For all you Kindle users, the first part of Arm of the Sphinx is available for download. If you'll recall, Senlin Ascends ended with Senlin and his friends stealing an airship and escaping Finn Goll's tyrannical employment and Commissioner Pound's dread warship.

Part 1 of Book 2 finds Senlin and his friends have had to resort to piracy to survive, though their brand of piracy is not as bold or bloody as most.

Senlin leads his friends and captains the Stone Cloud under the pseudonym "Tom Mudd." Here's an excerpt from the first chapter:

Captain Mudd had a talent for devising unorthodox ways to raid a ship. His crew, to their credit, followed his outlandish direction with hardly a squint.

On one occasion, they had snuck onto a merchant ship under the cover of fog and opened a barrel of cooking oil on the deck. The natural sway of the ship distributed the slick evenly, and the next morning they invaded on spiked cleats while the unsuspecting crew skated helplessly about, trying very hard not to impale themselves on their own swords. On another occasion, Mudd's crew had dropped several pounds of rotting fish onto a ship's envelope, and then boarded amid a horde of frenzied seagulls. They had once resorted to posing as a wounded vessel full of collapsed damsels. Their would-be princes, who rode in on a barge of cured tobacco, helpfully lashed the two ships together and came aboard armed with decanters of brandy to revive the ladies from their swoon. The rescuers rushed to the sides of the fallen women only to be greeted by gun barrels drawn from under skirts.

“The rules of engagement,” Captain Tom Mudd explained to the irate captain who'd been duped by this rouse, “were invented by men who would benefit most from them.”

This philosophical pronouncement might've commanded more respect had it not been delivered by a man wearing a frilly bonnet.