Sample Chapter: Winter Song – Day 4

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Angry Robot (www.angryrobotbooks.com) has offered up 5 daily sample chapters from Winter Song, by Colin Harvey!

Three
Loki

The world through your eyes is full of pain and wonder, made even stranger by the whirlwind of voices shrieking for your attention:
“The Mizar Quartet are Sol-type hydrogen-fusing dwarf stars–”
“Isheimuri lingua confirmed as mix of Standard and Icelandic–”
Some voices verge on making sense, but most babble gibberish. Each is accompanied by a dizzying sense of vertigo, and little shocks deep inside your body. Occasionally you smell burning. Sometimes you taste colours, can hear, flickering jeering shadows.
“Absolute magnitude uses the same convention as visual–”
You are dimly aware that the nanophytes within you that keep your muscle tone even as you waste away are locked in a desperate fight against the cannibal predations of the remaining lifegel in a near sub-atomic battle of the idiots. Either through accident or a design flaw, the inhibitors appear to have failed, and if left to themselves will eat you alive.
“The Long Night was the longest conflict since the Hundred Years War–”
A strangely familiar voice cries out, “I won’t lie down and die!”
“The Isheimur populace is likely to suffer genetic drift and disease–”
The man Ragnar’s voice is a rumble from a mouth full of misshapen teeth, his words unintelligible.
“Pappi: estimated height one-metre-eighty, mass eighty kilos–”
The woman beside him answers, her voice lower. Her hair is lighter, but her features equally mismatched, one shoulder slightly higher than the other.
“Oedipus: son of King Laius and Jocasta of Thebes–”
You realize that the voice refusing to die was your own, but it sounds strange. It should be alto but is tenor instead. Perhaps your voice-box was damaged in the accident?
“Pantropy lost favour as Terraforming grew easier–”
The accident. The pain increases as a shard of memory brings with its suddenly perfect recall the accompanying agony: The smell of burning dust, the isolation, the heat. After a while your throat hurts with the scream – which tails off into a whimper.
“A quasar at absolute magnitude −25.5 is 100 times brighter than our galaxy–”
The girl – barely a woman – Bera strokes your head. “Hush, Pappi, he kannske skilja you,” she says. Her breasts ooze milk, and a part of you realizes that while she has given birth in the last three weeks for there to be lactation, there is no sound of a baby. The rational corner of your mind tucks this away for later, but the animal part that has control has you lunging forward on all fours, scrabbling at her clothes.
“Humanity only found other sentient life after four centuries of spaceflight–”

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Sample Chapter: Winter Song – Day 3

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Angry Robot (www.angryrobotbooks.com) has offered up 5 daily sample chapters from Winter Song, by Colin Harvey!

Later, as Bera loaded up the vast tin bath with clothes and ran water from the hot tap into it, it struck her as odd that shape-shifters were always lumped into the same category as trolls and outlaws, snolfurs and other predators. But shape-shifters were so rare that no one – as far as she knew – had ever definitely been attacked by one. Maybe, if she could snatch five minutes on the Oracle later, she’d search.
She managed to turn the tap off before boiling water ran over the pan’s lip; at least – for all Hilda’s carping – there was no shortage of heat and hot water. It was a shame that, according to the Oracle, there was no longer the resource to tip Isheimur’s boundless low-level geo-thermal energy into full-scale vulcanism.
She was used to washing by hand. The farm had finally run out of parts for the antique washing machine when Bera had first arrived from the North, and the Norns refused to consider such parts life-saving, so their petitions via the Oracle for replacements had been useless. But she hated the way it chapped her hands, and the effort required to wring out the sopping clothes left her hands and shoulders aching. Still, she managed to wrestle the sodden blouses and shirts into the mangle, bolt the rollers into place, then turn the handle against a wall of inertia.
She jumped at the voice; “You want help?”
She turned. “Oh, Yngi, you startled me.” Isheimur only knew how Yngi the Halt with his club foot had managed to creep up on her.
His freckled face was as transparent as any window, so she saw his disappointment. She added hastily, “I know you didn’t mean to, but you should cough or clear your throat, or–”
“Okay, Bera.” he said. Ruddy features lit up:“You need help with that? I’m stronger than you are, even if I’m not as clever.”
She shook her head. “No thanks, Yngi. I’m almost done.”
He turned to go, just as Thorbjorg’s voice cut across them: “Yngvar Ragnarsson, get away from that whore!”
Yngi cringed, and Bera swung round at his wife, anger at one humiliation too many finally breaking her self-control. Before she could speak, a shriek from the courtyard interrupted them: “Grandpappi! Granpappi’s coming!”
Bera and Thorbjorg rushed out into the courtyard, Yngi hobbling behind. Both suns were now high in the sky, and Bera had to blink to focus. She followed the other’s gaze down the valley to west, and the men returning from a week at the Summer Fair.
The two men at the front of the group rode shaggy Isheimuri horses, which stood only chest high to a tall man, but were formidably strong. Ragnar liked to brag that his was the strongest horse on Isheimur, and the chunky buttermilk-coloured stallion needed to be to carry his owner and his belongings, which between them probably massed over a hundred and fifty kilos. Arnbjorn rode a slightly smaller horse alongside him.
Surprisingly the other two horses were riderless, and Ragnar’s tenant farmers walked beside their mounts, which were dragging something, but Bera couldn’t make out what it was. Bringing up the rear of the procession were the farmer’s eldest sons. Both had been unbearable ever since Ragnar had agreed to take them to the Summer Fair, and Bera suspected that they would be even more conceited now they had been, and would consider themselves too grand to mix with children. One had been flirting with Bera before she’d become pregnant, but had quickly lost interest when he learned of her condition, and probably wouldn’t even speak to her now.

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