The Element of Fire
By Martha Wells
Berham leaned back on the rope to test it. “That’s it, Captain Sir. Tight as may be,” the servant whispered.
“Well done,” Thomas Boniface told him. He stepped back from the wall and looked down the alley. “Now where in hell is Dr. Braun?”
“He’s coming,” Gideon Townsend, Thomas’s lieutenant, said as he made his way toward them out of the heavy shadows. Reaching them, he glanced up at the full moon, stark white against the backdrop of wind-driven rain clouds, and muttered, “Not the best night for this work.” The three men stood in the muddy alley, the dark brocades and soft wools of their doublets and breeches blending into the grimy stones and shadow, moonlight catching only the pale lace at the wrists or shirt collars of Thomas and his lieutenant, the glint of an earring, or the cold metal sheen on rapiers and wheellock pistol barrels. It was a cool night and they were surrounded by failed counting houses and the crumbling elegance of the decaying once-wealthy homes of the River Quarter.
Thomas personally couldn’t think of a good time to forcibly invade a foreign sorcerer’s house. “The point of it is to go and be killed where you’re told,” he said. “Is everyone in position?”
“Martin and Castero are up on the tannery roof, watching the street and the other alley. I put Gaspard and two others at the back of the house and left the servants to watch the horses. The rest are across the street, waiting for the signal,” Gideon answered, his blue eyes deceptively guileless. “We’re all quite ready to go and be killed where we’re told.”
“Good,” Thomas said. He knew Gideon was still young enough to see this as a challenge, to care nothing for the political reality that sent them on a mission as deadly as this with so little support.
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Martha Wells
Martha Wells (born September 1, 1964) is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has published several fantasy novels, young adult novels, media tie-ins, short stories, and nonfiction essays on fantasy and science fiction subjects. Her novels have been translated into twelve languages. Wells has won four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, and three Locus Awards for her science fiction series The Murderbot Diaries. She is also known for her fantasy series Ile-Rien and The Books of the Raksura. Wells is praised for the complex, realistically detailed societies she creates; this is often credited to her academic background in anthropology.
Life
Martha Wells was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and has a B.A. in Anthropology from Texas A&M University. She lives in College Station, Texas, with her husband. She was involved in SF/F fandom in college and was chairman of AggieCon 17. In May 2023, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Career
As an aspiring writer Wells attended many local writing workshops and conventions, including the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop taught by Bruce Sterling. She has also taught writing workshops at ArmadilloCon, WorldCon, ApolloCon, and Writespace Houston, and was the Special Workshop Guest at FenCon in 2018.
Her first published novel, The Element of Fire (1993), was a finalist for that year’s Compton Crook Award, and a runner-up for the 1994 William Crawford Award. Her second novel, City of Bones (1995), received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and a black diamond review from Kirkus Reviews, and was on the 1995 Locus Recommended Reading List for fantasy. Her third novel, The Death of the Necromancer (1998), was nominated for a Nebula Award. The Element of Fire and The Death of the Necromancer are stand-alone novels that take place in the country of Ile-Rien, which is also the setting for the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy: The Wizard Hunters (2003), The Ships of Air (2004), and The Gate of Gods (2005). Her fourth novel was a stand-alone fantasy, Wheel of the Infinite. In 2006, she released a revised edition of The Element of Fire.
She has written media tie-ins, including Reliquary and Entanglement set in the Stargate Atlantis universe, “Archaeology 101”, a short story based on Stargate SG-1 for issue No. 8 (Jan/Feb 2006) of the official Stargate Magazine, and a Star Wars novel, Empire and Rebellion: Razor’s Edge.[12]
Her fantasy short stories include “The Potter’s Daughter” in the anthology Elemental (2006), which was selected to appear in The Year’s Best Fantasy #7 (2007).[13] This story features one of the main characters from The Element of Fire. Three prequel short stories to the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy were published in Black Gate Magazine in 2007[14][15] and 2008.[16]
Wells’ longest-running fantasy series is The Books of the Raksura, which included five novels and two short fiction collections published by Night Shade Books: The Cloud Roads (2011), The Serpent Sea (2012), The Siren Depths (2012), Stories of the Raksura Vol 1: The Falling World & The Tale of Indigo and Cloud (2014), Stories of the Raksura Vol 2: The Dead City & The Dark Earth Below (2015), The Edge of Worlds (2016), and The Harbors of the Sun (2017). The series was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2018,[17] and The Edge of Worlds was reviewed in The New York Times.[18]
Wells has written two young adult fantasy novels, Emilie and the Hollow World and Emilie and the Sky World, published by Angry Robot/Strange Chemistry in 2013 and 2014.[19]
Martha Wells
