The Steel Seraglio 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, pdf
Tags: Fantasy, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781926851532
Publisher: ChiZine
Published: 2012-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Reading Lessons, Part the Second

Let’s back up a little.

After I spoke those words, “We take back Bessa,” everything began to move 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.

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