29 November 2012

Silviu the Thief - Now Availabile!

Hello all,

My new book, Silviu the Thief - the first book in the Hero's Knot series - is now available for sale at Smashwords and Amazon.



As always, you can also find my books via my website, www.alexanderneill.com.

I had a lot of fun cranking this one out during National Novel Writing Month, and I'm looking forward to following the adventures of Raven/Silviu through at least two more books.

I hope you enjoy it!

Cheers,

- Don

26 November 2012

SILVIU THE THIEF - DONE

Hello all,

I'm happy to announce that I've completed and submitted my novel to the National Novel Writing Month competition. That makes me a winner according to the contest rules. So, yay!


Of course, the real work comes next, formatting the book for publication at Amazon:Kindle and Smashwords (and its various affiliates). I should have it done by next week.


And then on to the next book. Not sure at this stage whether it'll be Book II of The Hero's Knot, or if I'll go back to the Chronicles of Anuru and finish off Book I of The Brotherhood of Wyrms. I think I might take some time off and get back to writing over Christmas.

Anyway, for the moment I think I'll just indulge in a little triumphalism and take a break. Yay again!


And as always, thanks for reading!

//Don//

17 November 2012

Silviu the Thief

UPDATE 20 November 2012, 1628 hours:

DONE!

I've completed the first draft of Silviu the Thief. It clocks in at 70,000 words - pretty short by my usualy standards, but chances are the tale will "grow in the telling", as another author once said.  And for now, it's long enough for the NaNoWriMo contest.

Now on to the proofing!

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As part of the continuing serialization of my new novel, The Hero's Knot, currently in drafting stage for National Novel Writing Month, here's part III.

Fair warning; upon reflection, it's going to have to be a trilogy. So The Hero's Knot is going to be the title of the whole mess.  My NaNoWriMo submission is going in under the working title, Silviu The Thief.

59,000 words down, -9,000 to go.  But you know me; brevity is not one of my flaws.

This one's headed for 100,000 words. The other two will be just as long by the time they're done.  Maybe longer.

 
Those are provisional titles, of course, but they'll do for now.
 
And for now, here's the next instalment of Silviu The Thief, as currently written.  Lots of proof-reading to come, but for the time being I've got a stranglehold on my dreaded Internal Editor.
 
It'll get better, trust me.
 



His first appointment necessitated a walk of a little more than a mile. After only a couple of blocks, Raven tired of his disguise; the freezing mist had become a drizzle, a chilling spray of near-ice that slicked the sidewalks and transformed his illusory boot-heels from an inconvenience to a danger. He’d used his charms to cure minor injuries and incidental ills before, but he’d never had occasion to try to mend something as serious as a broken ankle, and had little interest in finding himself compelled by importunity to do so. Passing the metro station at Delancey and Essex he stumbled on a curb, and that was the final straw; he put his right hand into his pocket, found the silvery imp, flicked it with a gnawed fingernail, and between one breath and the next, allowed his disguise to bleed away into the dusk. His right boot-heel clacked against the cement, but when the left struck, it did so with the squishy thud of a well-worn running shoe. Skirt, short jacket, ponytail and lip gloss faded away into the night. Raven stepped out of the illusion without breaking stride. Passers-by, their necks tucked tightly into coat-collars, their eyes downcast against the freezing rain or glued to illuminated digital screens, saw nothing.
Sure-footed now – he wore his runners through all the seasons, even in the snows of winter, preferring their comfort and reliable grip on the skin of the world to the conveniences of warmth or water resistance – Raven walked three blocks up Essex. At East Houston Street. He paused for a longing leftward glance at Katz’s Delicatessen (pockets bulging with cash sparked all manner of thoughts in his brain, not least of which were the hungry thunder pounding against his consciousness, and his fondness for latkes and vereniki, and similarly artery-clogging conglomerations of dough and cheese, onion and potato), then shook himself and crossed over to Avenue A. Dismal apartment blocks, an art gallery, shop fronts, sidewalk cafés and the utilitarian brick of the East Fifth Street Con Ed plant rose before him and receded in his wake.
A shadow followed behind him, but he didn’t notice.
With the persistence of a dentist’s drill, the drizzle worked its way down his collar, and he briefly considered holding back a few dollars for a new hat at one of the Chinatown street vendors. Up until a few weeks ago he’d had a Yankees cap, an old and tattered thing thick with filth and reminiscence, but had been forced to part with it as a favour to one of the watchers at Saint Joseph’s near Washington Square Park, in payment for a clean escape from a couple of street cops who’d happened to witness him sliding out of a liquor store with a handful of crumpled bills. They’d been a little more astute than the norm for their type, and Raven had had to think on his feet. He didn’t like to offer sacrifices to work the magic; each time he did it, it felt as if he were carving away a chunk of his being. He was scattering little pieces of Raven all over the city, leaving himself naked and exposed to its raw, elemental might, laying bar his activities, the very core of his being, to anyone with the eyes to see. That he’d had no choice was no balm to his wounded pride; with careful planning, he could work all the wonders he needed with his charms alone, and not be forced to fall back on the might of tokens like his cap, rich with essence and memory. He didn’t like the thought of one of the watchers keeping it, wearing it even; or worse, trading it in turn to some darker being in a further exchange of favours. There was power in personal objects. Raven didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. He knew it in his bones.
Six more blocks, and he was there: Tompkins Square Park, the heart of the East Village. Normally one of his favourite places in the city, he knew it with the intimate familiarity of a lover. He’d been there in summer time, luxuriating in the scent of oak buds and ash, walking barefoot, the better to feel the sparse and struggling grass between his toes. He liked sitting atop tree roots, leaning back against the towering trunks, feeling the life and wonder of living wood quivering beneath him, drawing strength from the vitality of the timber, and returning it in equal measure. He’d had a moment of awakening here, once upon a time; years ago, when he’d still been young in the world, before the darkness had come to cloud the light of day, and life had become a burden. He’d been at the park and had been caught unawares by a sudden rain-squall. He’d taken shelter beneath a leafy maple, only to discover that the tree had been struck a foot or so above the ground by some thoughtless lout behind the tiller bars of an earth-mover of some sort. The bark had been entirely torn away, half of the heartwood beneath it had been splintered into kindling by the force of fire-driven steel. He’d put a hand upon the groaning trunk, and felt the tree’s dying; and with the empathy of the pre-pubescent (an empathy tempered by hardship that kept tears at bay even when he’d happened across a human corpse), he’d wept.
Fumbling through his pockets, he’d grasped the runestone in his left hand, fingers working feverishly against the silver as he thumbed his way through the ten charms that he kept upon a leather thong. He had already learned the trick of knowing whether a charm would serve him in any given instance; either the old, worn silver token would feel alive and electric in his grasp, or it would lay still and quiescent like an old bone. He’d tried the nisse, the paired ravens, the hammer, the shield, the bull, even the crossed, crooked spears, the newest of his charms, the one that had come to him by mysterious paths on his tenth birthday. None availed him. It wasn’t until his questing fingers lit upon the horse – the peculiar eight-legged destrier, rearing and magnificent, that he’d had for more than half his life thus far – that he felt the pulsing tingle of possibility. With the runestone in his left hand and the horse-token in his right, he’d leaned forward, touching his forehead to the wounded tree...and worked a wonder.
Hot, golden light burst from him, exploding from his body like the radiance of a star, spilling from his eyes, his mouth like the very benediction of heaven. An effervescence of the spirit, the light washed over the wounded maple, cloaking it in health, in life, squeezing vitality into its very pores. Before Raven’s astonished eyes, the breach in the bark closed over, filled from all corners by new growth. He embraced the tree, glorying in the new access of strength that he had summoned, breathing in air charged with the shattering weight of possibility, laughing and weeping at the same time. Though it did not move, though not a single branch did more than quiver, it felt as though the tree had embraced him in turn, granting him life and strength in equal measure; and as it did so, Raven felt his senses expanding, his nerves running through the living wood of the tree until he could sense the distant Sun beyond the clouds. Through his fingertips he could taste the air, tainted with the dust and brimstone of upwind power plants; through his toes, the water, drawn from deep in the earth, the foulnesses of the rivers leached from the life-giving fluid by filters of porous stone. He and the tree were one, sugary sap and blood running together, shared in perfect, temporary harmony.
He’d learned another lesson, too; after so vast an expenditure of power he’d fallen prey to exhaustion, collapsing to sleep at the foot of the tree he’d healed. He awoke the next morning, rising wiht the Sun – with the tree itself, he’d realized later on – to find himself warm, dry and safe. The tree had sheltered him against the rain and the night’s chill, in gratitude perhaps for the gift of life and strength that he had imparted. Before leaving he’d thanked the new-healed maple with a touch, and had been a little disappointed not to feel the same explosion of glory and might. He never felt it again, but that didn’t change his memory of the majesty of what he’d done. For years afterward, every time he’d passed the park he’d looked in on the tree. Just to see how it was doing.
Now, as he stalked across East Seventh Street and entered the park from the south, hunched forward against the ever-increasing rain, he didn’t bother looking for the tree. It wasn’t there anymore; a few years ago, it had vanished overnight, hacked to the earth along with dozens of other maples to make way for a studio that advertised modern dance and something called ‘pilates’. Apart from the biblical reference to a former governor of Judea who (insofar as he’d been able to gather) had been conspicuously lacking in both decision-making skills and moral courage, Raven had no idea what ‘pilates’ were. But he was certain that they were a poor substitute for a living tree.
His appointment was behind the studio. There was an awning above the back door, nestled between a dumpster and an old Ford truck that had been parked behind the building shortly after it opened and didn’t appear to have moved since. These features made for decent shelter against the elements, and thus it was here, beneath a single overhead light bulb that was either burned out or had been partially unscrewed, that Two-Beats was generally to be found. Raven had no idea what the fellow’s real name was; everyone called him by his street handle, uttering the moniker with contempt or quivering respect, depending upon whether they looked up at him in fear, or not. Raven didn’t fear the man, but he respected him, just as he respected other dangerous features of the city, like speeding trucks or condemned buildings. Out of caution and customary politeness, he approached the back of the building in the open, walking slowly but steadily, keeping his hands in his pockets.
As he drew closer, he saw his contact’s head come up. The man’s right hand crept towards the back of his waistband, but stopped as recognition set in. Raven nodded at the compliment and stopped a couple of paces away. That left him under the rain instead of the awning, but it was prudent. Two-Beats was considerably larger, and had both a longer reach and an unpredictable temper. If it came to fisticuffs, Raven planned to beat a retreat. Fighting was for fools; for fools with a death wish, in fact.
His contact spoke first. “Blackie.” The word came out in an exaggerated drawl. Two-Beats was himself black-skinned, and embraced every aspect of the stereotyped culture portrayed on television. Raven knew that he had been born in Western Connecticut, in a milquetoast town that bore as much resemblance to Harlem as it did to Pakistan.
It didn’t bother him; as far as Raven was concerned, everyone had the right to smith-craft their own legend. It was what he himself did every day, more or less. “Beats,” he replied with a deferential nod. There was a glassy sheen in the taller man’s eyes, and Raven thought it might be cocaine. Two-Beats, he knew, had expensive tastes. Best to be polite, he thought. It usually was.
“You buying?”
“Paying.” Without moving too quickly, he pulled his left hand from his pocket, opening it to reveal a tight roll of bills. His right hand was still concealed, his fingers caressing the star-shaped silver slug that he thought of as the horn-charm.
Beats’ moist eyes widened. “Okay, then,” he exclaimed, reaching for the money.
Raven pulled it back a hand-span. “It’s for Sherlyn. A thousand. For what she owes you.”
The other man snorted. “Bitch owes me more’n that. A lot more.”
“I’ll get more,” Raven promised. “Tomorrow.”
Two-Beats blinked once, twice, working the offer and its implications through the thick, alkaloid-sodden sludge of his mind. “Three G’s,” he said, “on top o’that.”
Four thousand, Raven thought. A lot, but it might have been more. He waggled the roll. “Three more, and she’s clear?” He watched the tilt of his contact’s head, the set of his jaw, the narrowing of his eyes. The horn-charm granted loquacity, but it also helped the speaker read the truth of what he heard.
Beats nodded. “Yeah.”
Lying. Raven’s cheek twitched, but he gave no other sign. He put the roll of bills in the pimp’s outstretched hand. “Same time tomorrow, then?”
“Why you care, anyway?”
Raven blinked. “Sorry?”
“’Bout Sherlyn. She just Jersey ass, man.” Beats grinned, displaying decaying teeth. “You in love or something?”
Raven cocked an eyebrow, then shrugged. “She helped me out.”
“Ah just bet she did!”
Raven decided to let that pass. “Just trying to help out,” he said soothingly, grinding the horn-charm between thumb and forefinger and willing the magic to work. “Same time tomorrow?” he repeated.
Two-Beats frowned for a moment. Then his face cleared, taking on an almost beatific cast. He caused the money to disappear. “Yeah.”
“And she’ll be fine?” Raven said clearly, fixing the other man with his eyes, unclenching his will a little and letting their unsettling colour show through.
The fellow heaved a theatrical sigh. “’Course, man. My word’s good, right?”
“Right.” Raven’s cheek twitched again; he couldn’t help it. “See you tomorrow.”
Beats nodded. “Ah’ll be here.”
Raven dipped his head in farewell. He left the park, heading eastwards, crossing Avenue B towards Alphabet City, heading for the riverfront. There was a mission at Saint Emeric’s where he could usually find a lukewarm meal and a cold bed, and he planned to stuff the rest of his ill-gotten gains into the donation slot near the arched front doors.
Between the rain, the mounting wind, the slickly treacherous sidewalk, and his preoccupation with his bargain with Two-Beats, Raven failed to notice the old woman until he was practically atop her. At the last instant his brain registered the presence of a clot of shadow huddled in the corner between a mailbox and the crumbling brick of an artisanal bakery, and he stumbled to a halt the barest fraction of an instant before treading on her.
She was old; he saw that at once. Old, and wrapped in shawl and blanket like a film stereotype. The peculiar appropriateness of her attire caught Raven off guard; and when she looked up at him, her eyes caught the rain-dampened streetlamps, reflecting glints of feral yellow and scarlet. There was something atavistic, medieval even, about her appearance, and he found himself recalling the severed head he had seen only an hour ago, wide-eyed, staring, clotted with foulness, and swirling haplessly down into the maelstrom of the rain-tide. Despite himself, he took a step back.
A hand – a claw – age-gnawed, gnarled and spotty, crept tremblingly from beneath the shawl. “Milostenie?” she murmured. “Ofranda?” Though her voice was as decrepit and tremulous as her frame, he heard her words clearly, as if they had been coins dropped from a great height into still water.
Raven cocked his head. “I don’t...I’m sorry, I don’t speak your language.” He’d been about to say that he didn’t understand her, but shied at the last moment away from falsehood. He had no idea what tongue she used, but he knew what she’d said. A plea for alms.
The ancient, bird-like eyes didn’t move; they remained fixed upon him, like nails driven through the planks of his soul. The hand quivered again. “Halp,” she quavered.
There was curiosity in those eyes; assessment, evaluation, even interest. Raven could sense it all. But there was no compulsion. Had he known more about the temper of the world, he might have walked on; but it was not in his nature to deny someone in need. That, after all, was what had drawn him to Sherlyn’s plight, and into the dangerous world of Two-Beats and his ilk.
He didn’t stop to consider his next action; he simply plunged his hand into his pocket, drew out the remainder of the money he had purloined, and pressed it into the old woman’s hand.
The ancient eyes widened, although their colour and focus didn’t change. “Too mach,” she protested, shaking the wad at him. “Too mach!”
Raven took her hand, suppressing a shiver of disgust at the damp, crepe-like texture of her skin. “There’s no such thing,” he said gently, folding her brittle, twiggy fingers over the roll of bills, “as too much help.”
That brought a grin to cracked, ancient lips. The old woman tucked the money away with a conjurer’s finesse, and began to laugh – not a clean, hearty guffaw, but a chilling chortle, a cackle of glee that sent a runnel of spittle trickling down her chin. “No...no such thing!” she crowed.
Raven cast her a nervous sidelong glance and stepped back. The withered hand shot out and seize him by the wrist. Her strength and dexterity shocked him, and he tugged reflexively.
She held on, patting his hand. This time he did shiver. “You good boy,” she said eerily. “Very good boy, yes.” Her sleeve fell back, and he saw something on the inside of her left forearm; a scrawl of some sort. A tattoo, possibly.
“Lucky boy, nu?” she went on, almost crooning now. Behind her words the wind had fallen silent, and the tinkling tumble of sleet had ceased; glints of ice lay along the edges of roofs, silvering the power lines and glazing the streets. “Son of Sun and Moon, grandson of sea.” She tugged him closer, and he stumbled towards her; and with her free hand she grasped his forearm, kneading the muscles. “Strong son. Strong arm, strong heart. Very good.”
Alarmed, Raven reared back, yanking his hand out of her grasp. He felt her nails score his wrist, but forbore to glance at the scratches. “I – I have to go,” he stammered. His hands were empty, his charms buried deep in his pockets, all but forgotten, and his eloquence had deserted him.
Fii bine, fiul lunii,” she murmured. She patted her bosom. “Thanking. You see me soon, nu?”
Raven stumbled backwards. “Sure,” he grunted. Turning his back on her, he pointed himself at the river and threw himself into motion. He could feel her eyes on his back, touching him, probing him like cold, lifeless fingers.
The eyes followed him until he passed behind the apartment building at East Tenth and Szold. The instant he turned the corner, he paused, then glanced back around the edge of the structure.
She was gone. The streetlamps shone cold and passionless on the lip of stone where he’d spoken to her.
Raven took a deep, calming breath. By the time he’d let it out he was chuckling at himself, laughing at the megrims that had him staggering through the night like the liquor-stinking derelicts that gathered with their gauze and lighters beneath the Queensboro Bridge. By the time he was done laughing, he couldn’t recall what he’d been laughing about. A few moments later, lost in thought, he strode past Saint Emeric’s, wondering idly what had happened to the money he’d planned to drop into the church’s donation slot.
When Raven slept that night in an unheated room on a stained and musty-smelling mattress, wrapped in a threadbare blanket against the coming winter’s chill, he dreamed of the Sun and the Moon and the Sea...and of a dark god, tall, majestic and terrible, with lips and loins stained with blood, and a great stag’s head crowned with horns that towered over the earth like the dead branches of the world-tree against the starry sky. The vision shook him, and he woke screaming, but when he did he could remember none of it. All that he could remember was clammy, parchment skin, strange-sounding words...and an old woman’s cold, yellow eyes.

♦♦♦

13 November 2012

The Hero's Knot (II)

As part of the continuing serialization of my new novel, The Hero's Knot, currently in drafting stage for National Novel Writing Month, here's part II:

41,000 words down, 9,000 to go.




 

Outside the bank, on a sidewalk decorated beneath the litter of Starbucks cups with frescoes of chalk, chewing gum and old paint, there was a bench. Three horizontal planks of weathered wood set in stippled concrete formed the backrest, and atop the uppermost sat Raven, as secure and stately in his perch as the Lord Chancellor upon the Woolsack. No one noticed him: not the minor functionaries hustling by, tapping frantically at phones or berries or pads as they scuttled between meetings; not the flocks of ne’er-do-well ‘tweens jostling, smoking and cursing with the relish and facility of those new-come to the mysteries of profanity; not the shop-keeps sweeping store-fronts, straightening signs, putting out new produce and taking in the old, or simply standing and staring balefully at the tittering teenagers; not the old women gathered at the corner, scratching feebly at lottery tickets like superannuated hens scrabbling for a kernel in some long-forgotten and irregularly frequented corner of the barnyard.

None of them saw Raven, but Raven saw them. He saw everything. He was the eye in the sky, the all-watcher; the shadow-at-noon, who could hide in a head-beam, scream and be soundless, and even make himself invisible when alone upon a lighted stage. Long practice at his craft had made him a master, to the point where, now, the pale, mundane world and its scuttling denizens seemed to flit by like jabbering actors on the television that he no longer cared to watch. It was too like his everyday vistas; too similar, in that the poor players behind the glass spoke only to each other and never to him, never looked at him, never noticed or acknowledged him. The babbling box was a dim reflection of his life, save that in life the folk that passed him idly by were never so beautiful or witty or charming, never so poised or alluring or steely-jawed or clever or clean. The box spoke of gritty dramas; but his day, from dawn unto the dawning, was awash in the grit of the shadowy netherworld in which he floated like a dead leaf upon the stagnant water of a pond. He needed no pretense of grit; the reality of the world ground upon him every day, paring away flecks of his soul like a joiners rasp upon ash.

As he sat upon his perch, he found himself staring into the gutter, where the last wash of the evening’s rain carried the detritus of the city streets on its final journey via the city’s churning bowels to the river, and thence to the sea. Dead leaves, cigarette butts, a half-crushed bottle purporting to have contained Krystal! Klear! Springwater, a scrap of a campaign pamphlet promising change (although from what and to what was unclear; perhaps origin and destination had been laid out on the missing half of the appeal), a few fragments of a wooden pallet, the inevitable coffee cup-lids, all revolving slowly in the filthy rush, hurrying to the grate and the concrete pipe and oblivion. In their wake, bobbing like an augury, the severed head of a doll floated by. Its hair was long, blonde and clotted with some unnameable flotsam, its cornflower eyes wide and staring, possibly with the shock of decapitation. They seemed to fix on him for a moment, and Raven felt the feathers rise and rustle along his spine. The tangled skein of his destiny had made him a pragmatist and something of a skeptic, and he had long since learned to believe in that which he could see; but he had seen so much even in his brief time upon the earth that there was little left in the world in which he was not prepared to believe. He watched the severed head as it caught in an eddy, chilled by its rictus of a grin, following its azure gaze with his own beady ebon eyes until chance freed it and sent it swirling down into the oubliette, racing along after the rest of the great city’s ills.

Disturbed by the portent, Raven worked his neck, easing tight muscles against the gathering of the dusk and the evening’s chill. His feathers rustled again, and a long coat settled heavily upon his shoulders. His coal-black visage lightened to something pale, even sickly, and black, pinpoint eyes broadened and changed colour too. Only his hair remained the same shade as before; an unruly midnight tangle that hung to ears and eyebrows in a raffled rat’s-nest that hadn’t known a comb in recent memory, if at all. Legged and lanky now, he sat easily atop the wooden beam, not minding the hard edge of the rail as it dug into the back of his thighs through the thin and faded denim of his trousers. His feet, indifferently shod in runners that had once been white but were now an indescribable shade of old, were cold and damp, but that was nothing new. The cold and the damp were bonny companions, and Raven knew them of old, as most did who, like him, shunned the city’s clammy, grudging embrace.

The change came slowly, almost imperceptibly, as if no change were planned until all was done. One instant, Raven; and the next, the man, or nearly. It was a boy’s face atop a boy’s frame; the only manly things about him were the grim et to his lips and pale, jutting, beardless jaw, and the depth of knowledge in his eyes. Fortune’s grace kept curiosity away from them, and that was good; for if any had looked too deeply into those eyes, there might have been questions.

A casual witness would be struck first by the fact that they were of two different colours: the right eye blue, the bright and piercing azure of ice beneath a winter’s sun; and the left green, as glimmering green as a gleaming emerald. He knew what caused it. Raven loved the march of the written word and spent long hours in public libraries, idly rubbing the runestone charm, polishing the worn, knurled silver; consuming printed wisdom with the appetite of a starving man, losing himself in the majesty of lore until inattention made him careless and he allowed his disguise to fray, leading indignant custodians to expel him and his shabbiness from their august environs in a flurry of righteous imprecation. In one such foray he had researched his condition. The learned called it heterochromia iridis, and it was often associated with deafness or blotchy skin, neither of which afflicted him; save when he altered it for anonymity’s sake, his entire body was as pale as his cheeks, while his aural acuity was almost preternaturally sharp, and always had been. As sharp as his oddly-coloured eyes, in fact.

The blue-green eyes were unusual, and invited impudent stares, and so Raven worked hard to blur them. It was all a part of his daily ritual, the moment-to-moment attention that was necessary to blend in to his surroundings, to become a part of the drab and unremarkable backdrop that was the great and impersonal city. As he sat atop the bench, balancing easily, watching the drama at the bank unfold before him, his hands were in the pockets of his long coat. Beneath the wads of folded bills that he had convinced the bewildered teller to give him were other, more precious things. In his left hand – the hand of guile, of base emotion, of trickery – he held the forcing charm, the runestone, working it between thumb and forefinger, warming the silver, unlocking its nascent force, tapping into the coiled strength within it and letting that strength flow up sinister wrist and arm, through shoulder and chest and heart and belly, into his lungs, breathing the power, tasting it. And all the while controlling it by conscious volition, shaping it with his thoughts, binding and constraining it; forcing the flow like crackling current down his right arm, into the dexter hand, the hand of strength and reason, the hand of mastery, wherein lay the working charm.

Without looking, working by touch alone, he had selected a single charm from the score that lay jumbled in the depths of his pocket. He knew them all by touch, and knew which one he needed now, feeling the whorls and indentations with his fingertips, seeing in his mind’s eye the fading image of the tiny, grinning imp that hung head-down from the bent limb of witch hazel, sensing the shaping, the focus, that it vouchsafed the river of power coursing through him. It was nisse, the elf; the sprightly gamboller, the wight of the woodlands, the rascal of a thousand faces. Swift and tricky, the charm helped him work the magic, shaping it like clay, like the mass of water-slicked muck atop a potter’s wheel.

For the thousandth time, as he worked to mould the magic, panting and squinting, the image of the potter was replaced by another; by a vision of a smith, bare-chested and sweating, labouring at his forge, shaping glowing steel into a lath by the knowledge of his craft and the strength of his arms. It was a simile more apt to Raven’s peculiar circumstance; after all, one could scarcely wound or kill one’s-self with an ill-wrought earthenware bowl, whereas the magic, like hot iron, could, if mishandled, wound or kill without warning or remorse. It had happened before, through inattention, and would doubtless happen to him again.

Like his form and features, his internal monologue went unnoticed by passersby. Imperceptibly, by inches, his hair lengthened, changing from black to blonde, snarling like a nest of snakes and working itself into a ponytail. His features softened, the nose changing from aquiline to pert, the chin and Adam’s apple receding, the crooked teeth aligning themselves, the lips thickening and turning red. High cheekbones vanished, replaced by dimpled chubbiness, a pattern replicated elsewhere on his body as certain places thinned and others thickened; while crow’s feet, a thick layer of rouge and a clumpy excess of eyelash thickener made for the sort of face men glanced at once and thereafter ignored. Finally, the long, drab coat, jeans and runners became a short, faded leather jacket, a calf-length skirt, and heeled boots.

Careful now, moving with fluid feminine grace instead of his usual lumbering stalk, Raven stepped down from the bench. He didn’t feel any different, not really; the trick of nisse was only a disguise, a glamer, a cheat of the eyes. It was at best a half-change; the boot-heels, for instance, were higher and narrower than his normal footwear, and would trip him up if his concentration failed, but the rounded contours that graced his once-angular form were naught but smoke and shadow, a trompe l’oeil that would betray him if anyone so much as brushed up against him and felt the truth of bone and muscle behind the facade of soft, curvaceous flesh. He had to be careful to avoid physical contact when so disguised. He never wore the glamer of a woman on the subway.

With a final, deliberately incurious glance at the clot of police, investigators, employees and miscellaneous slack-jawed gawkers clustered outside the bank, enduring the cold and the beginnings of a sleety late-autumn mist for the sake of procedural drama, he turned away. He jammed his hands into the pockets of his illusory jacket. The wadded bills – twenties and fifties mostly, just as he had requested from the dreamy-eyed, elderly teller that he had charmed into handing over the contents of her till – were not as warm as gloves (even illusory gloves) might have been, but they were a comfort nonetheless. He had places to go, people to whom to speak, and debts to pay, and the night was still young. Certain that there were no eyes upon him, Raven, cautious and painstaking atop his ill-suited heels, tottered carefully off into the mist. The chill notwithstanding, a little money, no harm done, and a scatheless exit all made for a tolerably successful day. None of the authorities milling about so much as noticed the blonde girl’s departure.

None of the usual ones, at least.

 

11 November 2012

The Hero's Knot

Hi, folks!

Sorry for the lengthy absence; I've been working on a variety of other projects.

One of the more recent ones has been my entry for National Novel Writing Month - a book I've been allowing to ferment for a while, called The Hero's Knot.


The details are available at my author's blog, here.

I thought, just for giggles, that I'd serialize the thing on this site, first to see if anyone reads my Anuru blog, and second to air the material out.  I'm eventually going to publish the whole thing at Kindle and Smashwords, once I've submitted the final draft, and then fleshed it out into a full-length novel.

Anywhere, here's the first piece. Enjoy!

------------------------------------------------------------------------


THE HERO’S KNOT

 

by D. Alexander Neill

 

Prologue

 

The thief had odd-coloured eyes – and then he didn’t.

That was the extent of the identification provided by the wild-eyed Securitas rent-a-cop about a half-hour after the uproar at the Broome Street branch of Delancey Credit. His name was Quinn, and the rest of his testimony was of a sort seemingly designed to drive law enforcement officials to despair: average height and build, Caucasian (maybe), a mop of hair that might have been black or brown or even dirty blonde, jeans, and a dark jacket. Leather jacket, or denim? Can’t say, officer. Was he wearing a hat? Can’t say, officer. Gloves? Can’t say. High tops? Cowboy boots? Glass frigging slippers? Can’t say, officer. When one of the cops had asked him with a sour smirk whether the perpetrator had been wearing sunglasses, he’d nearly offered the same reply before checking himself. The fellow hadn’t been wearing any sunglasses. Of that much, Quinn was reasonably sure. After all, how else could he have known that the thief had had eyes of two different, distinct colours?

To be fair, being questioned by a pair of testy detectives from the NYPD Major Crimes Unit hadn’t done much to soothe Quinn’s jangled nerves, particularly as they’d hinted at charging him with a fistful of firearms offences. In the confusion of the moment, after slamming bodily into the thief and seeing the strange, inexplicable things that he’d seen, Quinn had drawn his sidearm, a nondescript .38 calibre Colt revolver, taken careful aim, and put two rounds into the centre of mass of one of the bank’s potted palms. The first slug was still lodged in the tree’s thick stem; the second, punching straight through, had shattered a polished panel of decorative rose quartz just below a clock and above a garbage can.

The flat crack of the bullets and the sudden whiff of burnt propellant had brought him back to his senses, and he’d found himself staring at the weapon as though he’d pulled a venomous snake from his holster. When questioned about the discharge – first by the branch’s operations manager, and a few minutes later by the two MCU cops – Quinn had sworn up and down that he’d had the front post site centred on the robber’s chest before pulling the trigger.

His oath occasioned a glance between the two constables. The older, and taller, of the two was the first to respond. “Think maybe we should frisk the ficus?”

“It’s a palm,” the other replied. “And I don’t think it was carrying.”

In the end, given that the only casualties had been vegetable and mineral, they let Quinn off with a warning. Perhaps considering valour the better part of discretion, the bank gave him three days’ paid vacation. After all, if it had been a robbery, it certainly wasn’t a major one; after the tills, lockboxes and vault had been verified, all that was found to be missing was one thousand, three hundred and twenty-one dollars: the contents of the single deposit drawer behind the business banking wicket. According to the eyewitnesses to the crime (none of whose descriptions of the thief was any more fulsome than Quinn’s), the malefactor hadn’t been anywhere near that end of the branch. Suspicion might have fallen on Marlene Cleddik, the spinsterly business teller, save for the fact that nearly thirty years of unimpeachable service had made her synonymous with reliability and trust.

Which left Delancey with a loss so picayune that it would cost the bank more in man-hours to investigate the incident, and the flatfoots of the NYPD MCU with a crime that could not rationally be described as ‘major, and that they would gladly have handed over to their brethren in less august sub-units of the force, save for one fact: as a matter of policy, all bank robberies were deemed major crimes – even robberies where the amount of money stolen was hardly enough to treat the bank’s staff to a burger and fries. This meant that they would keep the Delancey robbery on the same list as the attempt that had been made on the Federal Reserve Depository a few months early. That had been a real robbery, complete with armoured cars, machine guns, a recoilless rifle and significant casualties among guards, patrons and perpetrators alike. This was hardly on the same scale; but it was of the same kind, and New York’s finest would keep looking for the Delancey robber. 

At least this time they would have an advantage. None of the hundreds of witnesses at the Depository break-in had reported a thief with one grass-green eye, and another as blue as ice, that both suddenly changed to brown. It wasn’t as much money, the two detectives agreed later on over a beer, but at least this time they had something to go on.