Introducing Loshi vi Assarid — The Thief of Shimeth

Back in the late 1970s, I wrote a short story called The Gift of the Outcast. It was a deliberate attempt to write something that was closer to traditional sword & sorcery than the more elaborate fantasy I was writing. It concerned a young thief, Loshi, in a city called Shimeth who was hired to rescue her employer’s sister from the clutches of a dangerous sorcerer.

I enjoyed exploring Loshi and wrote two more stories about her, but unfortunately I couldn’t get them placed anywhere. How much that was down to the stories and how much it was down to restrictions of the market in the 70s and 80s I’m not sure, but in the end I abandoned the series and moved onto other things.

I didn’t forget about Loshi and her world, though. The setting had always been intended to be part of the slowly growing Traveller’s World (as I was to call it later), and the city of Shimeth played a short but crucial role in my novel At An Uncertain Hour.

Then, recently, I revisited Loshi herself. There were differences. I started her story younger, this time — still in her teens, rather than mid-twenties. And she’d also acquired a surname. When I wrote the original stories, I hadn’t thought to question the traditional model where fantasy characters didn’t have surnames — unless they were Hobbits, of course.

It became clear now, though, that the society Loshi inhabited was too complex to rely on calling everyone by a single name. I’d also learnt rather more about the history of surnames — but that’s the subject for a different blog.

The story I wrote ended up with the title The Guild’s Share, referring to the city’s Thieves’ Guild. After a number of submissions and rejections (including the usual ritual rejection from Clarkesworld), it was accepted this year by Swords and Sorcery Magazine. It can now be read free on their website.

So what next for Loshi? I have several ideas for stories about her, including a radical rewrite of The Gift of the Outcast, which may well shuffle up the queue now that she’s up and running. And, in the end, she’s going to play a significant part in the last volume of my current octology. But I can’t write that till I’ve revised three books and written two more.

In the meantime, though, I’m looking forward to exploring more about someone who promises to be fun to write about. So watch this space.