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Authors: Steven Brust

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At this time she realized with momentary confusion that, not only was there no longer a covering of tree branches over her head, but neither was there a sky; instead, it was as if she stood under a roof of stone. At the same time she detected a musty odor, and overlaying it, familiar scents: grass, pine needles, and wildflowers.
This confusion was, however, as we have said, momentary—she quickly realized exactly where she was. She wondered where Piro and his friends were, and then knew that, too. She became aware of the Enchantress, in her lair at Dzur Mountain, and now she understood much of that most peculiar of abodes as well. And, as she concentrated upon the Enchantress,
it seemed to her as if the two of them were looking at each other from only a few meters apart, and it seemed that Sethra Lavode looked into her eyes.
Zerika spoke to her, saying, “It is done.”
“Yes,” said the Enchantress, permitting herself a small smile. “Now matters become difficult.”
“Of course,” said the Empress Zerika. “We must move at once. There is no time to delay.”
Then the Empress turned her attention to other matters, and Sethra was gone.
Zerika the Fourth, Empress of Dragaera, realized that she was no longer tired.
 
 
I
n my two hundred years as publisher of Glorious Mountain Press, I have never seen such excitement over the publication of a book as there is in these offices over the novel you hold in your hands,
The Viscount of Adrilankha.
Everyone here read Paarfi of Roundwood’s
Five Hundred Years After,
of course. What novel in the last Cycle has been as wildly popular, as surprisingly successful, as that delectable tale of Lord Khaavren and his loyal friends and their role in the lurid events of Adron’s Disaster? In hindsight, it’s almost unthinkable that the book would not prove to be a popular fiction bestseller.
But
Five Hundred Years After
was meant to be a scholarly work in the form of an historical novel. It was published by the University press, and written in what some reviewers described as a “quaint” style (and what others, who are still being twitted for it by their peers, called “pure egocentric gas-bagging”). Certainly Paarfi’s University editors had no notion what they’d midwifed.
Then, like some talking familiar out of an Eastern folktale, the novel ventured forth into the world and made friends for its scholar-author. It was the topic of conversation in every klava-house in Adrilankha In salons and silk merchants’ shops, on parade grounds and palace balconies, people of every House discussed the sword fights, the scheming … and, of course, the romance. Even literate Teckla sought out the book, identifying with the brave, clownish servant Mica and his sweetheart. Rumor has it that Lord Khaavren’s admirers include high-ranking members of the Empress’s court.
(No names—that would be indiscreet—but a certain celebrated Dragonlord was seen with a copy peeking out from under his cloak!)
Paarfi of Roundwood was transformed from obscure historian to celebrity almost overnight. And what an elegant, gossip-worthy celebrity he makes! Who will ever forget his stunning appearance at the opening reception of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, where he dressed in white from hat to boots? “Artists,” he declared, “are of no House and every House. I prefer to dress to suit the first proposition, as dressing to suit the second would be garish.”
He became—and has remained—the must-have guest at every party. It is his arm that every rising young actress wishes to be seen on of an evening. That august poet, Ahadam of Hoodplain, has said of Paarfi, “He always buys the Wine. And he’s a damn fine writer.” What a testament to Paarfi’s artistic accomplishments and his personal generosity!
The University press, far from delighting in and capitalizing on Paarfi’s new notoriety, was taken aback. Anyone could have predicted that the gist of the University’s mean-spirited notes and conversations would leak out. After all, what environment is so much a hotbed of gossip as an academic institution? The details of Paarfi’s parting with the University have remained strictly private (as one would expect from such a gentlemanly and professional artist), but the rumors can’t be wholly unfounded. An author who brings so much prestige and—let’s not discount the material sphere—wealth to his publisher should certainly be rewarded by a few paltry perquisites and a quite humble increase of his royalties.
But that was not to be. Thus it was that when
The Viscount of Adrilankha
and its author sought a new publisher, Glorious Mountain was able to acquire them both, and the honor that comes with them, after lively competition with other worthy bookmen of the city. (All of us at Glorious Mountain extend deepest sympathies to Zerran and Bolis over the inexplicable flooding of their warehouse. It could not have come at a worse time for them, and we regretted the appearance of taking advantage of their misfortune.)
An author as popular as Paarfi of Roundwood has many obligations to his readers and admirers. He has been so much in demand for personal appearances, readings, lectures, and charity events that his writing time has been somewhat curtailed. But I’m sure none of his readers begrudge the extra decade it took him to complete this book, beyond our announced date of publication. Certainly we here in the editorial offices understood completely, and are sure our creditors will, as well.
Paarfi has begun work on the next volume of this landmark series, so we’re sure there will be no similar delay with its appearance. Still, he makes time for other projects that enrich our culture. The Orb Theatre has commissioned him to adapt this very book for the stage, as a starring role for the great Valimer. Paarfi also lectures on writing at academies around the city, and especially provides encouragement to young women, whose voices are so underrepresented in our fiction.
Before
Five Hundred Years After,
few publishers would have acquired an historical novel, let alone competed for the privilege. Now historical novels are the rage, and even mediocre efforts are flying off the bookshop tables. What makes them so attractive to the sophisticated modern reader?
Nostalgia, says the cynical critic—and yes, there is something to what he says. Our world is fast-paced and obsessed with efficiency over grace. Teleportation flicks us from our door to our friends’ without a chance for a happy survey of the landscape in between. Psychic communication robs us of the tactile pleasure of pen and paper, and the leisure to select the perfect phrase before we send our message to its intended recipient.
We face social upheaval that our ancestors were spared. We deal with Easterners, rebellious Teckla, and decidedly unchivalrous behavior in some of our most noble houses. How lovely it is to be transported, if only for a few hours, to a world where there is time for contemplation and elegance, and where the natural order is understood and secure!
But historical fiction isn’t merely an escape from the present. It illuminates the things we have in common with the ancients. They, too, faced what were for them new sciences, new peoples, and new social situations. Their solutions to their
problems might suggest solutions to our modern ones.
And of course, our uncertain times make us that much more fascinated with the cataclysm of Adron’s Disaster, and the upheaval of the Interregnum. The great moral questions involved in those events are still alive, though in a different tunic. People who are uncomfortable discussing contemporary issues and personalities can instead examine events that seem safely in the past. By doing so, they come to terms with our sometimes painful present.
It would be coy not to at least touch on another reason for the success of
Five Hundred Years After,
specifically: scandal. I can’t deny that I was eager to read a book that produced so much outcry from family members of certain historical figures who dispute Paarfi’s interpretation of their ancestors’ actions.
It’s fitting that Paarfi of Roundwood should be the author to lead the rebirth of the historical novel. Paarfi’s charming, slightly old-fashioned treatment of the elements of popular fiction—violence, sex, betrayal, humor—makes them easier to accept as part of history and as the stuff of contemporary life. The historian’s well-verified facts don’t offer the entertainments of character and language to draw the reader in. The deliberately shocking fiction of the “Truthful Art” school of popular modern novelists appeals only to those readers who already believe that life is shocking. Readers who seek diversion and pleasure in novels reject these novelists’ insights along with their plots. Paarfi’s approach to history and fiction has been called “dishonest” and “fantastical:” But it is that very approach that enables him to make history, philosophy, and politics available and attractive to those who believe they have no interest in them.
Legions of readers have learned all that already, of course, while delighting in The Phoenix Guards and Five Hundred Years After. Now, with The Viscount of Adrilankha, they will rediscover that delight And, far from quailing at the threatened lawsuits prompted by the publication of this wonderful volume, we at Glorious Mountain look forward to a long and mutually rewarding relationship with Paarfi of Roundwood and his creations.
—Luchia of North Leatherleaf, Publisher
THE DRAGAERAN NOVELS
Brokedown Palace
 
THE KHAAVREN ROMANCES
The Phoenix Guards
Five Hundred Years After
The Viscount of Adrilankha,
which comprises
The Paths of the
Dead, The Lord of Castle Black,
and
Sethra Lavode
 
THE VLAD TALTOS NOVELS
Jhereg
Yendi
Teckla
Taltos
Phoenix
Athyra
Orca
Dragon
Issola
 
OTHER NOVELS
 
To Reign
in Hell
The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars
Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille
The Gypsy
(with Megan Lindholm)
Freedom and Necessity
(with Emma Bull)
 
 
By C. Sophronia Cleebers
Resident Special Faculty,
Dragaeran Studies
How to Write Like Paarfi of Roundwood
1. Always refer to yourself as “we.” It is unclear why Paarfi prefers to use the first person plural. He doesn’t seem to be speaking jointly for himself and his patron of the moment; neither is he speaking jointly on behalf of himself and Steven Brust. His true camaraderie is reserved for himself and his manuscript, but that doesn’t usually prompt a writer to speak in the plural. It may be that he’s using the editorial “we.” Alternately, he may just have a mouse in his pocket.
 
2. Do not use “he or she” or “his or her” constructions. The Dragaeran language uses
gya
to refer to someone of indeterminate sex, thus avoiding these difficulties. Steven Brust has chosen to translate this as “he,” “his,” and “him,” to Paarfi’s everlasting dismay.
 
3. It appears that Dragaeran, like some languages in our own world, grammatically distinguishes statements of observed fact from guesses, inferences, and unsupported allegations. To illustrate this, compare English, which allows the same verb to be used for all those senses—both
I see it is red
and
I see it is new
—with the Hopi language, which requires
the speaker to distinguish them:
I see it is red,
but
I infer that it is new.
In Brust’s translation, this distinction is conveyed by the verb “to pretend.” It takes the place of such words as
feign,
guess, allege, assert, imagine, claim, believe,
say
(without further substantiation),
theorize, think, be under the impression that, represent as being,
and
pretend
(in its usual sense), as well as the interrogative,
do (you) wish to make me believe;
that is, in statements unsupported by material observation.
It is clear, from Brust’s translations of Paarfi’s pre-Interregnum works, that at that time the Dragaeran language also distinguished states of imperfect knowledge on the part of the speaker, a distinction that Brust most commonly translates as “to almost think.” For whatever reason—the linguistic evolution of Dragaeran is beyond the scope of this essay—it appears that by the time of the events described in the present volume, everyday speech had dispensed with this distinction concerning one’s own state of knowledge.
 
4. When “nearly” is not used to express a quantity, it is used as a somewhat ironic intensifier or as confirmation. Saying
I nearly think so
in answer to a question roughly translates as “I do indeed think so.” Using it as your sole response—“Is it cold outside?” “Nearly.”—is more like replying “You’d better believe it is.”
 
5. Many English speakers have one or several habitual phrases with which they fill hesitant pauses in their conversation. A few of these phrases retain some slight meaning; others come close to being neutral noise. To approximate the effect of Paarfi as translated by Brust, these should be replaced by “well.” Among the phrases thus replaced:
you
know; let’s just say that; could be; I guess; yeah; I suppose; I can see that, if you say so; whatever; maybe so; I’ve heard that said; you could say that; in that case; if that’s how you feel about it; and that may be so, but.
Judging from the different circumstances in which we see it used, “well” is one of those words, like “right” or “nu,” that are capable of conveying a broad and subtle range of meaning, depending on the inflection the speaker gives them.
“Well” is always followed by a comma. The only exception is when it’s used as a one-word sentence, which usage is approximately the equivalent of saying “If you say so” in a dubious tone of voice.
 
6. Some useful and characteristic phrases you may wish to cultivate include:
It is to be hoped; we wish to express the earnest wish; I do myself the honor to suggest; who have done us the kindness; about which (or whom) we have the honor to write; to lay before the reader; as we will endeavor to show; as we will take it upon ourselves to demonstrate; as the reader is now aware; with our readers’ kind indulgence; and consequently; with regard to; concerning the matter of; and we are at a loss to understand.
A sentence such as “We will omit the list entirely, confident that the reader is missing nothing of any importance by the omission” can’t really be cultivated, being entirely too particular and memorable to be used more than once in the same lifetime; but if you reach the point where you can construct equivalent sentences of your own, you may with some justice consider yourself to have achieved a certain degree of mastery.
 
7. A turn of phrase that must be used judiciously:
 
the reader will undoubtedly have noticed
the astute reader will have observed, no doubt,
as the reader will, no doubt, have deduced,
as the reader has no doubt surmised,
as the reader no doubt realized some time ago,
although the reader can, no doubt, form whatever conclusions
he wishes.
 
There are of course other variants. Generally speaking, when Paarfi says the reader will undoubtedly have noticed something, it’s either because he’s about to repeat some piece of information which was mentioned earlier, or because he wishes to draw attention to some implication or consequence that the reader would doubtless have noticed on his own if he’d thought about it, but then again might have missed, which would be a pity.
Some of the more captious and demanding critics might deplore these small reminders as superfluous or excessively obvious; but in truth they are a great help to readers who are trying to follow such a lively and complicated story, and who would rather concentrate on the interesting events going on, than soberly store up each small fact against possible future need, and dutifully examine each sentence for all its possible implications.
 
8. Only Khaavren, and later his son Piro, use “Cha!” as an exclamation. Any characters may say “Bah!” on occasion, but Tazendra says it oftener. “Blood of the horse!” is an oath properly used only by those present for the stirring events at the non-battle of Pepperfields.
 
9. Another phrase that requires special handling is,
The reader will permit us to say two words about
—. The convention to be observed here is that neither Paarfi nor anyone else ever stops at two, though most speakers come closer to that modest number than Paarfi does.
Say two words about
is a Dragaeran idiom, equivalent to our “say a few words about.” Note that this is slightly different from the equally idiomatic
two words
and
say two words to
, which are better understood to mean what we would express as “(I would like to) have a word with (you/him/them),” sometimes shading over into what we would refer to as “my two cents’ worth.”
 
10. It is not enough to use run-on sentences; they must also parse. Consider this 138-word three-sentence specimen from Paarfi’s preface to
The Phoenix Guards
:
But should he who holds the present sketchpad of words in his hands wonder how it came to occupy such a place, we should explain that it was one of our notebooks while we were preparing for the longer work mentioned above. Yet Master Vrei, who happened to see the notebook one day while we discussed the volumes
in question, and read it on the spot, announced that, by itself, it would, if not provide an accurate look at certain aspects of court life before the Interregnum, at least be a possible source of, in his words, “enlightened entertainment.” It was with this in mind that, for the past twenty-one years, we have had the honor of refining, or, if we are permitted, “honing” the notebook, and preparing it for the publication we humbly hope it merits.
You have to be orderly when you pile up that many clauses at once; otherwise they’ll fall over.
 
11. If you are in doubt as to the appropriate tone, politeness and gratitude for past favors are always a good fallback position. This should not be mistaken for natural humility of character. Neither should Paarfi’s absence of levity be mistaken for the lack of a sense of humor. Consider his description of a swordmaker’s cellar shop as “ … a small, stuffy basement, which would have been damp, smelly, close, and dark, were it not, in fact, well-lit, which prevented it from being dark”
 
12. Bear in mind, at all times and in all circumstances, whatever the subject under discussion—be it never so dear to your heart, and worthy of thoughtful consideration at far greater length than that to which you are regretfully obliged to constrain it—that conciseness is a virtue of such paramount importance that neither Paarfi nor the present writer would ever dream of relinquishing it, even for a moment; bearing in mind as well, that the related and yet not wholly identical temptation to entangle both the narrative and the reader in a thousand branching paths of digression, from which initially attractive yet ultimately fruitless byways (like those deceptively promising mountain trails which, when followed, gradually diminish to faint and narrow tracks and thence to mere nothingness, leaving the traveler stranded at some spot deserted by humanity not through whim or chance, but justly, on account of its intrinsic lack of any interest
whatsoever) one may only with great difficulty find one’s way back to the main thread, must also be sternly avoided.
Every time you explain this point to the reader, follow it with a firmly worded assurance that that is exactly what you intend to do. Believe yourself when you say it.
 
13. We have by now passed out of the territory of simple linguistics, and into the art of thinking like a Paarfi. The single most significant fact about him is that he set out to be a historian, not a novelist, but his milieu has little use for historians as such. It is therefore not an unmixed blessing for him that his patroness, publisher, translator, and enthusiastic readers are all fans of historical romance; but writers as a class get few enough blessings of any sort, and are inclined to take what they can get.
What we take to be his books—
The Phoenix Guards, Five Hundred Years After, and The Viscount of Adrilankha,
in the first volume of which
, The Paths of the Dead,
this essay has the honor to be included—should be understood to be mere notebooks, sketches for the much longer and much more serious work of real history he has in contemplation. Thus, to Paarfi’s way of thinking, he has left out 90% of the details: a veritable saint of brevity.
 
14. Paarfi’s background as a historian, as opposed to a writer of entertaining romances, may also explain why he periodically, and laboriously, feels obliged to explain matters any novelist would take for granted. See, for example, the opening section of Chapter the Sixth of the very volume which you now hold in your hands, and which we therefore need not quote.
 
15. An underappreciated point, which was ably discussed in the Dean of Pamlar University’s preface to
Five Hundred Years After,
is that Paarfi’s rendering and Steven Brust’s translation of Dragaeran speech is actually shorter, faster-moving, and less archaic than the language spoken by the characters. As the estimable Dean put it:
In the interest of accuracy it must be admitted that one aspect of our author’s depiction of these events is not, in fact, strictly in accordance with the actual practice of the times. The mode of speech employed by those at court, and by Khaavren and his friends as well, in casual discussions or when leading up to speeches actually recorded in history, does not represent, so far as can be determined, any actual mode of speech, past or present. It is taken from a popular anonymous play of the period,
Redwreath and Goldstar Have Traveled to Deathsgate,
where it is found in a game played by the principals to ward off unwanted inquiries. The proof of this is the exclamation of one of their executioners at the end of the play, “The Dog! I think I have been asking for nothing else for an hour!” This, or similar exclamations, are used several times in
The Phoenix Guards,
and more often in the book you now hold, to indicate that the time for empty courtesy is over.
 
But in the subtleties of its employment, the gradations of consciousness with which it is used, the precise timing of its terminations, this mode of speech does in fact give very much the flavor of the old court talk without that speech’s tediousness or outmoded expressions: it is a successful translation that does not distort anything of significance to anybody except a linguist.
Once again, we must understand that when Paarfi proclaims his undying commitment to brevity in prose, he is telling the truth. Those inclined to doubt this are invited to examine references in the text which mention the amount of time consumed by a given conversation. Note that in some instances the allotted time is far longer than can be accounted for by the words on the page.
 
16. Be aware that what may appear to be errors are almost certainly intentional, the result of Paarfi and Brust trying to
cope with nearly untranslatable circumstance. For instance, the mixing of feet, inches, yards, miles, meters, centimeters, kilometers, leagues, and furlongs is an attempt to convey the complexity of an Empire in which six different systems of measurement were used simultaneously.
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