Character assassination

About a year ago, I posted a couple of interviews with assassin, Shayla Carver. In reading through critiques of my early chapters I realised I needed to get more firmly into the head of her antagonist, Imperial Chief of Security, Chalwen ap Gwynodd.

So, before revising the chapter where Chalwen first appears, I decided to interview her to find out what she was really thinking at that time. The interview follows. It's pretty rough, but it's done its job. For the first time, I'm actually excited about tackling a piece of rewriting because this interview tool has helped me envisage how to portray her.

Whether I can get that down into coherent words, of course, is another matter entirely...

Spoiler alert (in case anyone from CC critiquing early chapters reads this): Chalwen is not who she first appears to be. This interview mentions things that only come out later in the story. It kinda gives away something of Chalwen's position, which I try to keep the reader guessing about.

Language advisory: one or two naughty words.

Chalwen ap Gwynodd - on being in the hot seat

Imperial Chief of Security, Chalwen ap Gwynodd, sits at her desk, facing me. Her aide had ushered me in but did not offer me a seat. Chalwen's eyes lift up from the dazzling stream of information flowing across the top of her desk. I realise that I now have her full attention, which is not a comfortable feeling. I feel like a moth caught in a spotlight, and I sense her impatience...

When you first heard about Chantry Bay, what went through your mind?

Momentary disbelief. [She presses her lips together and her face reddens] That didn't last long though. I've grown too accustomed to atrocities in this job to waste time with pointless incredulity.

Then I was fucking furious. I saw red.

Just as well the attendant who woke me with the news had my uniform ready to hand to me...

[Her fists clench, and I wonder if I dare prompt her to continue]

But then...have you ever had that feeling, somewhere in the back of your mind, that you've fucked up big time? But you can't put your finger on it.

It's just some grey dread growing inside you, because something's not quite right.

No, but I think I know what you mean.

Humph. Well. A ship down on home turf, that's bad enough. But I just had a feeling there'd be more to it. Something told me I wouldn't be able to just punish the perpetrators and get on with my life. Not this time.

What were you afraid of?

[She glances down at her desk. Her fingers twist together] What I've always been afraid of since I took on this fucking job. Screwing up. Letting something slip through the net. Something that'll destroy us all.

It sounds like you don't enjoy this job. Why do you keep doing it?

Julian appointed me because he trusted me. I can't let him down.

But why you?

I worked with his father, Paul, to root out the rot in the Empire. Part of a covert movement to fight an army of forces with vested interests in the old ways. Change and reform was something which Julian believed in, too. He needed someone he could trust in this position.

[She shakes her head, corners of her mouth turn up slightly] It was a smart move. I couldn't deny it. I was nobody, so nobody had cause to fear me or wish me dead.

No more than usual, anyway.

Julian could have picked a supporter from the ranks of the security service, but all those factions out there, all those shadowy figures, would have torn down anyone stronger. Me? I was an unknown. Someone they saw as weak and malleable. Someone they could turn and use.

So they thought.

I think most people would agree that you've been a very successful Chief of Security.

But I feel like I've been a fraud all these years. What did I know about security? I had many enemies within the service, jealous, ambitious people. All those eyes on me, waiting for me to fail. I kept ahead, only just, at times. But all the time my fear was that my enemies, our enemies, would prove them right.

So...I had this premonition that this was no simple act of sabotage. This was it. The small beginning that would turn out to be my downfall.

That scared me shitless.

I have trouble picturing you as someone who could be scared of anything.

[She looks down at her desk. Her voice is so quiet I have trouble hearing her]

Believe it.

Interview with an assassin, part II - revenge of the killer fungus!

Earlier this week I posted a first interview with Shayla. That gave me a lot of ideas to help describe her emotional state on her quest. This interview focuses more on her preparations and physical state, which eventually told me that I needed to be much more sympathetic to the difficulties she faced. This also helped to explain some lapses of judgment on her part which on or two critiquers had noted.

Shayla Carver - on being an assassin

Shayla, tell me something about the training you had. What made you such a deadly assassin?

[She raises an eyebrow] Just how far back do you want to go?

Well, I suppose the obvious place to start is your legendary fighting skills.

Right back to the beginning then! [She laughs, but sobers quickly] OK.

Let's see ... I can't even remember a time when I wasn't into some sort of combative sport. I guess I had a lot of excess energy to burn up. I was a junior master of Jivan wrestling by the age of ten, and was well on my way to the bronze standard in Shohan Calinda.

The Knife Dance?

That's the popular name, and I guess it does look like a dance in its more stylised forms. But it's actually a range of disciplines covering all sorts of hand-held weapons. Knives, swords, sticks and pikes, that sort of thing.

Then after Eloon was ... cleansed, I kinda threw myself into that. I suppose I had some vague idea of fighting my way into the palace and taking on the Emperor in person.

Things got serious when Brandt and I made our pact. We realised that we had skills that we could put to use, but all this unfocussed rage was getting us nowhere. We needed to set ourselves a goal and take steps, conscious steps, towards it. Childish fancy of course, but it led me into the Firenzi military at seventeen. I learned the difference between ritualised fighting for sport, and fighting to kill.

[She pauses, looking thoughtful] That experience hardened me. Once I'd killed for the first time, I knew I could see this thing through, but I also realised pretty quick that the military was a step in the wrong direction. The Firenzi forces would never take on the Empire, not in direct battle, and even if they did I would never be in a position to take out the kind of personal revenge I was looking for. I needed to get into the Special Service to get the kind of chance I needed.

How did you manage that? It's not exactly an organisation you can apply to join.

No shit! I had to get myself noticed by their talent scouts, so I started volunteering for scouting and behind-the-lines assignments. A chance to show the skills the Service would be looking for. The breakthrough for me was retaking Scorflac from the Family Wala. I was able to infiltrate the Wala base at Dojon and cripple their command centre with a small pulse bomb. After that, the navy was able to retake the planet without resorting to a full scale ground assault. Big brownie points!

This used something other than fighting skills then.

Yes. I managed to pass myself off as an emissary from one of the local grain barons. Scorflac is remote and right on the Wala-Firenzi border. It's been Firenzi for over three thousand years, but only just. It keeps flipping allegiance, with help from the Wala. The local bigwigs are constantly sucking up to one side or the other, so it was a plausible cover.

So you see, combat skills are only part of the story. In fact, my best trick turned out to be disguise. Not fighting, but blending in. I had this talent for it. And some hi-tech help in the last few years of course.

Your implants?

You bet! Something the Firenzi want to keep secret as long as possible. No surprise there. If you don't know about them they are such an effective disguise. But once people know what to look out for they'll be too easy to spot. They'll become obsolete. Well, the secret's safe, for now. And I'd never have gotten through any close scrutiny without them. But man! Those things were a pain in the butt.

How so?

Think about what the implants do. They give you conscious control over your appearance. Facial features, skin tone, hair colour. Can't do much about height, but the implants can absorb water and plump you out some.

Sounds marvellous!

It is. But remember what I just said back there. Conscious control. It's like flexing a muscle. It takes effort to morph, and effort to sustain. Slacken off and your features will revert.

So you woke up each morning as Shayla Carver instead of Brynwyn?

[She snorts and shakes her head] Not quite. It takes time. Nobody would notice much difference after only a few hours, and it takes several days to become recognisably yourself again if you simply relax. Quicker if you make a conscious effort.

But morphing your appearance in the first place is slow work and both physically and mentally draining. I normally take about four days to put on a disguise. On Magentis I did it in less than two. That was tiring.

And as for keeping the disguise up, just try walking around all day with your stomach muscles permanently tensed and your arms held high over your head and you'll start to get the idea. I spent most of my time on Magentis half dead from exhaustion. That led to a few lapses of judgement, which could have been serious.

[She leans back, gazing up at the ceiling] So, you see, the implants have their drawbacks. And I try to forget what I went through getting them in the first place.

[She looks at me again, with a sly grin] You know they were engineered from some strain of fungus? The implant process is ... painful. And creepy. You have these filaments growing under your skin from the implant sites. It's like an infection. It is an infection really. And it totally knocks you out for weeks. You're under constant medical supervision, feeling sick as a dog, but they're not trying to cure you. They're encouraging the infection, guiding it to all the right spots until it's taken over every inch of your skin.

Sounds gruesome.

It is! And then they give you a killer drug to stop it metastasising further. It knocks you sideways, but you don't mind that because you're just hoping like crap that it works!

What if it doesn't?

[She shudders] Then you really do have an infection. A nasty and terminal one.

So obviously it worked for you.

Yes. But that's not all. Once you've recovered, the real training starts. By now the filaments have made a whole network and tapped into your somatic nervous system. But it's like a phantom limb that you never knew you had. You have to learn to control it. It took me nearly two months before I started to make a conscious connection, and a full year before I had enough control to put on a decent disguise.

[She smiles] Boy was that a frustrating time for me. You know me. I'm all about action. I can be patient when I'm stalking prey, but I need to see progress. I was ready to bite heads off after the first few weeks. [She giggles. I find the incongruity unsettling] I don't know how many trainers I went through! I think the Special Service ended up offering danger money just to get them in the same room as me.

What about preparation for this particular mission?

Well, physical appearance and a shedload of painstaking factual research of course. But to effectively take on Brynwyn's persona, it wasn't enough just to look like her. I had to learn about her life, her family, her history. I had to immerse myself in her beliefs, her religion, the whole Vantist mysticism thing, the meditation and fanatical devotion to duty. I had to learn the holy books inside out, not just to recite quotes, but to get inside the mind of a believer and understand what the texts were saying.

Sheesh! What an eye-opener. I'm so glad I'm good at compartmentalising. I'd have gone gaga trying to get my head around all these conflicting beliefs and personae.

And of course, the devil is in the detail. For example, I spent weeks not just learning the Chensing tongue from scratch, but studying the dialect and colloquialisms that a Chensing speaker would bring to the standard Imperial tongue. And not just any Chensing speaker either. I got very specific about that broad north coast accent. A detail like that would be obvious to many residents of Magentis. But I knew Brynwyn mixed in refined circles in the politics of Toomin Barza, so I had to soften it just a little.

Well, you get the idea.

Interview with an assassin

In the writing world, I, the author, am totally in control, the ultimate authority, manipulating my characters and directing their every action like a master puppeteer.

Right?

Right! As if!

They really do have a life of their own, and they don't always want to co-operate. It can be quite eerie when one of your characters stubbornly refuses to follow the script and starts taking the story in a direction you hadn't envisaged. A fellow writer over at Discarded Darlings has long conversations with hers, and they haunt her desk and corners of her room. For me, they mostly just put up passive resistance. I write, and I just know something's bothering them, and the story won't go right until I sort out what they really want to do.

Somewhere in my writing journey, one of my colleagues recommended "interviewing" characters as a way to get inside their heads. Here is one such interview with my main character from Ghosts of Innocence.

Shayla Carver - on motivation for mass murder

So, Shayla, you got very close to killing the Emperor, along with about two billion innocent bystanders. It's a bit of a clichéd question, but why did you do it?

[She laughs] Very simple! Revenge. Nothing more complicated than that. No political aspirations, no deep-rooted desire to establish a new order -- let alone anything based on truth or justice or crap like that. I lost my home world to this man, and I wanted revenge. And I was young and naïve enough not to understand that I didn't have a hope in hell, which is probably why I nearly succeeded. You really can achieve the impossible as long as you don't know it's impossible!

I think we all understand your motivation, up to a point, but the lengths you went to seem pretty extreme. That suggests both anger and determination way beyond normal.

Well, I guess it was an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation.

But there were hundreds of other survivors from Eloon. Why didn't they all turn into lethal assassins?

Who says they didn't try? A lot of people were seriously pissed! They all had to cope with it in their own ways. Many of them did join the military, or the Insurrection. Many died in combat, or simply grew old and settled down. But they all wore the scars. Honestly, what were the chances of any of us making a real difference? Out of hundreds of survivors, and maybe thousands of other people affected, you just happen to be talking to the one who lasted long enough to get serious.

All the same, your lifelong mission was serious. Some would say 'above and beyond'. What kept you going all those years?

I guess I had nothing left to live for. My whole world was gone. And I mean my whole world.

I'm a pretty introspected person. Never made friends easily. But I adored my father. He taught me so much about life, and especially about loyalty and fairness. I don't think he opened up to many people either, but I thought I knew him. Back then it seemed like he was my only real friend. Then he was gone.

[She leans forward, speaking earnestly] I was shocked by the totality of the destruction. And the power. Have you ever seen a planet cleansed?

[I shake my head]

Well, I watched it!

Imagine the biggest volcano you ever saw, blowing its top. The weapons those Swords carry are like a force of nature. Liquid lightning raining down. Turning cities to glass.

[She frowns thoughtfully] I think quark bombs are the only other man-made things that come close to challenging nature for sheer power, but they are so touchy they're almost impossible to deploy.

Anyway, even watching from light years away, knowing I was safe, I could feel the heat. It was terrifying. But the point is, I was more shocked by the unfairness of it. This wasn't blind nature. This was personal. Someone, somewhere, made a conscious decision to bring that destruction down on my world. It was a choice! Someone chose to do this! That is what really stuck with me all through the years.

So you chose revenge.

C'mon! You're talking about an eleven-year-old child here! A spoilt super-brat at that! Of course I chose revenge. And there was never any question about the form it would take either. You took my world, I'll take yours! That was just childish simplicity talking, but over the years the focus became so ingrained it never occurred to me to question it. A matter of habit. Of belief. Almost religious.

And of course I had Brandt to think about too. He was just as affected, and just as determined as me. I think we fed off each other. Kept each other going

Didn't it occur to you that you were also making a choice, that you were going to bring destruction to another world just like someone did to yours?

Not really. Not at the time anyway. I didn't see it as a real world. It was the home of the Emperor, that was all I saw.

And I only really thought about Eloon in terms of my own personal loss too. It was all pretty selfish. Remember that I was from a privileged family, so I'd led a sheltered life. I didn't mix much with other kids. There were lots of people coming and going -- my family was pretty well-connected -- but they were formal acquaintances, not friends.

Remember when you were a child? Didn't you think the universe revolved around you? Well, I was still at that stage and I saw Eloon as my home. It didn't really occur to me that it was other peoples' home as well, so the loss of a planet was my loss. And I only saw the revenge on another planet as hitting at the Emperor. The other people on the planet didn't really register. If they did, it was an unfortunate evil but not important.

And all through the years, nothing caused me to challenge that idea. As I said before, my course was set. I had my goal, and it was never up for question after that.

So what changed?

I think what threw me was seeing Magentis close up. It was not how I pictured it. Of course everyone sees newscasts and stuff. All the famous views of the Palaces, the Legislature, and all the docs and histories, and the operatics set there. So everyone 'knows' what Magentis is like. I 'knew' it was a world full of strutting Imperial types, pulling all the strings to lord it over the rest of us.

And that's all real of course. It's all there. All the huge incestuous machinery of the public service, the military, the politics. But that's only one percent of reality. I had never imagined the other ninety-nine percent. The sheer ordinariness of it.

When I landed in Horliath and met up with the Insurrection cell, I was on a mission into hostile territory. What I was never prepared for was mixing with ordinary folk. The Inn at Skerrin could have been on Eloon, or Ploorbellin, or anywhere. Even in the Palace, right at the heart of the Empire, it was full of perfectly ordinary people living remarkably ordinary lives.

What about the girl on Chantry Bay?

Yes ... [long pause] ... That got me off-guard. I don't know why I hadn't seen her aboard before. Maybe she was with one of the richer passengers. Some of them pretty much stayed in their suites rather than mingle with the rabble.

But for a moment I saw myself in her. That touched me in a way I was not prepared for. I think that's what opened me up to seeing the people of Magentis for who they really were. It was like someone had opened the gates on years of denial.