1634: THE BAVARIAN CRISIS – snippet 16:
Chapter 9
Pia Desideria
Grantville, State of Thuringia-Franconia
It was Ash Wednesday. Athanasius Kircher, S.J., substituting for Father Larry Mazzare at the parish of St. Mary’s, had made a place in his schedule, on one of the busiest days of the church year, for the three women. When Bernadette Adducci had called for an appointment, she had asked specifically that it be on Ash Wednesday. Not, as the up-timers normally asked, for an appointment on a certain day of the month. She had referenced the liturgical calendar.
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PYRAMID POWER – snippet 26:
Chapter 19
“Yes, you do have to wear a mailshirt,” said Jörmungand firmly. “All the Valkyries do.”
Liz held the offending garment at arm’s length. “You realize that if it was going to do any good, there is no way I could hold this out like this? It’s too light.”
“I could bite through it like fine vellum,” said Fenrir, licking his lips. “But I think it is for the look of the thing. No one expects Valkyries to actually fight.”
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THE MIRROR OF WORLDS
by David Drake
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Dan Breen continues as my first reader, catching the sort of grammatical errors which creep in when I'm writing fast or heavily editing chunks that just didn't come out right the first time. (Or the second time and third time, often enough. My roughs are often a mass of arrows, brackets, scribblings and overstrikes by the time they get to Dan.) He's also very good on size issues. As an aside, he was hugely amused when he saw that the counterpart in the Isles of Saxo Grammaticus was the Scribe of Breen.
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If you're a subscriber to Jim Baen's Universe, and you haven't been there in a while, you'll want to go check it out.
There have been major updates to the site, and most notably to the e-arc experience (no no longer requiring a separate login) and to the member-self-management system.
You really owe it to yourself to go check it out. http://baens-universe.com
If you're NOT a subscriber, why not? Go visit Universe and see what's what! The first half of every story is free, and the entirty of Mike Resnick's Hugo Award Nominated story is free! Go for it!
In other news, Eric and Lou leave today for their tour of New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii. Anyone who is in the area who isn't planning on being at the con in New Zealand is really missing out! The boss won't be back for several weeks. We've been told to try to stay out of trouble till then.
More when we know it
– Loyal Minions
1634: THE BAVARIAN CRISIS – snippet 15:
While his secretary was out of the room in search of the elusive Zincgref, Duke Ernst crossed his arms on the table and put his head down. He had already been up for six hours, which equaled the number of hours that he had slept the night before.
There was a lot to do in the Upper Palatinate after a dozen years of war and devastation. He was quite prepared to do it: to reorganize, to reconstruct, to locate settlers for abandoned lands and try to find businessmen who were willing to invest in a place that had proved to offer a very chancy return. He would not do it with the political flair of his brother Wilhelm, perhaps, but he was willing to do it. In fact, he rather enjoyed the challenge of trying to create a model administrative system, without having to deal with co-regents. He and his brothers had governed Saxe-Weimar as a committee.
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PYRAMID POWER – snippet 25:
Chapter 18
“Marie’s missing,” said Lamont worriedly, as soon as Liz and Jörmungand returned. “So are Sif and that bum Thjalfi. I think they kidnapped her. And Thor’s useless. He got into the booze again. Got drunk faster than you can believe.”
Liz took a deep breath. “If they did kidnap her, there’s only one place she can have been taken, Lamont. Vallhöll.”
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1634: THE BAVARIAN CRISIS – snippet 14:
Chapter 8
Idea Boni Principis
Duke Ernst rested his forehead upon his hands. Being a Lutheran, he did not believe in purgatory. He did, however, suspect that purgatory would not have been a necessity for even a Catholic, presuming that said Catholic was upright and God-fearing otherwise than in the matter of being a Papist, who was assigned to work with Johan Banér. Banér provided purgatory on earth.
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PYRAMID POWER – snippet 24
“All right,” growled Fenrir. “She got to drink all the drink. Can I eat all the food?”
“No,” said Liz, firmly. “You need a properly managed diet, or you’ll end up with all sorts of growth problems. And we don’t want that.”
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1634: THE BAVARIAN CRISIS – snippet 13:
The young secretary nodded gratefully. He was learning fast, but he still was nowhere as close to being on top of the political developments of the past quarter century as his employer, who had been born to the job.
Duke Ernst was still dictating. “Wolfgang Wilhelm, seems, for the moment, to have no immediate intentions of undertaking military action to reclaim those parts of his Neuburg lands that are up here, north of the Danube, intermixed with those of the Upper Palatinate. That’s probably because Gustav’s main theater of military operation this spring and summer will be against the League of Ostend in the north and thus uncomfortably close to Wolfgang’s lands on the lower Rhine and Düsseldorf itself. However, his local administrators are still in place in the Neuburg lands south of the Danube and he has filed a complaint against us with the Imperial Supreme Court on grounds that we have ‘unjustifiably dispossessed’ him of the north-Danubian lands that interpenetrate those of the Upper Palatinate.”
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PYRAMID POWER – snippet 23:
Thor wandered over, shaking his head. “I think Sif’s up to something.”
Another one of your great thinkers, thought Liz, but kept her opinions to herself.
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