Zeuxis led them up to the highest storey. There he left them while he went back and forth between darkroom and roof with his camera and the parts to his flying machine, carrying them up to the pavement that surrounded the topmost spire.

With a shout Keftu took two mighty bounds and leaped into the air. He kicked his legs, spreading wide the wings that had been hidden in their case at his back. They were like insect wings, with veins of carved bone and membranes of golden resin, and he drove their gear box with chains linked to his greaves. "What do you think you're doing?" Yani cried.

The next night was much the same. I began to recollect certain old fables about a preadamitic race of ensouled decapods that did battle with the giant eurypterids and ammonites of the whirlpools in the southern straits. Do you see? I thought of the sea-folk only after their first appearance. And yet my labors were their ineluctable summons, as I had known (without knowing) that they would be.

Maugreth was roused by the concubine in the darkness before dawn. He threw off the chitinous coverlet of mushroom velvet and sat up. He was still half-asleep. The sound of a distant horn rolled through the forest, echoed by another note from nearer at hand. "Eh? What is it? What?" he grunted, groping for his sword.

Elerit felt a rush of arid wind as the daemon brushed past him. Released from his invisible bonds, he dashed after it, leaped onto the handcar, and began pumping. When he shot into the open air it was already far ahead. It was like a tall, black lemur, a living shadow crowned with two bifurcating branches. It turned and looked at him with eyes that were small and round and yellow. Then it was gone.

Harvesting the bodies meant taking a few risks, but it was easy enough for a steady man who did his research and kept himself sober, and anatomists always needed fresh bodies to dissect. And if we dug up a not-so-fresh body, well, wigmakers and dentists pay well for human hair and teeth. We’d lived well back then, Bet and me, and we’d planned to give our baby girl everything she wanted. But then the Anatomy Act passed and the demand for bodies plummeted.

Moogh decided, with regret, that he would have to temporarily abandon his trek due west and instead walk alongside this water for a bit until either he outlasted or outpaced whatever curse made it seem to go on forever. He declared its true name to be the Tricksy River, and decided if he ever found the trickster responsible for it he might justifiably commit some minor violence upon their person.

My smile broadened. It was lucky for the old man I don't practice my trade for free, or he'd have spent the rest of the day rolling on the floor clutching his guts. “If one of them was a wizard capable of performing that level of enchantment, he'd be a rich man,” I said. “Stands to reason.”

I didn’t have to ask whom he meant, but it seemed that Daiki, in this one regard, was not going to get his wish. The bushi produced two flea-bitten, scruffy men. Both were bruised and bloody but alive. Two more were not. Daiki kicked the body so that it rolled face up and studied the dead man’s features. “It would seem the bandit has escaped me after all.”

The old man’s form shimmered in my grasp, like a mountain peak glimpsed through summer haze. Another instant and I did not hold an old man at all, but rather an oni. He was perhaps a head taller than myself, with red skin, gleaming tusks and horns, and black hair as coarse and thick as a horse’s mane. He continued to struggle, and it was all I could do to hold him.

I snapped the flute in half across my knee. Junko’s scream drowned out the faint whistle and much louder crack of the flute coming apart. He dove toward me, nearly incoherent in rage. Kenji managed to trip him as he hurtled past, and Junko went sprawling, though he quickly scrambled back to his feet. “I’ll kill—”

The monk nodded. “You’re not seeking music; you’re seeking an answer. I wondered if you understood that. Very well then, I will help you find Akiko. Yet whatever happens, afterwards you will leave this place. You don’t belong here. Do I have your word?” Hiroshi hesitated, but he saw no good alternative.

Now, please bear in mind that this was a new thing. I had been trapped in what looked like a pitiful little statue for the better part of five hundred years, and in all that time no one saw my prison for what it was. Driana did. She knew someone alive was trapped there, and she was curious. Frankly I was curious about her as well.

I looked around slowly. I had a talent for spotting ghosts, monsters, foxes, even demons in their disguised forms, but a death spirit? That was something more within Kenji’s purview than my own. “Where?”

The demon's power would diminish in the light of day. All we had to do was survive the night, but as the cold settled in, I began to wonder if it might not be better to take my sword and my chances with the creature. If we weren't killed immediately, at least maybe we could find some firewood.

I had little talent for poetry, but my instruction in the classic metaphors was probably no less extensive than Akio's. The poem was both an entreaty and a question; that much was clear. But what was the answer? One who might be able to tell me was beyond speech now and might be for some time, if not forever.

Whether I was drunk or sober, Princess Teiko haunted my dreams. I had always assumed, if I drank enough that one day this would no longer be true, but there had been fifteen years of drinking after we parted, plus two more after her death, and now my optimism was quite exhausted. As this foolish hope had been all that I had to fight her with, there was nothing left for me to do tonight except the only sensible thing—I surrendered.

On the face of the matter I had to agree. While the estate would technically belong to the Imperial Family, I had been assigned the position of steward—quite a handsome income. “Security is the greatest illusion of all, Kenji-san. As for my poverty, it was more of a problem when I was drinking. Don’t mistake me—I am not ungrateful. I am merely puzzled.”

"Has death made you a demon, Lady? No! All who are mortal must die, but not all who die become ghosts. You did, and that is because your hopes and dreams as a living woman were so completely frustrated. Therefore, your defining characteristic is not death but rather an excess of the yin principle, which you would instinctively attempt to counter by taking my living energy. Your present condition is not fate but rather a condition, an illness. An illness can be cured."

Leaving Leo alone, with his brother's head. Leo stepped closer to the jar. Cary's white-blond hair floated up from his skull, the tips waving slightly. It looked like strands of spiderweb, or exposed nerves. "You still telling people things they don't want to hear?" He tapped on the glass. As if he might rouse it to speech.

With the seventh overcast night upon me, I’m beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t be easiest to put the flare gun to my head. I’m fixated on this thought, and on the feel of the cool brass in my hands, and the sand between my toes, when I hear a shuffling noise. I lean toward the edge of the hut and hold my breath until I’m sure of it. There’s someone coming along the beach toward me.

Kenji began to chant. It might have been a passage from the Diamond Sutra; I was not pious enough to know one book of Buddhist scripture from another, but Kenji, despite his flaws, knew nearly all of them and could recite the appropriate passages at will. Which he was doing now. The shadow moved away from us toward the outbuilding as we stepped out onto the rear veranda, always keeping the structure to its back, or such I judged its back to be. It was hard to be certain with something so close to formless.

The song became a chant, slow and rhythmic as a sleeping heart. The dance wove together three women, then four, then one alone with steel in her hand. Zel dreamed on her feet, free of pain, comfortable with the prospect of death. The white bed, the rubied throat. Two of the sisters went away into the darkness beyond the ring of fire. When they returned, they bore a white ghost between them. A white-feathered ghost with yellow eyes that burned brighter than the flames.

I lifted my muzzle and sniffed. The wood was different today. Fine dust still hung in the air and sparkled in sunlit shafts. Such a thing this sparkling was. I gazed at it in wonder. Had the light ever been just so before? Was this a new thing?

So well did Anansya tell the tale, little did I realize until too late that her ritual had already snared me, thrusting me into the tapestry of shadows. I became the hero laced with light, while my body sat mindless before the screen. The past had become present through Anansya's magic, the players and props conjured from my memories. I could feel an odd thinness to my flesh.

I walked down the aisle, passing frozen spectators whose eyes were riveted to the screen and weeping blood. I recognised the Mayor immediately by his bold muttonchops, and beside him, the actor Franchot Aucoin, whose lecherous exploits were as legendary off-screen as on. Both men were bleeding as though their eyes had been gouged out and pressed back in.

As a candy dog I lazed between two street-kitchen buckets. Through the legs of passers-by I glimpsed my real self resting at my stall. Next, I animated the sugar-horse. Nong had convinced an herbalist to hang my horse figurine under his ‘running horse’ lamp. I had worried about the flame but needed this vantage point covered, and so dangled the horse a hopefully safe distance under the lantern’s base.

I needed to stall the Ten Crows Sect’s men. I asked the Golden Water River for leave to shape a water-hound from its substance, and in return I’d offer my candy dog figurine as tribute. It was pleased, and it pulled the caramel into deeper currents while granting me dominion over a vat’s worth of sugar-tinged riverwater.

I finally scent Leaver at far edge of mamafield, past where my roots have ever dug. I don't feel safe so far outcircle, but he's traveled alone for years. He's been so far outside we wouldn't even scent his death. And that's what he deserves.

Rosco guessed he’d have to handle the situation, what with the sheriff being away down the Mile and all. He stepped out into the main road that ran down the middle of Gutshank, population one-hundred-fifty-three, and rested a hand on the pearly handle of his revolver. Tried to look mean, like his Pappy would’ve done.