Opus 5: An Okal Rel Legacy Anthology

“Maybe it’s an eye watching a tiny world, a bird about to eat an insect, a spike being driven into a bosom. Or maybe it’s just a random scribble of lines that you followed to get here.” Illustration by Richard Bartrop.

Published by Absolute XPress, this anthology contains “The Caddy”, the third story featuring Nestor Tark. A twisted gangster known as “The Caddy” has blackmailed Nestor into kidnapping a cat, a rarity in the Gelack Empire. It’s a Mission: Impossible style cat-smuggling story.

“Sandra Fitzpatrick provided the idea for Opus 5 when she wondered what impact Reetion cats would have on the Gelack court after Horth scores a bunch of them, in trade, at the end of Part 5: Far Arena, in the Okal Rel Saga. Cats have long been extinct in the Sevolite Empire, so the new arrivals would be high status possessions. But as prospective authors discussed possibilities, variations from other times began to arise. There have always been cats on the empire side of the universe after all, just tightly controlled by the Lorels who would sell only non-breeding specimens. The resulting anthology is a romp through history by authors Hal Friesen, Jennifer Lott, Christina Rundle and Elizabeth Woods, connected by the presence in the story of a cat. Meoww.”