QSFer Melissa Scott has a new MM fantasy book out: Point of Sighs.
Magic, murder and danger in Astreiant.
Rumors are swirling among the boatmen that the Riverdeme, the ancient spirit of the river, once bound by the magic of the city’s bridges, is back and hunting handsome young men.
The broadsheets are full of dire predictions and Adjunct Point Nicolas Rathe has been handed a case that involves a murdered tea trader, a death that implicates a prominent merchant family in the crime.
Philip Eslingen, now a captain in the City Guard, is assigned to assist him in navigating city politics and rivalry between the Points stations, as well as finding the killer. But there are tales from the riverside about extortion and violence and one murder follows another. Philip’s stars are bad for water and the Riverdeme is on the prowl…
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Excerpt
It had been raining for the better part of a week, a thin, cold drizzle alternating with colder, heavier downpours that were rapidly stripping the last of the leaves from the trees. Autumn had set in early and hard, and Nicolas Rathe was glad for once to be home by his own stove, stockinged feet stretched to the fender. Rain rattled like pebbles against the shutters, the draft bending the candles’ flames, and the basket terrier Sunflower lifted his muzzle from his crossed front paws. Philip Eslingen lifted his head, too, but quickly returned his attention to the flatiron heating beside the kettle. Behind him, his new-made captain’s coat hung on its stand, carefully arranged so that the crosspiece completely filled the padded shoulders and the full skirts hung without creasing. Silver lace and silver buttons caught the flickering light, bright against the fine midnight-blue wool. Rathe still had his doubts about the ultimate utility of the newly formed City Guard, but he had to admit that Eslingen wore the uniform exceedingly well.
As he watched, Eslingen laid a shirt on the table, holding the fabric taut with one hand while he ran the iron over it with the other. The air smelled suddenly of hot linen and the herbs it had been washed with, and Rathe tipped his head to one side.
“I thought you paid your laundress for that.”
“We don’t draw actual pay until the middle of Galeneaon,” Eslingen answered. “And what Coindarel calls maintenance doesn’t maintain very much at all. And anyway, this is only my second-best.”
Rathe refrained from pointing out that the point of second- and third-best shirts was that no one expected them to be uncrumpled. “I didn’t know we had an iron.”
“We don’t.” Eslingen flipped the fabric, rearranged it neatly. “I borrowed it from the weaver downstairs.”
“I was having trouble imagining you riding through the League with a lump of iron in your saddlebags.”
Eslingen laughed. “You’d be surprised. When I was senior sergeant, I had a sempster’s box and smoothing stones and a gauffering iron for the company’s use. Of course, I also had a seamstress and three laundresses on the rolls, so I wasn’t expected to use them myself except in emergencies. But Coindarel likes his men looking neat.”
Evidently. Rathe swallowed a word that might have rung too sharp—Coindarel’s new Guard encroached on the prerogatives of Astreiant’s points, charged with enforcing the same city laws, and Rathe had been a pointsman too long to take that comfortably—and Eslingen went on, apparently oblivious, “Do you want me to do yours, too?”
“Think it would do much good?” Rathe asked, with a wry grin.
“Probably not.” Eslingen set the iron back on the side of the stove, began folding the shirt ready for the clothes press. That was another piece of furniture Rathe had not owned before; his entire wardrobe lived in a single chest, winter on one side and summer on the other. “I’ve never known a man who could make a shirt wrinkle just by looking at it. It’s as if your clothes take one look at you and surrender.”
There was, regrettably, enough truth to that to make Rathe shrug. “It’s not like it matters what a pointsman looks like.”
“Not even an Adjunct Point? You’re second-in-command of Point of Dreams, don’t you need at least one good suit—and what about the Chief Points?”
Rathe looked up at that, but Eslingen’s expression was purely curious. “All right, if you’re chief at Temple Point or City Point, you spend enough time dealing with the regents—or the queen’s court, at Point of Hearts—that I suppose someone might care. But the rest of us, especially us Southriver points—we’re like the rat-catcher. People want the job done, but they don’t want to spend much time with us while we do it.”
“Many a woman’s been grateful for a good rat-catcher,” Eslingen said, lightly enough, but there was a faint line between his eyebrows. As Rathe watched, he found a limp roll of paper and carefully flattened it on the table, then reached for the iron again.
“Philip, what on earth—”
There was a soft hiss and a smell of scorched paper, and then Eslingen had set the iron on the back of the stove to cool. “I bought some broadsheets on the way home. Maybe you can explain this one to me.”
Rathe took the sheet carefully, the paper warm and brittle to the touch. It was recently printed, the ink dark, lines still sharp in spite of the rain, and he looked automatically for the printer’s license at the bottom of the page. For a wonder, the seal was there, and even legitimate—half Astreiant’s broadsheet printers skipped buying their license even for relatively innocuous projects—and it looked as though someone had spent the money to commission the woodcut illustration, rather than reusing an old block that was only tangentially related to the subject. But that subject… The print showed a flat-faced fish with an ugly, underslung jaw and a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth plus two more that jutted up like tusks, rearing up out of the water to balance on its belly and widespread, hand-like fins. Beneath it, oversized letters read: A New Sighting of an Old Curse, or, New Dangers in the Waters, Portending a Rise of All Tides and Other Prognostications Merrily Expounded.
Rathe skimmed the text, his frown deepening. Some of the river-folk, mainly sailors and bargemen idled by the early autumn, claimed to have seen greater dogfish swimming in the Sier, though the greater dogfish had been extinct for centuries, if indeed it had ever existed at all. The broadsheet writer was happy to claim that its reappearance meant a winter of disaster for the city, and in particular for its sailors—and I’m glad, Rathe thought, that I’m not in Point of Sighs to deal with this one. Point of Sighs and Point of Graves and Customs Point were responsible for the docks on the southern bank of the river, not Point of Dreams.
“What in Tyrseis’s name is a greater dogfish?” Eslingen asked. “Besides exceedingly ugly.”
Author Bio
Melissa Scott is from Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University, where she earned her PhD in the Comparative History program. She is the author of more than thirty original science fiction and fantasy novels, most with queer themes and characters, as well as authorized tie-ins for Star Trek: DS9, Star Trek: Voyager, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Star Wars Rebels.
She won Lambda Literary Awards for Trouble and Her Friends, Shadow Man, Point of Dreams (written with her late partner, Lisa A. Barnett), and Death by Silver, with Amy Griswold. She also won Spectrum Awards for Shadow Man, Fairs’ Point, Death by Silver, and for the short story “The Rocky Side of the Sky” (Periphery, Lethe Press) as well as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She was also shortlisted for the Otherwise (Tiptree) Award.
Her latest short story, “Sirens,” appeared in the collection Retellings of the Inland Seas, and her text-based game for Choice of Games, A Player’s Heart, came out in 2020. Her most recent solo novels, The Master of Samar and Fallen, were published in 2023.