What follows is a synopsis I wrote after completing the initial draft of my most recent novel, THE SORCERERS' PLAGUE, book I of my Blood of the Southlands trilogy. I wrote the synopsis because my publisher, Tor Books, asks all of its authors to submit brief outlines of their books to aid in marketing, preparation of jacket art, and other parts of the production process. This synopsis is far different from the outline I would have written prior to beginning work on the book. I always begin a project with some sense of where a book or series is going, but I don't outline to this degree of detail because, a) a lot of what I do with characters and plotlines comes to me as I write, and b) if I outline in too much detail I find that I actually stifle that organic creative process. On the other hand, had I written the book and then tried to interest an agent or editor in my work, this is very much the sort of synopsis I would have used. The synopsis in manuscript form was approximately three pages, single-spaced (six pages double spaced) not including the list of major characters included at the end.

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THE SORCERERS’ PLAGUE

Book I of Blood of the Southlands

by David B. Coe

As the book opens, a young girl is wandering alone through the wilderness on a stormy night.  Her parents and sisters have died in some unknown tragedy and the girl blames herself and others in equal measure for their deaths.  She wants nothing more than to die herself, but she hasn’t the will to take her own life.  Instead, she wanders on, searching for anyone who can help her.

Some sixty years later, we find Besh, an old Mettai man, tending his garden in the village of Kirayde.  The Mettai are Eandi sorcerers.  Unlike the Qirsi, the sorcerer race, for whom magic is as simple and natural as thought, most Eandi possess no magic.  But the Mettai are different.  Using blood magic, they are able to perform a variety of spells including those that enable them to heal, to change matter, and to conjure fire.  Their magic is not as strong as Qirsi magic, but it is considerable nevertheless.  Besh is with his grandson, Mihas, who asks him questions about Lici, an old Mettai witch and outcast who lives on the edge of the village.  Besh warns the boy away from the woman, saying that she is odd, perhaps even mad.

That same night, Lici leaves the village after loading her cart with dozens upon dozens of the fine woven baskets that she has made.  She remembers her arrival in the village sixty four years before, and her thoughts hint at some dark purpose in leaving now.

A single turn of the moons later, Lici arrives in an Y’Qatt village where she seeks to trade her baskets for food and drink.  The Y’Qatt are Qirsi, but they do not wield magic as most Qirsi do.  They believe that the god who created the Qirsi race did not intend for them to use magic, finding support for their faith in the fact that each time a Qirsi sorcerer uses magic he or she shortens his or her life by just a bit.  Lici sells several of her baskets and then leaves.  That night, a contagion sweeps through the Y’Qatt village, sickening the villagers and then causing them to lose control over their magic so that they cannot help but wield it until their power and their lives are utterly spent.  Lici watches all of this unfold from a small rise a short distance off.

Back in Kirayde, Besh and the other villagers realize that Lici is gone.  Many are happy to be rid of her.  But for years there have been rumors to the effect that Lici made so much money in her youth selling baskets that her home is filled with gold.  Now the villagers want to search her home for the treasure hidden there.  Besh is not convinced that Lici is gone for good, and though he never liked the woman, he cannot, as one of the village elders, condone the sacking of her home.  The other elders agree with him, but they also feel that they must search the woman’s home for some indication of why she left and when or if she might be returning.  Besh the village leader, a man named Pyav, search the house and do find a fair amount of gold.  They also find a journal that was kept by Sylpa, a former village leader and the woman who adopted Lici when she first came to the village as a young girl sixty-four years before.

Lici brings her baskets to another village and manages to trade several of them there before moving on.  Again, after she leaves the villagers are stricken with a strange disease

Along the eastern shores of the Southlands, in Eandi land, a ship bearing three travelers from the Forelands far to the north.  The travelers are Qirsi; one is Grinsa jal Arriet, a Weaver who helped the Eandi courts of the Forelands fight against an army of renegade Qirsi several turns before.  The second is his wife, Cresenne ja Terba, who had once been a renegade herself before turning against the leader of the Qirsi conspiracy and siding with Grinsa and the Eandi courts.  The third is their baby daughter, Bryntelle.  Upon arriving in the Southlands, they find that the Eandi here are even more hostile to their kind than were the Eandi of the Forelands.  Worse, the two races live completely apart from each other in the Southlands, so they must journey a great distance across hostile lands before finding a home here.  They manage to buy horses and food, and they begin their journey.

Back in Kirayde, Besh begins to read Sylpa’s journal, seeking clues from Lici’s mysterious past that might explain her disappearance.  He soon learns that her departure did not occur on a random day, but rather on the sixty-fourth anniversary of her arrival in the village.  In the Southlands, sixty-four is a significant number -- sixteen fours -- and this fact leads Besh to believe that the woman left with some purpose.  He continues to read the journal.

Lici is still roaming the land, bringing her strange disease to Y’Qatt villages.  A girl named Jynna lives in one of these villages -- Tivston -- and though her parents and older brothers are all stricken, she is not.  She runs north to Lowna seeking help for her people from the Qirsi who live there.  These Qirsi are of the Fal’Borna clan -- powerful warriors and skilled horsemen -- and though at first they are reluctant to help her, at last they agree to go back to her village.  When they reach Tivston they find that all the adults are dead, though a few other children have survived.  Jynna and these other children are adopted by the Fal’Borna, who begin to piece together what happened.  Eventually they will realize that the Mettai woman Jynna encountered the day the disease struck is the key to the matter.

Grinsa, Cresenne, and Bryntelle make their way through the Eandi sovereignties they must cross in order to reach Qirsi land and with the help of some traveling Qirsi merchants, they make the crossing safely.  Soon they are in Fal’Borna land.  They find a sept led by a man named E’Menua -- his title is A’Laq.  E’Menua is strong-willed and clever.  He wants Grinsa to remain in his sept because Grinsa is a Weaver, one of those Qirsi who can wield all types of Qirsi magic, and who also has the power to bind the magic of many other Qirsi into a single powerful weapon.  The more Weavers a sept has, the more powerful the sept.  In fact, Weavers are so important to the Fal’Borna, that they are expected to marry only other Weavers.  E’Menua does not recognize Grinsa’s marriage to Cresenne and wants Grinsa to marry a Fal’Borna Weaver.  Grinsa acknowledges that he is powerless to leave the sept if E’Menua and his other Weavers refuses to let the Forelanders leave, but he insists that E’Menua recognize Cresenne as Grinsa’s wife.  The A’Laq agrees, for the time being.

Lici reaches a large Y’Qatt settlement called C’Bijor’s Neck.  There, she sells many of her baskets in the marketplace, but not enough of them.  At last she manages to sell the rest of what she’s carried with her this day to an Y’Qatt peddler.  This peddler, in turn, sells the baskets to an Eandi merchant named Torgan Plye.  Torgan is an experienced trader who sees Lici’s baskets and appreciates their high quality and beauty.  He intends to sell them throughout the Southlands.  But that night, after leaving C’Bijor’s Neck and making camp on the plain, he watches in horror as the city is consumed in Qirsi flames.  He flees the area, thinking perhaps that marauders have destroyed the city.  Eventually he comes to the sept of a Fal’Borna man named S’Plaed.  There he hears that C’Bijor’s Neck was not destroyed by raiders, but rather by an outbreak of a strain of pestilence that effects Qirsi oddly.  Thinking that he just barely escaped the Neck with his life, Torgan sells all of his baskets in S’Plaed’s sept and quickly leaves.  That night the sept is struck by the same pestilence that wiped out C’Bijor’s Neck.  Torgan learns from another Eandi merchant, Jasha Ziffel, that the Fal’Borna blame him for what has befallen them and have declared him an enemy of the clan -- a virtual death sentence.

Besh finally finds the passage in Sylpa’s journal that he has been seeking.  Lici it seems, came from a Mettai village that was struck by the pestilence.  Her parents sent her to find help in a nearby Qirsi village.  But she went the wrong way and wound up in an Y’Qatt village instead.  When she pleaded with the Y’Qatt for help, thinking that since they were Qirsi they could use their healing magic to help her people, they refused telling her that they were Y’Qatt, that the pestilence was a danger to them.  Not understanding, she continued to plead her case, until the Y’Qatt told her that if she didn’t leave their village immediately they would have no choice but to kill her.  When she returned to her village her family, and everyone else, had died.  Word has recently reached Besh’s village of pestilence outbreaks in Y’Qatt villages just north of Kirayde.  Besh realizes that these outbreaks are Lici’s doing and he immediately resolves to go in search of the woman in order to stop her from spreading her contagion any further.  His daughter’s husband, Sirj, accompanies him.

Torgan and Jasha are found by warriors from E’Menua’s sept.  E’Menua has received word from S’Plaed of the disease and his suspicion that Torgan brought it to his people.  E’Menua intends to have Torgan and his companion put to death, but Torgan insists that he has done nothing wrong, and Grinsa, struck by the injustice of putting the men to death without proof of their guilt, argues for their lives.  Eventually Torgan tells them about the Mettai woman whose baskets he had been selling and E’Menua agrees to spare the men if Grinsa will take them to hunt this woman down.  Grinsa agrees, but insists that if they succeed, he, Cresenne, and Bryntelle must be allowed to leave the sept.  E’Menua counters that if he fails, Grinsa must marry a Weaver and remain in the sept for the rest of his life.  Cresenne and Grinsa decide that they have little choice and that this is their best chance to win their freedom.  Grinsa agrees and he goes in search of the woman, accompanied by the two Eandi merchants and one of E’Menua’s Weavers.

Lici, while traveling by the ruins of the village that was her first home, sells the rest of her poisoned baskets to an Eandi trader who then takes tells her that he will take them to the Fal’Borna rather than to other Y’Qatt villages.  She tells him that he can’t do this, but he doesn’t listen and he leaves her.  She has a mental breakdown and is still wandering around the ruins of her village when Besh and Sirj arrive there.  They subdue her, learn of the plans of this Eandi merchant to sell her diseased baskets to the Qirsi, and immediately go out in search of the man.

Thus ends book I of Blood of the Southlands.

Main Characters:

Kirayde (a Mettai village in the northern reaches of Stelpana):

Besh, an old Mettai man

Ema, Besh’s wife, now deceased

Elica, his daughter

Sirj, Elica’s husband

Mihas, Sirj and Elica’s elder son

Annze, Sirj and Elica’s daughter

Cam, Sirj and Elica’s younger son

Pyav, head of the village’s Council of Elders, addressed as ‘Eldest’

Lici, an old Mettai woman

Sylpa, Lici’s foster mother, now deceased

Lowna (a Fal’Borna village on the Companion Lakes):

S’Doryn, a Qirsi man

N’Tevva, S’Doryn’s wife

T’Noth, a Qirsi man, friend of S’Doryn and N’Tevva

T’Kaar, a Qirsi man, brother of T’Noth

U’Selle, A’Laq (leader) of the village

Jynna, an Y’Qatt girl, orphaned by the pestilence and adopted by S’Doryn and N’Tevva

On the Plains of the Fal’Borna:

Grinsa jal Arriett, a Qirsi man, originally from the Forelands

Cresenne ja Terba, Grinsa’s wife,

Bryntelle ja Grinsa, Grinsa and Cresenne’s daughter

S’Plaed, A’Laq of a Fal’Borna sept in the northern reaches of the plain

Torgan Plye, an Eandi merchant

Jasha Ziffel, an Eandi merchant

E’Menua, A’Laq of a Fal’Borna sept in the central plain

Q’Daer, a Weaver in E’Menua’s sept