Guest Post on Orbit Today—But Wait, There’s More: The Role of Place In Shaping ‘The Heir of Night’
I have another guest post on my UK publisher, Orbit’s blog today, all part of celebrating the mass market edition of The Heir of Night over there. Titled “Myth, Legend and History: The Shaping of The Heir of Night“, it begins:
“When asked, I always describe The Heir of Night as “classic epic fantasy.” In part this is because it is a hero tale with the fate of the world, and perhaps even of all worlds, at stake. It’s a tale of adventure and magic and battles, of friendship and betrayal and love, of both individuals and a whole people under pressure: all the stuff in which the mythologies and legends that underpin our western culture—the Greek, the Norse and the Celtic, with a fair dash of side influence from the Egyptian and Babylonian—are steeped.
…”
To find out more and where the history comes in, click here.
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But Wait, There’s More—the Role of Place In Shaping The Heir of Night
In terms of the shaping of a story and a world though, there are always more than one or two elements that come into play. I’ve talked a fair bit about characters lately: here when the guest post on “The Evolution of Character” aired two weeks ago, but also here, at the time of the UK mass market release last week (yup, it’s now free and in the wild! ;-)), and again here only this Monday when I was talking about classic epic fantasy being based on tropes not cliches—and the importance of character in achieving that difference.
But the whole “character” discussion took a slightly different turn when I posted as part of Mary Victoria’s current “Place as Person” guest author series. (A wonderful series, by the way, and well worth checking out—the introductory post is here and you just click forward from there.)
In my post I discussed what it means for a “place” to become a “person.” You can read the full piece here, but one of the places I dicussed was Jaransor, which may be “… not just a chaotic force, but a personality, albeit a fractured one, that has consciously entered into the conflict being played out.”
Just for fun, here’s a small Jaransor excerpt:
“The quiet lengthened, and Malian felt her mind turn to the murmur of the night breeze and the slow movement of the stars. She could follow the breeze, she realized, her fingers clasped around the armring, just as she had followed the vision of the hawk, earlier in the day. She flowed with it across the hillside, letting the little wind show her the fallen stones beneath the grass and the scurrying path of some small night creature. Malian could hear Lira’s footsteps, almost lighter than the breeze, as the guard made her careful way back to them. She could sweep high, too, far above the hills, and make out the whole length of Jaransor stretched out below her, just as the hawk must have seen it, spread beneath its wings.
There was power in the land. Malian could see it flowing like a river—but deep, far down in the earth. The hidden river only bubbled up at intervals along the crest of the hills, in a series of evenly spaced springs. The springs, she realized, matched the ruins of the watchtowers that had once stretched the length of Jaransor. Kyr was right, the ruins were centers of power still.”
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I believe place is one of the most significant shapers of both The Heir of Night and the soon to be released The Gathering of the Lost. Although Heir is ostensibly set between three major physical “places”—the Wall of Night, the intervening Gray Lands, and Jaransor—there are in fact a number of other significant places within each of these settings, each with its own distinct ambience. Here’s what’s on my list—but if you’ve already read the book please feel free to put forward any other place you think I ‘ve left out:
- First off, I have to say that I believe there is another place/space that stands on equal footing with the three mentioned above, and that is the Gate of Dreams–the alternate realm that lies “between worlds” and out of space and time. It’s definitely a very powerful player in the story and a big contributor to that “strange magic” Robin Hobb mentions in her author quote for the book.
- The fourth physical place that gets a mention, both as part of the realtime action of the book and in backstory, is the Winter Country.
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Within the larger place that is the Wall of Night we also have:
- the Keep of Winds;
- the Old Keep; and
- the heart of the (Old) Keep may also be a distinctive “place” in its own right
- And within the Gray Lands there is the Border Mark
- While Jaransor includes a tower that isn’t there …
So there you have it, upwards of 10 distinct places that shape the story that is The Heir of Night—and with allusion to others: the River and its cities, and all those realms that lie between Ij and Ishnapur in the far south, on the border of the great deserts: off the map, in fact … But you will get to visit some of them in The Gathering of the Lost.
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To end with though, here’s an extract from The Heir of Night that touches on a few of those “places” mentioned above: the Wall of Night, the Border Mark, and the Gate of Dreams—as well as introducing Kalan and the Huntmaster, characters who haven’t had much mention in the recent discussions, although Kalan, together with Malian of Night, is one of the series two central protagonists.
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~ from Chapter 19, The Huntmaster
The storm assaulted the Keep of Winds with renewed fury, battering the watchtowers and shrieking along the ramparts of spear-deep stone. Even in the inner fastness of the temple quarter its voice formed an uneasy backdrop to the tumbled darkness of Kalan’s dreams. He had dreamed every night since returning to the New Keep, a jumble of faces and voices and scenes that were as random and disconnected as the debris caught in the storm’s vortex.
On the first night back, Kalan had seen his father’s face, cold and closed, just as it had been on the day he disowned Kalan and threw him out. His words were not the formal rite of renunciation and expulsion, but sharp, nonetheless, and cold as stone. “What are you, boy? Who? You must be a changeling, an incubus, for none of our family ever had such powers!” In the dream Kalan had stretched out his hands, trying to protest, but his father had turned coldly away. Only his voice came floating back: “Nay, do not cry out to me for I invoked the rite long ago. You are no more son of mine!”
You are no more son of mine. Kalan had woken in a panic to the pressing darkness of his sleeping cell. The storm had still been building then, but he had felt its power closing in on him like the walls of the narrow chamber.
The dreams, like the storm, had grown in strength as the days passed and although none were as clear as that of Kalan’s father, they were all shot through with a sense of threat, snatches of conversation and the keep seen from odd angles. Other images intruded as well: Malian pacing in a red and white room, a glimpse of the heralds standing by a great pillar of stone, the wind whipping their hair beneath a sullen sky—and a great war spear with a blade like black flame and a collar of feathers, darkly iridescent as a crow’s wing. It sang to him, a low, fierce song of danger that reverberated in the core of his being.
“But you are lost,” Kalan said, coming on it unexpectedly through a wreathing of mist. “You pierced the Raptor of Darkness and fell with it, into the void.”
…
He was standing on a path surrounded by banks of fog that stretched between the stark trunks and branching black of a great forest. The Gate of Dreams, Kalan thought—except that this forest seemed vaster, wilder and infinitely older than the wood that surrounded Yorindesarinen’s fire. He shivered, for the space between the trees was dense with impenetrable undergrowth and the voice of the storm had gone, replaced by the creak and rustle of branches rubbing together. It sounded, he thought uneasily, like some dark, secret, and not altogether friendly conversation.
The fog in front of him lifted slowly and drifted apart, revealing the tall figure of a man. His back was turned to Kalan and a long black cloak fell almost to his booted heels; his right hand grasped a tall, hooded spear and a crow perched on his left shoulder. The bird’s head turned, snaring Kalan’s gaze with one bright gleaming eye, then it lifted its wings and cawed, the harsh cry echoing through trees and mist. The man looked around and Kalan gasped, for the stranger’s face was concealed beneath a mask of black leather and his left hand had been severed at the wrist.
Kalan forced himself to speak boldly. “Who are you?” he asked. The mask’s blank eyeholes were fixed on him but the man did not speak, just stood there, leaning on the hooded spear. “What is your name?” Kalan said, trying again.
The crow cawed a warning; the masked man’s voice, in the quiet of the wood, was harsh as the bird’s. “Welcome, Token Bearer,” he said. “It has been a long time since the Huntmaster was summoned to the Hunt.”
Jaransor was always one of my favourite elements of ‘Heir’…
Thanks, Mary–I enjoyed having the opportunity to talk about it some more as part of your “Place as Person” series.:)
Me too, very much so. And looking forward to seeing the River Cities too.
As I am I, very much—to seeing them finally make it to print. 🙂