Even though the chilled spring day promised nothing but beauty, the grains in Frere-Jones's body shivered to her sadness as she looked at the nearby dirt road. The day-fellows along the road were packing their caravan. Evidently her promises of safety weren’t enough for them to chance staying even a few more hours.

Jane whirled around, her shotgun leveled, and she found herself looking not at two fairies but into the dead eyes of her old partner, Earl. The witch and this fairy in the gallery were holding his head up by his light brown hair. They smiled at her until she lowered the barrel of her shotgun, and when she did, they dropped Earl's corpse to the floor.

The numbness started in his toes. He was well into the afternoon when he realized what it meant—that he couldn’t feel the pain anymore. Dead nerves. Or something worse. Some sort of permanent damage that didn’t heal in a place like Twopenny Falls.

I’m the only person honest enough to chronicle what happened to Madam Coates. The hotel concierge, a bald and ever-sweating British man, gathered us staff in the Jewelled Nawab Jungle Retreat and swore us to secrecy about the rules that she had ignored. If we so much as breathed a word to a private detective or a pale-faced guest with glasses that turned out to be a journalist, we would be kicked out on the street with only the clothes on our back.

After my rounds I paced the grounds thrice before retiring to my cottage beside the greenhouse to read stories I knew by heart. Little room in the Orangery meant the guardian's library was limited. The books on my shelves I had chosen as a young woman: stories of adventure and romance, stories that left me with a pitted longing.

“All who possess this weapon have regretted it, even the fiercest of killers, mad Lord Runestock, say, or bloody Sir Fairbeast, or Captain Slaughterdark who abandoned it here. Behold the Sword of Loving Kindness.”

Mistress Needles said, “Then may we be in harmony, to the degree harmony exists in this cesspool of a universe. The sword’s presence may yet prove a desirable thing. For your freedom, Imago Bone, and that of the companion who brings you fear and pain, depends upon its destruction.”

So it came to pass that over the weeks remaining until the parturition of Perdita, I fashioned for her, out of crystal and ebony and chips of fine jade, twin organs of sight not the equal of mortal orbs but by far their superior, in clarity, in beauty, even in soulfulness. If you ask me how I accomplished it, I shall show you the door, for I am still a tradesman, however exalted, and tradesmen tell no tales.

She shouldn’t have gone to the trial, or talked to that stupid reporter, even for a second. Her father would know, now, that it was her who had his file. It was her who had been called upon to bring him in. She wouldn’t have shown up at the trial otherwise, and he knew it. “Two bits to the one whose family it isn’t,” she said to Merriz, and rolled up to get a look at the shooters.

Tamalat studied Brio. He wasn't going to thank her when he woke up. She didn't feel the least bit sorry. "He was a better man once," she said. She remembered the war; remembered the snow churned to red slush, the arguments between Brio and his brother the commandant. "He left his shadow behind when he went into exile, thinking to start anew. It didn't work the way he intended."

This is how an abnarch is made. This is the torment to which Kavian gave up her first and only born. The wizards of the Paik Rede, dam-makers, high rulers of isu-Cter, seal a few of their infants into stone cells. They grow there, fed and watered by silent magic, for fifteen years. Alone. Untaught. Touched by no one. And on nights like these, their parents decant them for the war.

If the story was intended as a clue, Dorial saw three possible hints: the mother's instruments, the father's airships, and the boy's gemstone. Cloud City hosted three docking structures, each visited by dozens of airships every week—slim chance that anyone working the docks would remember a lone girl, even a lady. The other two destinations, though, could be checked.

Beatriz reached into the chest and plucked a single feather from its depths. Its quill was impossibly white, but its barbs were singed and melted, as if they'd been held in a candle flame. Though the feather was half the length of her hand, it felt as heavy as a cannonball. As Beatriz cradled it in her palm, she smelled scorched vellum; tasted ink and ashes.

In the sky behind, a group of children Calli's age swooped and dove in unison, followed by one of the tower's magisters. Calli heard scraps of song. A lesson about wind shifts. The students' wings cut patches of bright color in the deep blue air. Calli knew each span and spar, even from this distance. She'd tested them all.

The Hunt rode in a river of darkness under bright stars. For a confused moment, she thought the stars continued below them as if they rode through the heavens with no further reference to the earth at all, but then a tree branch flashed before one of the lights below her view, and she realized that these were earthly fires she saw. Or less than earthly, perhaps, for this was no festival night to be lit with bonfires, yet there they burned on the ground, and far below her besides.

The third time the lash had fallen I only grunted. I held my companions’ gazes because I owed them at least that. I held their gazes because then I would not think of a blood-reddened ravine, or Adhai’s silence, or the hope and pride being flayed from my flesh. In the barn, the whip descended again, and the musty air clogged in my throat.

Midst-caught, Parry thought he saw those eyes change—their pupils slide sidelong, opening like a cuttlefish's, even as her hips slipped, knees gone triple-jointed, twining 'round his legs like two fishtail tentacles. While the inside of her grew scaled and stringent, scraping him tip to root, leaving her mark forever.

And yet everywhere I looked, my periphery supplied ghosts of him: lounging indolently on a couch, reaching up to add a final stroke to a poem, bowing over my hand. And there, of course, pausing at the foot of the narrow stairs to the grand bedchamber. Looking over his shoulder, a half smile adorning the human face he wore even when we were alone.

Hester's skin itched all over, and she longed for cool sand sliding against her bare belly. One, two, three eggs into her mouth, one sharp bite, and the clear, viscous glair ran down her throat. The shells were tougher than she expected. They tasted tart, like spoiled goat's milk. She waited for the change, but the sun crawled higher and nothing happened.

But tonight she finds herself mouthing a prayer in a language she's almost forgotten, a simple sentence asking Quan Am to relieve the suffering of mortals, and she doesn't quite know which well the words come bubbling out of—a feeling of standing on the edge of a dark abyss that frightens her. What else has she forgotten, when she was here with Raoul?

We do this still—the train goes where I will it, and we are drawn where the world needs us. We are life, we are death; we are that which stands between. We allowed ourselves to be carried away, allowed ourselves to love, to die, and become a train that circles the world entire as the circus dictates.

When it happens, the sky creases and pulses. The ground before Sikata's shrine bristles, implosions of frost budding percussive through pavement. A body falls, producing no more impact or sound than a leaf. Fangs and cilia spring up, to protect or perhaps imprison. Melishem lets them bite and lash at her, though most fail to penetrate the alloy of her skin.

I found myself examining the impeccable rooms and gardens in these photographs, fearing that they, too, betrayed another world. I am ashamed to say that I was happy to have shut the door on such rooms, on Flora herself. But I could not erase the memory of the man with the Gatling gun, and the five-armed green creatures lying on the ground below him.

The salt-island reminded her of that reef. The great mosses and lichens that crowned it looked as though carved by elfin jewelers. There were golden heliodor stalks with exploding cinnabar heads, and beds of blue-green beryl, and creeping carpets of amethyst orbs, and forests of ruby-tipped olivine spears, and towering onyx pagodas and toadstools, and rolling lichen-mats like landscapes carved of jade in arches and hollows and orange-velvet cups. Dragonflies darted hither and thither like winged brooches, crimson, bronzy green, and black-banded yellow.

Juvianna spoke the new words of her duty, “I offer you banishment or release of the darkness from your mind.” Usually she said death or release, but as Hensson had not yet committed a crime, death was not on the table here. It did not matter—banishment and death were essentially the same thing. Where would he go, how would he survive if cast out?

“You're one of the lucky ones. We could put a mask on you, keep the particles out for a few days. You'd turn back into what you were before.” I moved closer to the fort and took another reading. The needle hovered over yellow. My tongue felt as dry as sand.

So lost in thought am I in my cell—pondering the many unintentional wrongs I've committed toward my biological father, wondering if perhaps my behaviour was never as unintentional as I like to believe—that it takes me several minutes to fully grasp that there is a great commotion afoot: shouting, screaming, explosions, and other sounds of battle.

I am cold. Icy water surrounds me, undulating in the glare of morning sun. It has been nearly twelve hours since I took Shashi into the desert and made those tracks. I hope, with every shivering inch of me, that Jagmeet's men are not able to distinguish the difference between the tracks of a boy fleeing across the desert sands and the tracks of the a boy walking carefully backward over his own footsteps.

Mateo dreamed of overwhelming power, and of hell. Men harnessed power by merging themselves with mutilated monsters, prodded alight the power of insensate gods through fires poked into other planes. Genoa stole the secrets of domesticating the gods from the Venetians. The Venetians stole from Genoa. Always chasing. Always fleeing. Always hunting up new gods with which to destroy each other.

Every one of our people hears three stories of Agani in their lifetime: once when we leave childhood behind and become women; the second before we marry and become one with another; and the third when we must face death and send a loved one off to the other world. I had hoped to tell you the first story in the summers to come. It is my sorrowful task to tell you all three, instead.