Shadow and Betrayal (101 page)

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Authors: Daniel Abraham

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‘Best change into those quickly, Idaan-cha,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a sledge and team waiting, but it’s an unpleasant winter out there, and I want to make the first low town before dark.’
‘This is madness,’ she said.
The soldier took a pose of agreement.
‘He’s making quite a few bad decisions,’ he said. ‘He’s new at this, though. He’ll get better.’
Idaan stripped under the soldier’s impassive gaze and pulled on the robes and the leggings, the cloak, the boots. She stepped out of her cell with the feeling of having shed her skin. She didn’t understand how much those walls had become everything to her until she stepped out the last door and into the blasting cold and limitless white. For a moment, it was too much. The world was too huge and too open, and she was too small to survive even the sight of it. She wasn’t conscious of shrinking back from it until the soldier touched her arm.
‘The sledge is this way,’ he said.
Idaan stumbled, her boots new and awkward, her legs unaccustomed to the slick ice on the snow. But she followed.
The chains were frozen to the tower, the lifting mechanism brittle with cold. The only way was to walk, but Otah found he was much stronger than he had been when they’d marched him up the tower before, and the effort of it kept him warm. The air was bitterly cold; there weren’t enough braziers in the city to keep the towers heated in winter. The floors he passed were filled with crates of food, bins of grains and dried fruits, smoked fish and meats. Supplies for the months until summer came again, and the city could forget for a while what the winter had been.
Back in the palaces, Kiyan was waiting for him. And Maati. They were to meet and talk over the strategies for searching the library. And other things, he supposed. And there was a petition from the silversmiths to reduce the tax paid to the city on work that was sold in the nearby low towns. And the head of the Saya wanted to discuss a proper match for his daughter, with the strong and awkward implication that the Khai Machi might want to consider who his second wife might be. But for now, all the voices were gone, even the ones he loved, and the solitude was sweet.
He stopped a little under two-thirds of the way to the top, his legs aching but his face warm. He wrestled open the inner sky doors and then unlatched and pushed open the outer. The city was splayed out beneath him, dark stone peeking out from under the snow, plumes of smoke rising as always from the forges. To the south, a hundred crows rose from the branches of dead trees, circled briefly, and took their perches again.
And beyond that, to the east, he saw the distant forms he’d come to see: a sledge with a small team and two figures on it, speeding out across the snowfields. He sat, letting his feet dangle out over the rooftops, and watched until they were only a tiny black mark in the distance. And then as they vanished into the white.
about the author
Daniel Abraham
has had stories published in the
Vanishing Acts
,
Bones of the World
, and
The Dark
anthologies, and has been included in Gardner Dozois’s
Year’s Best Science Fiction
anthology as well. His story
Flat Diane
won the International Horror Guild award for mid-length fiction. He lives in New Mexico with his wife and daughter.
 
Find out more about Daniel Abraham and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at
www.orbitbooks.net
interview
Were you writing for a long time before you were published? How did it feel to see your first novel in print?
I’ve been writing most of my life. I’d been actively sending out work for publication for about ten years before I started selling short stories, and then another decade between selling my first short story and the first novel coming out. Seeing my first real book in the bookstores was oddly anticlimactic. By the time it came out, I was writing the third book in the series and working on some side projects. Looking back, twenty years of not having a book out required that I find some real, sustaining joy in doing the work for its own sake. The goal was always to be published, but it was never the endpoint.
You’ve written short stories before moving on to novels - is there a difference, apart from length?
There are some structural differences. Stories that can’t be told at shorter lengths become possible as you get longer. And the ones that can be encompassed by five or six thousand words become also become impossible at twenty or a hundred or a quarter million. That said, the immediate issues - how to make the dialogue interesting, how to evoke a location, when to show and when to tell - are pretty similar.
Can you tell us a little bit about the background to The Long Price series?
The Long Price Quartet was a couple of things. First off, it was my journeyman project. I went in having written three previous book-length stories, and aware that I wanted to learn better how to do them. It was also my first real experiment with epic fantasy. I wanted to try a structure that could contrast the epic scale of traditional fantasy with the epic scale of a single, normal lifetime.
Did the idea for The Long Price series come to you fully realised or did you have one particular starting point from which it grew?
It was originally a short story that I thought was complete in itself. When it became clear that the story was going to be much, much bigger, it took some more work. That first story became the prologue of the first book, almost unchanged from its original form.
How extensively do you plot your novels before you start writing them? Do you plot the entire series before you start writing or do you prefer to let the story roam where it will?
I outline along the way, but every outline is provisional. For the whole project, I knew the overall shape I wanted, and what the last scene would be. As I approached each individual story, I’d figure out the ending I was aiming for. It’s sort of like longdistance driving. I knew I was going from Los Angeles to Chicago, so I knew where I was going, but I didn’t plan out each individual turn and stop along the way.
Do you have a set writing routine and if so, what is it?
I have the intention of a set routine. I drop the darling child off at daycare, and head over to a print shop that my parents have behind their house. I spend from about eight thirty to lunchtime working, break for a sandwich, then back for another session until mid aftemoon, when it’s time to retrieve the kid. In practice, the world intrudes. But that’s what I aim for.
Some authors talk of their characters ‘surprising’ them by their actions; is this something that has happened to you, or do you know from the start where each character will end up?
My experience isn’t so much the characters surprising me, as much as I have a good idea of how everything fits together, and I’m o~en a little wrong. I could be wrong about this, but I think the difference is more about how a writer thinks through a story. My first draft is how I think the story through. Other people think it through by writing detailed outlines. I suspect it’s the same process with differences in style more than substance.
What was the inspiration behind the names of your characters and your setting? There’s a very Eastern flavour to the books; was it your intention to rebel against the Fantasy’s traditional Western setting, or did it evolve during the writing?
That was there from the start. I wanted to do something to reset people’s expectations. I wasn’t trying for a traditional epic fantasy, and I thought that would be one way to alert readers that this one might be a little different.
The poses concept is really interesting. What inspired you to develop it as an integral part of the characters’ communication with each other?
I stole it from a Walter Jon Williams short story. It’s okay, he knows I took it, and he’s cool with it. He had a far future setting in which people used mudras as inflection. I thought it was a brilliant touch, so I took it and expanded on it so that it stood as almost a second language. And then S. M. Stirling took it from me for use in a novel called In the Court of the Crimson Kings. But it’s okay. I know he took it, and I’m cool with it.
Do have a personal theory on why Fantasy is so popular these days?
I do. It’s pretty involved, but the short form goes like this: Fantasy is, at heart, involved with nostalgia and the (sometimes imperfect) healing of the world. We are in a place as a world community in which nostalgia and healing are profoundly comforting ideas.
Do you see any particular trends in recent SF/Fantasy?
A couple, and they bother me. First off, I think there’s a strong trend toward emotional darkness. I can even make an argument that I’m part of that. I think it’s a mistake to equate violence and ‘grittiness’ with realism. The other is the infinitely postponed conclusion. I believe that good stories end.
Do you find it frustrating that so much excellent work is currently being produced in SF & Fantasy but that by and large it is still ignored by the literati?
Not really. I know a lot of folks who are, but I really don’t understand what the brass ring is that we’d be reaching for. It isn’t fame or money, or even cultural influence. J. K. Rowling has proven that. If recognition by an elite doesn’t get you anything other than recognrtion by that elite, that’s an argument that the elite is becoming inconsequential. That we are part of a living, vital, popular literature is why folks like Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, and Margaret Atwood have started borrowing our ideas. Literature
qua
literature is in real danger of going the way of professional poetry.
Do you have any particular favourite authors who have influenced your work?
No end of them. David Eddings as read by my sixteen-year-old self. George R. R. Martin. Dorothy Sayers. Camus, WalterTevis. Scott Westerfeld. Enrique Anderson Imbert. Robert B. Parker. Jane Austen. I could go on for days, really.
What do you enjoy reading in your moments of leisure? Do you stick to the SF/Fantasy market as a rule or enjoy other genres too?
I usually read something other than what I’m writing at the moment. So when I’m busy with epic fantasy stuff, I’ll read mystery or horror or mainstream literature or history or science. I enjoy the genre, but I read like an omnivore.
Do you chat about your books with other authors as you’re writing them, or do you prefer to keep in your own head until the first draft is complete?
I’m lucky that I live in a community with a lot of working writers. The group I hang out with talks about our work with each other, up to and including having planning sessions to work through structural issues and brainstorming plotlines and characters for work at the very beginning of its life. I don’t think I do my best work in isolation. Having other minds to spark against makes me better.
What would you do if you weren’t a writer?
I have fantasies about going back for a Masters degree in Public Health. I’m too old now to go to medical school, but public health is where MDs go when they burn out and want to do something that actually makes a difference. Epidemiology in particular turns me on.
So, what’s next for you?
Well, I have a new fantasy series that I’m getting ready to pitch, an urban fantasy series that I’m writing under pseudonym, a mystery series I’d like to spin up, and some short stories I’ve promised to write. I think I have enough to keep me off the street corners for a while yet.

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