She looked dead, as well she would be if she were anything else. Only a powerful magus could live without a soul. But even Khatereh needed the touch of her soul once in awhile; on midsummer day, as was her personal tradition, she would let it rest within her and be renewed. With her soul inside her body, she would be as vibrant and beautiful as a twenty-two year-old sister ought to be, and when it was removed she would look healthy again, for a while.  

“You?” I stood, furious, and as I did the red brazier-light glinted on something behind the throne that I could not see. “Did you not have enough of father’s blessings while he lived? He gave you gifts, and horses, and talked of the great kingdom you would inherit. Meanwhile I sat in your shadow and the heap of your scorn. No, brother. For this once I will have something that you have not had first.”

Abe experienced the odd sensation of Madame Oljon inside his head aligning her face with his, pushing eyes and lips forward past his own as they both stared at the small figure near the center of the room sitting cross-legged on a high cushion, naked save for a loincloth, smiling idiotically (not unlike, Abe thought, the wizard Philoneus’s own idiotic smile).

“Is that all you have?” Henry yelled at the locomotive. He kicked its hot firebox, and its whistle screamed at him, steam shrieking from the full boiler. “That’s right!” he shouted back. “Shake me. Come on, you ugly bastard. Shake me!” The train, spitting a thick spume of greasy smoke, hurled itself down the far side of the mountain.

I chuckled, cracked open my pistol’s cylinder, and loaded it with the wooden ammunition. “Don’t worry, my dear,” I said, and tucked the gun in my waistband. “There’s plenty of time before sunrise.”

Beatrice smiled; it was brittle and wavering. It reminded Mona of the first tentative rays of sunlight emerging on the end of winter. How they came through the windowpanes all watery and uncertain. It had been just the two of them for so long, Mona realized.

“Miss Em?” Florence called softly from the doorway. The woman—perhaps it was a woman—in the bed was fragile and hollow as a teacup. Her white hair wisped and curled around her skull, and her eyes looked like stones dropped in deep snow. She opened her mouth and made a weak, kitten-ish sound. Florence nodded and bent to adjust the pillow.

Dr. Benjamin, he was running, running through the rain from one tent to another, trying to save his Story Eater and those pasty wax circles he’s spent so long collecting and, once, he looked up. Mala was sitting there on the top of the sea wall. She wasn’t wearing a rain slicker or even shoes and she was just looking at him like he was a rat, like he was a bug. Like he was something with too many eyes and too many legs and all she wanted to know was what ridiculous thing he was going to do next.

Otranto didn't hesitate. On some level, he realized, he had been anticipating this moment, or one like it, for a very long time. "The punishment for failure should be death by my own hand."

The garrote was made of fine silk laced with steel wire, designed to choke bloodlessly. Its ends were looped to small grips of cherry wood. Otranto had crafted it himself over a period of three weeks, designing for speed and efficacy. Still, the target was thrashing hard enough that the smooth handles were biting his palms. He drew harder.

From this window, we watched the man’s whip rise again and the back hoof of the mare collide with his thin throat in the same instant. The man crumpled down into the festering street as gouts of blood spouted from his neck. No one came to claim his body. Below us in the alley, rats and dogs or rat-sized dogs emerged slowly. They began to sip at the red puddles around him.

The Prodigy scampered forward at once and sat before the pipe organ’s keyboards. Kreisler was with him. Together they began to play, calling the automata back to their city. Just as we had planned. And I, I ran after the Clockwork King, driven, as ever, by the thought of Olympia. For I had more that I would know.

As Alana approached, a single beastman detached himself from the crowd. He was larger than the others and wore only a long, red tabard that left his huge arms bare. His lower jaw protruded far beyond his upper, giving him a pugnacious look, yet his black hair was meticulously combed, shot through with braids ending in red beads. A three-fingered hand rested on the hilt of an oversized longsword.

If Lady Percivalia loved the cinematographist in her chaste way—and she thought despite all propriety that the rising, fluttering, tremulous sensation she felt when she looked at him might be a kind of love—then she loved him because he had brought her the shapes and shadows of creatures that dwelled outside the confines of her life.

We pass the last of those who have preceded us, those who crossed into the warped, rippling landscape without the benefit of protective magic. Father stops to examine a grotesquely deformed skeleton. The bleached bones are twisted and swollen; the skull cave-like. Of necessity, I halt too, but I already know this poor warped cadaver is neither Mother nor my sister.

I wanted to go, but I did not know where I was going. I wanted to stay and rub my hands all over her belly, but I did not like the thought of all that sand in the creases of my palms. I wanted to ask her more questions, about the way the world was made, about death and dreams, but did not want to know the answers, should they distract me from my destined future.

“You’re a liar,” said the girl with golden hair. “You lie to keep us in check. You lie about the fish people to keep us here, so we won’t try to escape down the river. And you lie about the mountains, so we won’t go there, either. You lie about the blood tax being integral to the wealth of the city. What could you possibly use the blood for?”

They turned their backs to Mabella. Her stomach twisted as it did when she pilfered too many sweets from the kitchens. She wanted to say something and nothing. She wanted to run, but her feet throbbed. Instead she turned and walked from the winged women's cackling silence.

If I did not stop her, she would be lying with strangers in the smoke-room tonight, heedless of those who might be watching. So I made a show of stepping forward to take her satchel, as though she were now too delicate to bear it herself. She let me carry it, and I followed her through the halls and to her room.

When you are young you think that you will live forever and that no harm will ever come to you. Your friends will stay friends and your lovers lovers, and the most dangerous thing is spotting a wrinkle in your looking glass. Ah, this is not true, my boy! There are worse things than a safe old age.

"No," Ela said. "Wait. Stop!" She’d not been idle in deception. She fumbled in the ragged pockets of her robe. Thread. Golden thread. To sew up a shirt. The pretty one he was never around to wear. How long have I hated you? she thought as he struck her. Is it because you aren’t here or because you are?

I haul my basket over to the stand of flowers that look like ladies’ lacy handkerchiefs. While I’m digging in the soil with my trowel, sure enough, Picket hops over in the funny way Rabbits do and stares at me through the fence. His ears have perked up again, and I can see him smiling out of the corner of my eye. Insults and scoldings never keep them down for long.

I felt it, or rather Gaumont’s body did, and with such force that it took me a moment to throw it off, a sudden desperation not to see what lay beneath that heavy drape of fabric. Yet I watched eagerly as the hands drew back the folds of grey material to reveal a granitic face, human in form, but so frozen that its wrinkles might have been carved from stone.

We settled in a semicircle, me facing the others, just far enough outside the ravine that the smell of wolfsbane and their sweat covered all traces of sheep's blood on me. I knelt on one knee, ready to leap away. The shepherds clustered behind Nydor, all but one of the men, who stood apart, an arrow nocked and ready. "What are you?"

The next noise I knew quite well; a sword drawn through a belt-ring. And there stood a small man, lost in a vast feathered cloak-and-cowl with a great ash-roc plume curling up from a thick combed headband, pointing a long needle of steel at me, his arm shod in small quills like an ant-hunter. I swear I heard a tinny, whistling call as my eyes took him in.

I tear the robe open. Father's belly’s a ruin—but he has been, as he is in all things, strangely exacting. I press in with my fingers, feeling the wound’s edges; mercifully, they don’t go up underneath the ribs. No, he’s slashed his intestines with expert precision—a deadly but slow wound. Plenty of time before swollen guts and poisoned blood will take his life.

Son squeezed billows of black ink around the ship to mask his approach, remembering what Two-Father had told him: Always curl your tentacles around the front, never in the back where the whirling tail-blades lie. Never rest your tips on the deck, lest they chop off the ends of your sensing-limbs. And should you brush against a long, thin tube of metal, draw away quickly before it squirts fire.

In a palace shaped like bromeliads Yin Sanhi sat sipping a liquor of fermented cactus essence and sand persimmon. The chamber was papered by scrolls of proverbs on statecraft. The mathematicians and artists meant to send her dancers in pale silk and musicians with wrists like flutes, but she had declined, choosing instead silence and solitude.

“Golems,” the sorcereress says, “are vessels of wishes. When you’re done building one it is as if you’ve given birth. When you take one in it is as if you’ve adopted new kin. You put so much of what you want into them, just as with offspring of the womb. Less blood, less mess. No less love.”

But for a reason I wouldn’t be able to name until years after—years stretching between us like clouds unrolling beneath chariot wheels—I was silent; I was silenced and could not demur. I let him, could not quite pull away, show me how to coax the flame and bring order that it did not need. I let him teach me what I already understood.