lagilman | Your First Sip...

Two months until Flesh & Fire: Book 1 of the Vineart War hits the stores, so I figure it's time to let y'all have a wee taste of what's to come...

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“Serpents.”

The Cooper didn’t bother to nod, looking over Malech’s shoulder at something fascinating on the wall behind him. “Sea serpents, yes. Witnessed and documented. Three ships lost this past season alone.”

Three ships was a considerable blow. But that wasn’t what had brought the Cooperage to the House of Malech.

“There hasn’t been a serpent sighting in seven generations, since the Spellstorm of Bradhai.”

“Yes. We know.”

Malech hated Coopers. They meddled in politics as well as craft, arrogant beyond the princelings of old, and claimed a price each year that bordered on criminal, protecting their craft with such violence no man dared break with them. If there were a way to bypass them, he and every Vineart would take it . . . but there was none. Clay and stone, glass and hammered metal had all been tried, but while casks of such material might make a drinkable vin ordinaire, you could not craft a spellwine thus.

There were other places a captain might go to commission a ship, and for better terms—but none were so seaworthy as a Cooperage ship. For them to admit to losing three in such a short period of time . . . he might have suspected the Cooper of creating a story of sea serpents to cover their failure, save that they had no need to tell him. Save that he had begun nosing about for things of just such an odd or unnatural nature, and a sea serpent, hundreds of years after the last one had allegedly died by the hand of Master Vineart Bradhai, was certainly that.

“A serpent,” he said again.

“A great gray beast, rising from the deepest waters between Jhain and Atakus, crushing the masts in its maw and slamming the body of the ship to splinters with an unending length of gray-scaled tail. Yes. A serpent.”

It could have been a giant craw, or even a pack of great sharks driven into a frenzy. Time at sea made even the most stable of men chancy, and sailors were odd sorts to start. “And your clients? They have responded to this news . . . how?”

The Cooper deigned to look at Malech then. “The Jhain-hai has ordered all of his ships to patrol his shores, looking for the beast, with orders to kill it. They trust in spears, not spells, and will die as their ship-brothers did. We do not intend to be so foolish.”

“And you bring this news to me. You think that I can craft a spell to kill a serpent?” Malech didn’t laugh, although he found the idea bitterly humorous. Bradhai had been a master of his generation, and it had taken his masterwork—and a fleet of ships—to kill that pack of serpents. Most had died in that final storm, including Bradhai.

“No.”

Malech wasn’t sure if he was relieved by that simple response, or insulted.

“If this is a serpent—and like you, we have our doubts, Lord Malech—if something has brought the serpents back from destruction, it is nothing for one man, however great a Vineart he may be, to undo. That would require a mage, and we have none in this world any longer.”

Malech made a quick heart-pour gesture of thanks, and noted that the Cooper did not follow suit. Interesting. The Cooper might simply not have been a pious man. Or he might wish for a mage to reemerge just as the serpents had. If so, he was more a fool than Malech thought: serpents, unlike mages, could be avoided or placated. Serpents could be taken out by spells. It had required a god to rid the world of mages.

from FLESH AND FIRE, © Laura Anne Gilman, 2009

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