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.

The shadows on the buildings seemed alive with movement, although the air was too cool for mirages. The memory of my dream still lingered, fooling my weary brain into believing that I glimpsed animal shapes writhing there. I hurried my pace along the empty streets, wondering if I should just pay the Commissaire's bribe and be done with the place.

Masaru peered past the struts and wires between his biplane's wings, trying to take the sight in. The tower's base was a madman's helter-skelter ziggurat, made of impossible stone blocks the size of townhouses, that cut a swath across the city's snow-covered grid of tenement blocks and terraces. From the ziggurat’s peak, the ragged-toothed tower reached up to a dark stain of cloud fixed in the sky directly above.

The leech crouched in the broken hole where the window had been. Its glamour made it hard to discern details. Thorfinn had seen leeches in daylight, knew the ragged, filthy reality. His gaze flickered involuntarily up to the dark hollows of its eyes. It was an effort to tear away again from the hypnotic stare.

She turned her back on him to reach for her pack, shielding her hands with her body so he wouldn’t see her fingers sketching the words of the attack spell that she mouthed under her breath. She licked her fingertips, holding the spell on the tip of her tongue, and turned round to face him while she dug in the pack for food. He opened his mouth. “Could...” was as far as he got.

Sunlight made the metalman more frightening, not less. She could see how it had been assembled; could trace the human form inside. It was naked—no human clothing could ever fit such a jagged silhouette. She saw the iron rods added over time to stretch bone and muscle, giving it longer arms and an extended spine. What she had initially thought was fur was actually chestnut hair, cascading down from its head and knotted into every dark place where metal met flesh.

Lily stretched her aching legs to the opposite end of the tub. The sheen of water accentuated her scars—thin, precise lines tracing the insides of both arms and legs. She worked her limbs daily to prevent their stiffening and contorting, but even with diligent chi practice the pain was never completely absent, only sleeping. Lily thought it far more likely that scar tissue would catch her up before her reputation ever did.

I go further in, to the ghosts. The first ghost is the ghost of the Boots. They are two holes in the wave of stone that half-fills a room of the old house. No telling who felt inside the pair of holes and found they were the shape of the inside of a boot. If you slide your feet into them—first checking that nothing has gotten there first—you can ask the ghost for a wish.

I saw my men, who had been the cream of the III Corps, gladly charge well-fed, well-shod Cossacks with nothing but the bayonet and stock of the musket frozen in their hands, barefoot and starving. I admired them for their courage. I envied it. Because I had lost what I most cared for: the calculus of risk, and in its disregard, of bravery. That month of frimaire, I learned that nothing could end my life. I was no longer human.

The true story the Slow Game tells is depicted in the scenes that are enacted as we players meet in the maze and move towards the central tableau. The audience members meet with each other, share what they have seen and try to decipher the overall meaning. The Slow Game moves ceaselessly, a great beast that never seems to shift and yet is never in the same place twice.

I get up and go to my old war chest. I wipe down the carved top once a week, but when I open it dust wafts up from the inside. My weapons are all well put away, but the metal looks dull from dust sticking to the oil. I kneel. The scent reminds me of an attic, of things forgotten. I pull a sleeve over my hand and wipe the dust away. It leaves a shiny spot and a greasy stain on my cuff. It’s just a work shirt but the stain bothers me.

I charged off, blind as the proverbial. With the burlap around my head, at any moment I could’ve tripped on a root or run straight into a tree. I let my instincts take over. The space around me revealed itself to me. I could visualize the forest, each root and fallen tree, all the colors strange and smeared. Weaving through the trunks at full tilt, I believed that I might escape after all.

The hut awkwardly navigated a twist in the road and turned towards the saltworks, disappearing from view except for its misshapen chimney bobbing above the modest rooftops. Its shuffling footsteps faded, and Nadia regretfully returned to the problem of her father's corpse.

Shortly after midnight, his vigil bore fruit. A star detached itself from the firmament and began to streak down towards the western horizon. Ho snatched up his celestial sphere, rotating its silver rings to record the stolen star's position. It disappeared into the west: beneath the House of the White Tiger. Above a prefecture a half day from the Imperial City. Ho's heart sank, although the blow was not unexpected. It was the prefecture run by August Advisor Chuko Tsin.

"Let me try something," I suggested, and slid into my goatskin and became a mouse. I winked at her—although I doubt she could see it—and skittered out into the front of the wagon, down into the ropes that held the ox to the cart. Akiiki and his man were discussing their impending fortunes. Whether they meant to sell the Lady Uduru off, or rent out her magic, I did not know and did not care. I wanted only to put a stop to it.

Meurig scrambled to his feet, confused. “Your pardon, that I missed prayers,” he said to Father Ambrose. “My heart is too heavy for my words to rise.” He had pierced the skin of worlds, however briefly. Now Rhiannon was a sword again, and Caedmon would die.

Before Aunt Victoria, I hadn't realized that a virtue could be a curse. In the schoolyard, my friends and I had always pretended at being grownups, putting on old necklaces of our mothers' and aspiring to the greatness of colors we had heard of or invented—things like deep purple Valor and moss-colored Genius. A virtue like Aunt Victoria's, though...