To catch a bug, you must burn him out. That had been our experience with Macti spies and rebels. Under the authority of the Wayfaring House we came with black fire and warned all that if the Spider known as Heriz was not returned, we would decree the island corrupted and purify by shot and flame. It had worked in Jani, Uurun, and it would work here.

What that profession might be, I would hesitate to explain had you not explicitly stated that you are unconcerned with my history. Pietro is what the many travelers through Harkuma refer to as a facilis or, commonly, "greaser." He makes his living by arranging contact between the various human merchants and the automata of Akkuma. If a person wishes to visit Akkuma, he must do so in the company of one of these faciles who will vouch for him, undertake the shipment of water, even make business connections, as well as make certain the entrepreneur adheres to all standards of conduct.

Meat for a blanket was no proper trade. Netta turned away from the fire, waiting for her eyes to adjust. She could make out a few of the other groups of refugees—and yes, they were watching her. Waiting for just such a sign of weakness as this.

We all looked up at the high, piping voice; none of us had heard the ladder rattle. Mieni hopped over the edge of the roof, adjusting the lines of her suit. Many koboldim wore children's clothes, but Mieni had made a point of wearing a ladies' suit tailored to her diminutive frame. "Kobold, not goblin. I do insist on the distinction."

Mieni closed her mouth so sharply I feared her fangs would cut her lips. "Just so, Mr. Swift," she muttered. A lone bee, moving drowsily in the cold, crawled out from under the shattered honeypot and stood on the dead Davala's broken eyesocket, waving its antennae as if lost. "Odd," she said. "Very odd."

"It's not—" I sighed as we reached the doors of the veterans' wing. "It was a cruel thing for him to do. She has her vows, and too many of us veterans are too scarred to be any sort of decent companion."

Izzy pushed himself up, trying to see. A flickering light like the reflection of moonlight on the ocean cascaded over the hall, and through it shadows darted like knife-edged fish—Society guards, he realized a little late, moving between him and the light. A gentle roar and boom heralded the trundler automaton's actions: settling down again, after whatever it had done to contain someone.

Marten hesitated. This life in the Wrights' Division, ground under the heel of the Bull's soldiery, or the pyre... but he was a coward, and the books, the books.... He sagged and took Gerda's hand, nodding. Just till I can escape.

The lenses continued to strike as I leapt over Phidias. I wrenched Lundqvist's stylus from the socket, heedless of the damage I did to both. "Professora Lundqvist!" I shouted, peering at her sensor ring and the brain beyond. But the walls continued to keen, and Lundqvist's phonograph remained silent.

The farther they traveled, the more Skald's old trade seemed to distort what he saw, forcing the faces he'd learned over the last few weeks to conform to the city vision. This one will break after a day, he would find himself thinking as the other drovers hailed him. This one is strong, but he favors his left knee; use the hammers first. This one will not break on his own, but hurt any member of his family and he'll tell you anything just so you'll stop.

Professora Lundqvist insisted on taking the bones to the captain, and borrowed me for the purpose. I piled the serpent’s jawbone on her tank, secured the lesser fangs to her braking mechanism, and accompanied her up to the lift. Lundqvist, lacking either an andropter or the torso around which to fasten one, could not venture to the open decks, and thus we were limited to the helm room.

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?"

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.

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.”

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.

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?”

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.