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    Pretty Polly
    Pretty Polly
    Pretty Polly
    Ebook49 pages43 minutes

    Pretty Polly

    By Barbara Hambly

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A novelette of 10,000 words, sequel to Hambly's Darwath series. The Keep of Dare is an enclosed fortress: no one knows all its secrets and corners. When people start disappearing, the Archmage Ingold Inglorion and his two Californian companions - warrior Gil Patterson and novice wizard Rudy Solis - are faced with the possibility that some deadly entity is hiding in the darkness of the Keep. And the situation is not improved when Ingold himself disappears.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarbara Hambly
    Release dateJul 14, 2015
    ISBN9781310553677
    Pretty Polly
    Author

    Barbara Hambly

    Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in Southern California, she attended the University of California, Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux, France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger, and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara Hamilton.Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.

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      Book preview

      Pretty Polly - Barbara Hambly

      PRETTY POLLY

      by

      Barbara Hambly

      Published by Barbara Hambly at Smashwords

      Copyright 2010 Barbara Hambly

      Cover art by Eric Baldwin

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, and may not be re-sold. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please include this license and copyright page. If you did not download this ebook yourself, consider going to Smashwords.com and doing so; authors love knowing when people are seeking out their material. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author!

      Table of Contents

      Pretty Polly

      About The Author

      The Further Adventures

      PRETTY POLLY

      by

      Barbara Hambly

      Pretty Polly was crying.

      Though ice-winds scoured the bare mountains that surrounded the fortress-keep of Dare, in most of the Keep it was warm. Only in the outer chambers of the black fortress’s mazes did the huddled remnant of humanity have to build fires to fend off the creeping cold, and here in the complex of chambers and subdivided chamber-lets, niches, and nooks allotted to the Guards, the problem was more often stuffiness and the reek of cooking-smoke.

      Yet in her dream, Gil Patterson felt the cold.

      Though it was dark in her dream, she could see the white cat, and it cut her heart to see how thin Pretty Polly was; to see the blood on her dirty fur. Polly would lick her bleeding paw, stop, and mew in that tiny kitten-voice, though she would – Gil calculated even asleep – be nearly twelve now…

      Damn her! she wanted to scream, through tears of rage and distress, God damn her for throwing Polly out…!

      If Donna didn’t want a cat she could have taken her back to Mom’s…!

      There were times when Gil hated her younger sister.

      But when she woke she was weeping, deeply and brokenly, not only for Pretty Polly, but for the sister and the mother she had left behind with barely a backward glance.

      *

      She woke to voices in the outer Guard-room, and knew immediately: There’s trouble.

      Beside her, her baby son clucked and fussed – absolutely a child of the Guards, Mithrys seldom cried, always seemed to be watching the dark, strange world of the Keep with his father’s bright-blue eyes. While Gil fed him and changed him by the light of the single glowstone that she kept in the little chamber – and the stronger illumination of glowstones and lamps that came through the louvers from the Guard-room beyond – she listened to the voices in the other room, and what she heard sluiced away the grief of her dream in cold shock and dread.

      There’s something back there, a young man was saying, terror in his voice. Something up there. I knew it! I heard it three days ago…

      By his accent he was one of the back-level folks, the dozen or so colonies of poorer families who lived up on the fifth level, or far back into the lower four levels away from the Central Aisle, where the water didn’t circulate through the Keep’s oddly elaborate plumbing system, and where the air was rank. When the survivors of the Coming of the Dark had taken up residence in the Keep of Dare, five years ago, the first-comers to the fortress had taken the cells in its endless, lightless labyrinths that lay closest to the vast central Aisle, where streams of open water ran and the air moved and whispered in the open spaces in the dark. Those who had come later,

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