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.

I realized I was thinking of my brother's guilt as a matter of 'if,' and rebuked myself. This was what I had joined the Quiet to do, to punish wrongdoing in the City and protect its peace. Family loyalty had no place in the ranks. There was no reason to suspect anyone else.

Now she walks through broken ruins warmed with radiation and the fading light of the sun, through streets strangled by the fallen brickwork of a hundred years' abandonment and train tracks whose split rails are choked with dust. The aqueducts have run dry and flow only with hydrolyzed acid, their walls fanned with slender needles of pale yellow crystal.

The science of anathema arrayed itself in my thoughts unbidden. I counted the marks--five in each swipe. They reached as high as a man, avoiding the iron fittings on the window frames. Whatever it was, it was as big as me. Something that size wasn't a fair match for ignorant villagers with nothing but a book written by an ex-priest.

The strange moment broke, and suddenly the stranger in her circle was an enemy again, and Kamalija struck out with her knife. He had already ducked back, and the blade dragged then stopped at the line where they'd poured her blood, as if the air was made of clay. She couldn't force it any further, and she watched his back as he bounded into the forest.

Niddy’s pale corpse lay naked on the table. Her eyes were held shut by river-worn pebbles rather than the coins I’d placed before I left. The dress that should have graced the corpse, Niddy’s best, was on Trilla. Though it shamed me that my sister’s body was shown such dishonor before strangers, it didn’t hurt as it might have. If justice prevailed, that dress would be all the benefit Trilla’s treachery brought her.

Shaken, I reach for her arm as though to pull her back, and feel rough skin under the robes: old scars, burns, long healed. For some reason I am reminded of another traveller, long ago, a little girl fleeing a burning house, running out into our pilgrim-train. She would have become a priestess when she grew up, I think. It is not impossible. Tekel, the woman had said before she died, and I wonder what she shares with my son.

The title of the book was Principles of Light-Bearing, and Sharide was engrossed in it by the second page. It described how light was the underpinning of the world. She had dreamed of being a weaver, and a fisher, and a soldier, and many different wives, but the life of a seeker of knowledge had never come to her yet. When next she slept, she decided, she would try to find a life wherein she had read this book, and other books, and understood them.

I held my father while he died. It was all I could do, but I whispered fiercely, "Father, I'll get your sword back one day. One day when he least expects it." I'm not sure Father could hear me by then, but I never forgot my promise.

Deathfire shot an arrow through the man’s back. Then he drew his sword. The woman and children would be easy enough to kill, but he wanted to take care of the baby first. “Don’t worry,” he said, rubbing a gentle hand across the woman's sweat-soaked brow. “I’ll make it painless for all of you.”

I thought about hitting him and taking what Gilga-Yar was after. But this old man had me curious, and my patron’s lack of forthrightness with me made me want all the more to know what was going on. So I took the shovel and the knife. “What am I doing with these?”

When no eyes were on her, Lys frayed a rope with her knife—choosing one which would not harm the sails but would send an iron pulley tumbling into the sea. When Tamlen angrily ordered a replacement brought from the cargo hold, Lys was first to volunteer and on her way before anyone could deny her.

When the boy opened his eyes, his finger was gone, the flesh sealed over it as if it had never been. Then the temple wall bucked and groaned, and a hairline crack appeared in its surface. Light came pouring out through it—a strange sort of light he could not describe. “Yes,” said his father. “It is opening. You must give more.”

Her age was impossible to say, for her face was crusted with muck and roots. Her teeth were like kernels of mottled corn. She was naked, her skin textured like stone, gray and gravelly. Wet, bulbous mushrooms grew in the moss around her womanly crevice. Her reek nearly brought me to my knees.

Carla caught her breath as the shape came clear: a face of pipes and fittings and gears, its eyes glowing faintly with the sheen of werglass. The mouth was only an expressionless line of cable, but when the voice spoke again there was no question whose it was. "Who is she?"