920 words yesterday and about 550 today so far; still keeping on keeping on!

Today’s excerpt:

“How much do you know about the Nameless?”

“I’ve been doing a bit of reading,” Ari said lightly.

Darien thought about the stories he knew. Trying to find something to say about that was like trying to skim the foam from a deep and storm-thrashed ocean. “Keep reading,” he said. “However treacherous you know it to be, you probably don’t know enough. I know I don’t know enough.”

Last time we discussed fate, prophecy and destiny. Another way to define those things is the power level of the Universe as agent. Today we’re going to talk about the flip side of that: the power level of the character as agent.

There’s a reason why the Amber novels get an exception case in the post on fate. The High Fate universe moves by a deterministic hand or hands moving in concert; the low fate universe is driven by uncertainty.

Zelazny’s model picks neither/nor, because the characters are among the hands moving the universe, and they’re not moving in concert. (And if they were the only hands moving the universe, that might bump the setting toward pantheistic High Fate – but there’s always another layer of supernatural superiors who they can affect but can’t entirely outwit.)

Absolute and Relative Power Levels

So already we have two questions to ask about characters’ power levels. There’s their absolute power level and their relative power level, and these can be massively different things. The scions of Amber have very high absolute power levels: they can push mini-universes around and make their own fates. But in their own universe, in each other’s company or the company of other Powers, they hit up against the irresistible force/immovable object problem quite quickly. In short, they have exactly as much trouble getting what they want as do any other protagonists.

In the profile for the author of “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” – an excellent and entirely unique thing which will hijack the entire post if I discuss it here – about three-quarters down the page he posits a “First Law of Fan Fiction”: “[E]very change which strengthens the protagonists requires a corresponding worsening of their challenges. Or in plainer language: You can’t make Frodo a Jedi without giving Sauron the Death Star. Read any book on writing ever and it will tell you that stories are about conflict; a hero too strong for their conflict is no longer in tense, heart-pounding difficulty.”

That’s about the difference between absolute and relative power level in a nutshell, puns on Amber and relatives notwithstanding. The example given raises the absolute power level on both sides without changing the relative power level.

As the original law points out, if Sauron makes his battle station fully operational before Frodo puts down his pipeweed, or if Frodo slashes his way through Mordor with a lightsaber, you’re telling the punchline to a joke before anyone has a chance to care about why it’s funny.

Of course, on any continuum of power there’s a skew. It’s never exactly 1:1. So there’s room for tweaking.

Elevate the forces opposing the hero more than you elevate the hero, and you’re telling a darker or grittier story; elevate the hero more than you elevate their opposition and you’re telling a more optimistic one. That’s relative power level: the balance of the scales.

High Absolute Power Levels

The Amber novels, and many of Zelazny’s other works, feature godlike protagonists in situations that are as dire and uncertain as life can be for anyone else; and that’s often a thing of beauty in itself because it means the stories are more extreme. The torment Corwin goes through toward the end of the first book would end the story altogether for a hero of less physical fortitude, but because Corwin’s physical fortitude is legendary, he can overcome it. Drastic measures must be taken to put him out of action for any length of time, to put a dent in him. And because that’s the case, the story of those drastic measures can be told, and the protagonist emerge whole from them, if not unscathed.

It’s a thing Amber has in common with Doctor Who. No wonder those are two of my favorite narratives. They can put their characters into extreme situations that people of ordinary human capabilities simply couldn’t overcome. Mortal enmity which resolves to friendship, death or near-death and return to life… Riches and status beyond imagining, brought into sharp relief by the threat of a bottomless fall.

If a hero undergoes something that would kill an ordinary person, and goes through unscathed, that’s no story; if the hero suffers all the trauma of the event but lives to tell about it, though? That’s a story, and there’s enormous emotional impact in it when done right.

Buckling your Swash; Cinematic Heroism

In the middle of this continuum, we have heroes who are just plain good at stuff. Take Han Solo, in Star Wars. He’s not and never will be a Jedi, but he can fly his ship and fire a blaster, and he can do these things well. The devious Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen of Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard Sequence fit in this category as well, along with countless con men and swashbucklers.

Most often, their narrative arcs pit them against outlandishly difficult situations, which they manage to navigate through by skill, talent, wit, coincidence and sheer damnedness – but at the same time, the “difficulty level”, the power skew factor, isn’t always what it appears to be. Han Solo says “Never tell me the odds!” and what he’s telling the audience is, the odds don’t count here. He’s going to make it through that asteroid field because that’s in the goddamn narrative contract.

In the Gentleman Bastard universe, on the other hand, it’s fairly apparent that bad things happen to good people; so the tension is ratcheted up by the possibility that we could lose a main character, because it’s an actual possibility. It’s also certain that a win will be a spectacular win, and a loss will be a spectacular loss. These characters live large.

Narrative contracts and relative power levels have a lot to do with each other. There are oblique ways in which every author tells their reader whether the hero will always win the day, and what they might expect to lose in the process.

Ordinary People in Extraordinary Circumstances

On the other end of the spectrum, take stories like Lord of the Rings.

It’s hard to think of similar ones, as it almost seems to have gone out of fashion to have a protagonist with perfectly ordinary capabilities or capabilities that are often outshone by those of other characters in the story. It’s more common these days for authors to start their protagonists out as ordinary people with ordinary circumstances and have them gain unusual abilities as the story continues.

There’s certainly a large spectrum here, and it breaks down further. Like immunities (I’m a science dork), special abilities can be innate or acquired. I’m going to address that more in the next post.

This brings us to one of the other major “sub-axes” of power level in fantasy stories: what are the stakes? Is your protagonist in it to discover their personal abilities, save the world, do both, or something in between?

Stakes: Heroes and Turning Points

High stakes have an in-built advantage for storytelling. When you hang a possible apocalypse on the wall, you’ve given readers a point of personal investment and a reason to keep reading and see how it turns out. There’s a reason why saving the world is a standard fantasy and SF plot. Everyone cares about saving the world (unless you manage to make an extremely boring world by giving it no emotional resonance.)

But how do we go about it? There’s more than one way.

The truth is, our world has been saved many times. It’s probably being saved many more times as I write this, and we won’t know it for years and won’t know some of them at all.

Stanislav Petrov saved the world by identifying a false alarm and refusing orders to start a nuclear war. Fritz Haber saved the world by pioneering a process to fix nitrogen in the laboratory, before which the world was running short of the fertilizer needed to, y’know, grow food. (He also made chemical weapons for Germany in WWI, and then was booted out for being Jewish in the 1930s. An interesting and rather screwed up life.) The people involved in the Works Progress Administration saved the world, or at least the country. The people involved in the mid-century African-American civil rights movement saved – well, check out this amazing piece, Most of You Have No Idea What Martin Luther King Actually Did.

Some acts are heroic by traditional standards (saving individual lives, making decisions at a particular moment in time) while others are obvious in retrospect as moments which changed history on a massive scale. Some of these turning points involve people with no special qualifications; others involve physical or mental prowess, or positions of high social standing.

The choices in front of the protagonist can be personal, or have an immediate effect on the universe – or, my favorite of the options and the one that most influences my work, they can be personal choices that have far-reaching implications for the protagonist(s) and their world.

Are You Up to the Challenge?

So: extraordinary people accomplishing things by extraordinary means – the Amber Chronicles, Doctor Who, and a lot of others fall into this category. Ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances - Lord of the Rings, and some of the real-life examples I’ve mentioned. Then there are stories where the magnitude of the consequences is scaled to the magnitude of the protagonists’ abilities. LeGuin’s Earthsea stories are often like that; the stakes are usually very personal. Protagonists literally go to the ends of the earth to fight battles for autonomy, wisdom, the life of another. Power is also rooted in these things, and as characters grow beyond themselves, their actions affect a larger swath of reality.

Having consequences and antagonists too far beyond the scope of the protagonists’ comprehension risks a hurried and unsatisfying ending – saving the world by pressing a button, because it’s there; a deus ex machina. Character development is an antidote to that kind of thing. The stakes and scope increase over the course of the Earthsea books as the protagonists mature. Frodo underwent quite the personal transformation over the course of his journey; the hobbit he was when he left the Shire could not have been the one to sneak into Mordor. That’s a coming-of-age narrative, quite common in fantasy fiction, but there are also longer games than that.

Great works of serial fiction often build in intensity over time. By the time the protagonists realize that the world is at stake, late in the game, they’re emotionally ready to handle it; then and not before. For some reason the webcomic and graphic novel formats seem to have an especial suitability for this kind of storytelling: Girl Genius and The Phoenix Requiem are two I can think of in which characters are drawn gradually and compellingly from everyday concerns into world-shaking events. Barbara Hambly’s books also sometimes use these kinds of slow-building threats, with intelligent protagonists who use their wits to keep up as the stakes rise.

This is one of my favorite models, and definitely an influence for The Long Academy, although I’m still trying to sort out exactly how the plot complications fit into that equation.

The “characters who improve as the plot enlarges” model has more than one form. Sometimes characters’ concrete powers increase: they can lift more cars, cast more spells, or whatnot as the villains get badder. In more serious works, characters’ increased abilities to deal with their later challenges hinge on their personal growth, their willingness to make sacrifices (or refuse to make sacrifices) or to trust each other, their capacity to make decisions on the fly. Often, of course, the external mirrors the internal.

Don’t Save the World Six Times before Breakfast

It gets tiresome. If you front-load everything into the first book of a series, you can’t build from there very effectively. Either your characters have taken care of the threat – in which case you have to come up with another that’s just as cool and threatening and a reason why it’s there – or they haven’t really and it keeps coming back, which is frustrating for its own reasons.

I quite loved Tehanu, a later Earthsea book that broke from the mold of the earlier ones, the second time I read it – because it does a wonderful thing with the question of: you’ve saved the world, what now? The problems of living a life and having a family are as good an answer as any to that question, and a fascinating counterpoint to the paradigm of the earlier novels. Instead of constantly raising the threat ante, LeGuin switches the nature and angle of it from one book to another.

Accidents of Birth and Social Power

And then there’s bloodline, and class, and sometimes race and other qualifiers. And there’s no overlooking them. I wrote most of the rest of this post days ago, but didn’t put it up until now because I realized that in order to do the topic justice, I had to branch out into fantasy’s Daddy Issues and their Unfortunate Implications. After spending a while debating with myself on the topic, I decided to give it its own post, coming soon.

Today’s work exceeds a thousand words, by a bit. I’m back on board!

And your promised excerpt:

“What is that noise?” Ari shouted.

“It’s the manufacturies,” Sianli boomed back calmly, over the clanging. “They think seven o’clock is a perfectly well and good time to begin their business day. If you don’t agree, you had best put in a petition with the Magister.” She said it in the no-nonsense tone of someone who had put in such petitions many times, had them ignored, and decided to live with it.

Well, she had paid far less for the room than she’d thought was normal.

As an administrative note, I’m going to need to re-deadline my novel finishing month because of the migraine that ate up my spare processor cycles during several days of the last week. But: Look! I still get around to things I promised!

‘K, so: people frequently speak of fantasy in terms of “High Fantasy” and “Low Fantasy”. I’ve been meaning for a while to break that down along several axes. Initially I thought it was two or three, but it may turn out to be more than that.

First of all, there’s the continuum of fate/prophecy/destiny. That’s what I’m going to be talking about in this post, since it’s such a central conceit of the fantasy genre.

Fate, Prophecy & Destiny – Why You Need Them, Or Don’t

So. What is fate? In terms of its role in the construction of a book, its meta-identity, it’s a reader engagement booby trap. It drops a bait for the reader: see, there’s this cool thing at the end of the book and you haven’t seen it yet! Readers like the feeling of deja vu, of knowing what’s going to come up. Of course, we don’t like to know too much, so how we use this sort of thing is important.

Fate isn’t the only reader engagement booby trap. Fantasy fiction, along with science fiction involving time travel, simply have it happen in-world rather than in the fictional format. Lit fic – and fantasy or SF with no fate or time travel involved – still use other such devices: flash-forwards, for example. The Victorian narratorial omniscience: “Little did she know, she would have met her spouse-to-be a year sooner had she but remained in that sitting room another hour, and that would have been terrible indeed…”

That was a made-up line, but it’s a great example of prophecy despite the fact that it’s narratorial rather than in-world. It leaves the reader with an AHA! “She’s going to get married to someone she meets a year from now!” and with a question: “Why would it have been terrible if they met sooner?”

Boom! Spring-loaded delivery of plot information at your fingertips! In a novel using fate, that would be something told her by a character or item with the power of delivering prophecy: “And ye shall flee that chamber, lest a moment’s fleeting sight replace true love next December.”

(As for why she’d better avoid her true love now: maybe the suitor is addicted to opium, under a geas to kill her or maybe just having a bad acne day. In a year the problem will have passed, or better yet she’ll be able to solve it.)

So, now we’ve established what fate is in the plot sense – what it does in the narrative. But what is it in the world? Where does it come from, inside the fourth wall?

High Fate: Divine Intervention

On the high end of the continuum, you have things like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time hippopotomonstroseries, the Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper, and Tolkien and the like. In these books there is a Higher Force of some sort providing the characters with Destiny; note the capital letters. Fate may or may not emanate from a deity or deities, but usually does, and if not there is still an underlying Higher Force that just isn’t personified/anthropomorphized. These narratives often have religious underpinnings, though not necessarily a particular religion to promote; other times they’re based in fairytale logic, with the recipe for the end of the story known from the beginning. In any case, there is a great surety about the whole thing. Srs bsns!

It usually takes the form of moral certainty, rather than certainty as to whether the protagonists will succeed or fail. The amount of specificity the Higher Force gives in its prophecies is variable. Often it comes down to free will and leaves the question of whether the protagonists will have the right stuff and make the right choices, whether the narrative will be heroic or tragic.

 

Distracted Divinities & Partial Prophecies

For everything with a high and low end, there’s a middle. The middle ground here would have to be stories where there are Hands at work, but not a unified Hand – imperfect or out-of-touch deities, as found in P.C. Hodgell’s work, or middle-sized fate-shifting forces at odds with each other, like in Robin Hobb’s Fool trilogy.

Then there are prophetic moments too overtly supernatural to be “low fate”, as discussed below, but also not fueled off a divine Duracell; for example Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea has a very literal foreshadowing early in the book wherein something very real appears from Ged’s future, but there doesn’t seem to be a Plan At Large.

The Amber books are another example of a story without an overarching Plan; rather there are individual powers making bids for the future of the universe. However, because characters can shift probabilities, they can toss omens and portents around which are above the scope of normal “low fate” stuff. It’s kind of unique as fantasy goes, and I’m going to address that more in Part Two.

 

“Low Fate” & Subtle/Realistic Prophecy

Yes, I said “realistic prophecy”. Ever had a friend who just has a really good intuition and could tell you what was going to happen in your next relationship? Ever heard a song on the radio for the first time in years and then heard from the person it reminded you of, also for the first time in years?

In fantasy fiction or realistic fiction, a prophetic device – fortune teller, omen, divination/scrying – can deliver this kind of information; fiction, as a whole, takes place with a great deal more coincidence and synchronicity than life. You’ve surely also heard an old song on the radio and then not heard from a friend, but that doesn’t make as good of a story. Fiction, definitionally, is what makes a good story. I’m going to define, then, the subtler uses of the prophetic device as the kind of thing which could conceivably happen in real life.

A good example of “low fate” used in fantasy fiction is in Barbara Hambly’s The Silent Tower, of the Antryg Windrose Chronicles. (In general, uncertain divination appears quite a bit in Hambly’s books.) Toward the later middle of the book, a main character does a tarot reading for himself. In the perspective of another character who witnesses it, tarot cards are regarded as inherently unreliable, but the reading later has significance; it foreshadows events that will occur. Nobody refers to the cards when those events play out, but their meaning is clear in retrospect. It has the resonance of a chord progression repeating itself, a dark leitmotif, and this makes it one of my favorite scenes to re-read, knowing what happens later.

In my current work, prophecy works like this, more or less. It’s not a High Fate book. There’s a character who sometimes involuntarily speaks prophecy, and she’s always highly annoyed when it happens; she can’t remember what she said and doesn’t always have a way of checking up on whether they’re true or not.

 

Some Questions to Ask about Prophecy

How accurate is prophecy? Pamela Dean’s The Secret Country series deals with this question in some sly and interesting ways. The child protagonists find themselves in a story that seems to be the story they were making, but some of the details are wrong and they have to figure out what rules to play by.

Can prophecy be defied? Sometimes that question is central to a book. Paul Cornell’s British Summertime and Jay Lake’s Mainspring both play, in different ways, with reader expectations of what constitutes a Divine Plan. The ancient Greeks loved the “protagonist runs afoul of fate by trying to throw it off” plot. A trick I’ve seen commonly used to raise tension is predicting a character’s death, but leaving a loophole.

How specific is prophecy? As with my first example, what is given (the “aha!”) and what is left for the reader to wonder about? This goes for other reader engagement booby traps too. Whether the reader is getting it from the narrator or the character is getting it from a supernatural creature, a book or a tarot reading, which details to put in and which to leave out are crucial.

Specificity varies wildly from one book to another. “You will meet a reptoid spy on the 24th of October, 2012″ leaves the question of who the reptoid spy might be, but little else to wonder about. More traditional is the poetic, symbolic approach, which allows quite a lot of leeway with interpretation. “The Chosen One shall ring the bell of freedom and dance the steps of the ocean’s tides.” …Okay, yeah. The Chosen One will what, now? That one’s pretty obviously going to have to come out in play, and so it’s a kind of weak reader engagement trap; it doesn’t give people much to latch onto. That’s the danger of being too nonspecific.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett has the “Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter”, which are often too specific: “Do Notte Buy Betamacks”.

“You mean she predicted videotape recorders?”

“No! She just picked up one little fragment of information,” said Anathema. “That’s the point. Most of the time she comes up with such an oblique reference that you can’t work it out until it’s gone past, and then it all slots into place. And she didn’t know what was going to be important or not, so it’s all a bit hit and miss. Her prediction for November 22, 1963, was about a house falling down in King’s Lynn.”

“Oh?” Newt looked politely blank.

“President Kennedy was assassinated,” said Anathema helpfully. “But Dallas didn’t exist then, you see. Whereas King’s Lynn was quite important.”

The Wheel of Time books are fond of nonspecific prophecies, some more obtuse than others. My current favorite– “To give up half the light of the world to save the world.” It’s reasonably easy to guess what will happen to this character, from the other hints placed in the narrative, but not one hundred percent certain from the line as given; and how or when or any other details are left blank until the event finally transpires.

And finally, how complete is prophecy?

It can’t be fully accurate, specific and complete without taking the fun out of the story. The point is to carefully choose where the holes are. Think about the questions readers will ask when we see the prophecy; in art terms, the ‘negative space’ and how it draws the eye. Do you want the sense of expectation to feel like hearing the first bars of Beethoven’s Ninth, guessing at an unopened birthday present or hearing the first crash of thunder in the distance?

Upcoming: character power level is the next axis I’m going to cover, and “tone” is another – or possibly more than one axis, because there’s both the sensibility of the language (poetic-prosaic, formal-casual – which are not the same thing; for example, Zelazny is both poetic and casual) and the logic by which the plot operates – whether characters navigate the world by magical/dream-logic rules or rules more similar to the waking world. Stay tuned!

So I had a few off days (this was kind of expected -  new classes plus editing gigs can really occupy some brain cells) but yesterday managed about 1200 words.

Newest excerpt:

“Oh,” said Darien. “People never can stop thinking of their utility to each other, can they?” Her dark brown eyes, striking in such a pale face, gave a pleading blink at him as if she hoped that he meant what he meant but wasn’t sure. “No, Ari,” he said, trying to clarify. “I won’t cease to keep you company because of the chance that your people can’t help me – or the chance that they won’t, for that matter. I’m a man of few illusions.”

 

Today’s amounts to around 900 words. I wanted more to happen, but it didn’t and I think this does not overrule the “go to sleep dammit” principle. However, I did succeed in sewing a flourish of feathers and tulle to a headband. Goth headgear FTW!

Excerpt from today’s and/or Wednesday’s (same scene):

Omire did not respond, but her silence was not a nervous silence. She sat at ease with herself, waiting for Darien to finish unlacing his boots. “Do you need to speak with me inside, or shall we remain in the courtyard?” she asked, and there was simple courtesy in her voice, none of the impatience or alarm someone else might exhibit at having been followed home by a near-stranger. Then she looked at him, her eyes quietly speculative, and said, “Come inside, I think,” answering her own question.

I promised a post on fantasy fiction in general, and I’m going to get there, but first a word on influences.

Since beginning this book, I’ve been seeing all other works I read as reflective mirrors – funhouse mirrors, as it were, showing me pieces of the elusive qualities I’m looking for in shapes and colors different from the way I mean to portray them.

Here follows a list of some of the books that have been… points of reference, I guess, on my process; and the themes and aspects in them I’ve found most helpful.  ”Influences” would imply, mostly falsely, that I set out to write a book that is like any of these things. I did not; I’ve been using them along the way to “check in” with how other authors deal with some of the same territory. Indeed, many of these are books I’ve read for the first time since beginning mine. So “mirrors” will have to do. They are not in any particular order, and it’s by no means limited to these: every book I read while I’m writing is an input on me, in some way.

Vonda McIntyre, Dreamsnake – power differentials, authority problems; the “arrive at your destination and find that your goal has changed” through-plot.

Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea (and the Earthsea series, somewhat) – thoughts on the nature of power and of learning; a world which is ethnically diverse and has many sub-regions.

Elizabeth Lynn, A Different Light – the problem of having a main character who explicitly has an expiration date from the beginning, and one of the possible ways of dealing with it.

Jay Lake, Mainspring – the “young adult from an imperialistic culture comes to the greater world outside his or her experience” plot/problem, and the slight unreliability-of-narrator it engenders. Early technological infrastructure.

P.C. Hodgell, Godstalk – a coming-to-town-and-leaving-town story setup, in a city with wildly diverse goings-on. My city is in no way based on her city, but the decision that a large rather than small portion of the story would take place in the city was influenced by my enjoyment of this book.

Rosemary Kirstein, the Steerswoman series – these are explicitly science fiction that look like fantasy, while mine is fantasy that works a little like science fiction, but there’s certainly an underlying theme of “finding out hard truths about the world” here that I like and think on.

Mark Budz, Til Human Voices Wake Us – transcendence interwoven with illness, neither dealt with glibly; character in-head personality dynamics.

Scott Lynch, the Gentleman Bastard Sequence – ohh, infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure; mid-technological worldbuilding influenced by our world without directly corresponding to it; a sense of a world where actions have consequences.

Diane Duane, Young Wizard series (and works in general) – magic, the structure and philosophy of the universe; almost no superficial elements in common, but they’ve influenced my own philosophy so deeply that it leaves recognizable marks on aspects of my writing.

Barbara Hambly, the Antryg Windrose series – there’s so much I like about these that I’d be lying if I said I didn’t always look to them. In common with my book? Just some stray elements – the feel of characters traveling with each other who aren’t telling each other everything, a society of mages that acts like a herd of cats, a world beginning to industrialize and an excellent grasp on its infrastructure. But these aren’t unique elements. Mostly this series is on the list of books I go back to, once or more than once, every time I’m writing something, just to remember what makes me fall in love with a book.

Anyway – despite the diversity of books here, there are some assumptions almost all of these books have in common, more or less, that separate them from fantasy fiction in the generic case, and that’s one of the things I’m going to talk about in the next post…

I finished ~800 words today and probably about another 200 in the couple of days before that (been editing files, so it’s add-a-bit-here, add-a-bit-there.) I’ll have an excerpt for y’all tomorrow, and very likely a post about what I’m doing with this book, its influences and mirrors, and some of my thoughts on fantasy fiction in general.

I had to drag myself out to the neighborhood all-night cafe to do it, but I dashed off another thousand words and change tonight. I think I’m getting my groove back.

Excerpt from today’s:

She spotted a desk that looked actually too small to sit at, as if it had been built for a child or a midget, and whose top was covered only in papers and books, nothing so delicate as specimen jars; so she cleared the top of the desk, settled the items underneath it carefully, and perched on it with her legs folded to the side.

It occurred to her to wonder what, exactly, was the point of a vigil for a stolen corpse. Did they think the thief might bring the body back?

I know for some writers that’s not terribly exciting. But if I can get and stay in the habit of making it happen daily, I’ll be writing many more novels than I have been, and that’s important!

Today’s excerpt:

“I have two apprentices who cannot stand each other,” Omire said. “They can take the next shift.”

“No,” Ressik said, “it should be cross-factional. Do you have an apprentice or a friend who is nursing a grudge with a cognis, or a workingmage, or one of the seekers?”

“I could probably piss somebody off,” Fyris offered cheerfully.

“Yes,” said Ressik dryly, “you probably could.”