakey, wakey, eggs & bakey. Find something to look at besides the snow. Snow was hypnotic at night; it made you forget where the road was. Sometimes it even seemed like it was trying to get in the cab with him, like a school of piranha in the dark.
     Ahead, on the median along the edge of the road, Kenny spotted a dead deer. Well, it was that time of year, wasn’t it? He cast it a glance as he passed. It was a buck with a decent rack, lying on a big pile of snow, legs askew. It had survived hunters, mad cow disease, droughts, coyotes, and famine, only to end up as roadkill.
     Going, going… gone.
     Such a waste, to be murdered by a road, a thing that killed indiscriminately but didn’t eat. There must be miles of venison on this highway alone, waiting for the county crews or the state to cover them with wood chips so that commuters wouldn’t have to watch them rot. It all seemed unnatural, somehow.
     In Kenny’s left rearview mirror, the buck stood up.
     Kenny blinked, checked the road ahead, then opened his window for a look back. Behind him, the pile of snow that the deer lay on rose up, wearing the buck like a hat. In another moment, it was lost to the snow, distance, and the dark.
     Kenny put up his window and shook the cold flakes out of his hair. He pulled off at the next exit and soon found a Giant Eagle parking lot to glide his rig into. A couple of hours’ sleep might cost him his bonus, but when you started seeing fucking snow banks stand up, it was long past time to put your head down, little blue pills be damned.
     The name of the road that the grocery store was on stuck in his mind as he shut the rig down, kicked off his boots, and climbed into his bunk:
     Trollbridge.
     He clicked on his bunk heater. In less than a minute, he was asleep.

     Chad tapped the pen against his teeth, a bad habit from grade school. He looked out the office window; it was already getting dark, and the sky had that weird, yellowish light that meant more snow was on the way.
     “I’m sorry, sir,” he said into the phone. “What did you say you hit?”
     “A big fucking buck.”
     “Do you mean a deer?” asked Chad.
     “What the fuck did I just say? Can you not hear me?”
     “Sir, I’m just trying to be clear.” Tap, tap, tap. This shift couldn’t end soon enough.
     “Yes, a fucking deer. I hit it with my fucking truck. It did a fucking number on my grill, and my bumper’s gone.”
     Chad hunted around on his desk. Where was the damned form?
     “Are you calling to claim the carcass?” he asked.
     “What?”
     “Do you want to keep the deer?” Ah, there it was.
     “What the fuck am I gonna do with it?”
     “Some people like to keep the meat,” said Chad. “Or the head, if it’s not damaged. It’s your kill, legally - we just have to send someone out with a deer carcass receipt.”
     “People eat these fuckin’ things?”
     “Yes. Deer meat is called venison.”
     “Why would anybody eat it? Are they poor?”
     “Not necessarily,” said Chad, getting a little angry but trying to keep it out of his tone. “Some folks like wild game.”
     “Look, I’m not Tarzan, okay? I just wanted somebody to know.”
     “We appreciate that,” said Chad, crumpling up the form and sailing it into the wastebasket. “Is the carcass off the road, or do you need us to come move it?”
     “I don’t give a fuck what you do with it. It’s on 480 by the bridge.”
     “Which bridge?” said Chad. He waited. “Hello?”
     The line was dead. The fucking fucker had hung up.
     “Fuck my life,” said Chad. “Now I’ve got to go out.”

     The problem with being a wildlife officer, aside from the pay, was that the job often sucked. Like - just for example - having to go out in a fucking blizzard to flag and maybe move a deer carcass when there was just twenty minutes left in your shift - a carcass that you didn’t know the location of, mind you - because those twenty minutes could mean the difference between a clear road or a dead motorist. With a baby on board, because that was just what life was like, when you were Chad Danzig.
     Jesus, thought Chad. When did I get so fucking dark? And when did I start saying fuck all the time?
     But he knew what it was. Spending a sizable portion of your workday dealing with dead things - or sometimes even killing things, when necessary, like that coyote that kept biting joggers by the canal last summer - reinforced the otherwise carefully avoided truth:
     Everything died. And more often than not, death was sudden, cruel, and unbelievably messy.
And for a large chunk of every year, that meant deer.
     Lots of other animals had adapted to people. You hardly ever saw a dead squirrel by the side of the road any more. Instead of running across the pavement, they almost seemed to swim across now, spreading their bodies out and staying low. Maybe it was learned behavior, maybe it was passed down in their DNA, but they had figured out the system.
     Hell, coyotes had adapted so well that there were more of them now than ever before - the one he’d taken down didn’t even put a dent in that. You sure couldn’t say that about buffalos, or any other animal that Chad could think of.
     But at the top of every road kill list, year after year… raccoons.
     Okay, well, that was true - you did tend to see a lot more dead raccoons than boneheads, but a raccoon carcass more or less took care of itself, falling to pieces over time or flattening out and becoming one with the pavement. Run over a dead deer, though, especially a big buck, and you just might join him.
     Which meant he wasn’t getting home any time soon.
     “Sean, I gotta go mulch a deer. Wanna go with me?”
     Sean looked up from his desk where he was texting his girlfriend, Brittany, because that was what Sean always did.
     “Aren’t you off?”
     “Don’t remind me.”
     “You don’t have to stick around,” said Sean. “I can get it.”
     “It’s a buck.”
     “Shit.”
     “Yeah.”
     “You pull around. I’ll call dispatch and log it. Where’s it at?”
     “Somewhere on 480. He said it was by a bridge.”
    “Which one?”
     Chad shook his head.
     “You’re kidding.”
     “Nope.”
     “There’s, like, 3 bridges.”
     “Maybe he meant overpass.”
     “Oh, dude…”
     “Let’s go.”
     At least the truck is warm, thought Chad, as they crawled along 480 in the weird light that you sometimes got on winter nights. Visibility was bad, but the plows had been through, so the roads were still passable.
     “I don’t get it,” said Sean.
     “What?” said Chad, turning on the wipers, which didn’t seem to change much.
     “We live in a place where it snows, right?”
     “Yeah?”
     “How come everybody drives like they’ve never see it before?”
     “Hmph,” said Chad.
     They passed an SUV on its side in the ditch. Neither remarked on it.
     “How far until the next bridge?” said Sean, bored.
     “I think it’s Harper, so about… eight miles?”
     “Ever seen deer around there?”
     Chad shook his head, squinting into the snow. “Not one of the crossings.”
     “I’m betting it’s Granger. We mulched four there last year, remember?”
     Chad nodded. He had mulched two of them himself that summer. You covered them in wood chips so they decomposed quickly, didn’t attract scavengers, and didn’t distract drivers. Mulch hid their stink pretty well, too. Winter was different - snow, sleet, and temperature swings did all the work - all you had to do was make sure the carcass was off the road.
     All part of the magic of being a wildlife officer.
     When they got there, Harper was a bust, but traffic was thinning out the later it got, so they made it to Granger in less time than Chad expected. He slowed as they approached.
     “I see a bumper,” said Sean.
     “Where?”
     “Just under the overpass, on the right.”
     Chad pulled the truck up and over. Sean was right - a bright blue bumper was lying next to one of the overpass’s supporting columns, just at the edge of their headlights. It wasn’t even covered by snow yet.
     He turned on the hazard lights and the flashers. No sense getting winged by some asshole who thought that he knew how to drive sixty in the snow. Sean was already up and out, flashlight in hand.
Chad opened his door and zipped up his coat, but snow got in at the neck, anyway, shocking him with its abrupt, cold bite. He slammed the door to shake it off.
     “So where’s our deer?” he said.
     He turned on his own flashlight and scanned the road. There was almost no traffic, by now, but it wouldn’t have mattered: There was also no deer.
     Sean picked up the bumper to examine it more closely. “There’s definitely blood and fur on here,” he said. “Maybe he took it with him.”
     “Not this guy. He’s never eaten anything that didn’t come in a box or a bag.”
     “Somebody else, then, maybe,” said Sean.
     He tossed the bumper under the overpass, farther from the road. It struck something wet, and both men turned in surprise.
     “Bingo!” said Sean.
     In the light of their flashlights, the six-pointer mooned at them from behind the next column, its eyes wide and dull. The bumper had landed squarely on its neck.
     Sean wandered over to take a look. Chad took out his log book to document the carcass.
     “You’re gonna want to see this,” said Sean, after a moment.
     “What?” said Chad, writing while trying to hold the flashlight at the same time. He glanced up. Sean was holding up the deer’s head. The rest of the deer wasn’t attached to it.
     “Wow,” Chad said, genuinely impressed. “How fast was he going, do you think?”
     “It gets better,” said Sean. “That’s all there is over here.”
     “No body?”
     “Not unless it vaporized on impact.”
     Chad walked over. There was a lot of blood on the ground where the head had lain. Too much.
     He turned in a slow circle, looking for footprints in the snow. He wouldn’t be surprised if another driver had taken the deer - venison was tasty, if you cooked it up right - but why chop the head off before loading it? That would make a - pardon the pun - bloody mess.
     That was when he noticed the dripping, and pointed his flashlight up.
     “Jesus…”
     The buck’s body was fifteen feet above them, draped across what Chad assumed were drain pipes. It hung mostly from its hind legs, like a side of beef in a butcher’s shop.
     That’s stupid, he thought. First, nobody’s going to dress a deer outside in the middle of a fucking blizzard. Second, especially not alongside a highway. Third, the buck had to weigh two hundred pounds, even without its head, so how could anyone have gotten the damned thing up there?
     “Holy shit!” yelled Sean, eyes wide. He pulled out his phone. “This fucker’s going on YouTube!”
     Chad shook his head. Even if the caller had been driving an SUV, upon impact the deer would have traveled mostly in the same direction as the vehicle - that is, parallel to the ground. Sure, it might catch a little air, but there’s no way that it would end up that far off the ground.
     Not unless it was pulling Santa Claus’s sleigh, he thought.
     Sean laughed, swinging his phone around to capture the bumper, the deer’s head, and the body.
     “That’s fucking amazing!” he said.
     Chad strode over to the column near the head, pacing off the distance. There was some blood on the support, he saw, but not much. If the body had traveled through the air, leaving the head here, wouldn’t there have been more spray?
     He wasn’t sure. And what was that smell? Like cabbage and sweat and feet.
     He swung his flashlight around the rest of the underpass above him. I-beams, pipes, concrete, some faded graffiti on the concrete blocks nearer the road, but no ladders, ropes, or chains. Nothing that could have hauled a full grown buck up under there.
     “How do we get it down?” said Chad, staring at it.
     Sean stopped laughing. “What do you mean?”
     “We can’t leave it up there,” said Chad. “It’s right over the edge of the road. If it fell on a car…”
     Sean put away his phone and brushed snow off his hood. He shrugged.
     “Grapple?”
     It was Chad’s turn to laugh. “You a cowboy, now? You Batman?”
     “Spider-Man, maybe. Why not?”
      Chad shrugged. “Sure. Why not. There a grapple in the truck?”
     “I think so.”
     “More power to you, buddy.”
     Chad put away his notebook and took a couple of pictures with his own phone. They would be blurry, with all the snow, but a dead deer was a dead deer. The important thing was recording where it had happened and when.
     Is that really the most important thing? he asked himself. Because I can think of one or two more.
     “Found it!” said Sean, coming back, a coiled, yellow nylon rope in hand. Well, mitten, anyway.      The steel grapple dangled at the end of it, looking for all the world like some kind of medieval weapon.
     “Should I get back in the truck?” said Chad. “Should both f us?”
     “Laugh it up, Overtime Boy,” said Sean, smiling in the wind.
     He played out a few feet of the line, swinging the grapple like a pendulum. Chad took a step back, then several more.
     “Don’t you trust me?” said Sean.
     “Hell, no,” said Chad. “That’s why I don’t let you drive.”
     Sean laughed. He swung the grapple around and around like a propeller, eyeing the distance to the carcass above them, then suddenly let fly.
     “Nice web-shootin’, Spiderman,” laughed Chad. “Now how do we get the grapple down?”
     Sean grunted. The grapple was wrapped around a pipe a good five feet from the deer. He jiggled the line, but the metal hooks were lodged fast.
     “Fuck!” he said.
     “What do we do now?” said Chad.
     “Tell you what I’m gonna do,” said Chad. He drew his service revolver.
     “Dude, you can’t…”
     Pow! Pow pow!
     In the darkness behind Sean, something silently dropped down from above, but it wasn’t the deer. It was wide and covered in shaggy grey hair like a goat. When it stood up, it was easily half again Sean’s height.
     “Fuck!” said Sean, still looking up at the deer. It hadn’t moved.
     The thing behind him had a prominent nose - a drinker’s nose, Chad would have said - and eyes like softballs. It stood on two thick legs, with hairless, long-toed feet as big as end tables. Even fully erect, its arms reached all the way to the ground.
     Chad caught its eye. It stared at him, shaggy head tilted slightly to one side. Then it smiled, and its mouth went on and on.
     “Hunh,” said Chad, blinking in the snow.
     It spread its arms to either side - seven, eight feet, easy. There were big hands at the end of them, with long, clawed fingers, like the sloth Chad saw once at the zoo.
     “Don’t tell anybody I did that, okay?” said Sean. He looked over at Chad for confirmation, then frowned.
     “What?” he said. Chad wasn’t looking at him. He turned. Then it had him.
     The moment that Chad heard Sean’s first scream, it was like someone fired a starter’s pistol. He turned and ran away from the truck and onto the road, all instinct and blind panic, because pavement was faster going than snowbound grass.
     Behind him, Sean’s screams rose in pitch and volume. Then, just as suddenly, they stopped.
     It’s coming for me. Sean’s dead and oh God those teeth and Mommy don’t let it get me I won’t look back that’s when they get you…
     But he did, and slowed, then stopped in the middle of the road, blinking in the snow. He could see Sean, or a pile of what used to be Sean. But whatever it was, it was gone, as if it had never been there.
     Ambush predator. It’s waiting for me to come back, so it can pick me off just like it did him. The deer was just roadkill - easy meat. But now it’s hiding, waiting for another meal to come along. This is what it does.
     Chad never heard the semi that hit him. In the driver’s defense, the snowfall had worsened to the point that visibility was almost nonexistent, except for under the overpass. He felt the rig shudder, and shuddered himself, but put it down to the wind.
     For a moment, Chad flew. As he had surmised, his direction of travel was more horizontal than vertical. He felt no pain from his impact with the semi or the column that it threw him into. That would come later. For now, there was only the pavement, swirling snow, and Sean’s face.
     Correction: Most of Sean’s face.
     A shadow moved at the edge of his vision, but he couldn’t turn his head. That was all right; after the semi was out of sight and things had quieted down, the troll came right over and squatted down in front of him.
     It was still smiling, its eyes like merry little raisins.
     “Good mourning, bleckfust,” it said.

2nd author-guy interview

what follows is my 2nd self-interview. since there are still no magazines, etc., jumping at the opportunity to do one, i ask myself a bunch of questions found at random via google, in the interest of saving future wikipedia curators time.

What is the first book that made you cry?

Magic, by William Goldman.

Does writing energize or exhaust you?

It depends on how long the session is. If I only have a little while, it’s exhausting. You have to get yourself back into it, back into the character and the scene, and then it’s hard to have to stop. If I have a couple of hours or more, it kind of creates its own energy, and I lose track of time as I slip into the book.

What are common traps for aspiring writers?

Falling in love with particular characters, scenes, or conversations that don’t move the plot along. It clouds your mind and your judgement. The law of writing is, if it doesn’t serve the plot, they have to die, or it all becomes self-indulgence.

Have you ever gotten reader’s block?

Sometimes, with John Irving or John LeCarre. Some of their books take a long time to get into. The payoff in their stories is always worth it, but sometimes I don’t feel like making the climb.

Do you try more to be original or to deliver to readers what they want?

I don’t have the skills to do either, yet. For me, it’s just about learning the process and trying to tell each story in a clear and understandable way. You have to learn to stretch canvas before you learn to paint.

Do you think someone could be a writer if they don’t feel emotions strongly?

Yes. Read Isaac Asimov. Great plots, interesting characters, terrific craftsmanship, but every bit of emotion seems to be observed, rather than felt.

Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?

In my head, every book takes place in the same world, on the same timeline. A lot of things happen in PoHo, which is a fictionalized version of my hometown. The character interactions between books have been slight, so far, but that’s changing.

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?

Get off your butt and write. Write more, even when you hate it. It gets better the longer you keep at it, and you can always fix it in the editing stages.

How did publishing your first book change your process of writing?

I learned a lot about editing and marketing. The first, that it takes so long, and it’s the hardest part, killing all of the bits you love, but can’t use. The second, that there’s so much to know, so much work to be done, and what works constantly changes.

What authors did you dislike at first but grew into?

John LeCarre. Tim Dorsey. Hunter Thompson.

How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?

Half-finished? Only 1 or 2. But I have bits and pieces – sometimes lots of bits and pieces, in physical file folders and in Google Drive, – for about 80 more.

What does literary success look like to you?

Having regular readers... people who look forward to the next thing that I publish.

What’s the best way to market your books?

For me, reading everything that Amazon says about it, then doing it. The rest is all the quality of your work.

What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?

It depends on the book. For ‘Rest Stop’, I read a lot about all of the bizarre behaviors that parasites can cause, and some more about serial killers – the different types. Daryl Gladring is miles away from Harvey Lee.

Do you view writing as a kind of spiritual practice?

No. For me, that’s writing music.

What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex?

The little, everyday crap that women have to deal with. Is that man checking me out in a creepy way? What do I do if he approaches me? Do I have a tampon if I need one? Am I being talked down to? How do I brush off this guy in a way that won’t potentially put me in danger or cost me my job? How does this outfit make me look? Women have to think about a lot more than men do, and most of it has to do with external threats and internal self-doubt.

How do you select the names of your characters?

I figure out who the character is – what they’re willing to do, what they want, and how they look. Once I have that, I can usually tell what their voice sounds like. From there, their name just comes. They tell me their names.

Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?

No. That seems silly. Maybe even destructive. Writing is about communication. I don’t play favorites. You buy the ticket, you get the whole ride.

What was your hardest scene to write?

Trying to describe the monster in the finale of ‘Frost Flowers’. I rewrote it so many times, and each time my editor/muse sent it back, and told me that no one would understand it. It turns out that describing an interdimensional entity that can only partially be seen in the dimension is hard – so hard that I just had to do it again in ‘Crayon Sugarsweet and the Spooky Thing’.

Do you Google yourself?

No. Who has time? Why - what does it say? Does it say I’m cute?

What one thing would you give up to become a better writer?

Doritos. Every flavor. This is serious.

What is your favorite childhood book?

‘Journey to the Mushroom Planet’. When I was a little older, Susan Cooper’s ‘The Dark Is Rising’.

What is the most difficult part of your artistic process?

I haven’t gotten to the artistic part yet. For me, editing. I have a tough time knowing when to stop.

keeping track of chapters in longer works

one of the best pieces of advice i've ever gotten about writing a longer work is to plot out each character separately from beginning to end. along with helping you decide who interacts with who and when, it helps you to figure out each one's motivation and how they see themselves, others, and the conflict at the center of the story. you can even get daring and write sub-conflicts. you don't even need a fancy tool - a simple spreadsheet will do.

each cell represents either one chapter or event:

• column one contains the name of the character that you're focusing on. 
• the second column is for the day of the week on which the event occurs. 
• the third column is for the number of the chapter in which the event occurs. 
• the fourth column is for the events themselves. 

 write out each character's arc from beginning to end in the fourth column, one short paragraph per major event, one major event per cell. when you're done with that for all of your main characters, arrange the order of the cells so that you don't have a bunch of chapters in a row that are just about one character. (it's kind of like shuffling cards.)

use the second column to keep track of which date or day of the week in which each event occurred (you might even have to have a division between days and nights, here, if a lot happens in a relatively short period of time, and for multiple characters).

number the results in column 3 (the chapter number column, remember?), sort everything by that column (something that excel is perfect for), and read your outline out loud.

if it still makes sense and has a logical flow, you have a working outline. if it doesn't, change the numbers around and resort, even if that means you hack things out. better now than after you've written four chapters that no longer belong in the story.

the snow wight, chapter 1

In the time before men walked alone, sirrah, err the winter that near killed the world, there was a wizard named Pirnha Lo’kresh.

Lo’kresh lived in the middle of a great desert, and it was there that he one day came upon an Ifrit - what some would call a Djinn - and threw himself at its taloned feet.

He told the Ifrit the truth: That he was a poor but devout seeker of knowledge, a pilgrim come to beg at the table of a people who were neither demons nor angels, but with attributes of both, and a greater understanding of the physical world than either. A tribe that had been cruelly denied the favor that Allah gave to the race of Men.

The Djinn, who was named Al-A’amash, threatened to tear Lo’kresh to pieces with his tusks, but then decided that the entertainment of seeing a mere mortal attempt to grasp the secrets of the cosmos would be more diverting, and agreed to take Lo’Kresh on as his pupil.

Under the bemused tutelage of this Son of the Flame, Lo’kresh learned to capture moments in time, even as tree sap imprisons the honeybee and becomes precious amber, and to bend the elements and aethers of reality to his will.

As Lo’kresh pursued this knowledge, he gradually lost interest in the stuff of mortal life, even as he lost track of time’s passage. So it was that he awoke one day to find his body suffering from an unknown number of days without sustenance, drink, or sunlight.

“This will never do,” said Lo’kresh to himself, “for what good is knowledge if I die before I can make use of it? I must acquire a servant to see to my earthly needs, for the mighty Djinn have none, nor any understanding of the necessities of mortal men.”

Full of the secrets that he had acquired, the young wizard decided to set off westward across the desert in search of a suitable caretaker, taking with him only a bag made from the carpet on which he sometimes slept. He waited for a day when Al-A’amash was absent - which happened as often as not - and determined where the nearest slave market lay.

With the first step of his journey, before his slipper touched a grain of sand, Lo’kresh trapped the moment, and so journeyed far beyond the desert in no time at all, coming to Mystras, sister city to fallen Sparta. Here it was still night, and the city slumbered while Pirnha Lo’Kresh wandered its streets in search of the slave market.

Eventually he found that place, and sat upon his bag to await the sunrise and the market’s opening, making himself invisible to passers-by, as the Djinn had taught him.

He saw the shepherd boys driving their families’ sheep to pasture, and the girls sent to carry water. He saw the merchants arrive at their stalls, which ringed the slave market, with carts full of items for sale, which they arranged with practiced hands. Before long the braziers were lit, and all manner of delicious smells danced on the wind - savory lamb and roasted goat meat, chickens, figs and olives, spices and wood smoke, nuts and honey.

Eventually a man came and set to sweeping the dust from the raised wooden platform at the center of the square, a sure sign that the slave traders were en route. A crowd began to gather, eating breakfast from the carts and talking amongst themselves about the weather, trade, politics, and women.

Lo’Kresh ignored them, his mind on other matters. He had no abode, but he had become immune to the elements. A slave would not be.That meant raising a house from the dust - a simple matter, but why raise a house when a palace was just as easy? Besides, cleaning it would give his caretaker something to do besides seeing to it that he ate, drank, and made his ablutions each day. And while Al-A’amash, was a great teacher, the Djinn not as he was, and did not understand his desire for conversation, nor did he understand what the Djinn’s people did in place of it. It would be pleasant to have a… well, not a companion, obviously, but someone with whom he could at least converse about the weather.

She must be intelligent, if not educated, thought Pirnha Lo’Kresh. Diligent in her duties and well-spoken, fastidious and curious about the world. But does such a woman even exist, let alone as a slave?

It was with this thought in the forefront of his mind that Lo’Kresh saw the slavers’ wagons arrive, drawn by ancient horses, full of human cargo. As each drew to a stop behind the selling platform, their masters hopped down and approached their fellows, greeting them and conversing in low tones.

After a time, they drew lots to determine in what order they would ascend the platform to auction their wares. A tall and swarthy fellow in a blue robe went first. His slaves were mostly heavy laborers, great dark men as muscular as bulls, capable of carrying blocks of cut stone to build homes, bridges, and temples. The next, a fellow with an oiled mustache that fell nearly to his sash, sold exotic, beautiful women in every shade, who could serve equally well as handmaidens or courtesans. The third, a bedraggled man in a red silk caftan, sold elderly serving wenches from the west and skinny sailors, wizened by decades of salt and sun.

By now the wizard was getting bored, having seen nothing that drew his attention, let alone his purse, and eventually dozed off. When he awoke, all but one of the slavers had gone, and most of the crowd with them. The sun was directly overhead, but Lo’Kresh had learned to redirect its heat away from his body, and was comfortably cool.

He stretched, yawned, and saw that the remaining slave merchant was having difficulty getting the price that he wanted for his final sale of the day, and Lo’Kresh soon saw why: It was a young woman, great with child. A pregnant slave could mean anywhere from one to three or more additional backs to toil, or to sell at a fat profit. This had not been lost on the slave merchant, but no one in the crowd would even meet his asking price.

Lo’Kresh considered. He had no desire for additional mouths to feed, nor need of money. The mother might die in childbirth, leaving him no better off than he was now. Perhaps it would be best to return another day.

He stood up and prepared to depart, rolling up his square of carpet and tucking it into his pocket as the merchant’s frustrated exhortations utterly failed to sway the crowd.

Suddenly, he heard a woman’s voice call out.

“Master, where are you going? Do you not know that I am meant to go with you, and only you?”

Curious, Lo’Kresh turned back, only to find the woman’s eyes fixed on him. He looked behind himself, but there was no one there. He glanced at his legs, but saw only air, as was natural when one was invisible.

“Do not forsake me, Master,” called the woman. “For it is destiny that has brought us together.”

“Woman, silence your tongue, if you wish to keep it!” hissed the slave trader. He raised his whip.

Lo’Kresh took a large step to the left. The woman’s eyes followed him.

“Yes, Master - I see you,” she said.

The wizard froze the moment, and the sunlight took on a grey cast. He stroked his beard, as he always did when thinking, and strode up to the platform. The woman’s eyes remain fixed on the spot where he had been, the slaver’s whip poised above her back.

Lo’Kresh made a slow circle around her, noting her soft palms, lithe body, and long, well-groomed hair. Clearly, she had not been a slave for long. Her clothing might be cast-offs, but her bearing suggested that she had come from a family of means.

“Wake,” he said, and the woman turned immediately to him.

“Thank you, Master,” she said. Her eyes fell on the slaver. She reached up, took the whip from his hand, and coiled it around the man’s throat, as tightly as she could.

“How is it that you can see me?” said Lo’Kresh, stroking his beard.

The woman faced him, and smiled. “My father was an Ifrit,” she said. “He came to my mother after her family’s caravan died in a sandstorm. I was born the same day. I have no magic, but I can see when it is at work.”

Lo’Kresh thought on this, and nodded. “The Djinn have few women,” he said. “I have heard that some take human females as mates. But where is your father now?”

“Sulaimon, the Great and Terrible, imprisoned him in a brass vessel when he would not speak the name of Allah,” she said. “Sulaimon burned my mother as a witch and cast the vessel into the sea. I have not seen my father since.”

“Is the father of your child also an Ifrit?” said Lo’Kresh.

“No,” she said, smiling bitterly. She nodded at the garotted slaver. “It was this dog.”

“I see,” said Lo’Kresh. “And what will you do when the villagers see that you have murdered your Master?”

“You are my Master.”

“You will be a mother soon. I need a servant, someone who will see to my house and the needs of my physical body.”

“One need not preclude the other, Master.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. Or I can simply remove the child…”

“No!”

“Why not? You clearly have no love for the father.”

“That does not mean I have no love for my daughter. She is like to be my only child.”

“You know that your child is a girl?”

The woman put a gentle hand over her belly. “I do.”

Pernha considered. If the woman did not perform her tasks well, he could abandon her on a mountaintop, or in the middle of the sea, and procur another. If she did, he would soon have two servants, and the second could take the place of the first when the time came.

“Very well,” he said. “Take my hand.”

The woman did so.

“By what name are you called?” he said.

“Llinuwe, Master.”

“Hm. I do not know this word. What does it mean?”

“Far-seeing.”

“Hm. Hold my hand tightly, Llinuwe, for we stride on the edge of the universe.”

the book that started it all

i first started working on what would eventually become 'the ring around the rose' for a creative writing class when i was 16 years old. the story was much shorter, of course, but even then i knew that more was going to happen to declan and dyomee - not all of it good - and that there was a huge cast of characters involved, waiting in the wings.

now you can hold the first paperback of the first part of the story in your sweaty little hands, and for just $9.95.

shameless hucksterism, of course, but it all comes down to that, in the end... even waldo's hat.