Istavia

By Lazette Gifford

Istavia is a crossroads city, filled with temples and spies, nobles and thieves, and through the crowded streets, one man searches for answers to help make sense out of the treachery that ruined his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A Conspiracy of Authors
• Release date: Feb 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781936507467

Lazette Gifford

Lazette is an avid writer as well as the owner of Forward Motion for Writers and the owner/editor of Vision: A Resource for Writers.It's possible she spends too much time with writers.And cats.

Book preview

Istavia

By

Lazette Gifford

Copyright 2014 Lazette Gifford

An ACOA Publication

www.aconspiracyofauthors.com

ISBN: 978-1-936507-46-7

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Istavia is a crossroads city, filled with temples and spies, nobles and thieves, and through he crowded streets, one man searches for answers to help make sense out of the treachery that ruined his life.

Copyright 2014, Lazette Gifford, All Rights Reserved

Cover Art copyright 2014, Lazette Gifford, All Rights Reserved

Cover Art designed with Carrara, Photoshop and Picasa

Published by A Conspiracy of Authors www.aconspiracyofauthors.com

Table of Contents:

Istavia

About the Author

Preview: Paid in Gold and Blood

Istavia

Istavia is a crossroads city, and this has made her great as well as left her so embattled. Trade comes from all directions, so east meets west, north meets south, and the great market trades in all manner of odd things, most of them legal. She sits on a wide bay at the far end of the Inner Sea, with the Kolti sailing at her from the west, the Tassanians marching in from the east, the Silnans sending marauders from the north . . . and the oh-so-civilized Tacanans sending only their spies and assassins from the south.

Legend says Istavia has never gone more than three generations under the same flag and I think this might be true. My great-grandfather served as a minister for the Tassanians when they last held the city. The Silnans held us, no joy to anyone, when I was born. By the time I turned twelve, we were in Kolti hands, with the Tassanians not far off, watching for their chance to return.

There's a joke in the city that if someone asks whom you serve, you ask which way the wind is blowing today.

Such a city is rife with intrigue, of course. No group ever fully leaves, and some part goes underground and begins the work to bring their side back to power. They dig down into their burrows and send out their worker ants to find out what is going on and whom they can betray.

And sometimes the burrows go so deep that those worker ants, like me, never really know whom they serve.

I stood outside the doorway of the Pritelin Temple, the one dedicated to the god of lame soldiers, and waited for the first light to pierce the inevitable fog off the bay. A few priests had already swept the steps and laid out mats for gifts and almsgivings from the visitors today. The temple's popularity probably says something dire about my city; that such a temple not only exists, but flourishes. I live there with the other maimed soldiers who have nowhere better to go, watching the older ones die off year by year, their wars forgotten along with their dreams.

I had lost my leg below my right knee in a short war with the Silnans when I was nineteen; and no, I will not tell you that nightmare tale. They did not win and when the Istavian army finally freed the surviving prisoners, I returned to the city a changed man, and for more than the loss of my leg.

I wanted answers when I came back. Why, why why?

For a while, I buried myself in the underside of Istavia, there in the alleys and cesspits on the north edge of the city where the poor build their ramshackle homes of brick, dirt and rock debris over the old marshes. The houses have fallen and been rebuilt so many times that they form a sort of bedrock beneath them, though seething here and there with mud and muck. Year by year the rude houses spread out a little farther, claiming more of the snake-infested marshland bordering Istavia, and the government is glad to have them do so and wipe that pestilence from the city. You can see the pile-on-pile of buildings from the doorway of the temple on the heights. I often stop and look into the area which seemed habitually filled with smoke and fog, glowing a little with the fires still lit against the darkness as the first light appears.

People die there every day in a battle fought against a different enemy than the one I had faced. They fought -- and mostly lost -- their war against destitution, disease and despair. I never found my answers there in the lowlands and eventually I moved up to the heights. I remember thinking one day that I wanted to breathe fresh air again. Even the breeze off the ocean carried the scent of dead fish since the docks are upwind of the area. There is nothing good in The Marshes.

Except there