WIP Wednesday

Very sleepy. Almost forgot WIP Wednesday (bad blogger!).

This Wednesday's WIP is The Blade That Whispers Hate. It is, as I've mentioned in other places, a prequel of sorts to Thagoth. Prequel in that it happens before the events of the other book, but not prequel in that the only connection the two books have are the two main characters and a bit of setting. The plots are not really connected. Does that make sense or is what I'm saying painfully obvious? Man, I need sleep.

Ok, it's like this: If you've read John D. McDonald's Travis McGee series you'll see the DNA for my Amra and Holgren tales. Different genre, setting, everything, but without Travis McGee, there would be no Amra Thetys. The closest you come in fantasy to what I'm doing with these characters is Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series.

So here's (another) excerpt from BWH, featuring Amra's insouciance:

***

I came in the back way, through the service entrance. Bollund, Locquewood’s muscle, sat whittling in the back room among packing crates and scattered straw. He glanced up when I came in, then fixed his attention back on his carving. I think it was supposed to be a pheckla, but mostly it looked like a turd.

“Bollund! Still twice the woman I am, I see. I need to talk to your boss.”

Bollund glanced up at me, fingered the smashed gristle of what presumably had once been his nose. He’d been a bare-knuckle fighter before becoming ensconced in Locquewood’s back room.

“You don’t see ‘im. ‘E sees you.”

“Well he needs to see me. Now.”

Bollund smirked. He was two heads taller and his bulk could make three of me. He wasn’t impressed and he wasn’t intimidated.

I pulled out the toad from my leather satchel, unwrapped its silk covering. The buttery glow of the gold drew his beady eye.

“He’s got five minutes, then I’m taking this to Daruvner.”

Bollund’s jaw clenched. He shifted his bulk up from the slat-back chair that somehow supported him. 

Locquewood was a fixer, not a fence, but Bollund knew enough not to make decisions for his employer where money was involved. The toad would fit in tolerably with the kinds of things Locquewood stocked his shop with. A little older, a little uglier, a little less precious, by appearances.

“Stay ‘ere. Don’t touch nothing.”

“Yes ma’am.”

He glared at me, then disappeared though an inner doorway.

***

So, um, yeah. Going to bed now.