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Overview
Hymneth the Possessed has been warned. He is coming—and he’s not alone. A master of necromantic arts, a questioner of all that is unanswered, a seeker of justice. Hymneth feels no threat in the warning, for no one in all the kingdoms in all the realms is as powerful as he is. His only weakness is the beautiful woman trapped in his tower: the Visioness of Laconda. Since her captivity, she has continued to ignore and despise him. He possesses no more of her presence than he does of her passion.
But herdsman Etjole Ehomba is on his way, hardened by his adventures, ready to complete his quest to find the Visioness and return her to her people. At his side are his loyal companions—a swordsman, a gigantic black cat, and an ape-like creature. Together they have crossed the Semordria Ocean, languished in its doldrums, fenced its winds, helped by sargassum men, crabs, and krakens. Their journey is coming to end. And the showdown between humble herder and malevolent wizard will unleash forces that the world has never seen . . .
Praise for the Journeys of the Catechist Trilogy
“The effect of this book is that of tales within tales, like those of Sinbad and his many voyages; a thousand dissimilar elements somehow fit together seamlessly. This is Foster at his best, thoughtful and fun.” —Booklist
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504088060 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 10/10/2023 |
| Series: | Journeys of the Catechist Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 414 |
| Sales rank: | 254,376 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Every now and then, in a pub or a restaurant, we wind up chatting with other people about pets, theirs or ours -- and every now and then we meet people who are surprised, or completely disbelieving, or sometimes even horrified, to hear that cats have personalities.
My initial reaction to this is usually that the people who don't discover this fact during prolonged exposure to cats are probably also people who don't notice human personalities on prolonged exposure, either. This is not normally an opinion I express out loud. Equally, I don't usually mention to these people that living with cats has provided me with some complex and enjoyable characters for my work in writing.
Ten years with our first two, Lilith (a black domestic shorthair) and Kasha (a delicately built tortoiseshell), have revealed the presence of personalities which, though maybe not complex, are certainly emphatic. Lilith has shown herself to be calm, collected, leisurely -- except as regards food: Whatever you're eating is good enough for her, with sometimes surprising results. This is a cat who will eat chili hot enough to make humans sweat. Food too spicy to be eaten, like one unfortunate specimen of jerk chicken I saw her spit out, is dropped on the floor and smacked repeatedly for its unreasonableness and recalcitrance. She is a gourmet, though as regards cream and other dairy foods she is likely to slop over into the gourmand category. Over the years she has revealed herself to be stubborn, though good-tempered. She is occasionally rash and bold, as when in her madder younger days she would go over the wall and herd the neighbor's sheep and cows for fun. She is mysterious, as when spending prolonged periods staring into what seems to be empty space, at what seems to be nothing. She is comfort-loving (and incidentally gifted in selecting the pile of laundry on which she can shed contrasting fur to best effect). She is home-loving and concerned about our safety -- this is a cat who, when one of us goes out for a walk, will follow us down a country lane shouting that the road is dangerous and we should come in now!
Kasha is much different. If human, she would be described as "a little delicate," with implications about the psychological end of things as well as the physical. Slim and asthenic, she was rescued from a pound where she had spent so much of her tiny life on concrete that it took her a long time to willingly walk on grass without looking as if she was trying to levitate over it. Even now she manages to give the impression of not actually bearing any weight on the ground she stands on. Her coat is of the vague/blended/camouflage type of tortoiseshell (as opposed to the bold/patchy/calico sort). She can vanish against almost any surface you nominate, a behavior reinforcing her generally shy and retiring manner. Evidence of early institutionalization is manifest elsewhere, as well, such as the extent to which her gormandizing runs in cat food. Give her fresh fish, chicken, liver, and Kasha's response is to sniff it delicately and then to look at you with an expression similar to that of an American who for the first time is handed a restaurant menu which includes the category Offal. She wants something out of a can, please, and purrs and rubs by way of thank-you when she gets it. She is conservative, intelligent, affectionate, extremely clever with her paws. There is a sense of a lot going on in that small, narrow head, though details of exactly what it might be are hard to come by. Kasha's almost comical nearsightedness is offset by hearing like Doppler radar. Any mouse that Lilith the mighty hunter lets loose in the house, and subsequently loses (or loses interest in), will shortly be found by the four-legged life sign scanner --patient, thorough, indefatigable, the classic by-the-mousehole cat who will see a job through to its logical or illogical conclusion no matter how long it takes.
With two such personalities ready to hand, it seemed unavoidable (since I'm as much of a jackdaw as any other writer) that they would wind up in a book sooner or later. When the plotting for THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON started, it suddenly seemed obvious that the easy-going, calm, even-tempered gourmet cat, the worrier, the starer-into-space, was a good candidate for the position of team leader for the group of wizard-felines whose business is to keep the Grand Central complex of worldgates running said gates -- hyperstring structure being normally invisible to humans, but normally visible to cats. And the clever-pawed, slender, thoughtful, slightly neurotic cat seemed an obvious choice for the technician and second-in-command -- the "Scotty" of the team. It then seemed to me that a couple of other characters were needed. Though two-wizard teams are common enough, they're hardly the whole story. So I invented a big stocky gray tabby tomcat as power source for the team, and a fourth "unknown quantity," a half-grown feral kitten who has to be smacked into shape and shown the ropes, or rather the hyperstrings, of the situation in which he finds himself.
So the book got under way. Then, in the midst of this process, into a household where (Peter and I thought) we had no room for any more cats, Mr. Squeak arrived. I opened the front door one morning to find myself looking at a Norwegian Forest Cat, who looked up at me politely and said...never mind, it can't be accurately transliterated from a 28-vowel system into one with only five. But if you imagine a sound like a duo of bagpipe and theremin playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever" for approximately 60 seconds, you'll get the idea. Squeak was hungry, had been so for a long time, and suspected that I might be able to do something about it.
At least that's what I think he said. It might also have been: "I understand you have a position for a third cat opening up, a gray tabby, a tom, I believe. Well, I have the necessary qualifications, if you'd care to look at my resumé...."
Feeding him came first. This went on for some time, for Squeak (having been dumped out someone's car door perhaps a couple weeks before) had been subsisting on the local game, and had a lot of catching up to do. By the time he was caught up, he weighed 22 pounds, all muscle. He was the kind of cat you might suspect of playing rugby on weekends -- big head, huge shoulders and brawny forelegs, no neck (or rather, I suppose that's a neck -- it must be...the collar goes there, doesn't it?). As he recovered from his abandonment (and recovered his normal voice, the tiniest, politest squeak -- hence the name) his personality began to show as well: the quintessential tom, a trencherman of classical proportions, not quite a Falstaff, but possibly in training for the part. He was self-confident, amiable, voluble, a bit brash at times -- another mighty-hunter type, who would bring home (and eat) whole buck rabbits, bones and all...making sure you saw them first. He was willing to throw his not inconsiderable weight around sometimes, for effect. In short, he was very much the character I had been describing in the book. Odd....
He also revealed a gift for vanishing and appearing in unlikely places...like that appliance which the cats refer to among themselves, in Ailurin slang dialect, as "the little white house," and which humans call the fridge. Squeak spends a certain portion of each day in silent contemplation of "the little white house," waiting for it to open and disclose what we're having for dinner tonight. Or alternately, not waiting. The first time I opened the door and found him in there, Squeak looked up at me as the light came on, and complained mildly that he couldn't get the milk carton open. Well, neither can I -- "Press back flaps and pull forward to open" has to be right up there between "The guy down in Accounting who cuts the checks is out sick" and "It's only a fever blister" on the "Great Lies" list.
Be that as it may, removing Squeak from the fridge (as I did that first time) has little effect. The chilly atmosphere in "the little white house" means nothing to him. Squeak's coat is specifically designed to protect him against such exigencies. He just keeps turning up in there, producing nothing but the certainty that (a) no chicken will ever go bad in our refrigerator, because none will ever be in there that long, and (b) we need a bigger refrigerator, one which will not necessitate the cat sitting in the butter while eating everything else.
But, anyway, here was the gray tabby. I had thought, at the time, that Squeak's arrival was a coincidence, and gave it no more thought. That is, until I started considering the plotting for the second book, and by chance one day ran across a reference to an event of June 9th, 1874 -- the afternoon when, in the middle of a desperately dull debate on the Public Worship Regulation Bill, a "large gray tabby cat" walked through the House of Commons -- walked in, rather, and then ran out, "vanishing," in the carefully-chosen words of the Times's Parliamentary correspondent.
Vanishing? Hmmm. Another coincidence? An awfully handy one, if so. From that kernel, practically the whole plot of book two sprang. But, yes, just a coincidence....
Then, two months ago, out of nowhere, our landlord appeared at the back door with a small squirming white Siamese-ish kitten which had been shoved into a hollow tree on the borders of our property by a person or persons unknown. And now, when I thought all the possible places in the cat-household were taken, here we were with a fourth one, throwing everything into chaos (rather as in the book), and betraying many of the characteristics of Arhu, the half-feral kitten-character who is dumped on the three full-grown feline wizards of the story -- the unmannered, slightly hyperactive youngster who has to be taught the ropes and who has to be taken everywhere twice, once to apologize. Goodman (named after the white cat-assistant to the philanthropic elephant Uncle in the children's series by J. P. Martin) is maybe three months old now. Goodman is athletic, loud (in the veritable earsplitting Siamese manner; he sounds like a fur-covered chain saw), and has yet to learn much in the way of manners -- especially, he sees no particular difference between his plate on the floor and your plate on the table. For example, sit down to a bowl of cornflakes, and lo, there is suddenly a small white head in it, crunching away. Remove the small white body to which the small white head is attached and place the body on the floor, lift your spoon...and lo, the small white head is in your bowl again. Toss the body/head combination suggestively onto a nearby chair and turn back to your bowl of cornflakes, and lo.... Pick up the body/head and, emphatically but not cruelly, test the configuration's glide ratio by flinging it in the general direction of the cat food bowl (full) and the milk saucer (full) on the floor six feet away, turn back to your bowl, and....
You get it. His unbridled orality is not limited to food. Over the space of two months, he has attempted to ingest nearly everything in the house: clothes, utensils, telephones, computers and parts of computers, bugs, mice, catnip mice, other cats, rats, TV remotes, faxes coming out of the fax machine.... I could forgive him this, except that the excuse "I'm sorry I didn't get back to you, but the cat ate your fax" seems unlikely to wash with any of my editors. He bounces around attacking everything that moves. He is as much in need of discipline as Arhu in the book, and just as her character Rhiow does in the book, Lilith has taken on the "heavy-pawed dam" role with Goodman, growling at him and slapping him around whenever he needs it (and sometimes when he doesn't), while generally reading him the Riot Act. For the most senior of our cats, and the most serene, this is bizarre.
Maybe not. Maybe this is just the old psychiatric-nurse training coming out and correctly predicting a behavior before it actually manifests.
Yeah...right. More likely, that old saying should be just altered slightly: Be careful what you write...for you may get it...?
This possibility concerns me profoundly. There are at least five new feline characters in the next book in this series...
...and I think we may shortly need a much bigger house....