After spending much of his life putting people behind bars, a veteran L.A. County sheriff's deputy stood in handcuffs Thursday, charged with gunning down a former neighbor who apparently got into a fight with his son.
Francisco Gamez, 41, is accused of shooting Armando "Cookie" Casillas, a well-known figure in his blue-collar neighborhood in Sylmar.
Gamez was off duty, sitting in his car, when he allegedly fired two shots on the night of June 17, killing Casillas and narrowly missing a second man, prosecutors said.
Gamez, a 17-year veteran who worked as a detective in West Hollywood, was allegedly furious over a fight between his 20-year-old son and Casillas, 38, prosecutors said. The younger Gamez had called his father to the scene, authorities said.
Casillas was later found by relatives lying near his home, and died later at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center.
Gamez was removed from duty in July after witnesses and evidence tied the detective to the slaying, authorities said. He was arrested Wednesday and led handcuffed from his San Fernando home by his former co-workers.
On Thursday he was formally charged with murder, attempted murder and discharging a firearm from an occupied vehicle. Gamez could face 75 years to life in prison if convicted of all charges.
In court, where he stood handcuffed in a plexiglass cage, sheriff's deputies peeked into the room to gawk at their former colleague. Sheriff Lee Baca described the whole thing as "deeply disturbing."
Gamez is being held on $4-million bail.
On Beaver Street in Sylmar, where the shooting occurred, Casillas' photo sat in a frame in the midst of a makeshift memorial, along with a cross and a potted plant with U.S. and Mexican flags and candles.
"He was a sweetheart, and very generous," said Patsy Telles-Cabrera, who lived across the street from Casillas for years. "He would check in on my parents." She left a box of chocolates at the growing shrine.
"It never should have happened," said one neighbor. "This is a family neighborhood."
sam.quinones@latimes.com
richard.winton@latimes.com
Times staff writer Wesley Lowery contributed to this report.
Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.
SPOILER WARNING: We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!
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TODAY’S PUZZLE:
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Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."
Awilda Jimenez got a scan for Alzheimer’s after she started forgetting things. It was positive.
When Awilda Jimenez started forgetting things last year, her husband, Edwin, felt a shiver of dread. Her mother had developed Alzheimer’s in her 50s. Could his wife, 61, have it, too?
He learned there was a new brain scan to diagnose the disease and nervously agreed to get her one, secretly hoping it would lay his fears to rest. In June, his wife became what her doctor says is the first private patient in Arizona to have the test.
“The scan was floridly positive,” said her doctor, Adam S. Fleisher, director of brain imaging at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix.
The Jimenezes have struggled ever since to deal with this devastating news. They are confronting a problem of the new era of Alzheimer’s research: The ability to detect the disease has leapt far ahead of treatments. There are none that can stop or even significantly slow the inexorable progression to dementia and death.
Families like the Jimenezes, with no good options, can only ask: Should they live their lives differently, get their affairs in order, join a clinical trial of an experimental drug?
“I was hoping the scan would be negative,” Mr. Jimenez said. “When I found out it was positive, my heart sank.”
The new brain scan technology, which went on the market in June, is spreading fast. There are already more than 300 hospitals and imaging centers, located in most major metropolitan areas, that are ready to perform the scans, according to Eli Lilly, which sells the tracer used to mark plaque for the scan.
The scans show plaques in the brain — barnaclelike clumps of protein, beta amyloid — that, together with dementia, are the defining feature of Alzheimer’s disease. Those who have dementia but do not have excessive plaques do not have Alzheimer’s. It is no longer necessary to wait until the person dies and has an autopsy to learn if the brain was studded with plaques.
Many insurers, including Medicare, will not yet pay for the new scans, which cost several thousand dollars. And getting one comes with serious risks. While federal law prevents insurers and employers from discriminating based on genetic tests, it does not apply to scans. People with brain plaques can be denied long-term care insurance.
The Food and Drug Administration, worried about interpretations of the scans, has required something new: Doctors must take a test showing they can read them accurately before they begin doing them. So far, 700 doctors have qualified, according to Eli Lilly. Other kinds of diagnostic scans have no such requirement.
In another unusual feature, the F.D.A. requires that radiologists not be told anything about the patient. They are generally trained to incorporate clinical information into their interpretation of other types of scans, said Dr. R. Dwaine Rieves, director of the drug agency’s Division of Medical Imaging Products.
But in this case, clinical information may lead radiologists to inadvertently shade their reports to coincide with what doctors suspect is the underlying disease. With Alzheimer’s, Dr. Rieves said, “clinical impressions have been misleading.”
“This is a big change in the world of image interpretation,” he said.
Like some other Alzheimer’s experts, Dr. Fleisher used the amyloid scan for several years as part of a research study that led to its F.D.A. approval. Subjects were not told what the scans showed. Now, with the scan on the market, the rules have changed.
Dr. Fleisher’s first patient was Mrs. Jimenez. Her husband, the family breadwinner, had lost his job as a computer consultant when the couple moved from New York to Arizona to take care of Mrs. Jimenez’s mother. Paying several thousand dollars for a scan was out of the question. But Dr. Fleisher found a radiologist, Dr. Mantej Singh Sra of Sun Radiology, who was so eager to get into the business that he agreed to do Mrs. Jimenez’s scan free. His plan was to be the first in Arizona to do a scan, and advertise it.
After Dr. Sra did the scan, the Jimenezes returned to Dr. Fleisher to learn the result.
Dr. Fleisher, sad to see so much plaque in Mrs. Jimenez’s brain, referred her to a psychiatrist to help with anxiety and suggested she enter clinical trials of experimental drugs.
But Mr. Jimenez did not like that idea. He worried about unexpected side effects.
“Tempting as it is, where do you draw the line?” he asks. “At what point do you take a risk with a loved one?”
At Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, Dr. Samuel E. Gandy found that his patients — mostly affluent — were unfazed by the medical center’s $3,750 price for the scan. He has been ordering at least one a week for people with symptoms ambiguous enough to suggest the possibility of brain plaques.
Most of his patients want their names kept confidential, fearing an inability to get long-term care insurance, or just wanting privacy.
A veteran Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy was arrested Wednesday for allegedly shooting and killing a man in Sylmar while off-duty in June, authorities said.
The deputy, Francisco Gamez, 41, has been with the department for 17 years and was last working as a station detective in West Hollywood.
Law enforcement sources told The Times that the deputy's son got into a dispute with another person. The son, they said, called his father to the scene. The deputy allegedly drove up soon after and exchanged words before opening fire from inside his car, striking one man, the sources said.
He then allegedly drove a short distance before shooting at a second person, added the sources, who asked for anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
That person was not injured, according to authorities.
The other victim, Armando Casillas, 38, was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead from a gunshot wound to the chest just before midnight on June 17.
FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article misspelled the victim's first name as Armondo.
Neighbors said Gamez and Casillas lived a block apart.
In August, a person who identified himself as the victim's brother commented on the website of the Los Angeles Times, saying he suspected a deputy was responsible.
"We think he is a L.A. COUNTY SHERIFF," the comment stated. "The reason we think he is a Sheriff is that he shouted to my Brother "L.A. COUNTY SHERIFF WHERE YOU FROM" as if the sheriff was in a gang."
The person who wrote the comment could not be reached Wednesday evening.
At the time of the killing, authorities said the victim got into an argument with an unknown person. At some point, the other person left the area only to return and shoot Casillas in a drive-by, authorities said then. Now they are saying that the shooter was not the same person who initially got into the argument.
LAPD officers arrested Gamez on suspicion of murder, attempted murder and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony. He was booked into the LAPD's 77th Street station Wednesday in lieu of $4-million bail, officials said. He has not been charged.
Casillas' sister said that the family was thankful for the arrest, but that they were not prepared to discuss the events that led to the fatal shooting.
In a statement, Sheriff Lee Baca called the incident "deeply disturbing."
His spokesman Steve Whitmore said the department placed Gamez on leave July 3 after learning from the LAPD about the investigation.
"He's been stripped of all law enforcement power," Whitmore said. "It casts a pall over the scores and scores of deputy sheriffs that every day do their job."
robert.faturechi@latimes.com
richard.winton@latimes.com
Times staff writer Andrew Blankstein contributed to this report.
Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.
SPOILER WARNING: We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!
Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.
And now, without further ado, we give you…
TODAY’S PUZZLE:
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Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."
(Reuters) – Rock star Jon Bon Jovi‘s daughter was arrested in New York state on Wednesday on drug possession charges following a suspected heroin overdose, local police said.
Stephanie Bongiovi, 19, was found unresponsive in a dormitory room at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York from an alleged overdose and taken to a local medical facility, according to the Town of Kirkland Police Department.
Heroin and marijuana were found in the dorm room during a search, police said.
Bongiovi was later booked on misdemeanor charges of possession of a controlled substance (heroin), marijuana possession and criminal use of drug paraphernalia. She has since been released, police said.
Representatives of the singer declined to comment.
Police said Ian S. Grant, 21, a student who was in the same room as Bongiovi, was also charged with possession of a controlled substance (heroin) and later released. Both Bongiovi and Grant will appear in court at a later date.
Hamilton College declined to comment on the arrests or Bongiovi’s health but said it is cooperating with the police investigation.
Bongiovi is the oldest of four children of rocker Bon Jovi and his wife, Dorothea Hurley.
(Reporting By Eric Kelsey and Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Kenneth Barry)
LONDON — It was 2004, and the British Broadcasting Corporation was gripped by a crisis over journalistic standards that had led to Parliamentary hearings, public recrimination and the resignations of its two top officials. Vowing change, the corporation established elaborate bureaucratic procedures that placed more formal responsibility for delicate decisions in the hands not of individual managers, but of rigid hierarchies.
The corporation also appointed a deputy director general in charge of news operations; established a “journalism board” to monitor editorial policy; issued numerous new guidelines on journalistic procedures; and put an increasing emphasis on “compliance” — a system in which managers are required to file cumbersome forms flagging dozens of potential trouble spots, from bad language to “disturbing content” like exorcism or beheadings, in every program taped for broadcast.
More crises would follow — the history of the BBC can be measured out in crises — and with each new one, the management team under Mark Thompson, director general from 2004 through mid-September 2012, added more guidelines and put more emphasis on form-filling and safety checks in news and entertainment programs. An organization already known for its bureaucracy became even more unwieldy (the editorial guidelines are now 215 pages long).
But it is these very structures that seem to have failed the BBC in the most recent scandal, in which its news division first canceled a child abuse segment it should have broadcast, and later broadcast one it should have canceled. In the first instance, it appears that people overseeing the program were too cautious, so that top managers were left unaware of its existence; in the second, managers may have relied too much on rigid procedures at the expense of basic journalistic principles.
“They burned their fingers,” said Tim Luckhurst, a journalism professor at the University of Kent who worked at the BBC for 10 years. “They wanted systems that could take responsibility instead of people.”
The recent scandal has had a number of immediate results. Mr. Thompson’s successor as director general, George Entwistle, resigned after just 54 days on the job. (Mr. Thompson is now president and chief executive of The New York Times Company.) Outside investigators were appointed to interrogate BBC employees in at least three different inquiries. A number of lower- and midlevel managers had to withdraw temporarily from their jobs and, facing possible disciplinary action, hired lawyers. And, once again, the BBC is talking about reorganizing structures.
Through a spokesman, Mr. Entwistle declined to comment on the scandal or the BBC’s management practices, saying he was “not doing any media interviews at present.” Mr. Thompson also declined to comment.
But Mr. Entwistle’s temporary successor, Tim Davie, who had previously been director of BBC Audio & Music, acknowledged that changes had to be made. “If the public are going to get journalism they trust from the BBC I have to be, as director general, very clear on who’s running the news operation and ensuring that journalism that we put out passes muster,” Mr. Davie said in his first week on the job. The first thing to do, he said, was to “take action and build trust by putting a clear line of command in.”
This is a complicated scandal in two parts. The first part was over the BBC’s decision last December not to broadcast a report saying that Jimmy Savile, a longtime BBC television host, had been a serial child molester, and instead to broadcast several glowing tributes to his career. The second part was its decision on Nov. 2 to accuse a member of Margaret Thatcher’s government of being a pedophile, an accusation that turned out to be patently false.
But both exposed the problems in a system that seems to insulate the BBC’s director general — who is also the editor in chief — from knowledge of basic issues like what potentially contentious programs are scheduled for broadcast. And both decisions were the result, it seems, of a system that failed in practice, even as it was correctly followed in theory.
Ben Bradshaw, a former BBC correspondent and now a Labour member of Parliament, said the 2004 scandal, touched off by reporting about British intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, had created a system based on “fear and anxiety.” The BBC, he added, became “even more bureaucratic and had even more layers, which exacerbated the problem of buck passing and no one being able to take a decision.”
Speaking of the Nov. 2 broadcast, the chairman of the BBC Trust, Chris Patten, said in a television interview that the piece went through “every damned layer of BBC management bureaucracy, legal checks” without anyone raising any serious objections.
Matthew Purdy contributed reporting from New York, and Lark Turner from London.
JOINT BASE LEWIS MCCHORD, Wash. — The case against U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales appeared at first to be horribly simple: Days after a bomb blew off the leg of a friend in southern Afghanistan, the 39-year-old combat veteran picked up his rifle, a pistol and a grenade launcher, walked to two villages and allegedly conducted a one-man campaign of vengeance, killing 16 civilians and wounding six more.
But by the time a weeklong hearing wound up Tuesday in a military courtroom, one of the Army's highest-profile war crimes from Afghanistan raised almost as many questions as it answered.
If Bales acted alone, why were shots heard coming from one of the villages 20 minutes after he was spottedreturning to the base for the first time?
Why was a witness who claimed to have seen two U.S. soldiers killing her husband while helicopters flew overhead not brought in to testify?
Why were the crime scenes so very different — at one house, a surgical execution of the head of the family, while at the next house, 11 men, women and children were shot and possibly stabbed, their bodies piled in a heap and burned?
The Article 32 hearing, held to determine whether there was evidence to hold the serviceman for a court-martial, drew a portrait not just of a rogue soldier, defense lawyers said. It revealed a U.S. combat outpost at which soldiers spent their evenings drinking alcohol, snorting Valium and taking steroids, all three of which Bales apparently had done before asking a friend to "take care of my kids" and setting out into the darkness outside the base perimeter, laughing.
"We have a dysfunctional, drinking and drugging … team," civilian defense lawyer Emma Scanlan said in her closing argument.
"We can't isolate Sgt. Bales within a bubble," Scanlan said, noting that he was under the supervision of Special Forces officers. "They are the command. They are in charge. And they are terrible at it."
Army prosecutors claimBales acted alone and with chilling rationality: walking to the village of Alkozai, where he is accused of killing four people and wounding six, coming back to the base and telling a friend what he had done, then venturing out again to the village of Najiban, where he is accused of killing 12.
When Bales returned to Camp Belambay the second time, he admitted to friends he had done some "sick" things, and told them they would thank him when fighting season got underway again during warmer weather later in the spring, saidprosecutor Maj. Robert Stelle.
"Terrible, terrible things happened. That is clear. The second thing that is clear is that Staff Sgt. Bales did it," Stelle said.
He urged investigating officer Col. Lee Deneke to recommend a full court-martial and that it be tried as a capital case, with the possibility of the death penalty. Bales committed "the worst, most despicable crime a human being can commit: murdering children in their own homes," Stelle said.
If Deneke recommends a court-martial, a lengthy process of mental health evaluations and further forensic reports will follow. Defense lawyers have pledged there will be a full exploration of the medical care Bales received at the Madigan Army Medical Center for an earlier traumatic brain injury.
The hospital south of Seattle was the subject of an investigation this year for tossing aside diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder, making it harder for those soldiers to receive follow-up medical care.
In the year before the shootings, Scanlan said, Bales had received an exemplary evaluation, in which he waspraised for "a strong moral compass, never wavering from what was right."
What went wrong?
Scanlan suggested part of the answer might lie in the steroids and sleep aids Bales was taking, along with the Jack Daniels he drank with two friends on the evening before the killings as they watched "Man on Fire," a movie about a former CIA operative who executes a violent campaign of revenge.
"They drank a ton, and they were all drunk," Scanlan said, noting that testimony showed that one ofthe soldiers who'd been drinking with Bales that night, Cpl. David Godwin, was stumbling, slurring his words and smelled like alcohol four hours later.
The prosecution said Bales had plenty of time to reach both villages and return at the end of the night with his clothing and weapons covered in blood. Before he left, prosecutorssaid, he had discussed his frustration with the Army's lack of response to the bomb thatblew off his friend'sleg; after his arrest, he reminded one soldier of an Afghan machine gunner the unit had faced earlier.
"That's not going to happen again," Bales said, according to Staff Sgt. Ross O'Rourke.
Prosecutors also established that DNA from at least one of the women killed at the home of Haji Mohammed Wazir in Najiban was found on Bales' clothing.
Yet defense lawyers continue to raise questions about whether Bales was the only one responsible — whether one person could have killed so many people in so many locations in one night.
A lot of the evidence suggests otherwise, Scanlan said, pointing to an agent from the Army's Criminal Investigations Command who said that Masuma Dawood, whose husband was shot, told her that two soldiers had killed her husband.
Army officials saidDawood did not testify because of "cultural differences," and the reluctance of Afghan families to allow a woman to testify in an American courtroom, even by remote video from Afghanistan. But sources in Afghanistan have told the Los Angeles Times that Dawood was, in fact, willing to testify.
Scanlan said the timeline laid out by prosecutors also raises questions, beginning with the Afghan guard who testified that he checked his watch, and was certain that the U.S. soldier he saw — returning from the initial killings in Alkozai, prosecutors allege — had returned to Camp Belambay at 1:30 a.m.
The shots heard from the direction of Alkozai didn't stop till 1:50 a.m.,the defense attorney said.
"I don't know what that means," Scanlan said. "But one thing it means is, if you believe what the government is telling you, that Sgt. Bales is the one who came back through that wire at 1:30, then somebody else was firing for another 20 minutes."
You would if you read Mad Science: Einstein’s Fridge, Dewar’s Flask, Mach’s Speed, and 362 Other Inventions and Discoveries That Made Our World, the new Wired book that exposes you to the history of the ideas, creations, discoveries and events that shaped our wired world — one day at a time.
Based on our popular This Day in Tech blog, and edited by yours truly, Mad Science is the best of the best: forty of Wired.com’s finest writers chronicling hundreds of years of “aha” moments that affect our daily lives, from the traffic signal to the ATM to the microwave oven.
Did you know that a Florida doctor invented mechanical refrigeration to help his patients recover from tropical fevers? Did you know that Einstein invented his own fridge, and after 80 years his design might finally go into production?
You think a light bulb went off in Edison’s head when he invented the light bulb? Hardly: It took him and his staff of “muckers” 14 months and 1,200 experiments to find the suitable materials for a filament. And after all that, he might not have been the bulb’s first inventor?
What did Alexander Graham Bell really say to Mr. Watson? And who invented the Xerox machine? The bandaid? The container ship? What about the traffic signal and the shopping cart, let alone the transistor and the microchip?
Folks lined up around the block in New York City in 1945 to pay to buy the latest technological wonder: a ballpoint pen! And they paid the equivalent of $150 in today’s money.
And the most important question of all: What happened on your birthday?
I’ve been working on this project for two years, and I’m proud of the result. This is a book for readers who like to graze a book’s small plates or bite-size nibbles, nonfiction readers, science-fiction readers, people who browse almanacs, people who surf the dictionary, because one word just leads to another. And it’s great for people who read while they’re sitting down in the smallest room in the house.
It’s a book for techies, science nerds, science wiz kids, gearheads, gamers, and people who are just plain curious about the world they live in. I think it’s a great gift for a techie parent, spouse, sibling, child, friend or sweetheart, when you can’t give them hardware or software because you don’t know whether they need it, use it, already have it, or if it’s compatible with what they’ve got. They don’t have this book. I think they’ll love it.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Liza Minnelli will guest star on an episode of TV musical drama “Smash,” NBC said on Tuesday.
The singer and actress will play herself and sing a number in one episode of the show when it returns in February 2013. The series, starring Debra Messing, Anjelica Huston and Katharine McPhee, dramatizes the backstage life of writers, producers and actors working to create a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe.
“Liza Minnelli is the essence of a multi-talented, singular show business sensation, particularly for her extraordinary contributions to Broadway,” Robert Greenblatt, the president of NBC Entertainment, said in a statement.
“So what could be more fitting than to have her legendary talent on a show that celebrates a world Liza has dazzled for decades?” he added
The daughter of director Vincente Minnelli and Hollywood legend Judy Garland, Minnelli, 66, is one of a handful of stars to have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and Tony award.
She is best-known for her portrayal of Sally Bowles in the musical “Cabaret.” She is also expected to revive her role as Lucille on the upcoming fourth season of “Arrested Development,” which is slated to air on Netflix after being canceled by Fox in 2006.
NBC has moved the second season of “Smash” from Monday to Tuesday night, starting on February 5, 2013.
(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; editing by Jill Serjeant and Matthew Lewis)
Eggplant is always a good, substantial vegetable to use for a vegetarian main dish. The chickpeas and the feta provide plenty of protein. Vegans can leave out the feta and substitute sugar or agave nectar for the honey.
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 28-ounce can chopped tomatoes, with juice, pulsed to a coarse purée
1 teaspoon mild honey (more to taste)
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, to taste
Salt to taste
1 large or 2 medium eggplants (about 1 1/4 pounds), cut into 1/3-inch-thick slices
3 cups cooked chickpeas (2 cans, drained and rinsed, or, 1 1/2 cups dried – about 3/4 pound
4 ounces feta, crumbled (3/4 cup)
1 teaspoon dried oregano, preferably Greek or Turkish
1. Make the tomato sauce. Heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in a heavy skillet or wide saucepan over medium heat, and add the garlic. Cook, stirring, until it smells fragrant, about 30 seconds, and add the tomatoes, honey, salt to taste and cinnamon. Cook over medium heat until the tomatoes have cooked down and the sauce is fragrant, about 20 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings.
2. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 425 degrees. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and brush the boil with olive oil. Place the eggplant slices on the baking sheet, salt lightly and brush with olive oil. Place in the oven and bake 20 minutes, or until eggplant is lightly browned and soft all the way through. Remove from the heat. Fold the aluminum foil over and crimp the edges together so that the eggplant steams as it cools. Do this in batches if you need more than one baking sheet. Turn the oven down to 350 degrees.
3. Oil a 2-quart baking dish or gratin. Place the chickpeas in the baking dish and stir in 1 cup of the tomato sauce. Layer the eggplant over the chickpeas and top with the remaining tomato sauce. Sprinkle the feta over the top and drizzle on any remaining olive oil. Sprinkle with the oregano and cover tightly with foil. Bake 30 minutes. Uncover and bake another 10 minutes, until the dish is bubbling.
Yield: 6 servings
Advance preparation: The eggplant slices can be cooked up to a day ahead. Hold in the refrigerator, covered. The tomato sauce will keep for 3 days in the refrigerator and freezes well.
Nutritional information per serving: 366 calories; 16 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 8 grams monounsaturated fat; 17 milligrams cholesterol; 44 grams carbohydrates; 14 grams dietary fiber; 431 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 15 grams protein
Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health
On a warm night in late October, Steven Sinofsky stood on a platform in New York’s Times Square, smiling as a huge crowd roared at the unveiling of a Microsoft retail store, where Windows 8 and the company’s new Surface tablet were about to go on sale.
Less than three weeks later, Mr. Sinofsky — who, as the head of Windows, was arguably the second-most important leader at Microsoft — suddenly left the company. His abrasive style was a source of discord within Microsoft, and he and Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, agreed that it was time for him to leave, according to a person briefed on the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly about it.
Mr. Sinofsky was widely admired for his effectiveness in running one of the biggest and most important software development organizations on the planet. But his departure, which Microsoft announced late on Monday, parallels in many respects that of Scott Forstall, the headstrong former head of Apple’s mobile software development, who was fired by Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, in late October.
Both cases underscore a quandary that chief executives sometimes face: when do the costs of keeping brilliant leaders who cannot seem to get along with others outweigh the benefits?
The tipping point that led to Mr. Sinofsky’s departure came after an accumulation of run-ins with Mr. Ballmer and other company leaders, rather than a single incident, according to interviews with several current and former Microsoft executives who declined to be named discussing internal matters.
One example of the kind of behavior that hurt Mr. Sinofsky’s standing at the company occurred this year at a two-day retreat for Microsoft’s senior executives at the Semiahmoo resort on the coast just below the Canadian border in Washington State. At the meeting, Microsoft’s various division heads were expected to make presentations on their businesses, answer questions and remain to hear their peers repeat the exercise.
When Mr. Sinofsky stood on the first day to speak about the Windows division, he told the group he had not prepared a presentation, and if they wanted to catch up on the progress of Windows 8, they could read his company blog, where he publicly chronicled the software’s development. He answered questions from the audience and then left the resort, while his colleagues remained until the next day, according to multiple people who were present.
Mr. Sinofsky’s early exit and halfhearted presentation were widely noted by his colleagues, irking even his admirers in the company. “He lost a lot of support,” one attendee said.
It wasn’t until this Monday, though, that Mr. Sinofsky and Mr. Ballmer both decided it would be best if Mr. Sinofsky left. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, supported the move, a person briefed on the matter said. Mr. Sinofsky served as a technical assistant to Mr. Gates in the 1990s.
In an e-mail to Microsoft employees, Mr. Sinofsky said the decision to leave “was a personal and private choice.” Many surprised Microsoft insiders noted that Mr. Sinofsky’s departure was immediate, an unusual arrangement for someone with a 23-year track record at the company. A Microsoft spokesman, Frank Shaw, said Mr. Sinofsky was not available to comment.
Although Mr. Ballmer grew increasingly impatient with Mr. Sinofsky throughout the year, he held back from taking any action earlier to avoid disrupting the release of Windows 8, the most important product Microsoft has unveiled in years, a person with knowledge of his thinking said.
The final decision could not have come lightly. Although many people at Microsoft viewed him as a ruthless corporate schemer, Mr. Sinofsky ran the highly complex organization responsible for Windows as a disciplined army that met deadlines, and he was respected by people on his team.
He achieved hero status within Microsoft several years ago by taking over the leadership of Windows after the debacle that was Windows Vista, a much-delayed operating system whose sluggish performance and technical problems worsened Microsoft’s reputation for mediocre software. Mr. Sinfosky led the development of a new version of the operating system, Windows 7, which was positively reviewed and sold well.
“He did great things with Windows,” said Michael Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s still the core of the company.”
But while Mr. Sinofsky was effective, Mr. Cusumano said, he could be secretive and difficult to get along with, as he learned while dealing with Mr. Sinofsky while Mr. Cusumano was writing a book on Microsoft in the early 1990s. “I could imagine that he burned a lot of bridges and created a bunch of enemies,” he said.
SACRAMENTO — An $11-million campaign donation that was secretly routed through an obscure Arizona group might have hurt the conservative effort in California on election day more than it helped, Republican operatives say.
The money went to oppose Gov. Jerry Brown's tax hikes, Proposition 30, and push a ballot measure to curb unions' political fundraising, Proposition 32. Voters approved the governor's tax plan and rejected the proposal to reduce labor's influence in California politics.
Some people behind the conservative campaigns now have second thoughts about the money's effect.
"At the end of the day, it was a significant distraction that took us off our campaign message," said Beth Miller, a spokeswoman for the Small Business Action Committee, which received the controversial $11 million.
Brown attacked the donation during many of his stump speeches, accusing "shadowy forces" of trying to undermine California's schools. If his tax plan failed, nearly $6 billion would have been cut from the budget, mostly from public schools.
Members of Brown's campaign team said the donation was something of a political gift. "They gave us the issue while hitting us in the nose," said Sean Clegg, a campaign advisor.
The furor over the money became one of the most closely watched sideshows in the final days before the Nov. 6 election.
State authorities sued the Arizona group, Americans for Responsible Leadership. The nonprofit group eventually named its contributors, but the mystery only deepened — the contributors were identified only as other nonprofits, which keep their donors secret.
Aaron McLear, a Republican strategist who worked against the tax plan, said Brown was successful in turning the controversy into a campaign issue.
"He was able to create a bigger boogeyman than Sacramento politicians, which is hard to do," he said.
Despite the $11-million cash infusion, conservatives still didn't have the money to match the Democrats and labor unions. Brown's campaign outspent its opponents, and unions flooded the airwaves to help sink Proposition 32.
Americans for Responsible Leadership did not admit any wrongdoing when it disclosed its contributors as other nonprofits. One of them, also located in Arizona, has been tied to Charles and David Koch, billionaire energy executives and Republican donors.
California officials are pushing forward with an investigation into who gave the money and are considering civil and criminal penalties for what they called "campaign money laundering."
"It ain't over," state Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris said in a recent speech. "It wasn't over on election day and we're going to keep pushing it through."
chris.megerian@latimes.com
Times staff writer Ken Bensinger contributed to this report.
Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.
SPOILER WARNING: We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!
Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.
And now, without further ado, we give you…
TODAY’S PUZZLE:
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Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian rock group INXS has called it quits as a live touring band after 35 years, thanking fans and honoring late frontman Michael Hutchence in a statement on Tuesday.
INXS, which sold more than 30 million albums worldwide, including more than 10 million alone of their 1987 breakthrough “Kick”, issued the statement after comments by band member Jon Farriss during a weekend performance sparked a frenzy on Twitter.
“We understand that this must come as a blow to everybody, but all things must eventually come to an end,” INXS members Tim, Andrew and Jon Farriss, Kirk Pengilly and Garry Beers said. “We have been performing as a band for 35 years, it’s time to step away from the touring arena.”
“Our music will of course live on and we will always be a part of that,” they added.
INXS was one of the biggest touring bands of the 1980s and 1990s, playing to 80,000 at Wembley Stadium in London and 120,000 in Rio De Janeiro.
But the death of charismatic lead singer Hutchence in 1997 was a major blow.
A U.S. TV talent show for a new frontman was won by Canadian J.D. Fortune, while Terence Trent D’Arby and Jon Stevens also had a turn at the microphone. Irishman Ciaran Gribbin was the last to take the role.
Farriss, the band’s drummer, set the Internet abuzz on Sunday night after he told the audience during a support performance for U.S. band Matchbox Twenty in Perth that it was the last time INXS would perform together. Saxophone player Pengilly later told a radio station the band was not breaking up.
The group declined to comment further on Tuesday.
(Reporting By Grace Williams, editing by Elaine Lies)
In the wake of being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping, Lance Armstrong last week cut all official ties with Livestrong, the charity he founded 15 years ago while he was treated for testicular cancer.
On Nov. 4, he resigned from the organization’s board of directors; he had previously stepped down as the chairman of the board Oct. 17. He has distanced himself from the charity to try to protect it from any damage caused by his doping controversy, the new board chairman, Jeff Garvey, said in a statement.
“Lance Armstrong was instrumental in changing the way the world views people affected by cancer,” Garvey said. “His devotion to serving survivors is unparalleled, and for 15 years, he committed himself to that cause with all his heart.”
Garvey said that the Armstrong family had donated nearly $7 million to the foundation and that the organization under Armstrong had raised close to $300 million to serve cancer survivors.
Last month, the United States Anti-Doping Agency made public its evidence in its doping case against Armstrong, saying he had doped and encouraged his teammates to dope so they could help him win races. He was subsequently barred from Olympic sports for life and was stripped of all the cycling titles he won from August 1998 on.
Since then, Armstrong has spent several weeks in Hawaii, out of the public eye. On Saturday, though, he posted a photograph on Twitter showing him at home in Austin, Tex. He is lounging on a couch with his seven yellow Tour jerseys framed on the wall in the background.
In the post, he said, “Back in Austin and just layin’ around.” The photograph had more than 400,000 page views as of Monday evening, with many people posting negative comments on the page.
“Lance, you have no moral conscious and it’s obvious many of your followers don’t either,” said one person who went by the Twitter handle “irobot,” who also posted that Armstrong needed “professional help.”
A person posting under the name “Aumann” said: “An art thief enjoying all his da Vincis.”
Other people posted words of support, including many who said they still thought Armstrong was the top cyclist in history.
“TomShelton” said of Armstrong’s seven Tour titles, “You earned all 7 of them no matter what is being said about you!”
SAN FRANCISCO — The Facebook page for Gaston Memorial Hospital, in Gastonia, N.C., offers a chicken salad recipe to encourage healthy eating, tips on avoiding injuries at Zumba class, and pictures of staff members dressed up at Halloween. Typical stuff for a hospital in a small town.
But in October, another Facebook page for the hospital popped up. This one posted denunciations of President Obama and what it derided as “Obamacare.” It swiftly gathered hundreds of followers, and the anti-Obama screeds picked up “likes.” Officials at the hospital, scrambling to get it taken down, turned to their real Facebook page for damage control. “We apologize for any confusion,” they posted on Oct. 8, “and appreciate the support of our followers.”
The fake page came down 11 days later, as mysteriously as it had come up. The hospital says it has no clue who was behind it.
Fakery is all over the Internet. Twitter, which allows pseudonyms, is rife with fake followers, and has been used to spread false rumors, as it was during Hurricane Sandy. False reviews are a constant problem on consumer Web sites.
Gaston Memorial’s experience is an object lesson in the problem of fakery on Facebook. For the world’s largest social network, it is an especially acute problem, because it calls into question its basic premise. Facebook has sought to distinguish itself as a place for real identity on the Web. As the company tells its users: “Facebook is a community where people use their real identities.” It goes on to advise: “The name you use should be your real name as it would be listed on your credit card, student ID, etc.”
Fraudulent “likes” damage the trust of advertisers, who want clicks from real people they can sell to and whom Facebook now relies on to make money. Fakery also can ruin the credibility of search results for the social search engine that Facebook says it is building.
Facebook says it has always taken the problem seriously, and recently stepped up efforts to cull fakes from the site. “It’s pretty much one of the top priorities for the company all the time,” said Joe Sullivan, who is in charge of security at Facebook.
The fakery problem on Facebook comes in many shapes. False profiles are fairly easy to create; hundreds can pop up simultaneously, sometimes with the help of robots, and often they persuade real users into friending them in a bid to spread malware. Fake Facebook friends and likes are sold on the Web like trinkets at a bazaar, directed at those who want to enhance their image. Fake coupons for meals and gadgets can appear on Facebook newsfeeds, aimed at tricking the unwitting into revealing their personal information.
Somewhat more benignly, some college students use fake names in an effort to protect their Facebook content from the eyes of future employers.
Mr. Sullivan declined to say what portion of the company’s now one billion plus users were fake. The company quantified the problem last June, in responding to an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. At that time, the company said that of its 855 million active users, 8.7 percent, or 83 million, were duplicates, false or “undesirable,” for instance, because they spread spam.
Mr. Sullivan said that since August, the company had put in place a new automated system to purge fake “likes.” The company said it has 150 to 300 staff members to weed out fraud.
Flags are raised if a user sends out hundreds of friend requests at a time, Mr. Sullivan explained, or likes hundreds of pages simultaneously, or most obvious of all, posts a link to a site that is known to contain a virus. Those suspected of being fakes are warned. Depending on what they do on the site, accounts can be suspended.
In October, Facebook announced new partnerships with antivirus companies. Facebook users can now download free or paid antivirus coverage to guard against malware.
“It’s something we have been pretty effective at all along,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Facebook’s new aggressiveness toward fake “likes” became noticeable in September, when brand pages started seeing their fan numbers dip noticeably. An average brand page, Facebook said at the time, would lose less than 1 percent of its fans.
But the thriving market for fakery makes it hard to keep up with the problem. Gaston Memorial, for instance, first detected a fake page in its name in August; three days later, it vanished. The fake page popped up again on Oct. 4, and this time filled up quickly with the loud denunciations of the Obama administration. Dallas P. Wilborn, the hospital’s public relations manager, said her office tried to leave a voice-mail message for Facebook but was disconnected; an e-mail response from the social network ruled that the fake page did not violate its terms of service. The hospital submitted more evidence, saying that the impostor was using its company logo.
Eleven days later, the hospital said, Facebook found in its favor. But by then, the local newspaper, The Gaston Gazette, had written about the matter, and the fake page had disappeared.
Facebook declined to comment on the incident, and pointed only to its general Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.
The election season seems to have increased the fakery.
Mike D'Antoni, not Phil Jackson, will be the next coach of the Lakers.
"We signed Mike D'Antoni to a multi-year deal," Lakers spokesman John Black said, mentioning the team's owner and top two executives. "Dr. [Jerry] Buss, Jim Buss and Mitch Kupchak were unanimous that Mike D'Antoni was the best coach for the team at this time."
D'Antoni, 61, coached the New York Knicks last season and the Phoenix Suns before that. He will officially take over the Lakers within a week or two, depending how quickly he recovers from knee-replacement surgery.
The Lakers will introduce their new coach at a news conference as early as Tuesday but more likely later in the week. Bernie Bickerstaff will remain the team's interim coach for now.
D'Antoni signed a three-year deal for $12 million. The team holds an option for a fourth year.
Jackson was the overwhelming favorite to return to the Lakers until they heard his informal demands, which included a stake in team ownership, according to a person familiar with the situation.
"He was asking for the moon," said the person, who also declined to be identified because they are not authorized to discuss the situation.
The Lakers then moved quickly to sign D'Antoni. He replaces Mike Brown, who was fired Friday after the Lakers began the season 1-4, their worst start since 1993.
Earlier Sunday, Lakers guard Steve Nash said it would "be a coup" for the Lakers to bring back Jackson, but he also had kind words for D'Antoni.
"Obviously, I think everyone knows how much I love Mike," said Nash, who played four seasons and won two MVP awards under D'Antoni in Phoenix. "If he were the coach, it would be seamless and terrific for me, and I think the team as well.”
D’Antoni was most recently employed by the Knicks, when he was forced to resign under pressure last season after an 18-24 start.
Kobe Bryant did not hide his excitement for the prospect of Jackson returning but, like Nash, he was also on board with D'Antoni.
"They know how I feel about Phil. They know how I feel about D'Antoni," Bryant said Sunday. "I like them both."
D'Antoni's coaching staff with the Lakers likely will start with two longtime assistants -- his brother, Dan D'Antoni, and Phil Weber.
The new Lakers coach has a 388-339 coaching record in the NBA. He led the Suns to the Western Conference finals in 2005 and 2006 with Nash running the show.
Bryant became familiar as a boy with D'Antoni, who was a star in the Italian league in the 1980s, when Bryant's father also played in Italy. D'Antoni helped Olimpia Milano win five league titles and two European club titles. D'Antoni also worked with Bryant on the U.S. national team as an assistant.
ALSO:
Photos: Lakers Coach Mike D'Antoni
Lakers, Steve Nash playing waiting game
Interim Coach Bernie Bickerstaff tries to keep it simple
You might be sick of hearing explanations for what happened in the election last Tuesday. I wouldn’t blame you. But this week on The Observation Deck I want to draw your attention to just one more — the primacy of cities in re-electing Barack Obama as president. This episode is map-heavy (but hey, who doesn’t love maps?) by way of taking a higher-resolution look, geographically speaking, at the red/blue divide.
NEW YORK (AP) — Comedian Dave Attell told a packed house at the Comedy Cellar that New York after Superstorm Sandy had a familiar feel. “It was dark. Toilets were backing up. … It was pretty much like it always was.”
Another comic, Paul Mecurio, told the same crowd that he got so many calls from worried family members that he started making things up about how bad it was.
“I’m drinking my own urine to survive,” he joked.
New York’s comedy clubs, some of which had to shut down or go on generator power in the aftermath of the storm, dealt with a bad situation like they always have — by turning Sandy into a running punchline.
“If they’re going to do jokes on Sept. 12 about Sept. 11, then this thing isn’t going to slow us down,” said Vic Henley, the emcee of a show Oct. 28 at Gotham Comedy Club.
Sean Flynn, Gotham’s operating manager, said comics were including the storm in their acts but had to be careful nonetheless not to make people feel worse than they already did.
“There’s the old adage that tragedy plus time equals comedy. The variable is the time,” he said. Still, he added: “You can’t ignore the subject. That’s what comedy’s all about.”
The Comedy Cellar, a regular stop for decades for the country’s most notable comedians, was closed from Oct. 28 through Nov. 1, but reopened on Nov. 2 after a generator was brought in at a cost of several thousand dollars. Power didn’t return until the next day, and the crowds came with it.
Everyone has a bad case of cabin fever,” said Valerie Scott, the club’s manager.
Mecurio said he thought the joke was on him when he got a call from the Comedy Cellar saying the club was going ahead with its show even though there was no light in the West Village. He headed downtown from the Upper East Side, hitting dark streets after midtown.
“It’s pitch dark,” he said. “And there’s a room packed with people laughing. It was so surreal. … I’m calling it the generator show. It was a really cool thing.”
“You could feel there was something special about the show,” he said. “The audiences were tempered in their mood. You could tell something was up, something was in the air. I knew it was cathartic for people.”
He said a woman approached him after the show to thank him, saying: “You kind of brightened my day.”
Sometimes, comics used the storm to get a laugh at the expense of the crowd, like when Mark Normand looked down from the Comedy Cellar stage at a man with a thin beard.
“I like the beard,” he told him. “Is that because of Sandy? You couldn’t get your razor working?”
And Attell used Sandy to mock a heckler, telling him: “You must have been a load of laughs without power.”
At another point, Attell looked for positives in the storm.
“There’s nothing better than Doomsday sex,” he said.
Mecurio said he has made a point of including the storm and the havoc it caused whenever he takes the stage.
“I feel like as a comedian in the spirit of social satire, it’s what we’re supposed to do,” he said. “It’s the elephant in the room. How do you not do it?”
Few smokers would claim that it’s easy to quit. The addiction to nicotine is strong and repeatedly reinforced by circumstances that prompt smokers to light up.
Yet the millions who have successfully quit are proof that a smoke-free life is achievable, even by those who have been regular, even heavy, smokers for decades.
Today, 19 percent of American adults smoke, down from more than 42 percent half a century ago, when Luther Terry, the United States surgeon general, formed a committee to produce the first official report on the health effects of smoking. Ever-increasing restrictions on where people can smoke have helped to swell the ranks of former smokers.
Now, however, as we approach the American Cancer Society’s 37th Great American Smokeout on Thursday, the decline in adult smoking has stalled despite the economic downturn and the soaring price of cigarettes.
Currently, 45 million Americans are regular smokers who, if they remain smokers, can on average expect to live 10 fewer years. Half will die of a tobacco-related disease, and many others will suffer for years with smoking-caused illness. Smoking adds $96 billion to the annual cost of medical care in this country, Dr. Nancy A. Rigotti wrote in The Journal of the American Medical Association last month. Even as some adult smokers quit, their ranks are being swelled by the 800,000 teenagers who become regular smokers each year and by young adults who, through advertising and giveaways, are now the prime targets of the tobacco industry.
People ages 18 to 25 now have the nation’s highest smoking rate: 40 percent. I had to hold my breath the other day as dozens of 20-somethings streamed out of art gallery openings and lighted up. Do they not know how easy it is to get hooked on nicotine and how challenging it can be to escape this addiction?
Challenging, yes, but by no means impossible. on the Web you can download a “Guide to Quitting Smoking,” with detailed descriptions of all the tools and tips to help you become an ex-smoker once and for all.
Or consult the new book by Dr. Richard Brunswick, a retired family physician in Northampton, Mass., who says he’s helped hundreds of people escape the clutches of nicotine and smoking. (The printable parts of the book’s provocative title are “Can’t Quit? You Can Stop Smoking.”)
“There is no magic pill or formula for beating back nicotine addiction,” Dr. Brunswick said. “However, with a better understanding of why you smoke and the different tools you can use to control the urge to light up, you can stop being a slave to your cigarettes.”
Addiction and Withdrawal
Nicotine beats a direct path to the brain, where it provides both relaxation and a small energy boost. But few smokers realize that the stress and lethargy they are trying to relieve are a result of nicotine withdrawal, not some underlying distress. Break the addiction, and the ill feelings are likely to dissipate.
Physical withdrawal from nicotine is short-lived. Four days without it and the worst is over, with remaining symptoms gone within a month, Dr. Brunswick said. But emotional and circumstantial tugs to smoke can last much longer.
Depending on when and why you smoke, cues can include needing a break from work, having to focus on a challenging task, drinking coffee or alcohol, being with other people who smoke or in places you associate with smoking, finishing a meal or sexual activity, and feeling depressed or upset.
To break such links, you must first identify them and then replace them with other activities, like taking a walk, chewing sugar-free gum or taking deep breaths. These can help you control cravings until the urge passes.
If you’ve failed at quitting before, try to identify what went wrong and do things differently this time, Dr. Brunswick suggests. Most smokers need several attempts before they can become permanent ex-smokers.
Perhaps most important is to be sure you are serious about quitting; if not, wait until you are. Motivation is half the battle. Also, should you slip and have a cigarette after days or weeks of not smoking, don’t assume you’ve failed and give up. Just go right back to not smoking.
Aids for Quitting
Many if not most smokers need two kinds of assistance to become lasting ex-smokers: psychological support and medicinal aids. Only about 4 percent to 7 percent of people are able to quit smoking on any given attempt without help, the cancer society says.
All 50 states and the District of Columbia have free telephone-based support programs that connect would-be quitters to trained counselors. Together, you can plan a stop-smoking method that suits your smoking pattern and helps you avoid common pitfalls.
Online support groups and Nicotine Anonymous can help as well. To find a group, ask a local hospital or call the cancer society at (800) 227-2345. Consider telling relatives and friends about your intention to quit, and plan to spend time in smoke-free settings.
More than a dozen treatments can help you break the physical addiction to tobacco. Most popular is nicotine replacement therapy, sold both with and without a prescription. The Food and Drug Administration has approved five types: nicotine patches of varying strengths, gums, sprays, inhalers and lozenges that can curb withdrawal symptoms and help you gradually reduce your dependence on nicotine.
Two prescription drugs are also effective: an extended-release form of the antidepressant bupropion (Zyban or Wellbutrin), which reduces nicotine cravings, and varenicline (Chantix), which blocks nicotine receptors in the brain, reducing both the pleasurable effects of smoking and the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal. Combining a nicotine replacement with one of these drugs is often more effective than either approach alone.
Other suggested techniques, like hypnosis and acupuncture, have helped some people quit but lack strong proof of their effectiveness. Tobacco lozenges and pouches and nicotine lollipops and lip balms lack evidence as quitting aids, and no clinical trials have been published showing that electronic cigarettes can help people quit.
The cancer society suggests picking a “quit day”; ridding your home, car and workplace of smoking paraphernalia; choosing a stop-smoking plan, and stocking up on whatever aids you may need.
On the chosen day, keep active; drink lots of water and juices; use a nicotine replacement; change your routine if possible; and avoid alcohol, situations you associate with smoking and people who are smoking.
They came from Walker Basin, a speck of a community at the edge of the Sequoia National Forest. From the farm town of Reedley, where a barber gives boys joining the military free haircuts before they ship out.
They came from San Francisco. Los Angeles. San Diego.
When they died, photos went up on post office walls in their hometowns. On Veterans Day, there are parades and charity golf tournaments. Buddies gather at graves to drink to the ones who are gone.
In the 11 years since the wars began in Iraq and Afghanistan, 725 service members from California have been killed.
As all veterans are honored, the fallen are remembered
Many died young — 41% were not yet 22. Sixty-three were still teenagers.
They were fun-loving singles. Forty-seven were engaged. They were married, leaving behind 307 wives and husbands. They had children — 432 sons and daughters.
Forty of their obituaries noted that the Sept. 11 attacks spurred them to join up. Some were in elementary school when they watched the Twin Towers fall.
The scope of their loss can't be measured at one point in time. Life moves on, the wars are winding down. But towns, families and individual lives continue to be shaped by their absence.
Lately, 9-year-old Naomi Izabella Johnson has been asking a lot of questions about her father, Allen Johnson, a Special Forces medical sergeant from Los Molinos who was killed on foot-combat patrol in Khanaqin, Afghanistan, in 2005.
What was his favorite color? School subject? Animal? Book? Did he like mashed potatoes?
"It helps me for when I try to imagine him," she said.
Two months ago, her 10-year-old brother, Joshua, started crying inconsolably.
"What's wrong?" his mother, Eunice Johnson, recalled asking.
"I'm starting to forget — sometimes I can't see Daddy's face."
In Yuba City, Taylor Silva, 21, has been spending some time alone. Last week marked six months since her fiance, Chase Marta, 24, was killed by a roadside bomb in the Ghazni province of Afghanistan. He was one of more than 40 California service members to have died in the line of duty since last Veterans Day.
"I know his family and best friend have it just as hard. But we're all being a little quiet to each other because we're all a reminder to each other. His mom can't see me without crying," Silva said.
Seventeen women from California have been killed in the wars.
Hannah Gunterman McKinney of Redlands had told her father that the Army wouldn't send a new mother to Iraq. But she was deployed when her son, Todd Avery Gunterman, was just 1. Ten months later, in 2006, she was run over by a Humvee in Taji, north of Baghdad. She was 20.
She had joined the military as a way to earn money to go to fashion school. She reenlisted because she was a single mother and wanted to give her son financial stability. Now her parents are raising Todd Avery.
Epic fantasy has become the literature of more. We equate it with more pages than the average book, more books than the average series. There are more characters, more maps, more names and more dates. The stories and the worlds are bigger to contain all of this more. And when all the books have been devoured, the fans want more.
For my just-released anthology, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, I compiled a collection of stories that demonstrate the heights the subgenre is capable of attaining; including works by George R. R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, Robin Hobb, Tad Williams, Ursula K. Le Guin and other legends of the field, the anthology attempts to survey all that is epic in the short form and bring the best of it to you in a single volume.
In this exclusive excerpt from the anthology, Mary Robinette Kowal presents a tale that exemplifies what epic fantasy is all about.
By Mary Robinette Kowal
Light dappled through the trees in the family courtyard, painting shadows on the paving stones. Li Reiko knelt by her son to look at his scraped knee.
“I just scratched it.” Nawi squirmed under her hands.
Her daughter, Aya, leaned over her shoulder studying the healing. “Maybe Mama will show you her armor after she heals you.”
Nawi stopped wiggling. “Really?”
Reiko shot Aya a warning look, but her little boy’s dark eyes shone with excitement. Reiko smiled. “Really.” What did tradition matter? “Now let me heal your knee.” She laid her hand on the shallow wound.
“Ow.”
“Shush.” Reiko closed her eyes and rose in the dark space behind them.
In her mind’s eye, Reiko took her time with the ritual, knowing it took less time than it appeared. In a heartbeat, green fire flared out to the walls of her mind. She dissolved into it as she focused on healing her son.
When the wound closed beneath her hand, she sank to the surface of her mind.
“There.” She tousled Nawi’s hair. “That wasn’t bad, was it?”
“It tickled.” He wrinkled his nose. “Will you show me your armor now?”
She sighed. She should not encourage his interest in the martial arts. His work would be with the histories that men kept, and yet…”Watch.”
Pulling the smooth black surface out of the ether, she manifested her armor. It sheathed her like silence in the night. Aya watched with obvious anticipation for the day when she earned her own armor. Nawi’s face, full of sharp yearning for something he would never have, cut Reiko’s heart like a new blade.
“Can I see your sword?”
She let her armor vanish into thought. “No.” Reiko brushed his hair from his eyes. “It’s my turn to hide, right?”
- - -
Halldór twisted in his saddle, trying to ease the kink in his back. When the questing party reached the Parliament, he could remove the weight hanging between his shoulders.
With each step his horse took across the moss-covered lava field, the strange blade bumped against his spine, reminding him that he carried a legend. None of the runes or sheep entrails he read before their quest had foretold the ease with which they fulfilled the first part of the prophecy. They had found the Chooser of the Slain’s narrow blade wrapped in linen, buried beneath an abandoned elf-house. In that dark room, the sword’s hard silvery metal — longer than any of their bronze swords — had seemed lit by the moon.
Lárus pulled his horse alongside Halldór. “Will the ladies be waiting for us, do you think?”
“Maybe for you, my lord, but not for me.”
“Nonsense. Women love the warrior-priest. ‘Strong and sensitive.’” He snorted through his mustache. “Just comb your hair so you don’t look like a straw man.”
A horse screamed behind them. Halldór turned, expecting to see its leg caught in one of the thousands of holes between the rocks. Instead, armed men swarmed from the gullies between the rocks, hacking at the riders. Bandits.
Halldór spun his horse to help Lárus and the others fight them off.
Lárus shouted, “Protect the Sword.”
At the Duke’s command, Halldór cursed and turned his horse from the fight, galloping across the rocks. Behind him, men cried out as they protected his escape. His horse twisted along the narrow paths between stones. It stopped abruptly, avoiding a chasm. Halldór looked back.
Scant lengths ahead of the bandits, Lárus rode, slumped in his saddle. Blood stained his cloak. The other men hung behind Lárus, protecting the Duke as long as possible.
Behind them, the bandits closed the remaining distance across the lava fields.
Halldór kicked his horse’s side, driving it around the chasm. His horse stumbled sickeningly beneath him. Its leg snapped, caught between rocks. Halldór kicked free of the saddle as the horse screamed. He rolled clear. The rocky ground slammed the sword into his back. His face passed over the edge of the chasm. Breathless, he recoiled from the drop.
As he scrambled to his feet, Lárus thundered up. Without wasting a beat, Lárus flung himself from the saddle and tossed Halldór the reins. “Get the Sword to Parliament!”
Halldór grabbed the reins, swinging into the saddle. If they died returning to Parliament, did it matter that they had found the Sword? “We must invoke the Sword!”
Lárus’s right arm hung, blood-drenched, by his side, but he faced the bandits with his left. “Go!”
Halldór yanked the Sword free of its wrappings. For the first time in six thousand years, the light of the sun fell on the silvery blade bringing fire to its length. It vibrated in his hands.
The first bandit reached Lárus and forced him back.
Halldór chanted the runes of power, petitioning the Chooser of the Slain.
Time stopped.
- - -
Reiko hid from her children, blending into the shadows of the courtyard with more urgency than she felt in combat. To do less would insult them.
“Ready or not, here I come!” Nawi spun from the tree and sprinted past her hiding place. Aya turned more slowly and studied the courtyard. Reiko smiled as her daughter sniffed the air, looking for tracks. Her son crashed through the bushes, kicking leaves with each footstep.
As another branch cracked under Nawi’s foot, Reiko stifled the urge to correct his appalling technique. She would speak with his tutor about what the woman was teaching him. He was a boy, but that was no reason to neglect his education.
Watching Aya find Reiko’s initial footprints and track them away from where she hid, Reiko slid from her hiding place. She walked across the courtyard to the fountain. This was a rule with her children; to make up for the size difference, she could not run.
She paced closer to the sparkling water, masking her sounds with its babble. From her right, Nawi shouted, “Have you found her?”
“No, silly!” Aya shook her head and stopped. She put her tiny hands on her hips, staring at the ground. “Her tracks stop here.”
Reiko and her daughter were the same distance from the fountain, but on opposite sides. If Aya were paying attention, she would realize her mother had retraced her tracks and jumped from the fountain to the paving stones circling the grassy center of the courtyard. Reiko took three more steps before Aya turned.
As her daughter turned, Reiko felt, more than heard, her son on her left, reaching for her. Clever. He had misdirected her attention with his noise in the shrubbery. She fell forward, using gravity to drop beneath his hands. Rolling on her shoulder, she somersaulted, then launched to her feet as Aya ran toward her.
Nawi grabbed for her again. With a child on each side, Reiko danced and dodged closer to the fountain. She twisted from their grasp, laughing with them each time they missed her. Their giggles echoed through the courtyard.
The world tipped sideways and vibrated. Reiko stumbled as pain ripped through her spine.
Nawi’s hand clapped against her side. “I got her!”
Fire engulfed Reiko.
The courtyard vanished.
- - -
Time began again.
The sword in Halldór’s hands thrummed with life. Fire from the sunset engulfed the sword and split the air. With a keening cry, the air opened and a form dropped through, silhouetted against a haze of fire. Horses and men screamed in terror.
When the fire died away, a woman stood between Halldór and the bandits.
Halldór’s heart sank. Where was the Chooser of the Slain? Where was the warrior the sword had petitioned?
A bandit snarled a laughing oath and rushed toward them. The others followed him with their weapons raised.
The woman snatched the sword from Halldór’s hands. In that brief moment, when he stared at her wild face, he realized that he had succeeded in calling Li Reiko, the Chooser of the Slain.
Then she turned. The air around her rippled with a heat haze as armor, dark as night, materialized around her body. He watched her dance with deadly grace, bending and twisting away from the bandits’ blows. Without seeming thought, with movement as precise as ritual, she danced with death as her partner. Her sword slid through the bodies of the bandits.
Halldór dropped to his knees, thanking the gods for sending her. He watched the point of her sword trace a line, like the path of entrails on the church floor. The line of blood led to the next moment, the next and the next, as if each man’s death was predestined.
Then she turned her sword on him.
Her blade descended, burning with the fire of the setting sun. She stopped as if she had run into a wall, with the point touching Halldór’s chest.
Why had she stopped? If his blood was the price for saving Lárus, so be it. Her arm trembled. She grimaced, but did not move the sword closer.
Her face, half-hidden by her helm, was dark with rage. “Where am I?” Her words were crisp, more like a chant than common speech.
Holding still, Halldór said, “We are on the border of the Parliament lands, Li Reiko.”
Her dark eyes, slanted beneath angry lids, widened. She pulled back and her armor rippled, vanishing into thought. Skin, tanned like the smoothest leather stretched over her wide cheekbones. Her hair hung in a heavy, black braid down her back. Halldór’s pulse sang in his veins.
Only the gods in sagas had hair the color of the Allmother’s night. Had he needed proof he had called the Chooser of the Slain, the inhuman black hair would have convinced him of that.
He bowed his head. “All praise to you, Great One. Grant us your blessings.”
- - -
Reiko’s breath hissed from her. He knew her name. She had dropped through a flaming portal into hell and this demon with bulging eyes knew her name.
She had tried to slay him as she had the others, but could not press her sword forward, as if a wall had protected him.
And now he asked for blessings.
“What blessings do you ask of me?” Reiko said. She controlled a shudder. What human had hair as pale as straw?
Straw lowered his bulging eyes to the demon lying in front of him. “Grant us, O Gracious One, the life of our Duke Lárus.”
This Lárus had a wound deep in his shoulder. His blood was as red as any human’s, but his face was pale as death.
She turned from Straw and wiped her sword on the thick moss, cleaning the blood from it. As soon as her attention seemed turned from them, Straw attended Lárus. She kept her awareness on the sounds of his movement as she sought balance in the familiar task of caring for her weapon. By the Gods! Why did he have her sword? It had been in her rooms not ten minutes before playing hide and seek with her children.
Panic almost took her. What had happened to her Aya and Nawi? She needed information, but displaying ignorance to an enemy was a weakness, which could kill surer than the sharpest blade. She considered.
Their weapons were bronze, not steel, and none of her opponents had manifested armor. They dressed in leather and felted wool, but no woven goods. So, then. That was their technology.
Straw had not healed Lárus, so perhaps they could not. He wanted her aid. Her thoughts checked. Could demons be bound by blood debt?
She turned to Straw.
“What price do you offer for this life?”
Straw raised his eyes; they were the color of the sky. “I offer my life unto you, O Great One.”
She set her lips. What good would vengeance do? Unless… “Do you offer blood or service?”
He lowered his head again. “I submit to your will.”
“You will serve me then. Do you agree to be my bound man?”
“I do.”
“Good.” She sheathed her sword. “What is your name?”
“Halldór Arnarsson.”
“I accept your pledge.” She dropped to her knees and pushed the leather from the wound on Lárus’s shoulder. She pulled upon her reserves and, rising into the healing ritual, touched his mind.
He was human.
She pushed the shock aside; she could not spare the attention.
- - -
Halldór gasped as fire glowed around Li Reiko’s hands. He had read of gods healing in the sagas, but bearing witness was beyond his dreams.
The glow faded. She lifted her hands from Lárus’s shoulder. The wound was gone. A narrow red line and the blood-soaked clothing remained. Lárus opened his eyes as if he had been sleeping.
But her face was drawn. “I have paid the price for your service, bound man.” She lifted a hand to her temple. “The wound was deeper…” Her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped to the ground.
Lárus sat up and grabbed Halldór by the shoulder. “What did you do?”
Shaking Lárus off, Halldór crouched next to her. She was breathing. “I saved your life.”
“By binding yourself to a woman? Are you mad?”
“She healed you. Healed! Look.” Halldór pointed at her hair. “Look at her. This is Li Reiko.”
“Li Reiko was a Warrior.”
“You saw her. How long did it take her to kill six men?” He pointed at the carnage behind them. “Name one man who could do that.”
Would moving her be a sacrilege? He grimaced. He would beg forgiveness if that were the case. “We should move before the sun sets and the trolls come out.”
Lárus nodded slowly, his eyes still on the bodies around them. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“How many other sagas are true?”
Halldór frowned. “They’re all true.”
- - -
The smell of mutton invaded her dreamless sleep. Reiko lay under sheepskin, on a bed of straw ticking. The straw poked through the wool fabric, pricking her bare skin. Straw. Her memory tickled her with an image of hair the color of straw. Halldór.
Long practice kept her breath even. She lay with her eyes closed, listening. A small room. An open fire. Women murmuring. She needed to learn as much as possible, before changing the balance by letting them know she was awake.
A hand placed a damp rag on her brow. The touch was light, a woman or a child.
The sheepskin’s weight would telegraph her movement if she tried grabbing the hand. Better to open her eyes and feign weakness than to create an impression of threat. There was time for that later.
Reiko let her eyes flutter open. A girl bent over her, cast from the same demonic mold as Halldór. Her hair was the color of honey, and her wide blue eyes started from her head. She stilled when Reiko awoke, but did not pull away.
Reiko forced a smile, and let worry appear on her brow. “Where am I?”
“In the women’s quarters at the Parliament grounds.”
Reiko sat up. The sheepskin fell away, letting the cool air caress her body. The girl averted her eyes. Conversation in the room stopped.
Interesting. They had a nudity taboo. She reached for the sheepskin and pulled it over her torso. “What is your name?”
“Mara Halldórsdottir.”
Her bound man had a daughter. And his people had a patronymic system — how far from home was she? “Where are my clothes, Mara?”
The girl lifted a folded bundle of cloth from a low bench next to the bed. “I washed them for you.”
“Thank you.” If Mara had washed and dried her clothes, Reiko must have been unconscious for several hours. Lárus’s wound had been deeper than she thought. “Where is my sword?”
“My father has it.”
Rage filled Reiko’s veins like the fire that had brought her here. She waited for the heat to dwindle, then began dressing. As Reiko pulled her boots on, she asked, “Where is he?”
Behind Mara, the other women shifted as if Reiko were crossing a line. Mara ignored them. “He’s with Parliament.”
“Which is where?” The eyes of the other women felt like heat on her skin. Ah. Parliament contained the line she should not cross, and they clearly would not answer her. Her mind teased her with memories of folk in other lands. She had never paid much heed to these stories, since history had been men’s work. She smiled at Mara. “Thank you for your kindness.”
As she strode from the room she kept her senses fanned out, waiting for resistance from them, but they hung back as if they were afraid.
The women’s quarters fronted on a narrow twisting path lined with low turf and stone houses. The end of the street opened on a large raised circle surrounded by stone benches.
Men sat on the benches, but women stayed below. Lárus spoke in the middle of the circle. By his side, Halldór stood with her sword in his hands. Sheltering in the shadow by a house, Reiko studied them. They towered above her, but their movements were clumsy and oafish like a trained bear. Nawi had better training than any here.
Her son. Sudden anxiety and rage filled her lungs, but rage invited rash decisions. She forced the anger away.
With effort, she returned her focus to the men. They had no awareness of their mass, only of their size and an imperfect grasp of that.
Halldór lifted his head. As if guided by strings his eyes found her in the shadows.
He dropped to his knees and held out her sword. In mid-sentence, Lárus looked at Halldór, and then turned to Reiko. Surprise crossed his face, but he bowed his head.
“Li Reiko, you honor us with your presence.”
Reiko climbed onto the stone circle. As she crossed to retrieve her sword, an ox of a man rose to his feet. “I will not sit here, while a woman is in the Parliament’s circle.”
Lárus scowled. “Ingolfur, this is no mortal woman.”
Reiko’s attention sprang forward. What did they think she was, if not mortal?
“You darkened a trollop’s hair with soot.” Ingolfur crossed his arms. “You expect me to believe she’s a god?”
Her pulse quickened. What were they saying? Lárus flung his cloak back, showing the torn and blood-soaked leather at his shoulder. “We were set upon by bandits. My arm was cut half off and she healed it.” His pale face flushed red. “I tell you this is Li Reiko, returned to the world.”
She understood the words, but they had no meaning. Each sentence out of their mouths raised a thousand questions in her mind.
“Ha.” Ingolfur spat on the ground. “Your quest sought a warrior to defeat the Troll King.”
This she understood. “And if I do, what price do you offer?”
Lárus opened his mouth but Ingolfur crossed the circle.
“You pretend to be the Chooser of the Slain?” Ingolfur reached for her, as if she were a doll he could pick up. Before his hand touched her shoulder, she took his wrist, pulling on it as she twisted. She drove her shoulder into his belly and used his mass to flip him as she stood.
She had thought these were demons, but by their actions they were men, full of swagger and rash judgment. She waited. He would attack her again.
Ingolfur raged behind her. Reiko focused on his sounds and the small changes in the air. As he reached for her, she twisted away from his hands and with his force, sent him stumbling from the circle. The men broke into laughter.
She waited again.
It might take time but Ingolfur would learn his place. A man courted death, touching a woman unasked.
Halldór stepped in front of Reiko and faced Ingolfur. “Great Ingolfur, surely you can see no mortal woman could face our champion.”
Reiko cocked her head slightly. Her bound man showed wit by appeasing the oaf’s vanity.
Lárus pointed to her sword in Halldór’s hands. “Who here still doubts we have completed our quest?” The men shifted on their benches uneasily. “We fulfilled the first part of the prophecy by returning Li Reiko to the world.”
What prophecy had her name in it? There might be a bargaining chip here.
“You promised us a mighty warrior, the Chooser of the Slain,” Ingolfur snarled, “not a woman.”
It was time for action. If they wanted a god, they should have one. “Have no doubt. I can defeat the Troll King.” She let her armor flourish around her. Ingolfur drew back involuntarily. Around the circle, she heard gasps and sharp cries.
She drew her sword from Halldór’s hands. “Who here will test me?”
Halldór dropped to his knees in front of her. “The Chooser of the Slain!”
In the same breath, Lárus knelt and cried, “Li Reiko!”
Around the circle, men followed suit. On the ground below, women and children knelt in the dirt. They cried her name. In the safety of her helm, Reiko scowled. Playing at godhood was a dangerous lie.
She lowered her sword. “But there is a price. You must return me to the heavens.”
Halldór’s eyes grew wider than she thought possible. “How, my lady?”
She shook her head. “You know the gods grant nothing easily. They say you must return me. You must learn how. Who here accepts that price for your freedom from the trolls?”
She sheathed her sword and let her armor vanish into thought. Turning on her heel, she strode off the Parliament’s circle.
- - -
Halldór clambered to his feet as Li Reiko left the Parliament circle. His head reeled. She hinted at things beyond his training. Lárus grabbed him by the arm. “What does she mean, return her?”
Ingolfur tossed his hands. “If that is the price, I will pay it gladly. Ridding the world of the Troll King and her at the same time would be a joy.”
“Is it possible?”
Men crowded around Halldór, asking him theological questions of the sagas. The answers eluded him. He had not cast a rune-stone or read an entrail since they started for the elf-house a week ago. “She would not ask if it were impossible.” He swallowed. “I will study the problem with my brothers and return to you.”
Lárus clapped him on the back. “Good man.” When Lárus turned to the throng surrounding them, Halldór slipped away.
He found Li Reiko surrounded by children. The women hung back, too shy to come near, but the children crowded close. Halldór could hardly believe she had killed six men as easily as carding wool. For the space of a breath, he watched her play peek-a-boo with a small child, her face open with delight and pain.
She saw him and shutters closed over her soul. Standing, her eyes impassive, she said. “I want to read the prophecy.”
He blinked, surprised. Then his heart lifted; maybe she would show him how to pay her price. “It is stored in the church.”
Reiko brushed the child’s hair from its eyes, then fell into step beside Halldór. He could barely keep a sedate pace to the church.
Inside, he led her through the nave to the library beside the sanctuary. The other priests, studying, stared at the Chooser of the Slain. Halldór felt as if he were outside himself with the strangeness of this. He was leading Li Reiko, a Warrior out of the oldest sagas, past shelves containing her history.
Since the gods had arrived from across the sea, his brothers had recorded their history. For six-thousand unbroken years, the records of prophecy and the sagas kept their history whole.
When they reached the collections desk, the acolyte on duty looked as if he would wet himself. Halldór stood between the boy and the Chooser of the Slain, but the boy still stared with an open mouth.
“Bring me the Troll King prophecy, and the Sagas of Li Nawi, Volume I. We will be in the side chapel.”
Still gaping, the boy nodded and ran down the aisles.
“We can study in here.” He led the Chooser of the Slain to the side chapel. Halldór was shocked again at how small she was, not much taller than the acolyte. He had thought the gods would be larger than life.
He had hundreds of questions, but none of the words.
When the acolyte came back, Halldór sent a silent prayer of thanks. Here was something they could discuss. He took the vellum roll and the massive volume of sagas the acolyte carried and shooed him out of the room.
Halldór’s palms were damp with sweat as he pulled on wool gloves to protect the manuscripts. He hesitated over another pair of gloves, then set them aside. Her hands could heal; she would not damage the manuscripts.
Carefully, Halldór unrolled the prophecy scroll on the table. He did not look at the rendering of entrails. He watched her.
She gave no hint of her thoughts. “I want to hear your explanation of this.”
A cold current ran up his spine, as if he were eleven again, explaining scripture to an elder. Halldór licked his lips and pointed at the arc of sclera. “This represents the heavens, and the overlap here,” he pointed at the bulge of the lower intestine, “means time of conflict. I interpreted the opening in the bulge to mean specifically the Troll King. This pattern of blood means — ”
She crossed her arms. “You clearly understand your discipline. Tell me the prophecy in plain language.”
“Oh.” He looked at the drawing of the entrails again. What did she see that he did not? “Well, in a time of conflict — which is now — the Chooser of the Slain overcomes the Troll King.” He pointed at the shining knot around the lower intestine. “See how this chokes off the Troll King. That means you win the battle.”
“And how did you know the legendary warrior was — is me?”
“I cross-referenced with our histories and you were the one that fit the criteria.”
She shivered. “Show me the history. I want to understand how you deciphered this.”
Halldór thanked the gods that he had asked for Li Nawi’s saga as well. He placed the heavy volume of history in front of Li Reiko and opened to the Book of Fire, Chapter I.
- - -
In the autumn of the Fire, Li Reiko, greatest of the warriors, trained Li Nawi and his sister Aya in the ways of Death. In the midst of the training, a curtain of fire split Nawi from Aya and when they came together again, Li Reiko was gone. Though they were frightened, they understood that the Chooser of the Slain had taken a rightful place in heaven.
Reiko trembled, her control gone. “What is this?”
“It is the Saga of Li Nawi.”
She tried phrasing casual questions, but her mind spun in circles. “How do you come to have this?”
Halldór traced the letters with his gloved hand. “After the Collapse, when waves of fire had rolled across our land, Li Nawi came across the oceans with the other gods. He was our conqueror and our salvation.”
The ranks of stone shelves filled with thick leather bindings crowded her. Her heart kicked wildly.
Halldór’s voice seemed drowned out by the drumming of her pulse. “The Sagas are our heritage and charge. The gods have left the Earth, but we keep records of histories as they taught us.”
Reiko turned her eyes blindly from the page. “Your heritage?”
“I have been dedicated to the service of the gods since my birth.” He paused. “Your sagas were the most inspiring. Forgive my trespasses, may I beg for your indulgence with a question?”
“What?” Hot and cold washed over her in sickening waves.
“I have read your son Li Nawi’s accounts of your triumphs in battle.”
Reiko could not breathe. Halldór flipped the pages forward. “This is how I knew where to look for your sword.” He paused with his hand over the letters. “I deciphered the clues to invoke it and call you here, but there are many — ”
Reiko pushed away from the table. “You caused the curtain of fire?” She wanted to vomit her fear at his feet.
“I — I do not understand.”
“I dropped through fire this morning.” And when they came together again, Li Reiko was no more. What had it been like for Aya and Nawi to watch their mother ripped out of time?
Halldór said, “In answer to my petition.”
“I was playing hide and seek with my children and you took me.”
“You were in the heavens with the gods.”
“That’s something you tell a grieving child!”
“I — I didn’t, I — ” His face turned gray. “Forgive me, Great One.”
“I am not a god!” She pushed him, all control gone. He tripped over a bench and dropped to the floor. “Send me back.”
“I cannot.”
Her sword flew from its sheath before she realized she held it. “Send me back!” She held it to his neck. Her arms trembled with the desire to run it through him. But it would not move.
She leaned on the blade, digging her feet into the floor. “You ripped me out of time and took me from my children.”
He shook his head. “It had already happened.”
“Because of you.” Her sword crept closer, pricking a drop of blood from his neck. What protected him?
Halldór lay on his back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know…I was following the prophecy.”
Reiko staggered. Prophecy. A wall of predestination. Empty, she dropped to the bench and cradled her sword. “How long ago…?”
“Six thousand years.”
She closed her eyes. This was why he could not return her. He had not simply brought her from across the sea like the other “gods.” He had brought her through time. If she were trapped here, if she could never see her children again, it did not matter if these were human or demons. She was banished in Hell.
“What do the sagas say about my children?”
Halldór rolled to his knees. “I can show you.” His voice shook.
“No.” She ran her hand down the blade of her sword. Its edge whispered against her skin. She touched her wrist to the blade. It would be easy. “Read it to me.”
She heard him get to his feet. The pages of the heavy book shuffled.
- - -
Halldór swallowed and read, “This is from the Saga of Li Nawi, the Book of the Sword, Chapter Two. ‘And it came to pass that Li Aya and Li Nawi were raised unto adulthood by their tutor.’”
A tutor raised them, because he, Halldór, had pulled their mother away. He shook his head. It had happened six thousand years ago.
“‘But when they reached adulthood, each claimed the right of Li Reiko’s sword.’”
They fought over the sword, with which he had called her, not out of the heavens, but from across time. Halldór shivered and focused on the page.
“‘Li Aya challenged Li Nawi, saying Death was her birthright. But Nawi, on hearing this, scoffed and said he was a Child of Death. And saying so, he took Li Reiko’s sword and the gods smote Li Aya with their fiery hand, thus granting Li Nawi the victory.’”
Halldór’s entrails twisted as if the gods were reading them. He had read these sagas since he was a boy. He believed them, but he had not thought they were real. He looked at Li Reiko. She held her head in her lap and rocked back and forth.
For all his talk of prophecies, he was the one who had found the sword and invoked it. “‘Then all men knew he was the true Child of Death. He raised an army of men, the First of the Nine Armies, and thus began the Collapse — ‘”
“Stop.”
“I’m sorry.” He would slaughter a thousand sheep if one would tell him how to undo his crime. In the Saga of Li Nawi, Li Reiko never appeared after the wall of fire. He closed the book and took a step toward her. “The price you asked…I can’t send you back.”
Li Reiko drew a shuddering breath and looked up. “I have already paid the price for you.” Her eyes reflected his guilt. “Another hero can kill the Troll King.”
His pulse rattled forward like a panicked horse. “No one else can. The prophecy points to you.”
“Gut a new sheep, bound man. I won’t help you.” She stood. “I release you from your debt.”
“But, it’s unpaid. I owe you a life.”
“You cannot pay the price I ask.” She turned and touched her sword to his neck again. He flinched. “I couldn’t kill you when I wanted to.” She cocked her head, and traced the point of the blade around his neck, not quite touching him. “What destiny waits for you?”
“Nothing.” He was no one.
She snorted. “How nice to be without a fate.” Sheathing her sword, she walked toward the door.
He followed her. Nothing made sense. “Where are you going?” She spun and drove her fist into his midriff. He grunted and folded over the pain. Panting, Reiko pulled her sword out and hit his side with the flat of her blade. Halldór held his cry in.
She swung again, with the edge, but the wall of force stopped her; Halldór held still. She turned the blade and slammed the flat against his ribs again. The breath hissed out of him, but he did not move. He knelt in front of her, waiting for the next blow. He deserved this. He deserved more than this.
Li Reiko’s lip curled in disgust. “Do not follow me.”
He scrabbled forward on his knees. “Then tell me where you’re going, so I will not meet you by chance.”
“Maybe that is your destiny.” She left him.
Halldór did not follow her.
- - -
Li Reiko chased her shadow out of the parliament lands. It stretched before her in the golden light of sunrise, racing her across the moss-covered lava. The wind, whipping across the treeless plain, pushed her like a child late for dinner.
Surrounded by the people in the Parliament lands, Reiko’s anger had overwhelmed her and buried her grief. Whatever Halldór thought her destiny was, she saw only two paths in front of her — make a life here or join her children in the only way left. Neither were paths to choose rashly.
Small shrubs and grasses broke the green with patches of red and gold, as if someone had unrolled a carpet on the ground. Heavy undulations creased the land with crevices. Some held water reflecting the sky, others dropped to a lower level of moss and soft grasses, and some were as dark as the inside of a cave.
When the sun crossed the sky and painted the land with long shadows, Reiko sought shelter from the wind in one of the crevices. The moss cradled her with the warmth of the earth.
She pulled thoughts of Aya and Nawi close. In her memory, they laughed as they reached for her. Sobs pushed past Reiko’s reserves. She wrapped her arms around her chest. Each cry shattered her. Her children were dead because Halldór had decided a disemboweled sheep meant he should rip her out of time. It did not matter if they had grown up; she had not been there. They were six‑thousand years dead. Inside her head, Reiko battled grief. Her fists pounded against the walls of her mind. No. Her brain filled with that silent syllable.
She pressed her face against the velvet moss wanting the earth to absorb her.
She heard a sound.
Training quieted her breath in a moment. Reiko lifted her head from the moss and listened. Footsteps crossed the earth above her. She manifested her armor and rolled silently to her feet. If Halldór had followed her, she would play the part of a man and seek revenge.
In the light of the moon, a figure, larger than a man, crept toward her. A troll. Behind him, a gang of trolls watched. Reiko counted them and considered the terrain. It was safer to hide, but anger still throbbed in her bones. She left her sword sheathed and slunk out of the crevice in the ground. Her argument was not with them.
Flowing across the moss, she let the uneven shadows mask her until she reached a standing mound of stones. The wind carried the trolls’ stink to her.
The lone troll reached the crevice she had sheltered in. His arm darted down like a bear fishing and he roared with astonishment.
The other trolls laughed. “Got away, did she?”
One of them said, “Mucker was smelling his own crotch is all.”
“Yah, sure. He didn’t get enough in the Hall and goes around thinking he smells more.”
They had taken human women. Reiko felt a stabbing pain in her loins; she could not let that stand.
Mucker whirled. “Shut up! I know I smelled a woman.”
“Then where’d she go?” The troll snorted the air. “Don’t smell one now.”
The other lumbered away. “Let’s go, while some of ‘em are still fresh.”
Mucker slumped and followed the other trolls. Reiko eased out of the shadows. She was a fool, but would not hide while women were raped.
She hung back, letting the wind bring their sounds and scents as she tracked the trolls to their Hall.
The moon had sunk to a handspan above the horizon as they reached the Troll Hall. Trolls stood on either side of the great stone doors.
Reiko crouched in the shadows. The night was silent except for the sounds of revelry. Even with alcohol slowing their movement, there were too many of them.
If she could goad the sentries into taking her on one at a time she could get inside, but only if no other trolls came. The sound of swordplay would draw a crowd faster than crows to carrion.
A harness jingled.
Reiko’s head snapped in the direction of the sound.
She shielded her eyes from the light coming out of the Troll Hall. As her vision adjusted, a man on horseback resolved out of the dark. He sat twenty or thirty horselengths away, invisible to the trolls outside the Hall. Reiko eased toward him, senses wide.
The horse shifted its weight when it smelled her. The man put his hand on its neck, calming it. Light from the Troll Hall hinted at the planes on his face. Halldór. Her lips tightened. He had followed her. Reiko warred with an irrational desire to call the trolls down on them.
She needed him. Halldór, with his drawings and histories, might know what the inside of the Troll Hall looked like.
Praying he would have sense enough to be quiet, she stepped out of the shadows. He jumped as she appeared, but stayed silent.
He swung off his horse and leaned close. His whisper was hot in her ear. “Forgive me. I did not follow you.”
He turned his head, letting her breathe an answer in return. “Understood. They have women inside.”
“I know.” Halldór looked toward the Troll Hall. Dried blood covered the left side of his face.
“We should move away to talk,” she said.
He took his horse by the reins and followed her. His horse’s hooves were bound with sheepskin so they made no sound on the rocks. Something had happened since she left the Parliament lands.
Halldór limped on his left side. Reiko’s heart beat as if she were running. The trolls had women prisoners. Halldór bore signs of battle. Trolls must have attacked the Parliament. They walked in silence until the sounds of the Troll Hall dwindled to nothing.
Halldór stopped. “There was a raid.” He stared at nothing, his jaw clenched. “While I was gone…they just let the trolls — ” His voice broke like a boy’s. “They have my girl.”
Mara. Anger slipped from Reiko. “Halldór, I’m sorry.” She looked for other riders. “Who came with you?”
He shook his head. “No one. They’re guarding the walls in case the trolls come back.” He touched the side of his face. “I tried persuading them.”
“Why did you come?”
“To get Mara back.”
“There are too many of them, bound man.” She scowled. “Even if you could get inside, what do you plan to do? Challenge the Troll King to single combat?” Her words resonated in her skull. Reiko closed her eyes, dizzy with the turns the gods spun her in. When she opened them, Halldór’s lips were parted in prayer. Reiko swallowed. “When does the sun rise?”
“In another hour.”
She turned to the Hall. In an hour, the trolls could not give chase; the sun would turn them to stone. She unbraided her hair.
Halldór stared as her long hair began flirting with the wind. She smiled at the question in his eyes. “I have a prophecy to fulfill.”
- - -
Reiko stumbled into the torchlight, her hair loose and wild. She clutched Halldór’s cloak around her shoulders.
One of the troll sentries saw her. “Hey. A dolly.”
Reiko contorted her face with fear and whimpered. The other troll laughed. “She don’t seem taken with you, do she?”
The first troll came closer. “She don’t have to.”
“Don’t hurt me. Please, please…” Reiko retreated from him. When she was between the two, she whipped Halldór’s cloak off, tangling it around the first troll’s head. With her sword, she gutted the other. He dropped to his knees, fumbling with his entrails as she turned to the first. She slid her sword under the cloak, slicing along the base of the first troll’s jaw.
Leaving them to die, Reiko entered the Hall. Women’s cries mingled with the sounds of debauchery.
She kept her focus on the battle ahead. She would be out-matched in size and strength, but hoped her wit and weapon would prevail. Her mouth twisted. She knew she would prevail. It was predestined.
A troll saw her. He lumbered closer. Reiko showed her sword, bright with blood. “I have met your sentries. Shall we dance as well?”
The troll checked his movement and squinted his beady eyes at her. Reiko walked past him. She kept her awareness on him, but another troll, Mucker, loomed in front of her.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“I am the one you sought. I am Chooser of the Slain. I have come for your King.”
Mucker laughed and reached for her, heedless of her sword. She dodged under his grasp and held the point to his jugular. “I have come for your King. Not for you. Show me to him.”
She leapt back. His hand went to his throat and came away with blood.
A bellow rose from the entry. Someone had found the sentries. Reiko kept her gaze on Mucker, but her peripheral vision filled with trolls running. Footsteps behind her. She spun and planted her sword in a troll’s arm. The troll howled, drawing back. Reiko shook her head. “I have come for your King.”
They herded her to the Hall. She had no chance of defeating them, but if the Troll King granted her single combat, she might escape the Hall with the prisoners. When she entered the great Hall, whispers flew; the number of slain trolls mounted with each rumor.
The Troll King lolled on his throne. Mara, her face red with shame, serviced him.
Anger buzzed in Reiko’s ears. She let it pass through her. “Troll King, I have come to challenge you.”
The Troll King laughed like an avalanche of stone tearing down his Hall. “You! A dolly wants to fight?”
Reiko paid no attention to his words.
He was nearly twice her height. Leather armor, crusted with crude bronze scales, covered his body. The weight of feast hung about his middle, but his shoulders bulged with muscle. If he connected a blow, she would die. But he would be fighting gravity as well as her. Once he began a movement, it would take time for him to stop and begin another.
Reiko raised her head, waiting until his laughter faded. “I am the Chooser of the Slain. Will you accept my challenge?” She forced a smile to her lips. “Or are you afraid to dance with me?”
“I will grind you to paste, dolly. I will sweep over your lands and eat your children for my breakfast.”
“If you win, you may. Here are my terms. If I win, the prisoners go free.”
He came down from his throne and leaned close. “If you win, we will never show a shadow in human lands.”
“Will your people hold that pledge when you are dead?”
He laughed. The stink of his breath boiled around her. He turned to the trolls packed in the Hall. “Will you?”
The room rocked with the roar of their voices. “Aye.”
The Troll King leered. “And when you lose, I won’t kill you till I’ve bedded you.”
“Agreed. May the gods hear our pledge.” Reiko manifested her armor.
As the night-black plates materialized around her, the Troll King bellowed, “What is this?”
“This?” She taunted him. “This is but a toy the gods have sent to play with you.”
She smiled in her helm as he swung his heavy iron sword over his head and charged her. Stupid. Reiko stepped to the side, already turning as she let him pass.
She brought her sword hard against the gap in his armor above his boot. The blade jarred against bone. She yanked her sword free; blood coated it like a sheath.
The Troll King dropped to one knee, hamstrung. Without waiting, she vaulted up his back and wrapped her arms around his neck. Like Aya riding piggyback. He flailed his sword through the air, reaching for her. She slit his throat. His bellow changed to a gurgle as blood fountained in an arc, soaking the ground.
A heavy ache filled her breast. She whispered in his ear. “I have killed you without honor. I am a machine of the gods.”
Reiko let gravity pull the Troll King down, as trolls shrieked. She leapt off his body as it fell forward.
Before the dust settled around him, Reiko pointed her sword at the nearest troll. “Release the prisoners.”
- - -
Reiko led the women into the dawn. As they left the Troll Hall, Halldór dropped to his knees with his arms lifted in prayer. Mara wrapped her arms around his neck, sobbing.
Reiko felt nothing. Why should she, when the victory was not hers? She withdrew from the group of women weeping and singing her praises.
Halldór chased her. “Lady, my life is already yours but my debt has doubled.”
He reminded her of a suitor in one of Aya’s bedtime stories, accepting gifts without asking what the witchyman’s price would be. She knelt to clean her sword on the moss. “Then give me your firstborn child.”
She could hear his breath hitch in his throat. “If that is your price.”
Reiko raised her eyes. “No. That is a price I will not ask.”
He knelt beside her. “I know why you can not kill me.”
“Good.” She turned to her sword. “When you fulfill your fate let me know, so I can.”
His blue eyes shone with fervor. “I am destined to return your daughter to you.”
Reiko’s heart flooded with pain and hope. She fought for breath. “Do not toy with me, bound man.”
“I would not. I reviewed the sagas after you went into the Hall. It says ‘and the gods smote Li Aya with their fiery hand.’ I can bring Li Aya here.”
Reiko sunk her fingers into the moss, clutching the earth. Oh gods, to have her little girl here — she trembled. Aya would not be a child. There would be no games of hide and seek. When they reached adulthood, each claimed the right of Li Reiko’s sword…how old would Aya be?
Reiko shook her head. She could not do that to her daughter. “You want to rip Aya out of time as well. If Nawi had not won, the Collapse would not have happened.”
Halldór brow furrowed. “But it already did.”
Reiko stared at the women, and the barren landscape beyond them. Everything she saw was a result of her son’s actions. Or were her son’s actions the result of choices made here? She did not know if it mattered. The cogs in the gods’ machine clicked forward.
“Are there any prophecies about Aya?”
Halldór nodded. “She’s destined to — ”
Reiko put her hand on his mouth as if she could stop fate. “Don’t.” She closed her eyes, fingers still resting on his lips. “If you bring her, promise me you won’t let her know she’s bound to the will of the gods.”
He nodded.
Reiko withdrew her hand and pressed it to her temple. Her skull throbbed with potential decisions. Aya had already vanished into fire; if Reiko did not decide to bring her here, where would Aya go?
Her bound man knelt next to her, waiting for her decision. Aya would not forgive Reiko for yanking her out of time, anymore than Reiko had forgiven Halldór.
His eyes flicked over her shoulder and then back. Reiko turned to follow his gaze. Mara comforted another girl. What did the future hold for Halldór’s daughter? In this time, women seemed to have no role.
But times could change. Watching Mara, Reiko knew which path to choose if she were granted free will.
“Bring Aya to me.” Reiko looked at the sword in her hand. “My daughter’s birthright waits for her.”
