Copyright © 1996 by Lisanne Norman.
All Rights Reserved.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1039.
Microsoft LIT edition ISBN: 0-7420-9113-9
Adobe PDF edition ISBN: 0-7420-9115-5
Palm PDB edition ISBN: 0-7420-9221-6
MobiPocket edition ISBN: 0-7420-9114-7
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All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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Elizabeth R. Wollheim
Sheila E. Gilbert
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For Tal, who started it all.
And Mike, for all his support during the dark years.
Special thanks must go to two people:
Judith Faul, who has lived through just about every scene with me.
And, of course, my editor, Sheila Gilbert, who has the rare gift of being able to accompany me on my journeys to Shola.
With two books now completed, I made a list of all the threads, or unresolved story issues that were part of the larger picture, left from Fortune's Wheel. It was about now that I realized my series was generating vast amounts of background data that would need to be kept in some sort of easily retrievable order as I was constantly going back to it to look up who met whom and where they met! I also needed a calendar for Shola so I could keep track of the passage of time. I had begun to get organized— after a fashion, but not as organized as I needed to become.
Coupled with that came the realization I needed to work out the actual Guild and government system on my world, as well as the social position of the two most important Guilds in the series; the Telepaths and the Brotherhood of Vartra. Along with doing all this background work, looking up the compositions of various large governing bodies like WHO and the UN, and the medieval guilds, I had started work on Fire Margins, and it wasn't working!
On the 5th failed attempt to write the very beginning, I finally sat back and asked Kusac what he wanted to do about Vanna having been kidnapped.
"Finally you're asking me!" he said. "About time. I'd never behave the way you've had me behaving. I'd do ..."
And so the beginning of the new book finally got off the ground. For those of you wondering how Kusac could possibly influence the way I wrote the book, consider this: I created him, he's part me because all authors put something of themselves into every character, but mostly he's himself because over the first two novels, he has evolved and changed from how I initially saw him. If I've done my job well and constructed a character even I can believe in, then deep down in my subconscious, I know how Kusac will behave in any given situation. All I had to do was get in touch with the person he is and listen to how he wanted to solve the problem rather than impose the way I, Lisanne, would do it on him. Simple, isn't it? Well ...Yes, and no.
This was the book in which Kusac began to take control of his life rather than let events dictate what he and Carrie should do, and right from the start, he intended to do it all his way— not Kaid's, and not mine. Kaid has a large part to play too. At the end Of Fortune's Wheel, I put in a hint of Kaid's feelings toward Carrie, and in this novel, you see inside his mind for the first time and get an inkling of just how mysterious and complex a character he is.
It's a political novel, dealing with the politics of Sholan society on one level, and the politics of relationships on another as Kaid's past comes back to haunt him while he's drawn, almost against his will, ever closer to Carrie, and Kusac. It was also time for me to flesh out a lot more of the world in which my Sholans live, and though hard work, I enjoyed doing that.
With my characters needing to travel far back in time to break free from the rigid Guild system on Shola, I needed to look at their religions and how the ancient rites of one of them could hold the secret to time travel. The title, Fire Margins, came from the name of that rite and forms part of the title theme for the series— a margin is a boundary or a defining space. Fire Margins takes my characters into a world of fire and danger where they can be destroyed, or tempered and made stronger.
It would have been easy to look at ancient religions and then base my main Sholan religion on one of them, but anthropology is among my interests— how the earliest civilizations evolved, and interacted with each other. Sholans had evolved on the plains, not up in trees like us, which is why they have digitigrade legs, jointed for four legged locomotion. They would have a better chance of survival if they were omnivores, with meat as their preference, rather than evolving as only carnivores. So they must have gone through a Hunter Gatherer stage just as we did.
I discovered religions evolved to fit the life style of the community, and one of the earliest religions for hunter-gatherer communities included a tribal shaman. I also found that this term has been taken over by the New Age people to mean something very different from what it originally meant. Research brought me to a specific book, and to a small news group on the internet, then eventually to one of the real modern day shamans who agreed to correspond with me.
Shaman is an Innuit term, the Innuit being a specific tribe of Eskimos with a history going back to the earliest times. Much of what is called shamanic today owes nothing at all to the Eskimo people from whom the very word and its meaning has been taken. Suffice it to say, I gave my word not to use wholesale anything I learned from the person prepared to tell me about real Shamanic beliefs. He quite rightly didn't want to see something in which he believed deeply reproduced in a novel. So all that remains of what I learned is the boundary of fire through which my characters must pass in order to reach their past.
In the first two books, I had given myself several clues as to how Sholan religion had evolved since the days when the ritual of the Fire Margins had been created. If that sounds strange, if I say that I never create anything for their culture until I have to because if I do and later need to change it, I can't, that should make sense. Once I've put it into a book, it's there, written in stone, unalterable. In the first book, Kusac refers to Vartra as their Creator God. I was beginning to realize just how very meaningful that phrase that was going to become.
I settled on a pantheon of Gods and Goddesses because it's the way we as a species mostly evolved, but rather than make religion a driving force on Shola as it still is on Earth, I decided to de-politicalize it and make it more of a personal thing. There are no state recognized religions and forms of worship on Shola, at least since their Cataclysm. I picked a Greek style religious system because my Sholan culture already owed much to the Cretans. I decided on a core of main deities— adding to the Green Goddess and Vartra — and created a couple of stories for them, notably the Midwinter festival tale you will read in this book.
That done, I needed to look at the Brotherhood of Vartra, the secretive Warrior Elite of Shola who once a year have the right to go to the Warrior Guild to recruit likely candidates. Those chosen often are unsure as to whether they are being blessed or cursed because membership means turning their back on the world they've known and giving their total loyalty to the Brotherhood.
Obviously the Brotherhood has Ninja style overtones, but basing it on the Japanese warrior culture was an easy way out of actually taking the time to create something alien to us as Westerners. Once again, I made my Sholans firmly rooted in traditions analogous to our Western culture. My many years re-enacting Dark Age battles came in useful here again, because I've tried my hand at more than a few different European combat disciplines. Believe me, Western based martial arts are just as effective, though not as well known, as the Eastern ones. One of them is the good old English Quarterstaff, as used by Little John in all the Robin Hood legends.
With the Sholan calendar, government, religion, their Warrior Elite, and the ancient religious ritual for traveling back in time all worked out, all that remained to be done was write the actual storyline!
This novel became the most complex and the longest one I'd done. I think it still is because I was dealing with not only so much new material, but using the new skills I was learning, thanks to my editor's help, namely those of weaving multiple plots within plots. Drafting the ideas out on paper and making them mesh with each other so that each character's story line intersected at the correct point in the fabric of the overall novel wasn't easy.
As well as looking deeper into Kaid's past and how it impacts on events in this novel, we learn more about his foster-son, Dzaka, whom we met in Fortune's Wheel. Kusac's two sisters, Taizia and Kitra, have their parts to play too, meanwhile more and more mixed Leska pairs are forming, bringing even more trouble from Master Esken at the Telepath Guild. And Ghezu, at the Brotherhood, has his own plans for these mixed Leskas.
* * *
Wanted by the Telepaths, the Warriors and the Brotherhood, each with their own political agenda for this new breed of mixed species Telepaths, Kusac and Carrie know they have to break away from all they have ever known and strike out on their own to carve a new life of freedom for themselves and their descendants. The path is dangerous, no one who has taken it has ever survived. To accomplish it, they must have a Third, a Warrior, sworn body and soul, to protect them with his life, as was done in the days just after the Cataclysm.
Pivotal to Kusac's plans is Kaid, once a member of the feared Brotherhood but expelled by them ten years before for reasons no one, least of all him, will discuss. Will their risk pay off, or are they gambling everything by even considering as their Third someone who may be flawed and unreliable?
Lisanne Norman
March 2000