I wrote this back when I was trying to figure out how to start The Lord Of All Fools.  I came across it this morning as I was outlining my rewrite, and I thought, “Hey.  This is a nice little chapter that, even though it has nothing to do with the novel as it exists now, kind of set the tone for it when I was beginning.”

So, what better way to tease my avid fan base than with a short chapter from the novel?  This about 2500 words– enjoy!

            The dirigible passed directly over them.  Even in the basement, with walls and ceilings and a street over them, the sound made the small hairs on Randall Ograhim’s arms tremble.  The council room was silent as it passed.  Mice, Randall thought.  We are all mice in the shadows.  Even if the Tedescans can’t hear us, we clap our mouths shut as they pass by, hold our hands together, sit still.  Randall strained a moment against the padded shackles that held him motionless on the table, trying in vain to shift his lower back a little.  But he’d been tied down tightly, and there was no hope of movement.

            As it should be.  As it must be.

            No bombs fell, this time.  The Tedescans didn’t need bombs to frighten them, not any longer.  Not after a week and a half of the dirigibles’ siege.  There was a far off explosion; Randall heard the screech and thwump of a bomb off at the edge of the city.  Someone else in the room, from the Aldermen’s side, gave a little squeak.  A little mousey squeak. 

            The drone of the dirigible began to fade.  Randall realized his eyes were shut, and opened them, just in time to catch some dust in his eye.  He blinked and blinked some more, but couldn’t get it out.  There were mutterings and whisperings from the wizards and aldermen gathered together.  Muttering about the heresy of what they were doing, the dangers, the…impropriety of it all.

            Mice. 

            Bill Thulio leaned over him, lowered his scalpel to Randall’s eye.  “Hold still, Scrivener.” Bill’s voice was soft. 

            Randall’s breath came quick and shallow.  The edge of the scalpel was right above his pupil, glittering in the glow of the lamps.  Bill stretched his eye open with his free hand, fingers cool and smooth and brushed the tip of the scalpel against Randall’s eye.  Bill Thulio’s hands were deft, and the scalpel was nothing, a shadow, a breath. 

Lies.  When another dirigible rumbled over them, Randall took a moment to grunt and blink and swear softly to himself against the burning in his eye.  By the time it had faded, he’d forced himself back into stoic acceptance of the scalpel.  Bill Thulio leaned over him again, licking his lips.  Grinning.

No one was muttering now.  Not the Aldermen, not the wizards.  Randall could hear them breathing out there, somewhere, beyond the lamps that surrounded the table.  As if to fill the silence, Bill Thulio began singing to himself as he traced the edge of the scalpel against Randall’s eye.  Nonsense, that’s all it was, but it was something Randall could hold on to, something other than the pain and burning. 

“Now is your moment, Randall,” Bill said, in a whisper that carried across the room.  “If you blink, it will all be for nothing.  If you blink now, we must wait for the eye to heal, and try again, months from now.”

There would be no later.  They could not wait any longer to unlock the secrets of the Tedescan’s dirigibles.

“Or maybe one of your colleagues could take your place on the table,” said Bill Thulio.

Mice.

“I’m ready,” Randall said.

“Do not blink, Scrivener.”

The scalpel lowered, and cut a long, curving line of pain under Randall’s iris.  His lower eyelid trembled, threatening, threatening… but Bill’s finger reached for it, held it still.  Randall stifled a whimper, felt his back arching involuntarily as he sucked in a breath, as he fought against the unnaturalness of not blinking.

And above them came the thunder of another dirigible.  Obscenely loud, the power of its engines made the glass in the lamps chitter.  More dust shook down from the ceiling drifting toward Randall’s face.

Bill had stopped cutting him.  He was looking up at the ceiling, where the dirigible passed, waiting for the bomb that would end them all.  The point of the scalpel lay like bright fire against Randall’s eye, and he felt his eyelid begin to slip.

“Cut me!” Randall cried.  “Hurry, cut me!  Finish me!”

Bill Thulio looked down on him.  Smiled.  He pointed up at the ceiling, then made a shaking motion with his free hand.  Don’t blink, he mouthed.  And smiled.

Again, no bomb fell.  Bill Thulio turned back to his work, to Randall’s eye.  But he didn’t cut.  He waited.

“Cut me,” Randall said.  “Now.”

Bill Thulio didn’t whisper this time.  He said, loudly, “Beg me for it, Scrivener.”

Now the wizards in the room murmured, and frowned and muttered.  Now they spoke.  Randall felt his face go hot.

Bill Thulio spoke above them all, “Beg me, Ograhim.  Beg, or I will lay down this scalpel, and it will not matter how…”

“You go too far!” someone shouted.

“It will not matter how you and your…men of standing whine and threaten me, I will not raise it again!”

“Traitor!” Several men watching them shouted it.  Randall heard the screech of chairs being pushed back the stamp of feet—but no one came forward.

“We are all traitors and blasphemers!” Bill Thulio screamed.  “All of us!”

“Please.” The word squeezed out of Randall’s throat.

The scalpel shifted a little.  Bill’s face came into Randall’s view.  “What was that, Scrivener?  Did I hear a whisper?”

“Please cut me.”  The room was silent now.  Randall’s eyelid was trembling so violently…

“That’s not begging, Randall.”  Bill Thulio licked his lips. 

“Cut me.”  Randall let a whine come out with the words.  He drilled all the pain and anguish he could into it.  Pathetic, wheezing, weakness.  “Cut me, Bill, I beg you.”

Bill Thulio’s voice was heavy and fast, “Weep.  Weep for me, like a little boy.”

More mutterings from the wizards.  But something was broken in them now, something that not even the Tedescan bombs could shatter.  Here was a wizard, a Scrivener, begging a gory handed… commoner.  It was unnatural. 

Randall wept.  He sobbed and moaned and snorted, until he didn’t have breath in him any longer.  Bill Thulio caught his tears with the scalpel and dripped them into his open mouth.

“Call me your lord,” Bill Thulio whispered.  Slowly, like he didn’t dare say it.

“My sweet lord Thulio,” Randall said.

“Again.  Beg me now.  Beg me to finish you.”

“Lord Thulio, I beg you, finish me.  Lord Thulio, I beg you…”

            The point of the scalpel trembled, then drew a thin line of pain down to the edge of his eye, and into the soft skin.  Randall felt the edge of the scalpel scrape across the skin there, and then saw it lift above his eye.  Bill let a fat drop of blood drip into both eyes and said, “It’s done, Scrivener.”

And then he stabbed the scalpel into Randall’s gut and ran.  Randall gasped in pain, and felt the blood down there next to the blade begin to ooze up, felt himself bleeding.  Dying!  He’d been stabbed and it hurt worse than the pain in his eyes…

He heard scuffling in the direction Bill had run, and shouting, and curses.  The world was full of reds and pinks and there was someone standing over him in mid-air.  A woman, with hair curling down to her bare shoulders.  She was naked, and lithe, and he would know her even if he couldn’t see her, just from the way she held the air around her.  Even if she wasn’t dead.

“Anna?” he whispered.  “Anna.”

She opened her mouth, and leaned down to him, placed her lips on his.  Her kiss was wet and cool.  She was whispering something, even as her lips moved on his, but he couldn’t understand it.  His dead wife, above him, her lips on his, and he couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything.  She lifted away from him, frowning, whispering.  He didn’t understand any of it.  He thought he should, though.  Because it was obvious that what she was saying was very important, the pain in her eyes was deepening, and she whispered, whispered, until his mind was full of her voice, soft and unintelligible and maddening.  She fell silent suddenly, blinked at him, brushed his eyelids with her lips.

            Then she drove her fingers deep into his eyes. 

            Randall screamed, tried to shut his eyes away from her probing, but could not.  He flailed and strained and screamed.

Anna twisted her fingers.  And when she whispered this time, he understood, even though he shouldn’t have even been able to hear her above his screaming.

You will find the angels in the southwest.

Her fingers drew away from him, and he whimpered.  He squeezed his eyes closed.  Someone was pulling at his hands and feet, someone was unlatching the belt around his middle, someone was poking and prodding his belly where, oh, yes, Bill Thulio had stabbed him.

They pulled him off of the table, pushed some liquor into his mouth.  Men with voices he knew, but names he couldn’t remember. 

“Anna?” he called.  What did he want with these men, when she was here?  What did they matter, when she was alive again?  He didn’t need his eyes, as long as she’d just answer him.

“Mad,” someone close to his ear said.  “He’s been driven insane.”

Randall opened his eyes, and thought that the speaker was right.  The wizards and Aldermen, all of them, were marked with runes.  Scrawled on their chests, on their thighs, everywhere.  He blinked, but the runes did not disappear.  There was the rune for safety, a rune for luck, a rune for virility, all scribed on these men.  Randall reached up to the chest of one of the men, put his hand over the rune there—felt it warm and pulsing somehow.  And with his hand, he gripped the rune, tucked his fingers beneath it and just…tugged.  The rune unraveled in a long string of gold, and melted in his hands. 

The man pushed his hands away, frowning and cursing.  His fingers pried into his coat pocket and brought out an empty strip of parchment.

“It’s gone,” he said, staring at Randall.  “You…you stole it.”

Randall could still feel the rune melting in his fingers like snow.  “My apologies.”

“You took it right off the parchment.”

Randall pulled himself to his feet, letting his bulk push many of the men away from him.  His head was light, and he didn’t dare look down at where Bill Thulio had stabbed him.  “Let me through,” he said.  “Let me see to these airships the Tedescans have set upon us.”

He made his way to the stairs, stumbling.  The wizards, the aldermen… the mice, they all stood behind him.  And Bill Thulio—hunkered over in a dark corner by the door, watched by men with pistols.  Randall didn’t acknowledge him as they passed.  He stared at the door in front of him, and the runes hidden within it, symbols that kept their council room safe and secure.

 Nothing is safe here.

“Anna?” he whispered.  But there was no reply, even though her voice echoed in his ears.  Nothing safe.  Not even his own mind. 

He turned the door knob, and pushed the door open.  It swung outward into darkness.  Randall took a candlestick off of the table next to the door, and stepped through the door. 

He’d need to get as high as he could, the better to see the dirigibles.  The council building was a wreck of glass and burned furniture, and outside, Randall saw a building burning down the street.  One of the textile factories, maybe.  He found the stairs to the second floor, and climbed.

The wizards and aldermen followed, rustling and whispering.

There was no wind when Randall emerged on the roof.  No wind, no stars, no moon—no light.  Randall held the candlestick in front of him and walked to the edge.  Now, now he could see Nanston.  And it was all burning.  Cinders drifted upward into the night from twenty, thirty fires.  More than that.  More fires than he could ever imagine.  And he had sat inside the council room and listened to the Tedescans murder his city, his people, he had kept quiet, he had hid.

A rumble like thunder growled from behind him, and Randall turned to see what he knew would be there.

It was one of the airships, but that was not what Randall saw.  A huge bloom of fire and smoke hung in the air where the dirigible should have been, moving toward him slowly.  Randall felt his breath catch in his chest.  Not just fire and smoke and thunder.  Something, some…beast moved within the flames.  Something winged, with a terrible, human face, and eyes that devoured the flames around it.  Randall watched as the airship moved toward him, as the thing that powered it strained against chains that bound it to the skeleton of metal and cloth and wood. 

“They’ve chained a seraph,” Randall said.  His eyes trembled as it drew closer.  The roar of the engines beat on him, made his skin ripple and shake.  Randall locked his knees and opened his arms to it, forced himself to bear the weight of the thing’s power.  He did not look away from it as it passed, but stared into the raging smoke and flame at the wings of the seraph.  And then its face.

It sees you.

The beast and the airship screamed at him, scoured him with their voices.  Randall felt flayed and burned and whipped—but when it passed him, he was still alive.  Kneeling now, knocked off his feet, entirely.  But he was alive.

And Nanston was lost.  The Tedescans were beyond them.