Fictional Worlds

A truth about rivers: we have always been able to draw our water together into solid bodies, to walk on two legs. But it is not without risk, and not without cost. We lose much of ourselves in the transformation, and if there's not enough of us to start with, well...

All was silence, and Uhammad was alone with the desert and his phial of spice. He held it above his left eye and focused on his strongest memory from their journey. After pulling back his lower eyelid, he tapped some of the powder into it. It burned worse than the bright red peppers he used to flavor his dishes. He felt weightless. Despite his sudden wish to fight its call, it had all too soon taken hold of his entire being.

We hold the entire kingdom hostage, the two of us. We have their names. Those that her clerk cannot find for her, I search out myself in the stacks of Tsud’s library. Tsud was nothing if not meticulous. He had every clansman and kinsman listed, along with their wealth and their holdings. They send a tithe of their family to us, and we use them to again people the palace.

She gritted her teeth against the mounting pressure in her skull, like steam rising from a kettle. Is that when the void breaks through? A brokenness of the soul and a wound in the body; so Brighteye had described the moment of awakening to sorcery. There were people in the world who lusted for that terrible power. The same sort of people, Orha assumed, who would kill and leave the corpse its jewelry.

A flare of illumination washed the chamber in flickering shadow and gleam. I'd gone through another door, into a different room, longer and wider than the one I knew. Runes were scratched on every visible inch of walls, ceiling and floor. Repeated phrases: Death feeds life. Life breeds death. Death breathes. Tall and heavy armoires slithering with gold filigree lined both sides of this horrid space, most with their doors open, spilling out once-beautiful gowns now molded and rotting, reminding me of molted skins.

Never before had she run with such speed or such fear, caroming off trees, tearing through brush, ripping loose the roots that hooked her feet, until she caught up to Hundeil. Both were wheezing with exhaustion when they reached the gnarled behemoth of a tree that proved to be Olderra's dwelling. Its bark parted like curtains to admit them.

But when Mister Hadj started in on them cowboy songs—well, as sure as I’m standing here, when that man got to crooning a tune he made the earth itself cry. This ain’t just me tale-telling, you hear? I seen tears fall from big red rocks when the old man hummed. Heard stones weep as they parted before him. So when Mister Hadj said that a stone in the road told him where to find Parson Lucifer, I didn’t doubt it.

Sere wouldn’t be able to send letters. Diligent, loyal Tashet would never fathom that anyone was reading her mail and would take no precautions. Sere couldn’t explain what would happen to them both if she didn’t leave.

Almas wants to say that it’s barbaric, but then so is the whole of it; it would be like observing that a cupful dipped from the sea is salt. And this man has been the author of barbarisms as well, so how should it matter to him? So all she says is, “I’m sorry.” That much is true.

The giant man’s eye went wide as he looked at me, truly looked at me. He hefted the hammer, but it was too late. It had been too late from the moment they stepped from the trees. Voice soft, pictures solid in my mind, I did as I’d been taught, and flawlessly.

But she is special. That first night, when you land together on the roof of the north tower, she hops off the wyvern as easy as dismounting a horse. Her skin is burned from the high sun and chapped from the hard wind, but she spins on her heel and hugs the wyvern around its huge neck. It turns to look at you, with a slightly tilted head, a confusion in its eyes.

Father may have been a scholar of the Tao, but he was not above invoking the teachings of Kong Fuzi when it suited him, usually where I was concerned. It was my place to be the innocent, obedient daughter, except in our role of devil hunters when I had to use my martial training to kill something. I took a moment to loosen my jian in its scabbard across my back. This accomplished little except to make me feel a bit better.

Out of respect for the fox, she ground its bones there. First the tail-bones, murmuring the words her grandmother had taught her early in the pregnancy: For a strong heart. For strong lungs. For strong arms and legs. For strength. For strength. Then the other bones, separating them as use dictated, and picked up the hide and meat and set off home with steps full of fear: that the tail bones would not strengthen her son; or that they would, and her mother would hate her for it.

As Knowe hikes fast over the plain and down the heather-thick slope to the farms spread out along the low lands, she almost laughs thinking: of course a ghost is the first person to want her singing.

The South-East Wind had not blown through those hills since becoming the guardian of the temple for this period, but the South Wind blew there / where the bones drift into gullies like the snow that falls in other lands and I can call through them in a hundred voices, like lizards, like foxes, like men /

I hear the swish of snow falling off branches outside our thick-needled shelter and think, for a strange moment, that the illness is over, that animals will come near us—but no, it’s Oruguaq standing at the narrow opening, with a dead fox slung over her shoulder almost blending into her furs, winter-hidden. She looks like she’s trying not to laugh.

They couldn't be serious, Morrow thought, could not possibly be...but then the Major allowed the squid to slip from his fingers and into his mouth. Miss Twickenham stifled a horrified gasp. Morrow’s heart quickened its beating. Surely, there had been some sleight of hand in the Major’s actions. What he had witnessed was impossible, and he wondered just how strongly the professor’s tobacco had been tinctured with laudanum.

Aspley turned slowly. He had been washed ashore on the island, and in a daze, a delirium, had stumbled from the beach and into this building. He had no idea where he was or how he had come to be there. No explanations to soothe the rushing of his frantic mind. But then his intellect cut in. Reason, lovely, lovely reason, told him, in all its wisdom, that wherever he was it was preferable to where he had been, preferable, dear god, yes, to the horror of sucking seawater into his lungs.

The neighborhood was dark and insalubrious; if it had not been for the sake of Professor Haversham's scientific endeavors I would never have ventured into its foul-smelling streets in the daytime, far less at night. He, however, appeared to have no such misgivings but looked about him with interest. "Now to find a public house of suitable character," he said. "Not too difficult in this area, I should think."

The rugmaker's lips twitched of their own accord, itched to speak her mind, to ask the wise woman what right she had to come and make the rugmaker doubt herself now, while when it had mattered, no one had been surer that the rugmaker had done well to send the warrior away.

Oh, poor Enanatuma! We had been estranged long before my banishment. I had seen her only once since the day ten years ago when I had given up dancing and devoted all my energies to magic. I had done her a favor in return for the thousand kindnesses she and her father had shown me and had intended never to see her again. But she was still my sister.

I was sagging, listing in pain, by the time I could see Rattle and the crew. They were waiting on the Eight-B platform, near the engine console. The Eight-B line had a rust-and-people smell that mingled into a peculiar musk. I imagined the stench of Hail's blood and body beneath the usual platform scents. From Rattle's face, I knew she didn't have to.

Mandate knew the count of those who had died exactly; knew it the way stone-crafts could tell granite and marble apart without their eyes and the way a blaze-dancer knew a candle from a torch from miles off, in a way he'd never known anything in his life.

She didn't see what happened in the girl, what changed, but something did. Tsani relaxed, losing a tension that Sagraille hadn't noticed was there until it wasn't. She glided forward to kneel at the table, though calling the waterfall of silk and almost-exposed skin she displayed kneeling was probably insulting. It was more beautiful than that. A painting from the medium of motion. The girl even cast a shadow with elegance.

It is the nature of empire to calve new words, and Mattar has walked ruined roads and suffocating marketplaces to find them. She knows the word for how a Kilin-kasa woman turns a wax-melon in her hands three times before she asks a price—tsa-tsa-tsa. She knows the name the now-dead Enokoans had for her, diabi-sai, witch-mother. She knows, too, the syllables of the arrows of the Hasha as they fall, tulbuku, on Korondi shields and Korondi flesh.

Dajan nodded, then trudged after Esu who had set off in a new direction. It was always this way with the gods. Nothing held fast. Nothing held still. They were the wind and he was the grain of sand blown heedless in their wake. He licked his lips. It tasted of salt, but he smiled anyway. He had tricked this boy-god once. There was more to be gained from him.

When I woke again, I was looking up into a face which, belonging as it now did to a girl, was much prettier than it had been when it belonged to a boy. It was more than that, however. The face was more willing to smile now, and to be as soft as in truth it was. And when the face spoke, it relinquished all pretense of a voice other than its own--a relief to my ears and certainly to Bonifacio’s as well.

Bonifacio looked at me puzzled for a moment, but then said: “Here is a vial, then. If you wish more, let me know. I will have Frazetti bring you ten thick candles that will last till morning. He will check on you during the night, but without waking you. Will your dog bite him?”

Lession's first catch was an old drunk, a silver-haired sailor who was staggering through one of the back streets. When he bit a chunk from the drunk's shoulder, the man went limp. The initial thrill of tasting meat soon evaporated. The flesh was old, sour, steeped with alcohol. He couldn’t take this back for Hurkerna. No. Goat would taste far better.

Taniel removed a snuff box from his belt pouch and tapped a line of black powder out on the back of his hand. He snorted it in one breath and felt the world warp and twist beneath his feet, coming into focus clearer than it had been before. The shapes of the city buildings sprang into sharp relief as the powder trance washed over him, the rain brightening as if he'd shone a lantern on it, and the shadow became a girl.