Old Opening of Kingdom Come

When I quizzed fans on what kind of content they'd like to see between books, one of the most popular responses were cut chapters that didn't make it to the final books for whatever reason.

This is the first one of those. When I was drafting Kingdom Come, I actually started with the dolphin cheese scene as the first chapter, along with some worldbuilding stuff for Vlachia itself - specifically religion in Vlachia, and how the Priests of Khors interact with their lay worshippers. I decided that the book needed to open with action instead, and cut out the fluff to turn this scene into Hector and Suri's night market date.

This draft Ch 1 was never finished, so I've ended it at the point where the narrative becomes familiar to those of you who've read Kingdom Come.

Anyway, here it is: an alternative to the final opening of Book 3.

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Our last day of peace was the second day of the Sea Calming Festival in Vlachia, a three-day celebration of the impending harvest and the rare spectacle of a true full moon. Erruku, Archemi’s moon, was so enormous that it lit the night sky with a burnished golden glow that was usually bright enough to see by, even without a dragonrider’s enhanced vision. As the months had gone by, Erruku had gone from a great half-disk sitting on the horizon to a globe that took up most of the southern sky. The further away it was, the calmer Archemi’s ferocious seas became. They were normally violent enough that even the greatest battlecruiser would have been chewed up in the churning hundred foot-high waves, square currents, and massive rip tides. The ocean in Archemi was synonymous with Hell, a place for demons and the unworthy souls of the disgraced dead. This made the period of relative calm the perfect time for religious pageantry.

Day One of the festival in Taltos was marked by a great parade, where priests of Khors and lay-folk ran through the city with bells and hammers to ring demons and evil spirits out of people’s homes and drive them toward the cliffs marking the coast. Mercenaries and adventurers did a brisk trade in small urban monsters and vermin, throwing their corpses over the seawall and into the ocean as offerings. That seawall was where the parade ended. The High Forgemaster of the Church of the Maker climbed onto the edge of the wall, where he gave a sermon on The Nine - focusing on Khors, naturally - and then hurled the iron-bound effigy of a demon into the sea.

The day after that, the crafter-priests of the church threw open their doors to repair, sharpen, and bless farm tools, wagon wheels, pots and ploughs. Automata that had stopped working were serviced in the church, and either fixed or given ritual funeral rites before being donated as scrap. Across the country, people feasted on spicy fried pork, bread, beer, and pies baked with the last fruits of Summer and the first fruits of Fall. Summer in West Vlachia was long and dry, while Fall was very wet, with a short monsoon-like period about a week after the Sea Calming Festival was over. This meant that there was barely a week to bring in the harvest, and Taltos was electric, bustling day and night with people frantically partying as hard and as long as possible before the week of grueling labor ahead of them.

I’d never paid attention to the seasons when I was alive. California really only had two: Summer and Hellfire. For the cooler half of the year, it was hot, dry, and bright. For the other half, the hills were on fire and ash rained down like snow over the entire West Coast, from the metropolises of Alaska down to the ruins of San Diego. We ate the same bland megacorp foods all year round. Fruits and vegetables were grown in towering skyscraper farms, and cultured meat came from laboratories and factories. The seasons hadn’t meant anything to me, or anyone else I knew.

That wasn’t the case here. In this digital afterlife, my life and the lives of those around me were ruled by the seasons, and any reason to celebrate here meant food: lots of it. Holding hands, Suri and I followed our noses through the singing, laughing, chattering throng winding down toward the Market District, grinning like kids.

“I swear we’re going the right way!” I called back to her over the noise.

“Just follow your nose!” She called back, white teeth flashing in the twilight gloom. “Can you smell that?”

Hell yes I could. And when we broke out of the street and emerged into the plaza, we saw the Holy Grail laid out before us: rings of stands selling every possible type of street food from every part of the continent.

“We finally found it,” Suri said hoarsely. “This, right here, is what Heaven looks like.”

I pulled her in against my hip and turned to look at her. Both of us were dressed up for the festival: me in a fashionable black tunic, black leggings, and soft knee-high boots; her in a gold dress that poured down her body like a heavy river of silk and glass beads. It was cut low in the front and high at the seams, swirling around her dark legs when she walked. Her brilliant red hair hung around her face in thick curls, burnished by the light of the lanterns.

“Nope,” I said. “I’m pretty sure Heaven is a six-foot tall Beserker in an amazing dress, and is standing right beside me right now.”

Suri’s face flushed a dark cinnamon-brick red, and she playfully whacked me on the shoulder. “Flatterer.”

“I’m serious. You’re stunning.” I pulled her in closer, and she pressed her body in against mine. “So: shall we sally forth and stuff ourselves stupid before the big day?”

Suri’s golden eyes danced wickedly. “Hell yes.”

I wrapped my arms around her waist. “Then let’s do it, because if my intuition is telling me right, tomorrow is going to suck ass.”

Her full mouth spread out into a broad grin just before she leaned down to kiss me. It was lingering and sweet, the kind of pleasure I knew I’d want to hang onto in the days and weeks to come. Tomorrow, we were going to war. But tonight was date night, and we were going to eat ourselves stupid.

We started at one end of the night market and worked our way around. There were wheels of juicy veal and lamb kebab, served in fresh pita with pickled vegetables and garlic sauce; breads of all kinds, from sweet fried cheese donuts to cherry croissants. Then there was the burek: ring-shaped pastries dripping with butter and garlic and filled with meat, vegetables, cheese... and, well, more cheese. Vlachia was a great place for cheese: goat cheese, sheeps’ milk cheese, and cheese made from the milk of more exotic species, like...

“Dolphin... cheese?” We had stopped in front of a Meewfolk food stand, the only one in the entire market. Since Ignas had taken the throne, the cat-folk were allowed to trade in the city again - and they’d bought their food with them. The stand was dressed with tropical silk flowers, and the selections were laid out in baskets and on trays: steamed fish, pungent with herbs and fresh chilis and baked in large, fragrant leaves; skewers of marinated songbirds, and translucent rice-paper wraps of squid, crab, shrimp and giant water-beetle meat with chives and a thin, smoky sauce. And dolphin cheese, which was fatty and yellow, chopped into cubes, then flash fried and served in a giant water-beetle shell.

“Is this really made from dolphins?” I asked the chef: a tall Meewfolk with heavily pierced ears, tabby points, and brilliant blue eyes.

“Yes, of course! That is ki’kira, mrah? A dish of the royal court! Very tasty, very rare.” He flashed me an attempt at a human smile, showing off a pair of inch-long canines as he deftly ladled oil into a wok of frying crickets and tossed them up into the air. “You want try? Only one Florint!”

I was about to tell him to hit me when Suri’s eyes narrowed. She clapped me on the forearm and leaned in. “Is this the real shit? Or is it made out of ki’ka’fir?”

The Meewfolk man’s tail bristled with offense. “Ki’ka’fir!? What garbage! Of coursssse it’s real ki’kira!”

“Right. Let me guess: it fell off the side of an airship and just happened to fall into Cat Alley?” Suri arched an eyebrow.

The chef’s ears flattened briefly as he tipped the crickets into a leaf-lined basket and passed it over to his fellow trader, a young girl barely out of kitten-hood who went to go and serve them up. “I have good connections to Prrupt’reao’lan, lady. My brother is an overseer at the place where it is made. He cut me good price for the festival so I can send money home, mrah? I would never dare serve ki’ka’fir here after all the troublesss we have in Vlachia.”

Suri seemed satisfied, and nodded. “Okay, Hector. You really wanna try it?”

I passed the Meewfolk two Florint. “One serving of your finest cetacean curd, please. And I’ll take a beetle wrap as well.”