Last excerpt before the release date of September 15!

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The city folk had another story, but the way the nomads told it was like this:  The people here were once great.  They were patrons of the arts and music and made such machines that even the townies’ best smiths could never match them.  But they were also corrupt.  They squabbled among themselves and worshiped false gods.  Finally the Confederacy of Heaven itself came down to earth and revealed itself to the people, and as punishment for the ancients’ corruption they took away all the rain and invented gliders.  The punishment came with one condition: in one hundred years’ time, the people of Earth could send one representative to plead their case to the Confederacy.  Barnaby the Accursed was sent, and he failed, and that was one hundred years ago.  There would be no rain now forevermore.

But in their bitterer moments the nomads said even that story was wishful thinking.  Think of it, water falling from the sky, free for everyone!  A fairy tale for children.  No, rain was a myth.

A few weeks back I mentioned the possibility that I’d post a new, Expand-O version of Zwitterion on this site.  Haven’t got any nibbles from the U of M’s newspaper about syndicating it, but I’m starting to think that’s just as well.  My schedule is in flux right now, and if I happen to miss a week when I’m just posting it on my blog, that’s okay.  Now I need to figure out where I can get ready access to a scanner and Photoshop … and some free time …

And there’s further news on the Confederacy front, too.  Podiobooks has scheduled The Confederacy of Heaven to come out on September 23.  (They have a lot of audiobooks in the pipeline right now.)  The Smashwords edition and the blog version will still be here on September 15, though.

Menkar changed into his Star-centaur form easily, without fear – more than could be said for her.  Her skin hardened, turned black and shiny as an insect’s carapace.  She brought her hands up in front of her and stared at them.  They were not flesh but something segmented and chitinous.  She stumbled back a few steps, the obsidian chest that was not her chest heaving.  Then it stopped as she stopped needing to breathe, at least in the normal way.  Something behind her brushed the wall.

Wings.

Feathered wings, black as a raven’s, folded against her back.  The wind plucked at them, rattling the feathers against each other like dry leaves.  Now that she was thinking about them they jerked.  But there wasn’t enough room for them to unfold inside the tent.  The edges crashed against the walls, the roof, and the shattered glass whirled out into the vortex.

I must be dreaming, Nasan thought, in a detached way.  But no, people who were dreaming never wondered whether they were dreaming or not, right?  She didn’t bother much to puzzle it out.  It didn’t seem to matter.

“Come,” he said, and his voice was that of the man who was speaking to Oscar earlier that night.  He held out his hand, palm up.

Without hesitating she took his hand and stood.  Then they were standing out in the square, and she was not sure how they had gotten there.  It was daylight, but the sun was a bloated red disk like a vision of the end of the world and it seemed to be in the wrong place in the sky.  She wondered that she didn’t hear anybody else in the city stirring.  How could they help but wake up?

The whole city was lifeless and reddish as if preserved in amber.  The buildings had turned into red sandy stone with empty windows like dead eyes.  They cast long shadows in the ember sun.  The khipu totem at the center of the square had somehow become a tree.  It was still in the grip of winter, leafless, dead.

“That tree isn’t dead.”

The robed man said it matter-of-factly.  There he went, reading her mind like Oscar did.  He produced a knife from somewhere – her knife.  There was that chip in the end from when she dropped it on her first hunting trip.  She was too far away to see the knife clearly, but she knew the chip was there all the same.  The man walked toward the tree and beckoned her to follow.

While she watched, he used the knife to strip some of the bark off of a low branch at about chest height.  The tree’s flesh underneath was green.  Beads of sap welled at the edges of the cut.

“So you see it’s not dead.  It’s lying dormant.  Waiting for something.  A bit more light, maybe some rain, and it will bud out again.”

She looked up at him.  “What are you?”
A knowing smile.  “I am the Star Menkar.”

And then he changed.  He became fluid, like heated putty.  Limbs bent, ran together, grew brighter.  Seconds before the transformation was complete she realized what she was about to see.  A Star-centaur of legend, and it was standing there before her.

Part man, part bird, part horse, it was beyond classification.  At the horse’s shoulders where its head and neck should have been was the upper half of a man’s body.  Whether he was covered in skin or fur she couldn’t tell because he was so blindingly white it hurt the eyes to look at.  His eyes might have been any color; against that brilliance they appeared black.  On this man-horse’s back were four feathered wings, each as long as a man was tall, the same dull red of his steaming hooves and hair, and the robe he’d worn a moment ago.  The wings beat the air slowly, out of time.

Nasan dropped to her knees.

“Don’t kneel, child.”  Amazingly, the creature’s voice was the same as before his transformation.  “I’m a very lesser Star.”

“What do you want with me?”

A pause.  In anything other than a Star it would have seemed like dissimulation.

“I’m here to help you.”

And remember, everybody, The Confederacy of Heaven is due to come out on Smashwords and Podiobooks on September 15.

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Nasan approached Shadowings like he was a horse who’d been allowed to run free all summer and gone half-feral.  She ran the back of her hand down his neck to calm him.  He just turned his head and looked at her.  It was hard to read any expression in those glittering insect eyes of his, but she didn’t think there was any hostility.  At least, he hadn’t bitten her fingers off yet.

She decided to risk it.  Halfway up Shadowings’s back she ran into a problem she hadn’t even thought of before.  This wasn’t like being on her mare Belladonna at all – there were wings to contend with.  Did she sit above or below them?  Then all at once it was the most natural thing in the world.  There was a place right in front of his shoulder blades, a sort of depression between two of his vertebrae, almost like a natural saddle.  She settled herself right in.

Shadowings didn’t buck or turn his head or anything.  He simply took off.

At the first explosion of air from his wings, she closed her eyes and pressed herself close to his back.  Muscles tensed under leathery skin.  His body lurched, then lifted, and her ears popped.

Come on, you can’t ride a horse with your eyes closed. After about a minute she finally talked herself into opening her eyes.

Oh, good Stars in Heaven.

They were high in the air! Higher than treetops – possibly they were higher than the towers of Calgary itself.  The air tasted sweet and cold as it rushed past them like a windstorm.  The barren trees, no bigger than new-sprouted grasses.  And the mountains, from here they looked like wrinkles in a sheet.  And Mother Sol rising in the east – she’d never seen so much horizon all at once.

She caught movement out of the corner of her eye behind her.  Oscar was flapping madly to keep up with them.  With each downstroke of Shadowings’s powerful wings, he lagged a little further behind.  He shouted something to her, but the wind whipped his words away.

“What?” she yelled.

This time she caught a snippet over the wind.

“…fast!…”

“Hitch a ride!”  She pointed to her shoulder.  She didn’t know whether he’d heard her or not, but he understood the gesture.  He put on a burst of speed and dove for her jacket.  His talons dug deep to keep him holding on, pricking her skin.  He folded his wings and hunkered down into the wind.

“I brought your pack,” came Oscar’s voice.

Nasan reached out and found it in the dark.  It was torn all down one side, but all its contents were still there.  Her hand ran into the broken halves of the spear on the ground next to it.

“You carried that?  You’re a quarter my size!”

His silence was a yes.

She realized she ought to be grateful to the bird, but she wasn’t sure what to say.  Instead of answering she got the firesticks out of the sack.  She grudgingly opened up a fire khipu, just a little bit, enough to let out a spark.  The firestick kindled and caught fire.

It didn’t provide much light, not nearly as good as the light khipu, but the dried and compressed horse dung of the firestick would burn slower.  This one should last her for about an hour.

She wrapped herself up in the square of tent canvas and huddled next to it.  The flames licked at the brick-shaped chunk without giving much heat.

“Would you like some–”  She caught herself.  “Do you eat?”

“A little, yes.”

“Would you like some barley paste?” she said, by way of an apology.

The bird hopped over to her, and she fished around in the pack for the paste.  Her hand ran into the glider’s egg.  For a moment, she paused.  No, she’d save that for eating later.  Barley this time.

She peeled back the cloth wrapping and broke a chunk off for the bird.  It – he – held it under a claw and pecked at it politely.  She ate, too.

“Dunno what I’m going to do when it runs out,” she said.  “I never thought this would happen to me.  Running out of food before I do water.”

And she had her arm to worry about.  It still throbbed, and it still wouldn’t move.  And where the heck was she?

“You don’t know my name, do you?” she said suddenly.

The bird blustered.

“I can tell, you keep calling me girl-child.”  She kicked the sack away.  “For another thing, what’s all this about my destiny?”

And then something very peculiar happened to Oscar.  He seemed to be fighting with something invisible.  He wriggled his head, as if to shake it free of a net, and squinted – was that supposed to be a grimace?

“I can’t tell you,” he said finally, panting.

She raised an eyebrow.

“It’s against the rules,” he said.  “I’m under these rules for … reasons that I can’t talk about, either.  I can give hints, though.”

“Oh, isn’t that lovely?”  She rolled her eyes over the barley paste.

“You’re going to be doing something very important.  It has to do with the fate of this world.”  The best part was that Oscar looked utterly serious as he said it.

“Keep on telling me that, witch-spirit.  Maybe once I figure out what you are, I’ll get some more answers.”  She pulled the canvas around her and gingerly lowered herself down.  “Until then, good night.”

Then, on second thought, she levered herself up a little.  “One other thing, bird.  My name’s Nasan.  It means ‘life.’  I don’t have a clan name anymore.”

It was satisfying just to see the bird look at her with its beak half open.  She rolled over and closed her eyes.