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Steam!Callanthe Story from Prompt

Jan27

Part One: Plans

They hadn’t been meant to hear the news about Little Svon-on-Taba; they hadn’t been intended to be out of their rooms at all when the messenger came. Evanika and Orma were, as they had spent most of their childhoods and into what were nominally their adult years, grounded the week the messenger showed up. But, with a trait that had probably contributed to their state of perpetual confinement, they didn’t let a little thing like maternal disapproval (or the even-less-likely paternal censure) get in the way of their adventures.

So they had been in the back of the Emperor’s receiving room, anonymous among their cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and assorted other dozens of royal relatives, and conveniently camouflaged from discovery by Cousin Illavania’s immense feathered concoction of a hat, when the messenger, hastily cleaned up but still looking very much of the road, battered and scruffy and missing buttons on his jacket, bowed low and impatiently before His Eminence.

“We have found Little Svon-on-Taba, sire,” he’d announced eagerly, with an air of great importance emanating from him. The room had seemed less impressed with his announcement than he himself was, however; he’d gotten only a few gasps and quite a bit of murmured confusion.

Evanika and Orma had been just as lost as the rest of their family, but the Emperor had seemed intrigued enough that, when they’d retreated to Eva’s room, barely dodging detection by their father, they had immediately begun plans to discover more.

It had taken them over a week to research and prepare, their pace slowed by the necessity of hiding from their parents not only their plans, but the fact that they were working together on anything at all more complicated than eating dessert. All the while, several levels away in the huge castle warrens, the Emperor’s exploratory team made their own preparations.

They had to get there first; that was a given. Once they’d discovered what the story was behind Little Svon-on-Tabe, there had been no question if they were going; it became a matter, simply, of how.

Their older brother Iai provided the primary “how,” all unwitting; flitting from project to project in what appeared to be a family trait, he had put aside an small airship three-quarters of the way through building it because of a terminal flaw in the rudder design; he could not get the boat to properly detect nor navigate the air currents without making it too heavy for its air bladders to lift. In the mountainous ridged landscape of northern Callenia, the winds could easily be deadly for a ship with such a flaw; the ponderous, lumbering passenger air barges stuck to the valleys and lowlands, travelling, in many cases, the same paths as the river boats.

Making the boat steer itself was beyond the capabilities of either Orma or Eva, as it had been beyond Iai’s (Eva had held out some hope; together, the two of them could often outwit any one older relative). Eva had found a way to make the steering function manually, however, with the addition of two winglike appendages to the sides of the vessel to serve in lieu of a keel.

Orma had come up with the pièce de résistance, however, for their little expedition: spectacles, the metal-framed sort with the leather side guards that airship pilots wore to protect their eyes, but to these he’d attached a set of interchangeable lenses, pivoting from the sides up or down, to be looked through or not in whatever combination the wearer chose.

The lenses had taken most of the week and a few discrete calling-ins of favors on Orma’s part, while Eva designed and fabricated the wing-fins. Each individual lens, etched with the proper symbols and made of tinted glass, allowed the wearer to see into a different spectrum of what scientists, poo-pooing millennia of religious study, were now calling the aether. With the spectacles and Evanika’s new steering system, they could see the air flows and ride them, like riding the surf in a small sailboat. They could get to Little Svon-on-Taba faster in their tiny, swift aircraft thus than any river boat (going against current as it would have to) or plodding air barge could hope to.

With the questions of transportation and navigation out of the way, provisioning took only a few midnight trips out. They had done this enough times to know exactly what to swipe (and the castle staff, it seemed, had gotten used to their escapades; most of what they needed was already tidily packaged for them and waiting in their common hidey-holes); by the time they’d finished the fabrication of their tools, the ship was packed and ready to fly.

The maps had been the hardest; the castle librarian had gotten in some trouble over one or three of their earlier adventures, and, as such, was disinclined to help them or even let them into her domain. The closest city librarian was of a similar inclination, for similar reasons. They had to sneak all the way down to the West Quarter, a neighborhood that had been, in the days when their research was set, a very fine, up-and-coming place, and was now the sort of place where young royals should probably not be without an armed guard or three.

The very fact that no-one expected there to be royals in the West Quarter (combined with a bit of cleverness in the nicknames they used for each other and in their manner of dress) got them in and out of there safely, with the Allesely-dynasty-era maps of Little Svon-on-Taba, the Taba River, and Large Svon-on-Taba tucked away in Orma’s map case.

Two night before the Emperor’s exploratory party was even ready to leave, the pair floated their improved ship out of Iai’s launch bay. It moved perfectly, even loaded with supplies; the spectacles were amazing; they were actually doing it! Adventure awaited!

The ship glided a few lengths from the castle and jerked to a stop.


There will be more! I promise! But once I got to a stopping point at exactly 1000 words, I liked it so much I had to post it!

From wyld_dandelyon prompt “Strange glasses — not just steampunk-looking, but magical or cool in some mechanical way” and eseme‘s prompt “Also, I like blimps.”

Skill and Dreams, a story of the newly-christened Reiassan world #weblit #DofC @inventrix

Nov19

Daughters of Clio is a new prompt-a-week group four of us started – Trix, Clare, Tara, and I.

This week the prompt was my choice to pick a person, and I picked “the mapmaker’s child.” It’s set in the world of Rin & Girey, newly-christened the Reiassan world after the continent on which it’s set.

Skill and Dreams

“You have quite a skill with that, Pera.” Her father studied the small map she’d finished, a layout of the town green and the surrounding two blocks. “You’ll do well with the business when your mother and I are ready to pass it down to you.”

The praise felt nice. Her father was one of the best surveyors in the land, her mother one of the best map-artists. They made a fine team, travelling the length and breadth of the continent documenting towns and borders and the occasional shifting river, and they were famed for their work. Her father wouldn’t pad his praise or lie to spare her feelings, not where his profession was concerned.

“Thank you,” she murmured. Despite herself, she continued, pointing at the centerpiece of the map. “The temple to the north of the town square was the trickiest, because it’s not laid out along compass points.” The triangular building faced only one point towards the green, which sent the roads out from it in an awkward V that everything else shifted to fit. “I had to take measurements from each point and, ah, triangulate.”

“A lot of the older towns have temples laid out like that. They went where they wanted to, and reasonable layout could go begging.” He smiled. “It looks like you got it spot on. Good job, honey. You’re going to make a wonderful mapmaker.”

There had never been any question in her parents’ minds. Perizja had the talent, she had a good head for figures, and they were in a time in which young women could do such things easily; besides, she was their only surviving child. Her mother’s mother, who had been born during the reign of Empress Alaszia, pressured her to take as much freedom as she could while it lasted. The Emperor wouldn’t live forever, after all.

That the life her parents led didn’t suit her never game up in these discussions. It was a good life, after all. They made a beautiful home of their wagon, and were in love with their itinerant lifestyle. They spoke dismissively of home-bound, village-bound people who never went further than the nearest fair; they loved the exploration, drawing new places onto the maps where before there had been only vague scribbles or blankness.

That part of the job, Perizja loved just as much as they did, laying down in precise fashion things that had been only guessed and suggested before, making those diagrams beautiful, making them accurate and useful. If she could have done it settled into one place, she would have been happy to take up the family business. The problem was the wagon.

It was a nice wagon, a snug, warm home with everything a small family needed to survive, but it was very snug, for a very small family, and it was created for a wandering lifestyle. Perizja wanted a big family, children coming out the windows, and a stable house in a nice village with a town square that wasn’t. She wanted a husband in the trades who’d never been any further away than the nearest fair. She wanted a homebound life.

Her grandmother, when she’d mentioned this to her, had frowned and talked about the opportunities a girl her age had, opportunities that hadn’t been there for her grandmother’s mother. “Right now, you can determine your own life. You have a skill; you shouldn’t squander it.” And that was that, or it had been when they’d last visited her, a season past. She’d dropped the topic, and tried to resign herself to a life on a wagon with one or two children, if she could find a like-minded mapmaking husband. She was good at it, after all, when not many people were; surveying and mathematical mapmaking were still new enough to be a very small field. She could make a very comfortable life for herself, within the confines of the wagon and the road.

As resigned as she was to it, she found herself irritated with her grandmother. It had been two seasons since they were last in her grandmother’s town, the tiny village in the heart of Callia where Perizja, her mother, and her grandmother had been born. Perizja had been able to ignore her pique, like she could ignore her frustration with the wagon and the ruts in the road, when there was nothing she could do about it. But here they were, mapping her grandmother’s home town, heading to have dinner with her that evening, and there was no more ignoring the anger. She didn’t want to talk to her.

She smiled anyway, putting “talking to ancestors” in the realm of other inevitabilities, and followed her father to the snug house. Grandmother Tatya had a house. She’d had a husband, and four children who lived, three cats and a tidy kitchen garden laid out in perfect rows, and now she shared the house with her youngest daughter and family, grandchildren coming out the windows. Perizja caught an underfoot cousin as they entered and shifted her to a hip, cuddling the little girl. Aunt Zaide was on her sixth, possibly her seventh, and she never minded another hand to help out.

“There you are!” Tatya bustled out from the kitchen, smiling broadly. “Come here and give your grandmother a hug, there, that’s fine, I can hug you and Titi at the same time. Come over into the kitchen, Pera, I have a present for you.”

Last time it had been a map case, a fine-carved thing good for travelling, both treasured and detested. Today, holding on to her irritation and her niece, she found it hard to be too excited. Another pen? A travelling inkwell?

Tatya handed her a folded piece of paper. “Careful, pumpkin, don’t let Titi drool on that. There you go, yes, open it up.” She was looking over Perizja’s shoulder as she spoke; watching for someone? Her parents were still out in the doorway talking to Zaide. Something secret from them? She unfolded the paper quickly, read it, and read it again.

“Grandmother, what…?”

“You’ll have to make another diagram of the house for me, I’m afraid, sweetheart. I sent it to a man I know in Lannamer. They’re beginning a project, you see, to map out and survey the entire city.”

“Lannamer’s huge! And it’s a maze of streets… that sort of thing would take every mapmaker in the country a lifetime to do properly!” She stared in awe as Tatya’s smile grew, and slowly found hers growing as well, in a sort of desperate hope. “Grandmother…”

“This is the other half of your present.” She handed her a brass key. “It’s a very small place, but it will do for starters.”

She was gaping, now, staring at the key. “But how…?”

Tatya leaned over and kissed Perizja and Titi both on the foreheads. “I always wanted to be an artist,” she confided quietly. “I’ve done a few paintings, over the years…”

http://addergoole.com
http://lyn.thorne-alder.info

Abduction – self-indulgent

Aug24

Abduction. Bondage. Slavery. When I can’t write, when I can’t think of anything with literary merit to come up with, when I’m depressed, sullen, and moody, this is what I write.

The question is: can it be marketable? Is there any potential market for – Cali is a good example, but only the most developed setting I’ve created for this – such stories? And if so, which flavour of abduction stories works best?

There’s a decided plot to such things, at least the way it runs in my head. It climaxes *ahem* with this moment of Stockholm syndrome, where the captive has a choice to go free or stay with the captor and protect/help/support said captor, and he chooses to stay.

There’s also a specific sort of guy in this story, when I write it myself. The Rugged Soldier, usually… tho’ the people I’ve roleplayed abduction stories with have changed the way the story can go.

Oh – and has anyone else noticed that the abduction is almost always state-sanctioned in my kidnapping settings?

This is 1700 words or so, chapter one of something I don’t ever intend to try to get published.

The tent where the wounded prisoners were kept stank. The entire battlefield stank; the entire city of Ouyknan stank; the entire country of Bitran (soon to be merely the province of Bitran) stank, but of all those stenches, this one canvas tent well behind the Callanthe lines stank the worst.

It had something to do with expectations. The Bitrani were brutal to their prisoners when they took them, and more often than not simply killed them on the spot. It was a waste of resources to heal your enemy, especially when you were just going to torture and kill them. The prisoners the Callanthe took had no comprehension of why they were being tended to, and so they feared the worst, and fear led to a rank stench.

Rin had learned to tolerate the smell. It was no worse than gangrenous, infected wounds she had treated from time to time, and it was mostly an emotional stink, not a physical one. There were those, mostly of the Red and the Blue, who couldn’t go near the place. A few had even fled Bitran entirely.

Even with weeks, months of acclimation, she could tell from fifty feet away that it was worse today, ranker, like old corpses. The news had gotten around then: after a bloody and suicidal and nearly effective attack on Callanthe’s northern border, after months of all-out warfare, the Bitrani king had be captured; their army had surrendered. The war was over.

The guard at the front flap of the tent gave her the barest nod in acknowledgement as she entered; she responded with a marginally more respectful obeisance.

Once inside the tent, the smell was nearly overwhelming. Prisoners murmured softly among themselves, and, although hope showed on a few faces, for the most part they looked grim and strained.

They quieted as the tent flap opened, and then relaxed as they saw it was her. “Hey, girlie,” one called, “When’s the prisoner exchange?”

She smiled, accepting it for the grim joke it was, and looked slowly around the room. They were all quiet, waiting to see what she’d say. “Some of you will be freed. Some will be taken,” she replied simply. That none would be killed out of hand, she kept unspoken. “You,” she pointed at the one she’d come for, “will come with me.” She closed the distance between them as she spoke with four long steps.

Amid soft teasing, the soldier – a high-ranking officer too young for the rank – bleated out an angry complaint. “You can’t! I should be set free! I-”

She backhanded him hard against the mouth before he could finish, and glared at him. “Silence,” she said coldly, “or I’ll have your tongue ripped out.”

He raised his hand to his face, where a trickle of blood ran down his chin, and glared up at her. When she had found him – an accident; she’d been on the field at night, looking for the living among the corpses, and he’d been doing the same – he’d laughed and said he’d take her as a doxy, carry her back to Ouyknan on the back of his horse. Now, she smirked cruelly at him, hoping he’d have the common sense to stay quiet now.

“I think I’ll put you over my horse for the ride back to Lannamer,” she crooned softly, stroking the back of her hand across his cheek, the tone of voice and the gesture borrowed from Bitrani men’s way with their whores and camp followers.

The men around chuckled nervously. For months, she’d tended their wounds, set their bones, and seen to their needs with a brisk efficiency, and they knew her to be gentle and thorough. “Lass…” one of them began, a graybeard farmer who had lost his right arm above the elbow.

“Don’t worry, Ancher,” she reassured him over her shoulder. “I’ve talked to the Commander, and you’re to be set free. Go back to your grandchildren.” She bent down to scoop up the chains binding her prisoner – shackles locked to a heavy ring set deep in the ground – and unlocked them.

He glared rebelliously at her, but said nothing, instead presenting his wrists to have the shackles around them removed. She grabbed him by the short chain of those shackles and hauled him to his feet.

“Lady Healer,” one of the Bitrani officers tried, in a decent approximation of the Callanthe language. “I did not think the Callanthe kept slaves.”

A pretty way of asking “what’s going to happen to us,” she thought, but she paused long enough, her hand twisted tightly in her prisoner’s shackles, to answer.

“It’s a lot more complicated than that,” she answered in the simpler Bitrani tongue. “I’ll make sure it’s explained to you before everything is sorted out – but, in short, while the Callanthe do not use slave labour; Callanthe nobility sometimes keeps slaves.”

He nodded his thanks and, before that question could open up a whole host of other questions, Rin dragged her prisoner out of the tent.

“This isn’t right,” he complained, blinking into the sun, when they were away from the stink of the tent. “I…”

With her free hand, she gestured, closing the air passage through his throat with a twist of her Art. “Shut up,” she warned, and held him breathless and choking while she pulled him across the camp. When she gauged he was about ready to pass out, she released her hold on his breath and let him pause to gasp for air.

“Not a word,” she warned him, and resumed their passage across the camp. This time, he listened and, sullenly, let her drag him to her tent.

It was no bigger and no more grand than any junior officer’s tent, but it was private, the one place in the camp she could be assured of privacy. She shoved him down to the floor in the middle of the tent – she had already installed a ring in the ground like those in the prisoners’ tent, which she shackled him to quickly, before he regained his equilibrium. Before he remembered he was a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier than she was.

He tugged surreptitiously on the chains, testing their strength, and rubbed at his throat, glaring at Rin. He drew breath to complain again, and she talked over him in a casual conversational tone.

“You have the common sense of a rabbit,” she told him lightly. “Don’t you want to live?”

“I’m…”

“I know who you are, your highness.” She smirked as he gaped at her. “I’ve known since you offered to take me back to Ouyknan with you. But if you want to live, I’d suggest you make sure no-one else in the camp knows it.” She looked him over with the eye of a horse-breeder. “Girey is a common enough name for Bitrani boys your age – when the Royal Lady finally had a son, every woman who swelled within a year of her named their son after the new prince. I’ve even met a couple Bitrani women named Girelle. You’re clearly noble – your teeth are too good, your skin too good, to be anything but a rich man’s son. So an officer. Surviving son of the former Duke of Tuguia. No-one in Callanthe will be able to tell the difference, and I don’t think anyone wants to count the scorched body pieces left after the Sixth Company hit Tuguia Major.”

“What… what are you talking about, girl?” he demanded, his old arrogance returning.

She slapped him again, this time making sure the sharp points of her signet ring cut the side of his mouth.

“Saving your life, you moron,” she snarled. “And,” she added, as she saw his eyes settle on the heavy green stone and the triple-trefoil of the House of Callanthe, “if you can’t manage a proper title, ‘Lady’ or ‘Mistress’ will do.”

She felt an uncharacteristic and unkind sense of vengeful glee as he stared at her, making fish-faces again. “You weren’t wearing that before,” he accused.

“It’s there when I need it,” she answered placidly. “Now look,” she added, before he could go off again. “The Bitrani king perpetuated a horrific and unprovoked war on the Callanthe borders, committing atrocities on Callanthe citizens and personally overseeing the violent murders of our priests, and the rape and mutilation of our priestesses. The best he can hope for is a swift execution. The absolute best his heir can hope for – because all rumours suggest that his heir was a reasonable man, not like his father – is a gentile prison in which to live out the rest of his days. More likely is execution next to his father.”

He jingled his chains wryly. “And what are you doing, padding the prison a little more?”

She shook her head. “I’m taking a junior officer of the Bitrani army as my companion-slave. It’s clear your blood is good – you have the nose and the eyes – and those who have tried it say that noble Bitrani blood breeds good children. Besides,” she smirked, “I confess I will enjoy watching you humbled.”

“But I mean, why are you…” he fell silent as she raised her hand again.

“If you can’t learn to stay quiet, I will remove your tongue for your own good,” she warned. “Stop persisting in this stupidity, son of Tuguia. Do you understand?”

Fuming, he nodded.

She ignored him for a while, packing and tidying what weeks in a single camp had left spread over her tent. He watched her silently, sulking.

After a while, he offered, in a more cautious tone than before, “I’ll escape, you know.”

She sighed. He was so very, very young. “And what will you do then?”

He was silent for a moment, thinking up and discarding answers. Rin wished idly for a Blue priest to crack open his thoughts as he sat frowning into space. “Be Girey of Tugia,” he finally grated out.

“Good. There’s hope for you yet.”