The creative process is among the most fascinating things in the world for me, and that’s the purpose of the gloss. Reveal the process. Not to expose problems and invite solutions. That’s an editor’s job. This book, no matter how many times I redraft it, no matter the suggestions I get from fellow writers, will remain unedited until a pro who’s worked in the genre agrees to take it on. Until then, the gloss is just to reveal the process. I hope you find mine as interesting as I find others!

I mention Elmore Leonard’s rules for writers later in the Gloss for Chapter Four, but it’s worth noting here that I violate one of them right up front, I use adjectives. I figure, if they’re good enough for Robert B. Parker and Terry Pratchett, they’re good enough for me. I went through a period where I tried to rip out all the adjectives, and indeed now reading the book I think I went a little too far in that direction. There’s such a thing as style and if you pull things back too far, you start to erode your own work. But I left some of them in!

I don’t believe this was the first chapter written for the book, but it was always intended to be the first chapter. By which I mean, I started with an outline and this was always the first chapter in the outline. Though I believe the first chapter with Gwiddon was the first actual writing done.

I do all the heavy lifting in the outline, that’s where I solve all the problems and when I run into a problem while writing, it’s back to the outline I go!

In this case, the only thing I knew was that Heden goes to the jail, and while there some cultists kill a man. The obvious point to be made is about how dangerous the job of being someone like Aragorn would really be. Show the unintended side effects of the hero’s job.

But really all I wanted to do was blow someone’s head up in the first chapter. Start with a bang. That’s it. Just grab the reader’s interest. The rest  that stuff is what the reader naturally takes away from it all, and I am happy they should do so, but it’s a side effect of the tone and subject matter. It’s not, in other words, the reason for the chapter.

This first chapter is doing a lot of work and I feel it suffers for it. A recent edit made it longer than it used to be and, at over 3,000 words, it’s one of the longest in the book. I also noticed, when I was recording the audio for it, that the section with Taegan fighting wasn’t as smooth as the other action sequences in the book. Which means it probably needs a redraft. Long chapters are often a sign that I’ve packed too much crap in. And it now seems somewhat antithetical to the idea of starting with a bang.

Also, while I believe in the idea of showing how Teagan is different from your typical guard by the way he uses his sword, I feel like there’s a more effortless way to go about it. Right now I think I spend too much language on description, interrupting the flow. That use of the long-sword is authentic, by the way. There’s a 17th century woodcut showing how people who fought with a long, or broad sword would basically treat it like a tool, rather than a weapon. Meaning, they had no real notion of “hold it by the handle, swing and stab,” but rather “use all the parts in any way necessary.”

There was originally a “flyover” setting things up more, but I quickly cut it. Readers sometimes say they don’t understand everything that’s happening, but I think that feeling is desirable. You know what you need to know.

Here’s that original intro, which is replaced by the first paragraph in the current draft.

—

It was cold, the light was thin, and Heden’s hard leather boots rang on the cobbled street as he approached the gaol. The dawn moon spun, thin and pale-red like a distant ghost in the blue pre-morning sky. Domnal worked the night watch which meant Heden could meet with him now at the end of his shift and avoid the press of bodies, the throng that surged through Selkirk starting in less than an hour. It meant convenience, but it came at the cost of a bright, glowing sun and blue sky. Heden was conscious of this.

The gaol was a large, single-story stone building which meant it was both important and old. The massive Cathedral of St. Llewellyn, by contrast, was merely important. The cathedral dominated the landscape like no other building including the castle. It was impossible to live in Selkirk and not be aware of it constantly.

It was half a mile from the Hammer & Tongs to the gaol, from the end of Mull street north, and then east on Whitten. Both were main thoroughfares and had wide, cobblestone roads. The cobbles hurt his feet. They hadn’t hurt his feet the five years he first lived here, but then three years in Capital and he became used to the flat Riojan sett. Maybe he was just old. Certainly he was old.

As he often did, he thought of all the other people who walked on the stones and how they must be thinking the same thing without complaint and then for the first time it occurred to him that his expensive boots, bought in Capital, might be the problem. Many Riojans preferred style over comfort. Maybe everyone else wasn’t as stoic as Heden, maybe they just had better boots. He vowed to make a point to invest in some new boots. It would give him something to do later in the day.

While it was bleak and felt empty in that time between dawn and sunrise the streets were not completely deserted. In a city of over 100,000 souls they never were. Empty like this the city seemed so huge, the two and three story homes and shops all seemed massive. During the day, streets crowded with people and carts and horses, the city seemed to shrink. Heden marveled at how wide the streets were when he saw them like this. It was only during this time that he noticed the little details. In his mind, all the wooden buildings were brown, some with new white trim. But now, taking the time to look, he saw that many of them were red or blue or green but so old and dirty that the colors were muted.

Reaching the stone gaol,

—

Of course, back then, the chapter was much shorter. Having this long intro was less of a problem then than it would be now, but unnecessary in both instances, I feel.

The “recent edit” I mentioned took the guard the Eseldics kill and made him a little more important. I wanted to begin the chapter with a confrontation. Whereas originally Heden meets Mathe, I added the character of Wil (who I named, on a whim, after Wil Wheaton, because I was reading his blog at the time, and that spelling of Will seemed appropriately archaic) and then set him against Heden.

We’re not supposed to think Wil is a bad person, only that he’s not used to having 30 cultists milling about and he’s nervous. His bad behavior is more a reaction to that. Once I had that set up, it struck me that Wil should be the guard the Eseldic’s kill. Before, he was a random guard named Bened. Conflating Bened and Wil was purely to avoid introducing too many characters. I didn’t want to manipulate the reader by introducing someone and then killing them off, and I hope to avoid that feeling of “Oh he did this on purpose to create a reaction” in the reader by making Wil unlikable.

But now I feel like the chapter is both too long, and not representative of the tone of the overall book. But that’s not a battle I’m going to fight right now, I’d rather wait and see what an editor thinks. The reason I posted the first seven chapters is because Chapter Seven is where many readers are “hooked.” You might see why.  But some readers aren’t hooked until later, it varies. Be nice to hook people in chapter one, but in my experience as a reader, that’s rare. It’s very rare that I know I’ll love a book based on the first few pages.

And that’s it! Gloss part one, done! Let’s hope it’s interesting to someone.

Chapter 1

Priest

Ratcatchers, Book 1

Heden made the trip while the Dawn Moon was still visible, marking that brief period between darkness and daylight in the early morning when the streets were mostly empty. He didn’t like crowds.

Out of habit he knocked his boots against the step leading up to the jail’s heavy oak, iron-reinforced door just in case he’d stepped in dung. Expecting a few guards on duty, and no one else, he grabbed the thick ring on the door and pulled it open.

From inside came spilling out a riot of noise and heat and the smells of sweat and blood and oil. There were maybe twenty or thirty men milling about being policed by a small handful of guards. It was hard to see, as their bodies blocked the candlelight inside. The nearest prisoners stopped their protest and turned to look at him and the open door.

The prisoners were all men of different ages and sizes, all wore dirty black robes, and each had a black eye patch over his left eye. Heden recognized the cult, though not these cultists.

It took him a moment to process the scene in front of him. A thin, pale young man, his hands tied in front of him, saw Heden’s confusion and tried to make a break for it. Tried to run through the door and past Heden.

Heden’s instincts took over. The door was heavy and Heden was neither tall nor particularly big. But his compact body was almost all muscle and so he was able, without thinking about it, to yank the door back, slamming it into the boy who ran into it at speed.

There was a loud grunt and a thud as the failed escapee hit the floor inside the jail.

Heden opened the door again and looked at the young man. His nose and mouth bleeding. Heden stepped into the jail, the other cultists moved away from him, and he reached down and pulled the prone figure up.

“It’s alright,” Heden said, not without sympathy. “I don’t blame you.” The cultist wasn’t listening; he was crying and holding his bloody face in his bound hands. “It was worth a try.”

“Hey!” a voice called out. It came from a guard Heden did not know. He was tall and well-built with short blonde hair and a small piggish nose. He seemed to take pride in the way he looked. How fit he was, how clean his outfit. He stood only a few yards from Heden but the prisoners were packed in so tight that the guard had to fight to move. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” He pointed to Heden.

Heden made a show of looking around and then turned to the bleeding prisoner and said, “I think he’s talking to you.”

“No, not him you dog-faced…hey!” The guard was pressing his way through the prisoners toward Heden when one of the cultists tried to grab the guard’s key ring. “You keep the fuck away from me!” the guard shouted, shoving the cultist back into the pack. The little man retreated, frightened, and the guard, seeing his fear, followed up by bashing the man across the face with the back of his gloved hand. The cultist tried to cover up. “Don’t you fucking touch me again you slimy piece of piss!” The guard hit the prisoner again, hard in the gut and the man doubled over.

The guard pulled back to punch the man again, and found his arm restrained by Heden.

“Come on,” Heden said, grabbing the watchman’s raised arm at the elbow. “He’s not going to put up a fight.”

The guard, fully a head taller than Heden, wasn’t listening. He was looking down, wide-eyed at the smaller man who dared restrain him. He snarled and swung at Heden with his free hand.

Heden ducked out of the way and let go of the guard’s other arm. He backed away and put up his hands.

“I’m not your problem,” Heden said, trying to be pleasant. He didn’t want to hurt the guard. Dom would be mad at him. “You should be watching these folks,” he nodded at the cultists. “Some of them are dangerous.”

“Don’t tell me my job you little pigfucker!” the guard said, advancing on Heden.

“Wil!” This was a voice Heden recognized. He and the guard Wil both turned and looked at the big man looming toward them.

Sergeant Mathe was of the generation between Heden and the young guard, Wil. Heden knew Mathe from his first week on the job ten years ago and even then he was hugely fat. With enough muscle and experience to hold his own in a street fight. He had a mop of red hair and the boyish face some fat men kept through their lives.

As he moved toward them, the cultists got out of the way.

“Wil, don’t be messing around with him,” Mathe said frowning and shooing Wil away from Heden with his fat hand. “He’s a priest for fuck’s sake. You’ll bring bad luck and we need all the help we can get.”

Wil straightened and looked at Heden anew. Some people saw it right off, others thought Heden was a soldier with his old breastplate over a chain shirt, a heavy cloak on his back. Wil looked at the scabbard at Heden’s side.

“Didn’t know he was no priest, Sarge,” Wil said, his face screwed up. “He should’ve said something, coming in here like that with a sword and all and roughing up the prisoners. He should’ve said something!”

“Well all I saw was him stopping you from doing the roughing up, when you should know better.” Mathe stood between the two men. The guards were all taller than their prisoners, Heden noticed. He didn’t know why. Most of the cultists were his size. Whereas before they seemed furtive and eager to act, now they were careful to ignore the three men standing together.

“Wil this is Heden,” Mathe said. “He’s a friend. He works for the church.” They all knew which church he meant. “Hey!” Mathe said, remembering something. He slapped Wil on the shoulder. “You remember the Hammer and Tongs?” Wil gave no indication that he did or he didn’t. He seemed interested in getting away before Mathe yelled at him again. “That’s Heden’s. He bought it. He owns it.”

Wil didn’t seem to know how to react to that and so touched his forefinger and thumb to where his forelock would be, if his hair wasn’t so short, and bowed, making only fleeting eye contact with Heden. “I’ll go help Teagan, will I?” he said to Mathe.

Mathe turned Wil around and pushed him through the prisoners. “He don’t need no help as you well know. Now go and see these little fuckers aren’t getting each other out of their bindings.”

Wil headed off into the crowd, careful not to manhandle any of the cultists in sight of the Sergeant. Mathe observed him as he went.

“Ahh, he’s young,” Mathe said, waving him away. “He don’t remember the Hammer, you keep the place all locked up.” Mathe turned and looked at Heden watching Wil being a petty tyrant once Mathe wasn’t looking.

“Wil’s a good man,” Mathe assured him. “Works double shifts. Got a young boy and another on the way.” Heden knew that Mathe would call every guard in the jail a good man, even if the guard in question were an evil-minded thug, as some of them were. But Heden saw no point in pressing the issue. He knew Mathe followed Adun. In Adun’s eyes, hard work was the greatest virtue.

Mathe looked around at the scene before them. “The boys all get nervous with these evil chanting buggers around. Nice to have a priest here for a change,” he said smiling.

“He called me ‘dog-faced,’” Heden said running his hand over his cheek and jaw. “I’m not dog-faced, am I Mathe?”

Mathe smiled and looked down at Heden and shook his head. “We’re none of us the men we once were.”

“Mmm,” Heden said. “I’m here for your boss.” He looked around the room. He didn’t see Domnal, but he noticed most of the cultists hands were tied with rope. Some were in manacles. None were gagged. “I thought the place would be empty.”

“Heh, yeah,” Mathe said. “A bunch of ratcatchers brought this lot in about a turn ago.”

“There was a bounty?” Heden asked. He knew the answer.

“Yeah, the Castellan put a price on their head back in Bleaker. We all forgot about it.”

“They dropped off thirty cultists, went off to the Castellan to collect the bounty, and left you to clean it up?” Heden asked. To his eye, the prisoners arrayed before him were thin, pale shadows of the kinds of zealots he used to deal with.  He wanted to believe things were easier for the younger generation, but treacherously suspected he was just getting old.

“Yeah. It’s shit, but it was a slow night anyway.” Mathe smiled as he manhandled a cultist.

“It is shit. Those ratcatchers are shit, and you should get half that bounty,” Heden said.

“That’s funny coming from you,” Mathe said with a wide grin as he kicked the legs out from under a fanatic who looked to be Heden’s age, forcing the man onto a bench. “Sit down, you streak of shit!” Mathe hollered, and more than one cultist involuntarily sat on whatever was nearby.

“Yeah,” Heden said. “Where’s Domnal?”

“He’s downstairs with Alaric, getting all the manacles he can find. Said we couldn’t leave this lot tied up with rope.”

Heden raised his eyebrows, impressed. Good man Domnal, he thought.

As Mathe and the other guards forced more prisoners onto benches, Heden noticed one guard on the other side of the room. He was tall and lean and seemed disinterested in everything happening around him. He leaned against one of the big wooden pillars holding up the stone ceiling. To Heden’s practiced eye, this guard seemed to take everything in, missing nothing. He wasn’t shouting at the cultists like the other guards. He had a handsome face, and short curly brown hair. He wore a slight smile, like he was observing a secret joke. There was an attitude Heden recognized.

“Who’s the new guy?” Heden asked.

Mathe looked around and realized who he meant. “Teagan!” Mathe shouted the name over the chanting and raving. The man heard his name and looked over. Mathe pointed to Heden and gave the thumb pointing upward gesture. He’s one of us, Mathe was saying. Teagan looked at Heden and nodded once, the slight smile not leaving his face. Heden nodded back.

“He ain’t new, been here a year,” Mathe said. As far as Heden was concerned, that was new. “He’s good. Keeps to himself. Seems happy to have a job. Good man in a fight,” Mathe said with obvious respect. “You’d know him if you ever came out of that hole you got yourself locked up in all year ‘round,” he said reproachfully to Heden.

“Yeah,” Heden said without inflection, “Listen, Mathe,” he said, “you need to gag these people.”

“We what?” Mathe said, turning his big round face to look down at Heden. “Gag them?”

“These men are Eseldics,” Heden said. “They serve Saint Eseld of the Eye.” Heden reached out to the cultist Mathe had just pushed down and deftly tore his eye patch off.

The unshaven, undernourished man’s good right eye began to search around wildly, not seeing. He was in an apoplectic ecstasy and no danger to anyone. His left eye, the one the eye patch covered, was missing its upper and lower eyelids. They’d been carved off and the eye underneath had grown putrid and decayed. There was a smell. It was terrible to look at, the flesh around it wincing and writhing with no lid to blink. This is what those who worshiped She of the Maddening Eye, the Eye of Hate did to themselves. They thought it gave them power. They were right.

Mathe gasped Saint Llewellyn’s name and warded himself by making his right hand into a fist and then covering it, grasping it with his left hand.

“These men are dangerous,” Heden said. He looked down at the acolyte whose patch he’d torn off. “Well, not this one. He’s an idiot. But the ones who haven’t lost their minds will know some potent….”

One of the Eseldics, and Heden now knew this man was no acolyte, brought his hands around from behind his back where they’d been tied. Somehow he’d untied them, or cut the ropes, or someone else had cut them for him.

Heden wasn’t ready. He realized that it was his arrival, Mathe being distracted and talking to him, that gave the enemy priest the opportunity. Mathe had no idea what an Eseldic was, or that some of them could be truly dangerous. Heden should have seen that. Should have seen that since Domnal was elsewhere, he had to take responsibility. He’d regret not doing so for a week afterwards.

Before Heden could blind him or suck the air from his lungs so that he could not speak, the priest of St. Eseld chanted a quick but potent prayer to his witch-saint, pointing at the nearest guard. Wil. In slow motion, Heden watched the scene play out. He knew Wil was just unlucky. The priest had picked the closest watchman to cause confusion and tip the whole jail over into disarray.

His single eye wide with zeal, head thrown back in a twisted form of ecstasy, mouth chanting words no one but Heden could understand, the priest stabbed a finger at Wil and Heden watched the young guard’s head explode in a burst of pink. Bone, hair and brain showered in every direction as a headless body slumped lifeless to the ground. All of the guards froze in shock, looking down at the blood and human remains covering their clothes and faces. All but one.

Teagan stepped smartly into view, grabbed the cross-guard of his sword with his left hand and his scabbard with his right. Heden recognized the non-standard draw and knew his instincts were right. He was in the presence of a professional.

As the priest turned to Mathe to attempt his lethal prayer again, Teagan yanked the sword halfway from its scabbard, turning the pommel into a projectile, driving it up into the priest’s chin. There was a loud crack. The priest was unconscious, possibly dead, and Teagan hadn’t even drawn his sword yet.

The priest’s body slumped to the ground while other acolytes began fighting the guards, some of them chanting minor prayers. Heden grabbed the amulet of St. Lynwen under his shirt out of habit, and began a prayer of his own. He knew the battle would be over in a moment, was already over from his point of view, and he thought it best if everyone just calmed down.

Teagan yanked his sword the rest of the way out of his scabbard, gripping the blade with both of his leather-gloved hands and used the natural angle and momentum of a sword pulled up and out of its sheath to bash the nearest acolyte over the head as though the sword was a mace, knocking the acolyte out. This was a man used to fighting with metal gauntlets. That kind of thing will ruin even the best leather if the sword is worth a damn, Heden thought. Another acolyte hit the ground.

He allowed the sword to continue its swing down, using its own momentum to flip it, catch the pommel, and leveled it at the neck of the nearest conscious acolyte.

“Halt,” he announced. The acolyte stopped chanting and stared down in terror at the blade at his throat.

Teagan had taken two men down and had another held at sword-point in the time it would have taken even an experienced guard or soldier to draw his blade and swing once. Heden was impressed.

Meanwhile, Mathe had made his way to the dead priest who’d killed Wil. Heden was almost done with his prayer.

“You bastard,” Mathe gasped as he stood over the dead priest. “That was Wil, you fucking bastard!” Mathe kicked the dead priest’s head, causing blood and teeth to fly out. “He was my fucking friend you piece of shit!” Mathe was shouting and crying and about to take his rage out on a living captive.

Heden finished his prayer and, taking a deep breath, watched a calmness wash outward from him like the wave from a stone dropped in a pond. Everyone calmed down. Only Teagan seemed unaffected, but he hadn’t even broken a sweat or been out of breath. He was calm as a rock.

Mathe seemed to collapse a little. His rage stopped, his tears stopped, and he turned away from the dead priest. He looked lost. A face Heden had seen before on men after a battle.

The acolytes had stopped chanting, stopped struggling. They weren’t compelled into silence or submission, Heden had just returned them to normal. Many of them had been worked into a fanatical ecstasy for hours and would now be wondering why they were in a jail.

Teagan pulled his sword away from the acolyte’s throat and sheathed it, guiding the point into the scabbard without looking. I could never manage that, Heden thought. I always had to look down and watch what I was doing when I sheathed a sword.

One of the guards asked Mathe what he should do, and Heden watched Mathe pull himself together. These men would be home much later than normal. The Vine would have to open early for 5 watchmen coming off shift who’d desperately need to drink their memories away. Wives and families would be worried and when husbands returned home, they’d get no explanation. And more than one man would take his anger and confusion out on his family. Heden’s prayer would help with that, but it would be hours later and there was only so much Heden could do without taking the men’s will away from them. Which he was loathe to do in any circumstance.

A stomping was heard and the door to the dungeon below opened. Domnal emerged, his shoulders laden with two dozen heavy manacles. Domnal was a big man, fat but strong. He stood looking at the scene before him, at the acolytes all staring silently at the floor. At the explosion of red on the wall and the headless body of Wil on the floor, next to the beaten corpse of the priest of St. Eseld.

He let the manacles slide off his shoulders and in wide-eyed anger said;

“What the fuck happened here?!”

On to Chapter Two!

Read the Gloss for Chapter One

Chapter 1