THE RED THREADS OF FORTUNE (Tensorate) - Softcover

Yang, Neon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765395398 ISBN 13: 9780765395399

Verlag: Tor.com, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

"Joyously wild stuff. Highly recommended." -The New York Times

The Red Threads of Fortune is one of a pair of unique, standalone introductions to Neon Yang's Tensorate Series, which Kate Elliott calls "effortlessly fascinating." For more of the story you can read its twin novella The Black Tides of Heaven, available simultaneously.

Fallen prophet, master of the elements, and daughter of the supreme Protector, Sanao Mokoya has abandoned the life that once bound her. Once her visions shaped the lives of citizens across the land, but no matter what tragedy Mokoya foresaw, she could never reshape the future. Broken by the loss of her young daughter, she now hunts deadly, sky-obscuring naga in the harsh outer reaches of the kingdom with packs of dinosaurs at her side, far from everything she used to love.

On the trail of a massive naga that threatens the rebellious mining city of Bataanar, Mokoya meets the mysterious and alluring Rider. But all is not as it seems: the beast they both hunt harbors a secret that could ignite war throughout the Protectorate. As she is drawn into a conspiracy of magic and betrayal, Mokoya must come to terms with her extraordinary and dangerous gifts, or risk losing the little she has left to hold dear.

The Tensorate Series
Book 1: The Black Tides of Heaven
Book 2: The Red Threads of Fortune
Book 3: The Descent of Monsters
Book 4: The Ascent to Godhood

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Neon Yang (they/them) is a queer non-binary author based in the UK. They have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Lambda Literary, Ignyte, and Locus Awards, and their Tensorate series of novellas (The Red Threads of Fortune, The Black Tides of Heaven, The Descent of Monsters, and The Ascent to Godhood) was an Otherwise Award Honoree. In previous incarnations, Neon was a molecular biologist, a science communicator, a writer for animation, games and comic studios, and a journalist for one of Singapore's major papers.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Red Threads of Fortune

By JY Yang, Carl Engle-Laird

Tom Doherty Associates

Copyright © 2017 JY Yang
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7653-9539-9

CHAPTER 1

KILLING THE VOICE TRANSMITTER was an overreaction. Even Mokoya knew that.

Half a second after she had crushed the palm-sized device to a pulp of sparking, smoking metal, she found herself frantically tensing through water-nature, trying to undo the fatal blow. Crumpled steel groaned as she reversed her actions, using the Slack to pull instead of push. The transmitter unfolded, opening up like a spring blossom, but it was no use. The machine was a complex thing, and like all complex things, it was despairingly hard to fix once broken.

Mokoya might have stood a chance with a Tensor's invention, anything that relied on knots of slackcraft to manipulate objects in the material world. But this was a Machinist device. It worked on physical principles Mokoya had never learned and did not understand. Its shattered innards were a foreign language of torn wires and pulverized magnets. The transmitter lay dead on her wrist, Adi's strident voice never to squawk forth from it again.

"Cheebye," she swore. "Cheebye."

Mokoya repeated the expletive a third time, then a fourth and a fifth and a sixth, head bowed prayerfully over the transmitter's corpse as she swayed on her mount. Phoenix breathed patiently, massive rib cage expanding and deflating, while her rider recited swearwords until her heart stopped stuttering.

The desert wind howled overhead.

Finally Mokoya straightened up. Around her, the Gusai desert had been simplified to macrogeology by the moonlight: dunes and rock behind, canyon and cave in front. A thread of the Copper Oasis shone in the overlapping valleys before her. Sky and sand were blissfully, thankfully empty from horizon to horizon.

No naga. And if the fortunes were kind, she would not meet one before she returned to camp.

Scouting alone was a mistake. Mokoya knew that. The crew had followed a scattered, crooked trail of dead animals and spoor for a dozen sun-cycles, and it had brought them here. Experience told them that the naga's nest would be hidden in the canyon, with its warren of caverns carved out through the ages. The chance of a scouting party crossing paths with the beast while it hunted during the sundown hours was very real.

And yet Mokoya had convinced Adi to let her take Phoenix and the raptor pack to explore the sands east of the camp by herself. I'm a Tensor, she had said. I trained as a pugilist in the Grand Monastery. I can handle a naga, no matter how big. I'm the only one on this crew who can.

Unbelievably, she had said, I know what I'm doing. I'm not a madwoman.

Just as unbelievably, Adi had let her go. She had grumbled, "Ha nah ha nah, you go lah, not my pasal whether you die or not," but her expression plainly said she was doing this to prevent more quarreling and that she considered this a favor to Mokoya, one she intended to collect on. And so Mokoya had escaped into the cool darkness, the open sands imposing no small talk or judgment or obligation, free of all the things that might trigger her temper.

Now, barely an hour later, she had already destroyed the transmitter entrusted to her care. Even if she avoided encountering the naga, she still had to explain the transmitter's death.

She had no good excuses. She could lie and say it was done in anger, because Adi would not stop fucking calling to check whether she was still alive. But such violence was the hallmark of a petty and unstable woman, instead of a Tensor in full control of her faculties.

And what of the truth? Could she admit she had been startled by Adi's voice coming out of nowhere and had lashed out like a frightened animal?

No. Focus. This question could be answered later. Getting distracted by these neurotic detours had allowed shimmering pressure to sneak back into her chest. Mokoya shook her head, as if she could dislodge the unwanted thoughts and emotions.

Phoenix sympathetically swayed her massive head. Her head feathers rustled like a grass skirt. Perched on the giant raptor's back, Mokoya cooed and petted her as though she weren't a beast the size of a house, but a small child. Phoenix was a gentle, happy creature, but one wouldn't know it just looking at her. In cities, people scattered at her approach. Sometimes the scattering was accompanied by screaming. And sometimes Phoenix would think it was a game and chase them.

Mokoya avoided cities these days.

A hooting noise heralded the return of her raptor pack. A hundred yields ahead of Phoenix, the flat sandy ground dropped away and folded into a crevasse: the beginning of the steep, scrub-encrusted canyon that bordered the Copper Oasis. It was over this lip that Mokoya had sent the eight raptors on their hunt for quarry. They were really Adi's raptors, raised by the royal houses of Katau Kebang in the far south of the Protectorate's reach and trained in the arts of hunting any naga that strayed across the Demons' Ocean.

The first leapt into view and landed in a cloud of sand, tail held like a rudder for balance, teeth and claws splendid in the moonlight. They were exactly like Phoenix — narrow-headed, long-limbed, plumed in coruscating feathers — only differing in size (and in other aspects that Mokoya did not like to discuss). One by one they loped toward their giant sister and stood patiently at attention, their hot breaths a whistling symphony.

Nothing. The raptors had found nothing.

Mokoya's fingers tightened around Phoenix's reins. If she listened to common sense, it would tell her to return to camp immediately. It would tell her that lingering alone in a naga's territory with a dead communications device was tempting the fortunes. It would tell her that there were worse things in this forsaken world than having to fend off Adi's wrath, as if she didn't already know.

She whistled and sent the raptors farther east to comb through more of the valley.

As Phoenix slouched after the sprightly creatures, her clawed feet sinking deep into the sand, the weight of the dead transmitter pulled on Mokoya's left wrist, reminding her what a fool she was. Mokoya ignored it and reasoned with herself, running guilt-assuaging lines of thought through her head. This assignment was an abnormal one, and abnormal circumstances called for abnormal tactics. She was making the right move, plowing through unturned ground as fast as she could.

The sooner she found the naga's gravesent nest, the sooner they could get out of this blighted desert with its parched winds that could peel skin and blind the unwary. And that was the sooner Mokoya could get away from Bataanar and its web of things she did not want to get tangled up in.

Naga hunting was a specialty of Adi's crew. In the uncharted south past the Demons' Ocean lay the Quarterlands with their permissive half gravity, separated from the Protectorate by the claws of sea tempests that no ship with hoisted sails could cross. Megafauna lived there: crocodiles the size of ships, sloths the size of horses, horses the size of houses.

Above all, there were the naga. More lizard than serpent, they soared through the skies on wings of leather, bird boned and jewel toned. These were apex predators, graceful and deadly, inscribed into the journals of adventurers with the kind of reverence reserved for the gods of old. A single bite could cut a man in half.

But even gods had limits. When the storm winds caught unwary naga and tossed them across the Demons' Ocean, they turned ugly and ravenous,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tor.com
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765395398
• ISBN 13: 9780765395399
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 230
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland