Sunday Sneak Peek 8/25

If you’re looking for my Hot Heroes Post for HD Thomson’s blog hop, you can find it here.

Sneak Peek Sunday is a weekly blog hop in which writers are challenged to post six paragraphs, no more and no less, from a published work or work in progress and then invite other writers, readers and random bloggers to read, critique and comment. Visit their site by clicking on the button below for a list of other participating writers and share the love! Today’s Sneak Peek, like all my snippet-producing posts for the immediate future, is from The Last Hour of Gann, picking up where yesterday’s WeWriWa left off and continuing with Wednesday’s Hump Day Hook. So read, enjoy, and don’t forget to let me know if you want to enter my Gann Giveaway!

“Tothax,” Meoraq replied at once. He knew every city that fell within his circuit well, and quite a few others that did not. Tothax, he knew better than most. He had received an urgent summons to that city half a year back, a summons not merely for a Sheulek but for Meoraq himself, and refusing to name the charges. This had so annoyed him that Meoraq deliberately made Tothax his last stop upon his circuit and he made certain the courts of Tothax knew it. Indeed, upon his arrival in Xheoth, he had found another summons waiting for him, even more tersely worded than the last. And if there was a reason why he had perhaps overstayed himself in this city many days after the last dispute had been heard and the last trial judged, there it stood. He was a Sword of Sheul, greatest of the warrior’s caste, a Sheulek. He took orders from his father and from God and no one else. He would move on in his own time, and he fully intended to make himself obnoxious in the House of whoever wanted him so damned badly right up until the last lick of autumn.

Ah, but then it would be home, home to Xeqor and House Uyane. Familiar faces. A bed more myth than reality. His father’s company in the evenings, and perhaps his brothers’ as well, if they were home from their own duties. Well…Salkith would be there; he was a governor’s guard and entitled to a room in their barracks, but he preferred to sleep at home where he could punish those who joked about his infamously slippery brain instead of force himself to laugh along. Nduman was a Sheulek with his own circuit and his visits were infrequent enough, but he was also keeping a low-born woman and several children in Vuluth, outside of conquest and without formal marriage, although he thought it a great secret. Thus far, their father had seemed strangely inclined to tolerate this, but Rasozul was lord of Uyane and steward of the bloodline and could not ignore the scandal forever. As for Meoraq himself, he was what he was: the eldest son of a legendary man, the heir to a glorious name and a proud House of Oracle Uyane’s own lineage, a servant in the favor of great Sheul, and a man who was perhaps not as humble as he’d ought to be. He was working on that.

“Tothax,” the abbot mused, bringing him roughly back to himself.

“If somewhat to the north.”

“So it is not Tothax that burns.”

“No.” Regrettably. “There is nothing there that should burn for so long.”