Birthday gift--a free novelette!
It's a strange story, in the best of ways, a touch of Kafka's frustratingly opaque bureaucracy, a touch of a mystic's view of the city of chained singers, plus Spire City's iconic beetle-drawn carriages. I hear now and then from readers who have loved it, but for whatever reason it doesn't get much in the way of reviews. Maybe it just falls between the cracks of the sub-genres, a steampunk setting but an odd, weird-fantasy story that doesn't entirely fit any specific norms.
So if you're an in-the-cracks reader like me, drifting happily between whatever strange wonders catch your fancies, maybe this story will be for you, too.
If you get a chance, leave a review. But mostly I want people to have a chance to read it.
Cartesz is a man of routine and propriety, of clockwork schedules and regimented footsteps.
And most importantly, a man bound by spire songs that fill the city. The singers, chained to the roofs of the city's spires, give him the pattern of how to conduct his life.
When one of those singers is knocked to the cobbled street, it falls to Cartesz to help her.
As his carefully counted life becomes an uncertain mess of bureaucracy and mystery, he discovers what he's never given thought to, the cruelty of a city that so callously chains the singers to its roofs.
Trapped by the Kafkaesque bureaucracy stifling so much of the city, what can he do to help the singer? Especially when his own grip on life seems to loosen...
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