Lora Selezh
Katherine Addison
A tasty little Celehar story
Lora Selezh is a short story in Katherine Addison‘s Cemeteries of Amalo series. It is number 0.5 in the Goodreads reckoning, or number 1.5 in the Chronicles of Osreth, which puts it between The Goblin Emperor and The Witness for the Dead. It was initially a bonus in the paperback edition of Witness for the Dead. You can now find PDF and ePub versions on Ocean of PDF.
Celehar has just arrived in the city of Amalo to take up his mandate as Witness for the Dead. He’s already notorious. A poor seamstress petitions him on behalf of Lora Selezh, the infant son of her recently deceased lover and business partner. Celehar’s kindness and courtesy, leavened with his antiauthoritarian streak are on full display in this little story. (OK, that’s not accurate -- Celehar isn’t really against authority -- he just DGAF about it.)
It’s 13 pages -- you can read it in 10 min. If you love Celehar, you definitely want to. I wouldn’t recommend it as a standalone or even a first Cemeteries of Amalo read. Despite being temporally before Witness for the Dead, Lora Selezh might not make a lot of sense if you haven’t previously been introduced to the world.