The City of Silk and Steel by Mike Carey & Linda Carey & Louise Carey

Author:Mike Carey & Linda Carey & Louise Carey [Carey, Mike & Carey, Linda & Carey, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Fantasy, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780575132696
Google: 8Cgy6PMacfQC
Amazon: B00B1TJE9W
Publisher: Gollancz
Published: 2013-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

Reading Lessons, Part the Second

Let’s back up a little.

After I spoke those words, ‘We take back Bessa,’ everything started moving in double time. The council of war, the visit to the djinni: the flood of revolution engulfed us with such astonishing speed that most of us never paused to consider the precise nature of the current that swept us along. But it is part of my gift, and my burden, always to consider the current, and I would neglect the responsibilities of both if I avoided it now.

When I spoke to the women of the seraglio about retaking the city, I planted an idea in their minds. It was an idea of freedom and beauty and power, of women leaving the bedchamber and entering the throne room. It was the embryo of a political ideology at least six centuries before its time, but that does not even begin to explain its potency. It was not the newness of the concept but its familiarity which moved them. They had all seen the rights to their own flesh passed from one man’s hand to another, and all had felt keenly their own powerlessness in those exchanges. In such situations, a version of the same concept has formed many times in many people’s thoughts, and most of the time fear, or reason, or a sense of overwhelming odds, has stifled it before it can be uttered. A thousand stillborn revolutions are buried a thousand times over for every day that the world has endured. It is very seldom indeed that one is delivered alive.

For an idea of the general effect my words produced, imagine a bomb going off in four hundred minds at once. And if the story I am about to tell now seems as strange and unbelievable to you as it does to me, then I can only say that the fallout from such arcane explosions is never the same twice, and most likely is beyond the power of human minds to anticipate.

At first the party who had visited the djinni spoke little on the return journey. Their memories, not only of the djinni’s words, but of their own and each other’s speech and actions, differed in such fundamental respects that for the first two days after their departure all their conversations foundered into uneasy silence. More than this, for many leagues each one of them was haunted by the sneaking conviction that the djinni watched them still, and though none dared voice the suspicion, all could feel that tightening sensation at the base of the skull which suggests the gaze of unseen eyes. It was not until a little before noon on the third day, when they reached the flat rock which lay a half-day’s journey from the bandits’ cave, that they began tentatively to discuss the djinni’s mysterious instructions, and the gifts they had been asked to exchange.

‘Well, that was a waste of six days,’ Imtisar proclaimed. The others shushed her hurriedly, even Jamal looking alarmed at this blatant disrespect.

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