Humouress in 2021; 2021 vision, the new normal (thread 2)

June
Review:
recorded/ rated/ written/ read
✔ / / (#) / Title

✔     46) The Candle and the Flame by Nafiza Azad (2019)
✔     45) Graevale by Lynette Noni (2018)
✔   44) Seraphina by Rachel Hartman (2012)
✔   43) Bound in Blood by P.C. Hodgell (2010)
✔   42) Sorcerer's Son by Phyllis Eisenstein (1990)
✔     41) Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop by Annie Darling (2018)
✔   40) Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots (2020)

May
Review:
recorded/ rated/ written/ read
✔ / / (#) / Title

✔  39) The Sorcerer in the North by John Flanagan (2006)
✔     38) Crystal Dragon by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller (2005)
✔     37) Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (2016)
✔          36) An Offer From a Gentleman by Julia Quinn (2001)
✔       35) The Viscount Who Loved Me by Julia Quinn (2006)
✔       34) The Duke and I by Julia Quinn (2000)
✔     33) Beyond the Empire by K.B. Wagers (2017)
✔     32) Draekora by Lynette Noni (2017)
✔     31) True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop by Annie Darling (2017)
✔  30) Point Blanc by Anthony Horowitz (2001)
✔     29) The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel Power by Ryan North & Erica Henderson (2017)
✔     28) Who's That Earl by Susanna Craig (2020)

April
Review:
recorded/ rated/ written/ read
✔ / / (#) / Title

✔     27) Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis & Tracey Hickman (1984)
✔       26) Fifth Quarter by Tanya Huff (1995)
✔     25) After the Crown by K.B. Wagers (2016)
✔       24) The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts by Annie Darling (2016)
✔     23) Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley (2007)
✔     22) Frostgilded by Stephanie Burgis (2020)
✔     21) The Left-handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix (2020)
✔     20) The Switch by Beth O'Leary (2020)

Review:
recorded/ rated/ written/ read

✔ / / (#) / Title
March
✔     19) Mister Monday by Garth Nix (2003)
✔  18) Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz (2000)
✔  17) One Fell Sweep by Ilona Andrews (2016)
✔     16) The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren (2019)
✔     15) Behind the Throne by K.B. Wagers (2016)
✔     14) The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (2020)
✔  13) Blue Moon Rising by Simon Green (1992)
✔  12) The Politeness of Princes and Other School Stories by P.G. Wodehouse (1912/ 2002)
✔     11) The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary (2019)
✔  10) The Time of Green Magic by Hilary McKay (2020)
✔      9) In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren (2020)

February

✔     8) Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho (2015)
✔     7) An Assembly Such as This by Pamela Aidan (2003)
✔     6) The Glass Magician by Caroline Stevermer (2020)

January

✔       5) A Spy in the House by Y.S. Lee
 4) Blood and Iron by Elizabeth Bear (2006)
✔     3) Crystal Soldier by Sharon Lee & Miller (2004)
✔     2) Sweep in Peace by Ilona Andrews (2015)
✔       1) City of Brass by S. Chakraborty (2017)

I was sure Lois would be brokenhearted if she woke up one morning and discovered she'd fried me in her sleep ... but what if she did?

You don't go near a dying dragon. They can fry you after they're dead. The reflex that makes chickens run around after their heads are cut off makes dragons cough fire. Quite a few people have died this way, including one zoo-keeper. I suppose I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about the fact that she was dying, and that her babies were going to die because they had no mother, and that she'd know that. I boomeranged into thinking about my own mother again. They wanted to tell us, when they found her, that she must have died instantly. Seems to me, if she really did fall down that cliff, she'd've had time to think about it that Dad and I were going to be really miserable without her.

How do I know what a mother dragon thinks or doesn't think? But it was just so sad. I couldn't bear it. I went up to her. Went up to her head, which was likely nearly as big as a Ranger's cabin. She watched me coming. She watched me. I had to walk up most of the length of her body, so I had to walk past her babies, these little blobs that were baby dragons. They were born and everything. But they were already dead. So she was dying knowing her babies were already dead. I started to cry and I didn't even know it.

“Haul your ass out of cover, Bannon, and let’s get going. This isn’t funny.”

Her whisper pierced the shadowed corners, pierced the shroud that dying had wrapped around the governor.

He opened his eyes. Unfamiliar features twisted into a familiar expression. “Vree …”

She stared, not believing.

“Vree …” Cold fingers clutched at her wrist and pressed out a pattern only her brother knew.

The eight are given the power to save the world.

Raistlin stood. “Know this!” the mage said, his golden eyes staring around the common room. “I have cast a spell upon our belongings. Anyone who touches them will be slowly devoured by the great worm, Catyrpelius, who will rise from the Abyss and suck the blood from your veins until you are nothing more than a dried husk.”

“The great worm Catyrpelius!” breathed Tasslehoff, his eyes shining. “That’s incredible. I’ve never heard of—”

Tanis clapped his hand over the kender’s mouth.

With a smile that even a stranger would recognize as self-satisfied, Scott picked up the letter again and tucked it into a file in a drawer no one but he ever opened. A good agent, even when he resigned his commission, was never really lost to His Majesty’s service. Thanks to a little strategic maneuvering—what civilians called matchmaking—he had spies in places no one would suspect.
Now including Balisaig.

‘It’s rather odd,’ he said. ‘Most schoolboys dream of being spies. With Alex, we have a spy who dreams of being a schoolboy.’

‘Will you really use him again?’ Mrs Jones asked.

‘Of course.’

Whichever way you looked at it, Peter Hardy was a prime catch, a paragon of boyfriendly virtue, and Verity Love, though she was a vicar’s daughter and meant to lead by example, was going to have to kill him off at the first opportunity.

He had no business lusting after this woman. He didn’t even like her.

if her experience had been sufficiently wretched so that she refused to risk bearing a bastard herself—well, then, he should have respected that.
If he respected her, then he had to respect her beliefs.

She taught me to challenge authority and question the system. The only way it backfired on her was that I constantly challenged and questioned her.

My favourite thing to eat as a kid, and still my favourite dessert of all time, was custard and jelly, what Americans would call Jell-O.

The citations and reprimands, the write-ups for offences that earned him detention wove a kind of narrative, as if the Jela in the file was a character in a story who touched some points with the man ... but was otherwise wholly imaginary. Not that she couldn’t perfectly well imagine Jela taking on an entire squad of soldiers - and winning the fight! - but the smile and the sheer joy coming off him while he courted and committed mayhem - that didn’t come through the reports. For Jela, she thought, had been bred, born and trained to fight and destroy - and he’d been happy in his work. He’d been bred for that, too.

A series of pictures flared inside his head, hard enough to hurt, strong enough to obscure the sight of the ships and the port around him: The golden dragon, voice faint, calling against the fall of night. From the darkening sky, the black dragon swooped, behind and beneath her, bearing her up, moving them both toward a distant cliff-edge and the tree growing there, the scent of seed-pods clear and enticing on the wind ...
‘M. Jela, are you well?’ the old scholar asked sharply.
He shook the pictures out of his head, and blinked the port back into existence.
‘Disagreement among the troop,’ he muttered, and took a hard breath.

The long grass shivered once more. It was only a faint movement but there was no wind to cause it - as the hanging clouds of steam from the horses‘ breath clearly showed.

But, along with the other skills of a Ranger, he had learned patience. As he sat and waited for his superiors to broach the subject, he felt Halt‘s approving eye on him from time to time as his former teacher assessed this new-found quality. Will looked up once, caught Halt's eyes on him and allowed a grin to touch his features. He was pleased that he was able to demonstrate his forbearance.
Finally, Halt shifted his seat on the hard ground and said in an exasperated tone, 'Oh, all right, Crowley! Let's get on with it, for God's sake!'
The Corps Commandant smiled delightedly at his friend. 'I thought we were testing Will's patience here, not yours,' he said. Halt made an annoyed gesture.
'Well, consider his patience tested.'

'Look at them,' he said. 'Are they human?' ...
One at least was huge - he must have been two and a half metres tall and massive across the chest and shoulders. ...
The pallid-skinned giant had begun to advance across the clearing towards them, one ponderous step at a time. ...
The frown disappeared from the huge creature's face and he went down on one knee, one massive hand out to the dog. ...
'You know, I think he's quite harmless. Thank God you didn't shoot him.'

He tugged on his gloves and seized the tied-off end of the rope with his left hand about half a metre above his head, using his right to belay the loose end against his hip.
Alyss's stomach heaved as Will let himself fall backwards into space, controlling his fall with the loop of rope running around his body, fending off from the wall with his feet.

“Anna Tromedlov,” I croaked.
“Am I speaking with . . . the Palindrome?”

A budding restaurateur whose business was physically demolished by an errant eye laser. A makeup artist blinded by psionics. A parade of mortified flesh: burned, crushed, frozen, liquified. Buildings people saved years or decades to afford reduced to rubble by a hero blundering through. The endless reams of psychological damage. A litany of heroes leaving trauma blossoming in their wake.

'My point is just, if we're willing to tolerate that, who is going to care about a temp worker's spiral fracture?'
Or a photographer's spinal injury. I let that unspoken sentence hang. The journalist's experience had been similar to mine; Supercollider had learned so much of his manner and affect and approach from his old hero. Proton was vaguely apologetic, but once he was satisfied that the young photographer he had catastrophically injured wasn't a threat (with no aspirations to villainy), the hero forgot about McKinnon entirely.

Supercollider had a great deal in common with a diamond: aesthetically tacky; value artificially ascribed by corporate greed; cultural significance vastly overinflated; and incredibly hard to damage.

'Have you ever met him, Quantum?'
She looked utterly startled. 'Of course! We've fought -'
'No. Like when you were not trying to kill each other. Has he ever actually exchanged words with you.' She opened her mouth to speak. 'Delivering a monologue in the third person does not count, nor do general threats.'
'Oh. No.' She pressed her lips together and frowned, furrowing her brow and trying to think. 'We've never - no. I don't think so.'

She was going to play it cool.
Then Noah looked up, caught sight of Nina hovering uncertainly in the no-man’s-land between shop and counter and he smiled broadly and brilliantly as if just the sight of her was enough to make everything right in his world.

The storm drove from beyond the fortress, and so there was a respite from both wind and wet in its lee. Almost at the arch of the gate, the animal stopped and bent to drink from a puddle and to crop a bit of soaked grass; its rider fell then, slid silently off its back and dropped to the mud in an awkward heap.

Inside, warm and dry and surrounded by the things she loved, was Delivev Ormoru, mistress of Castle Spinweb. She expected no visitors, neither on a stormy night nor a clear one; no one had knocked at the gates of Castle Spinweb in many years, and she was pleased with that state of affairs. But when the ivy curled in her bedroom window, when a small brown spider scurried across its tendrils to report a stranger outside, she was curious. The stranger had not requested entry, had not pounded on the heavy wooden gate or shouted or beat sword upon shield to attract attention through the noise of the storm, yet why would he be there but to enter? She looked out of her window, but the outer wall was too high for her to see anything close beneath it. She could have spun a web to view there, but walking would take no greater time, so she went.

Gorbel's foot was tightly laced about with fine, white, willow rootlets. As they sensed the water's warmth, they began to untwine and spread into a fibrous mass that filled most of the tub. Longer fringe root reached out to tap the ceramic walls of their prison, probing for any crack or flaw.

'Tori has to remember the names of everyone bound to his - that is, to our - house and so far he's forgotten at least one of them. I've memorised all I've been able to learn. Frankly, though, I don't know what's going to happen to me in the hills. We need a third list-keeper. You.'
'Trinity. First Index's shed and now this. Haven't you written them down?'
Jame was taken aback. 'That never occurred to me. They say that memory is safest.'
'Not if some overenthusiastic hillman is waiting to flatten your skull. As far as I can make out, people have been lining up to do that for years. No, we'll have a paper and quill, if you please.'

“Forty years,” interrupted Eskar. “We‘ve had forty years of peace. You weren‘t even born when Comonot‘s Treaty was signed. Your own mother—”
“Rest she on Heaven‘s hearthstone,” I mumbled, as if it were my job to make up for the social inadequacies of dragons everywhere. The prince flashed me a grateful glance.
“—was but a speck in the queen‘s womb,” continued Eskar placidly, as if I hadn‘t spoken.

He taught me not just music but everything he thought I should know about dragonkind: history, philosophy, physiology, higher mathematics (as close as they came to a religion). He answered even my most impudent questions. Yes, dragons could smell colors under the right conditions. Yes, it was a terrible idea to transform into a saarantras right after eating an aurochs.

Only then did I notice the dragon waiting for me on the cathedral steps, flashing me his best facsimile of a proper human smile. No one in the world could have found Orma‘s strained expression heartwarming but me.

“I‘m sorry about your mother. I believe I am.” He gestured toward his stomach. “There, yes? That‘s where one feels it?”

An aged monk led me to the infirmary. “He‘s got the place to himself. Once the other invalids learned there was a dragon coming, they miraculously got well! The lame could walk and the blind decided they didn‘t really need to see. He‘s a panacea.”

Orma moved a pile of books off a stool for me but seated himself directly on another stack. This habit of his never ceased to amuse me. Dragons no longer hoarded gold; Comonot‘s reforms had outlawed it. For Orma and his generation, knowledge was treasure. As dragons through the ages had done, he gathered it, and then he sat on it.

Alex was covered in blood.
It was splattered on her arms, her legs, her chest, even her face—silver and red blood, coating her from head to toe. Black blood from the Shadow Walkers. White blood from the Dayriders.
Blood.
Everywhere.
All around her, the four races were fighting on a vicious, merciless battlefield.
There were bursts of darkness as the Shadow Walkers appeared and disappeared, and flashes of light as the Dayriders did the same. More flashes came as the Dayriders called forth lightning, using it as their chosen weapon of attack.
There were humans amongst them, too—humans who had answered Alex’s call after she had activated her Beacon tattoo, tracing the sideways figure-of-eight five times to send out her location. Bubbledoors had appeared almost instantly, with the armed forces charging from the colourful portals and into the fray.

The books on the shelves of the mahal library all belong to the Name Giver, who, in Zulfikar‘s private opinion, has gone out of control where his book buying is concerned.*

Suddenly, her vision darkens, and the two soldiers standing before her fade into shadowy outlines. Each of them has a golden name embedded in the skin above their hearts. Each name has a different meaning, a different shape. The soldier on the right, his name is Qais; firm, lonely, and loyal. The qualities that compose this Ifrit are in his name. The soldier on the left is Masrur: happy and carefree, content to let life lead him where it chooses. The names glint, and upon a closer look, Fatima realizes that hundreds of gold tensile strings extend from the names and appear to shape the Ifrit who are no longer shadowy outlines but man-shaped smokeless fire.

“Let me hear the tune first,” she says clearly.
There is a pause, and then from the other side of the purdah comes the sound of the oud. The three witnesses from the men’s side try to maintain straight faces, but the Alif sisters do not even bother. Azizah is snickering while Adila has buried her face in her hands, though her shaking shoulders give away her mirth. Amirah has stuck her fingers into her ears. The Emir’s oud playing is that atrocious. Fatima Ghazala, however, looks delighted.
Thankfully, the piece the Emir is butchering is a short one and over fairly quickly.

Arsène Lupin in our midst! The mysterious housebreaker whose exploits had been related in all the newspapers for months! The baffling individual with whom old Ganimard, our greatest detective, had entered upon that duel to the death of which the details were being unfolded in so picturesque a fashion! Arsène Lupin, the fastidious gentleman who confines his operations to country-houses and fashionable drawing-rooms, and who one night, after breaking in at Baron Schormann’s had gone away empty-handed, leaving his visiting-card:

ARSÈNE LUPIN
Gentleman-Burglar

with these words added in pencil:
“Will return when your things are genuine.”

It was just after mid-day when Ganimard was shown into Arsène Lupin’s cell. Lupin, who was lying on his bed, raised his head, and uttered an exclamation of delight.
“Well, this is a surprise! Dear old Ganimard here!”
“Himself.”
“I have hoped for many things in this retreat of my own choosing, but for none more eagerly than the pleasure of welcoming you here.”
“You are too good.”
“Not at all, not at all. I have the liveliest feelings of esteem for you.”
“I am proud to hear it.”
“I have said so a thousand times: Ganimard is our greatest detective. He’s almost—see how frank I am—almost as good as Sherlock Holmes. But, really, I’m awfully sorry to have nothing better than this stool to offer you. And not a drink of any kind! Not so much as a glass of beer! Do forgive me: I am only passing through!”

And when, in the course of this private interrogatory, which appeared at full length in the columns of the Écho de France, the magistrate resumed his cross-examination, Lupin exclaimed, with a weary air:
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! What is the use of going on? All these questions have no importance whatever.”
‘How do you mean, no importance?”
“Of course not, seeing that I shall not attend my trial.”
“You will not attend? …”
“No, it’s a fixed idea of mine, an irrevocable decision. Nothing will induce me to depart from it.”
This assurance, combined with the inexplicable indiscretions committed day after day, ended by enervating and disconcerting the officers of the law.

It seems probable that the so-called Rostat, who, eight years ago, was acting as assistant to Dickson, the conjurer, was none other than Arsène Lupin. It seems probable that the Russian student who, six years ago, used to attend Dr. Altier’s laboratory at St. Louis’ Hospital, and who often astonished the master by the ingenious character of his hypotheses on bacteriology and by the boldness of his experiments in the diseases of the skin—it seems probable that he too was none other than Arsène Lupin. So was the professor of Japanese wrestling, who established himself in Paris long before jiu-jitsu had been heard of. So, we believe, was the racing cyclist who won the great prize at the Exhibition, took his ten thousand francs, and has never been seen since. So, perhaps, was the man who saved so many people from burning at the Charity Bazaar, helping them through the little dormer window … and robbing them of their belongings.”

As for myself, I opened my newspapers and read the reports of Arsène Lupin’s trial. They contained nothing that was not already known, and they interested me but slightly. Moreover, I was tired, I had had a poor night, I felt my eyelids growing heavy, and my head began to nod.
“But surely, sir, you are not going to sleep?”
The lady snatched my paper from my hands, and looked at me with indignation.
“Certainly not,” I replied. “I have no wish to.”
“It would be most imprudent,” she said.
“Most,” I repeated.
And I struggled hard, fixing my eyes on the landscape, on the clouds that streaked the sky. And soon all this became confused in space, the image of the excited lady and the drowsy man was obliterated in my mind, and I was filled with the great, deep silence of sleep.

This was really the famous necklace, the historic necklace, which Böhmer and Bassenge, the crown jewellers, had designed for the Du Barry, which the Cardinal de Rohan-Soubise believed himself to be presenting to Queen Marie-Antoinette, and which Jeanne de Valois, Comtesse de La Motte, the adventuress, took to pieces, one evening in February, 1785, with the assistance of her husband and their accomplice, Rétaux de Villette.

“Yes, he’s a man, and a man on whose shoulder I shall have great pleasure in laying this hand with which I now grasp yours, Monsieur Devanne. And I have an idea, mark you, that Arsène Lupin and Sherlock Holmes will meet again some day …. Yes, the world is too small for them not to meet …. And, when they do! …”