"No, I will not. I cannot. I do not have a baby and even if I did, I would not give it to such a dreadful little monster as you!" Sylvie thrust the carrot back into the dirt and ran into the house. She slammed the door and secured each of Mother Dar's seven locks.

We found my dog by the eastern overlook, sniffing the floor beneath a table with her pink nose. As Deng and I approached, I greeted the spirit of Dog echoing within my mind with a reverent thought. Your visit surprises yet honors me, Lord Dog.

"Touch the tree here. Listen." There was nothing at first, just the early breezes rustling a few tattered leaves. Then the blood rushing in my ears, my breath in and out. These sounds faded with concentration. Beyond them there was a very faint groaning, as of wood straining in a wind, but nothing more. "They still sleep," Sister Mauro whispered.

The train took us to the maker's bench, and we laid out our son's body, chest open. Tonight the maker would give him a mainspring and wind him for the very first time. "Should we name him now, or after we've gotten to know him?" My parents had waited to name me until my second day, because they wanted to be sure the name would fit.

There was a small, insistent part of her that wouldn't let her give up so easily. The tiny part of her that had put down roots outside of her uncles' laboratories and workshops. She'd poured hours into learning how to make things grow, how to keep them alive, and she had succeeded. She could spend an entire day in her garden with Marci and Gil, weeding, watering, laughing and it never felt like wasted time.

"That's a very noble thing, Miss Parrish. I commend you." The strange woman smiled. It was a small, half-secret smile that hinted at private approval and a vast but encouraging amusement. Lavinia flushed, and went on before she grew tongue-tied.

Slipping into the dead girl's body was like meditating inside a stone, cold and still. Yōsei filled her with tendrils of gold and divided life energy between two bodies—one cold and dead, the other hot and familiar. The girl was too plump, too dense, and filled with tiny creatures that decomposed her flesh. These Yōsei banished, drowning them in golden light.

The final scenes leave me breathless. The priestess’s condition enters its final stages, and, though she hammers at the portals of her sealed chambers, no-one comes to her aid. The artist responsible for the narrative cuts his scenes faster and faster, becoming more and more metaphorical. We see her eyes tighten in pain; a shot of the two birds, both young and old, silhouetted against a gas flame; the woman’s hand clenching her bed sheets; the gas flame flickers; the woman’s hand relaxes; the young canary sitting alone on its perch, its older companion nowhere in sight.

“I can preserve (here insert animal’s name if known, otherwise state ‘your loved one’) in any pose and moment of expression that you desire. Whenever you are plagued by dolorous thoughts of his (or ‘her,’ never ‘its’) passing you may simply turn your gaze to your mantelpiece and your spirits will be raised as you see him (or ‘her’) captured eternally in a moment of zestful energy.”

There had better be treasure in there, or he would be very disappointed. Perhaps it was just that he liked to drink stronger wine than was traditional, but he had never been willing to spend the rest of his life in the village, in the shade of the fat tree that had birthed all his cousins, harvesting berries and fruit and fermenting them, and then forgoing all drink and swelling to harden into a sessile giant, content never to move his limbs except with the breeze...

At the Wicker Knight's feet Kverna faced the foe. "I do not hate you," she said to them. "You are as you are. Maybe Perfection has no choices. It is this thing behind me I hate. Leeching our hope, and returning nothing. At least without it we will meet our fates as human beings."

The Spinies pressed flutes to their chest-maws and trilled a maniacal improvisation, something like Chinese opera filtered through jazz and spliced with a catfight. Not what I'd call music to die for, but my opinion didn't count much. Customs had generously allowed me to keep my pistol, after draining its battery to red. I had maybe three shots. Worse yet, if I killed someone, that was the end of my journey to sanity. I’d be deported or executed.

Her mountain of skirts fell away, and their pocket and petticoat undersides revealed her arsenal: grappling hooks, spider climbing-legs, a buckler that doubled as a bit of mid-line accent on her corset. Fashions this year had left Ivette room to arm a platoon if the need arose, and she and her mentor had refined her skirts into the perfect carrying system. She could not sit, but really, who but old dowagers and incurable bores ever sat at an imperial fête?

Her words made no sense, but neither did the lost hours. I shivered in the warmth of the day. Beyond the window, in the square, I saw a familiar figure in a tattered cloak. Even from a floor up, the smell that greeted me was unpleasant: unwashed hair, perhaps rotting leather. Suddenly, I wanted to escape from my studio and the chill that hung over it.

The music grew louder, skirling with strange harmonies that wove in and out of each other, and I knew then it couldn't be Nanny, though I did not recognize the instruments. I emerged from the artificial forest to stand behind my brother and sister. An elegant divan covered in striped cream and blue silk was faintly visible out of the corner of my eye. I crossed my arms over my chest as though I could protect myself. "Where is this?"

I am Melika. And that is all, now. My grandfather—I believe he was my grandfather—said that our memories make us who we are. I hope that he was wrong, for if he spoke the truth, then I am no one.

The iterations of his death resound about him like the echoes of a minor chord. All seems as it was and should continue to be, here in the moving present Men perceive as Time: the all-consuming anguish, a scullery knife, bleeding out alone with the final notes from his mandolin.

My host studiously ignored the open portfolios of photographs that had been retrieved from my carriage. Presented therein were proofs from the aforementioned exhibit ("mechano-erotica", it had been dubbed by the artistic community). Androgynous waifs posed in the controlled symmetry of Machines; the hair on their heads and elsewhere thickly woven with industrial cable; black metallic powders darkening eyes and lips.

Cecily grabbed a shard from the mirror, traced an unsteady line along the flesh of her wrist. Scars and metal piercings adorned her arms where she’d cut herself before. “They demand the spilling of blood,” Granduncle would always say, when he bothered to notice her at all. “They envy us, you see, and covet the iron flowing freely in our veins.”

Sully could practically feel her glance brushing along his skin like silky smooth lips. It could, more to the point, the thing inside him, exploiting his senses as if they were its own. She stood and stretched, then strolled to the doors of carved tulgey wood that opened into the mews outside. Sully caught her fragrance, the scent of her feminine places, a smell of spice and rich dark petals of bloodleaf. “Sabrina? Don’t get too close.”

Peavey could not fault his grandson Moot’s skill nor the beauty of the boy’s sculpture. No, it was the subject matter that cut into his heart, even now. Moot cherished his beliefs so deeply; if his faith were ever shaken, it would surely devastate him. He was so very much like his grandmother in that regard.

The arsenal’s observation scopes terminated in lenses that provided magnification in each of the cardinal directions. The indistinct blurs of six vehicles had crossed the property line, paralleling the road that led down the valley to Myddleham-on-Tyne. “Blast,” I muttered. “Hit the ansible beacon, Plio. Get reinforcements here as fast as you can.”

I pulled a heavy sidearm from my weapons harness, a Navy variable-bore Persuader with deep scrollwork along the barrel and grip, as natural an extension of my mechanical hand as were wrist couplings and steel-jacketed fingers. “I’m a weaponsmith. I’ve got your diplomacy right here.”

Ordinary catastrophe. Is there such a creature? All catastrophe feels extraordinary to the one caught in its tide. It is no comfort to the ones whose fortunes I read, to say to them, This thing is ordinary, this thing that will happen to you.

Where's it all come from? George wondered. Where you think it comes from? Frank scoffed. It's fields and roads and house lots. It's America, running westwards to somewhere else, anywhere else, someplace maybe better, like Great-Grandpaps did, and like Papa did, and just like we're doing.

Henry flings the partly sewn upper at James's head. James laughs and ducks, and the thing flaps like a shot-struck fowl, flops to the floor. Henry leaps to his feet so violently that his stool topples over. —Out with you, he shouts, be gone!

Mr. Stutley Northup is not a magistrate. Why, he's not even a lawyer. But if people are free to come to him with their controversies, he is just as free to offer his opinion; and if they choose to act on it, well, that's their own lookout.

I crumbled to my knees on the front steps of the church as the hinkypunks closed in on Danny O'Neil. In the twilight of the village square, their bodies were like whirling balls of smoke and light, each one's single foot hopping almost too quickly for me to see. They had brought the smell of the bog with them, thick as sludge and duckweed.

I don't remember whose idea this was, mine or Elu's. We talked about leaving for years, so much that we had to either do it or stop talking about it at all. Then Elu's mother died. We saw her burned, her ashes put in the tomb with our ancestors, a spiral carved in the rock to mark her passage from this world, and found that nothing else was holding us there. So here we are.

It dawned on me that he enjoyed watching me squirm; a proud competent woman but to him just Nahemiah’s commoner puppet. “Ten thousand!” I spat out the words intentionally in the heaviest Tavalland accent that the theater had eradicated in me twelve years before. “Ten thousand thalers for your measly sculpture that the Opera rejected!”