Most eyes in the citadel were pointed out toward An-Zabat, watching for retaliation. Those that were not had their own tasks and worries to concern them. We were only four servants and a guard among many scurrying about the garden. In the torch-lit dark no one would see that the servants were An-Zabati porters.
A lone guard approached as we neared the armory.
“More grenades are needed at the front,” I said before he could speak.
The guard stared at me in shocked confusion.
“Lieutenant Jasper?” he said, horrified. “We carried you back on a stretcher—”
Fluid as the wind, Shazir stepped around me, shifted his crate to one hand, and threw a punch. Power burst from his fist, and behind it, a cylinder of air. The guard’s helmet cracked. Blood sprayed from the ruin of his face.
Shazir thrust the crate into my hands and caught the falling guard.
“I will hide him,” Shazir said. “Go!”
“Voice Rill could have seen that from the other side of the city!” I snarled. “There is no point in hiding the body. We are likely dead because of you.”
He dropped the corpse and glared at me.
“We are here because of you, Firecaller.”
“Shazir, we have to hurry.” Atar pulled us apart, then frowned at me. “You have the keys.”
While the others rushed through the door, I looked toward the Gazing Upon Lilies pavilion. Voice Rill surely monitored the battle, attending to every ripple of magic in the city, making continual reports to the Emperor. At any moment he could appear on the hilltop, raise a finger, and strike me down with brilliant rays of power. Without the tetragram on my palm I had only fire and shape-changing. Poor weapons against the vast, nation-toppling Canon.
I returned to my natural form. No sense leaving a beacon burning for Rill to see.
“Firecaller, where are the grenades?” Atar hissed at me.
“This way.” I led them to a door marked with the Sienese logograms for dangerous and flammable. Within was a small, windowless chamber that smelled of sulfur and stale air. Crates of grenades packed in straw stood in careful stacks. Along one wall hung six bandoleers already strung with grenades.
“Take these.” I handed two bandoleers to each of Katiz’s runners. They nervously strapped them on. This done, they pressed hands with Atar and Shazir and sprinted across the garden to the servants’ gate and out toward the minarets they were tasked to destroy.
I held out the remaining bandoleers for Atar.
Her hand lingered as she reached for them.
“Find me,” she said at last. “When it is over, come to the dunes above the Valley of Rulers. Katiz and I will be there.”
My heart hammered. A thread of life burned in my blood. I wanted to lean over the bandoleer between us and kiss her. But I knew, no matter what either of us wanted, that our paths had never truly converged.
I was not Sienese, but neither was I An-Zabati.
“I will find you,” I said.
She smiled, took the bandoleers, and ran, fleet as the forest deer of Nayen.
The crates proved too heavy. I would never be able to run while carrying one. Shazir struggled just as much as I did, I noted with petty satisfaction.
“We need more bandoleers,” I said.
While I searched for them he began unloading one of the crates. I winced at the quiet clink as he set each grenade on the stone floor. He hefted the crate and tilted it from side to side to make sure that the remaining grenades would not shift and explode while he ran.
“Hurry, Firecaller,” he said from the doorway. “We have little time.”
He left me there, but survived only three steps into the main room of the armory.
Power rippled. Sorcery hissed and cracked. Thunder pounded my ears, rattled my ribs, shook the world around me. My nose filled with smoke and plaster dust. My ears rang and my limbs shook. I lay sprawled amid grenades. They clinked together as they rolled across the floor.
My heart stuttered in my chest. My lungs burned. I stifled a gasp, not daring to move. Crates had cracked, but not toppled. Dust poured from my clothes as I carefully stood and fought the urge to call out for Shazir.
Acrid smoke rolled along the ceiling and filled my throat at every breath. I covered my mouth and nose with my sleeve. In the dark I felt my way along the wall and into the main room of the armory, where Hand Cinder waited.
“I should not be surprised,” he said, and stepped toward me through the smoke. A hissing whip of sorcery trailed from his hand. “Foolishness is a common trait of the Easterlings. I cannot tell you how many times one of your countrymen could have escaped me, but turned to fight out of some delusional sense of honor instead.”
I recovered from the shock of seeing him and groped for a weapon. Swords hung on a rack beside me. I got hold of one and yanked it from its sheath. Cinder’s whip lashed out and tore the rack apart. Swords clattered to the ground.
“Ah yes, a sword,” Cinder taunted. “You Easterlings are so fond of swords. More honorable than an arrow or a crossbow bolt. Ironic, isn’t it, that your sorcery does little more than hide your faces?”
He flourished his whip. It coiled and hissed, a serpent of blazing light. I circled, stepping carefully around the fallen swords. One of the walls had been badly damaged by the blast that killed Shazir. Stars and the orange light of the burning city showed through a jagged gap. It was too small for a man to fit through. Not for a bird.
Cinder’s whip cracked in the air between me and the broken wall.
“Shouldn’t you be out in the city?” I asked. “Haven’t you wanted this battle for years?”
“I’ve fought enough battles. Alabaster needed this one. That boy is soft. Intelligent and articulate, but soft. Without at least one victory, he will never be taken seriously in the capital.”
“You two never seemed like friends.”
I took a step toward him. He smiled.
“A charade, as it all was,” he said. “You are not the only man capable of deceit.”
He riffled his whip along the ground toward my advancing feet. Distance was everything. My sword could still cut him. His whip had more reach, but could not strike instantly.
If he had wanted to, he could have sent a lance of sorcery through my chest from where he stood.
That day I came upon him at the archery range he had been practicing only the whip.
He hated me, and would relish the taunts and the feints and my pitiful attempts to fight back. Our battle was a game. One I could not hope to win.
“Did you know that all the while you thought you served as Minister of Trade, Alabaster did the bulk of the work? He monitored your every decision, and kept most matters of real import away from your desk.” Cinder smiled, catlike on the balls of his feet. “None of your accomplishments as Hand of the Emperor were your own. You have only ever been our puppet, Easterling.”
I saw flames behind him. A breeze tickled my forearm. I waited until he cracked the whip again—there!—and retreated backward and to the right, toward the broken wall.
“I may have been your puppet,” I said. “But there are still secrets you do not know.”
“Oh?” Cinder chuckled, raised the whip, prepared to strike. “Many Easterlings have betrayed their secrets to me. Most screamed and begged for death as their flesh peeled away. Let us see how long you last.”
His sorcery flashed, hissed, cracked the air. I dropped my sword. Ripples of power brought fire to my hand. I threw it along the ground, toward the open doorway marked dangerous and flammable.
I jumped, gathered power, and on falcon’s wings rode the blast wave through the broken wall, up and out of the armory and into the smoke-filled skies of An-Zabat.
The armory burst into fire and dust, strips of burning wood and broken weapons. Shouts of alarm rose from the garden as s
ervants and soldiers raced to the scene. In a backward glance I saw no sign of Cinder, alive or dead. He was likely no more than mist and ash.
Power rippled out, a tidal bore surging toward me. A blade of light burned from the wreckage and cut the sky, so bright it dimmed the moon and stars. I dove beneath Cinder’s attack. It was poorly aimed. He could not see me, but only lashed out at the wake of power I trailed. He stood in the light of his sorcery. One arm hung limp and charred. His jaw was broken, his face blackened. He was furious.
A flash of light burst from the base of a nearby minaret. Atar, or one of Katiz’s runners, had turned the grenades of the Empire against the symbol of their home. A crack like distant thunder sounded. There was the grinding sound of stone separating from stone, the shriek of metal tearing. The minaret began to list to one side, shedding broken pieces that shattered where they fell.
Another burst of light, crack of thunder, cacophony of falling stone and silver.
The ancient power rippling beneath An-Zabat began to fade.
I left the city behind and rode thermals toward the Valley of Rulers. A third minaret fell, and Cinder poured blind rage into the roiling sky.
I never learned how the fighting ended. I know only that, as I stood on the prow of Katiz’s Windship, no minarets stood silhouetted by the fires that raged through An-Zabat.
“They will wonder why we destroyed the minarets before we fled,” Atar said. She stood beside me. I smelled her sweat, the lavender scent beneath the dust and char that clung to her.
She sidled close and took my hand.
Plumes of sand rose behind the other Windships as they scattered to the four corners of the waste. Katiz drove us east, as I had asked him to.
“When the dust settles in a few days, they will see that Naphena’s urn no longer flows. Perhaps the Voice or his Hands will feel the emptiness beneath them, the void where old power once flowed. In six months, perhaps a year, the oasis will be dry. If they have not abandoned the city by then, they will die.”
“Not only the Sienese.” I turned toward her. “Your people will have to flee as well.”
She met my eyes. My heart leaped, then broke for the third time that day. Her smile was sad, but proud.
“We were nomads, once,” she said. “There are old men who still know how to bring water from the waste. Old women who still polish the cistern-bowls passed down by their mothers and their grandmothers. They will survive. An-Zabat was only ever a place of rest. A temporary home. Now we will return to our wandering.”
She paused. The wind tossed her hair around her face. It streamed out toward the orange glow that hung over her city.
“You destroyed An-Zabat,” she said, “but you helped to free its people. There is a place for you among us, if you want it, Firecaller.”
I did. My heart ached. My body wanted to gather her to me. To kiss her. To carry her to the cabin. To be An-Zabati.
But I had never been An-Zabati, as I was never truly Sienese, and at the edge of the waste I called a high, easterly wind to carry me on falcon’s wings across Sien and the sea.
My grandmother would be waiting, somewhere in the mountains of Nayen.
Suspense
by L. Ron Hubbard
* * *
L. Ron Hubbard lived a remarkably adventurous and productive life. His versatility and rich, imaginative scope both spanned and ranged far beyond his extensive literary achievements and creative influence. A writer’s writer of enormous talent and energy, the breadth and diversity of his writing ultimately embraced more than 560 works and over 63 million words of fiction and nonfiction over his fifty-six-year writing career.
Early into Ron’s writing career, when he had already established a commanding reputation in many of the genres of popular fiction, he was repeatedly asked to share the secrets of his success with the readers of writers’ magazines. He was glad to do so; there is quite a file of his essays published in those days.
Here, from the June 1937 issue of Author and Journalist—one of the most prominent writers’ magazines of the time—is one of those pieces.
The question he poses in the article goes to the heart of the creative process: What rivets a reader to the page, “tensely wondering which of two or three momentous things is going to happen first”? The answer L. Ron Hubbard provides, by insightful analysis and example, is both witty and compelling.
We use it, along with a number of other essays by Ron, in the annual Writers of the Future workshop. Participants often remark on how relevant it is despite the passage of time. Why shouldn’t it be? Fashions in storytelling change, but story remains the same. Here, then, is L. Ron Hubbard’s “Suspense,” one of the key building blocks to writing a really good story.
Suspense
Next to checks, the most intangible thing in this business of writing is that quantity “Suspense.”
It is quite as elusive as editorial praise, as hard to corner and recognize as a contract writer.
But without any fear of being contradicted, I can state that suspense, or rather, the lack of it, is probably responsible for more rejects than telling an editor he is wrong.
You grab the morning mail, find a long brown envelope. You read a slip which curtly says, “Lacks suspense.”
Your wife starts cooking beans, you start swearing at the most enigmatic, unexplanatory, hopeless phrase in all that legion of reject phrases.
If the editor had said, “I don’t think your hero had a tough enough time killing Joe Blinker,” you could promptly sit down and kill Joe Blinker in a most thorough manner.
But when the editor brands and damns you with that first cousin to infinity, “Suspense,” you just sit and swear.
Often the editor, in a hurry and beleaguered by stacks of manuscripts higher than the Empire State, has to tell you something to explain why he doesn’t like your wares. So he fastens upon the action, perhaps. You can tell him (and won’t, if you’re smart) that your action is already so fast that you had to grease your typewriter roller to keep the rubber from getting hot.
Maybe he says your plot isn’t any good, but you know doggone well that it is a good plot and has been a good plot for two thousand years.
Maybe, when he gives you those comments, he is, as I say, in a hurry. The editor may hate to tell you you lack suspense because it is something like B.O.—your best friends won’t tell you.
But the point is that, whether he says that your Mary Jones reminds him of The Perils of Pauline, or that your climax is flat, there’s a chance that he means suspense.
Those who have been at this business until their fingernails are worn to stumps are very often overconfident of their technique. I get that way every now and then, until something hauls me back on my haunches and shows me up. You just forget that technique is not a habit, but a constant set of rules to be frequently refreshed in your mind. And so, in the scurry of getting a manuscript in the mail, it is not unusual to overlook some trifling factor which will mean the difference between sale and rejection.
This suspense business is something hard to remember. You know your plot (or should, anyway) before you write it. You forget that the reader doesn’t. Out of habit, you think plot is enough to carry you through. Sometimes it won’t. You have to fall back on none-too-subtle mechanics.
Take this, for example:
He slid down between the rocks toward the creek, carrying the canteens clumsily under his arm, silently cursing his sling. A shadow loomed over him.
“Franzawi!” screamed the Arab sentinel.
There we have a standard situation. In the Atlas. The hero has to get to water or his wounded legionnaires will die of thirst. But, obviously, it is very, very flat except for the slight element of surprising the reader.
Surprise doesn’t amount to much. That snap-ending tendency doesn’t belong in the center of the story. Your reader knew there were Arabs ab
out. He knew the hero was going into danger. But that isn’t enough. Not half.
Legionnaire Smith squirmed down between the rocks clutching the canteens, his eyes fixed upon the bright silver spot which was the water hole below. A shadow loomed across the trail before him. Hastily he slipped backward into cover.
An Arab sentinel was standing on the edge of the trail, leaning on his long gun. The man’s brown eyes were turned upward, watching a point higher on the cliff, expecting to see some sign of the besieged legionnaires.
Smith started back again, moving as silently as he could, trying to keep the canteens from banging. His sling-supported arm was weak. The canteens were slipping.
He could see the sights on the Arab’s rifle and knew they would be lined on him the instant he made a sound.
The silver spot in the ravine was beckoning. He could not return with empty canteens. Maybe the sentinel would not see him if he slipped silently around the other side of this boulder.
He tried it. The man remained staring wolfishly up at the pillbox fort.
Maybe it was possible after all. That bright spot of silver was so near, so maddening to swollen tongues.…
Smith’s hand came down on a sharp stone. He lifted it with a jerk.
A canteen rattled to the trail.
For seconds nothing stirred or breathed in this scorching world of sun and stone.
Then the sentry moved, stepped a pace up the path, eyes searching the shadows, gnarled hands tight on the rifle stock.
Smith moved closer to the boulder, trying to get out of sight, trying to lure the sentry toward him so that he could be silently killed.
The canteen sparkled in the light.
A resounding shout rocked the blistered hills.
“Franzawi!” cried the sentinel.
The surprise in the first that a sentinel would be there and that Smith was discovered perhaps made the reader blink.