Aspley turned slowly. He had been washed ashore on the island, and in a daze, a delirium, had stumbled from the beach and into this building. He had no idea where he was or how he had come to be there. No explanations to soothe the rushing of his frantic mind. But then his intellect cut in. Reason, lovely, lovely reason, told him, in all its wisdom, that wherever he was it was preferable to where he had been, preferable, dear god, yes, to the horror of sucking seawater into his lungs.

They couldn't be serious, Morrow thought, could not possibly be...but then the Major allowed the squid to slip from his fingers and into his mouth. Miss Twickenham stifled a horrified gasp. Morrow’s heart quickened its beating. Surely, there had been some sleight of hand in the Major’s actions. What he had witnessed was impossible, and he wondered just how strongly the professor’s tobacco had been tinctured with laudanum.

I hear the swish of snow falling off branches outside our thick-needled shelter and think, for a strange moment, that the illness is over, that animals will come near us—but no, it’s Oruguaq standing at the narrow opening, with a dead fox slung over her shoulder almost blending into her furs, winter-hidden. She looks like she’s trying not to laugh.

The South-East Wind had not blown through those hills since becoming the guardian of the temple for this period, but the South Wind blew there / where the bones drift into gullies like the snow that falls in other lands and I can call through them in a hundred voices, like lizards, like foxes, like men /

As Knowe hikes fast over the plain and down the heather-thick slope to the farms spread out along the low lands, she almost laughs thinking: of course a ghost is the first person to want her singing.

Out of respect for the fox, she ground its bones there. First the tail-bones, murmuring the words her grandmother had taught her early in the pregnancy: For a strong heart. For strong lungs. For strong arms and legs. For strength. For strength. Then the other bones, separating them as use dictated, and picked up the hide and meat and set off home with steps full of fear: that the tail bones would not strengthen her son; or that they would, and her mother would hate her for it.

Father may have been a scholar of the Tao, but he was not above invoking the teachings of Kong Fuzi when it suited him, usually where I was concerned. It was my place to be the innocent, obedient daughter, except in our role of devil hunters when I had to use my martial training to kill something. I took a moment to loosen my jian in its scabbard across my back. This accomplished little except to make me feel a bit better.

But she is special. That first night, when you land together on the roof of the north tower, she hops off the wyvern as easy as dismounting a horse. Her skin is burned from the high sun and chapped from the hard wind, but she spins on her heel and hugs the wyvern around its huge neck. It turns to look at you, with a slightly tilted head, a confusion in its eyes.

Almas wants to say that it’s barbaric, but then so is the whole of it; it would be like observing that a cupful dipped from the sea is salt. And this man has been the author of barbarisms as well, so how should it matter to him? So all she says is, “I’m sorry.” That much is true.

Sere wouldn’t be able to send letters. Diligent, loyal Tashet would never fathom that anyone was reading her mail and would take no precautions. Sere couldn’t explain what would happen to them both if she didn’t leave.

Never before had she run with such speed or such fear, caroming off trees, tearing through brush, ripping loose the roots that hooked her feet, until she caught up to Hundeil. Both were wheezing with exhaustion when they reached the gnarled behemoth of a tree that proved to be Olderra's dwelling. Its bark parted like curtains to admit them.

The first dozen or so corpses Yinghua paused to examine yielded nothing. By then her nostrils were so full of the death-stench that proximity to any particular corpse hardly mattered, and her nausea began to settle, as if her body were reluctantly coming to terms with the situation. She saw the carnage in the abstract—this was not a severed limb or a split skull, it was simply part of a butterfly habitat.

Eefa looks back. Talaan is bed-tousled and half-dressed astride a yellow mare, her hair a tangled mane behind her (how many times has Eefa combed that hair, gently, in the glow of the fire?), her robe fallen open to the chest (the laundry Eefa washed the previous day, folded with lavender and cloves). Her feet are bare. She does not seem to feel the white-toothed wind nipping at her flesh.

She spends the afternoon with the clay-boy, watching for signs of wakefulness, sprinkling a few more seeds onto his chest. She feels as though she’s woken up into a world that’s slightly off-kilter, as though everything has taken one step to the left in her absence. Everyone’s acting a bit odd. Besides that, there’s this creature, this half-human, half-monster, this not-quite-Sleeper who nevertheless is Sleeping just as Magda does.

Not for the first time, Li considered killing Nasrin. The young woman was too trusting; too confident in the persuasive power of her logic. But everything Li had seen of Nasrin told her she wasn't a threat. At best, she was someone else's catspaw. But whose?

I was famous for my skill with time, in my solo work, but soloists who feared that their rhythm was not the best were reluctant to engage me as accompanist. This competition for the Prix du Halispell was my first accompaniment job in years, other than with Armand at home, and three days ago I would never have expected that it would be for the daughter of Lorenzo Caramin.

She sailed through the arpeggios, touching each briefly. The sound of her won me so completely that it took my brain a moment to detect her crime. Improvisation! Undeniably lovely—yet completely and utterly taboo! I’d already put my score past the censors, spending weeks of my time and more money than I had. One did not go around altering approved notes—not unless one hoped to draw the Ministers.

She joined the fragments of its mind, and it soothed her even more than she remembered. The Cataract's ghost said,

Properly, the cat's name was Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells, along with a number of ceremonial titles that needn't concern us. But the people who had called her that no longer lived in the station's ruins. Every day as she made her rounds in what had been the boundaries of the temple, she saw and smelled the artifacts they had left behind, from bloodstains to scorch marks, from decaying books to singed spacesuits, and yowled her grief.

“It's more than that. It's a symphony.” When LeSony'ra had reported for national service, it was as a conscientious objector. She wanted to produce a happier future through music, which positioned her at odds with most of the other cadets. A position she was now long used to.

She needed to be among her own kind again. But not ones like those who had programmed her. No, she needed to live with a peaceful group of survivors, a human community left untainted by the rebels, untouched by the Spliced. Perhaps somewhere out in the wilderness, there might be people with no connectivity. Off the grid. Humans who had not seen the broadcast of Dahlia's feast.

Shiny metal bloomed out and out from her touch and the red rust disappeared. Her heart sped and it felt good. Not from fear, but... satisfaction? Tarnish sought the right word like in a prayer and it came to her. Euphoria. She jerked her hand back, but the next instant she wanted more. She needed more, that little bit hadn’t been enough.

All of a sudden there’s an enormous black cube filling up the sky above them. No thunderclap, no sound at all, it just appears. The cube is like nothing she’s ever seen, an enormous black box composed of a thousand shifting slivers breaking and melding, rippling, almost liquid. Blinking red sensors swarm around its edges like flies. Vertigo swamps her, and she retches.

Bile rises. I anticipate her words. “This song meant everything to us. It reminded us of how we survived the wars in our little underground shelter as the Dvenri troops exterminated those of our people who did not hide in underground enclaves. As your people, your glorious Yroi Empire, then exterminated mine.”

Her words make me shudder like a puppy introduced to an unfamiliar environment. When I recover, I don't answer. Instead, I scuttle to the nook between the head of my bed and the mud wall opposite the window and ransack the wicker cupboard there for my incense, muttering to myself, "Amadioha the great god, there's two of them. Nnanna's ghost too?"

Yet even with that dim illumination, the blackness surrounding them was oppressive. The air was damp, rotted; it lay greasily against his skin. With every breath, he felt grime collecting in his lungs. As he followed Elseir, her skin bluish-white in the strange light, he wondered if she felt it as he did. Yet he could read nothing in her thin features but a tremendous powerful intent.

Folu has forgotten how to read them, but something is stirring. The symbols start dancing again, even if only a little. The Lion, the Knight, the Sun. The Knight is finally here. The cards knew he was coming. He came to ruin everything, with his warm blanket and bright fire and hot soup. The Knight has brought the Sun. The Sun burns. The Grey Men’s Sun burnt Mother. Folu will never forget.

We dry the tongues on butcher's paper beside the stove. Once desiccated, they barely have a scent. Uncle Sholert has shown me how to arrange them like tiny shingles or scales, overlapping. We fix them in place with a glue made from horses' hooves, and then we seal the boxes with beeswax.