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 born a slave, like all of you. My master was a hoary old bull known as Ascaro, one of the Bull-King’s champions. Twenty feet high at the shoulders, and even past his prime he was a quick devil, though old trunk muscles were turning into fat.

Of course it was impossible. They were shaping impossibility here: a miracle so great it approached blasphemy. And Kahzakutri was not vandalizing this creation. If anything, She was generous. She gave it a core of Herself. The essence of loss, of grief—the urge to undo.

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.

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.

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.

Slipping into the dead girl's body was like meditating inside a stone, cold and still. Yōsei filled her with tendrils of gold and divided life energy between two bodies—one cold and dead, the other hot and familiar. The girl was too plump, too dense, and filled with tiny creatures that decomposed her flesh. These Yōsei banished, drowning them in golden light.

It is the nature of empire to calve new words, and Mattar has walked ruined roads and suffocating marketplaces to find them. She knows the word for how a Kilin-kasa woman turns a wax-melon in her hands three times before she asks a price—tsa-tsa-tsa. She knows the name the now-dead Enokoans had for her, diabi-sai, witch-mother. She knows, too, the syllables of the arrows of the Hasha as they fall, tulbuku, on Korondi shields and Korondi flesh.

I realized that she was as poorly off as us. Too young to do any good and too old to use her tears to make things happen for her. I saw her life stretched out before her; the past that she had spilled to me in crisp detail. She would amount to nothing. A girl with golden hair can never live up to expectation. And a human with a horse body can never be more than a beast.

Then there's the sparrow you set to chirping an alert whenever someone approaches your suite from the palace courtyard. After several days, it falls to the ground and is no doubt claimed by some hungry scavenger. It had too diminutive a mind to realize it could serve you longer by taking time to eat and sleep.

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?”

—all around me, a great ring of warriors, clothed in armor of polished bronze and headgear of enameled tin feathers that rattled in the wind; warriors with curved breasts and also beards, their faces lighter brown in color than my own, their hands wrapped around pennons and spears. Between them prowled small lions, feather-maned and winged, that bared at me thin fangs of sharpened emerald.

I had not entered the parched lands entirely unprepared. I had an excellent pair of boots—good boots are underrated everywhere—and I was almost glad the ferryman would not accept them in exchange for passage. I had the Apiarist's Gun, made to fit my hand. And as for nourishment, that took care of itself, even here.

Ana thought the land of the dead would be empty, but it is full to bursting. With gods’ turquoise bones, with small grimacing golems fashioned from maize and bone-thin fellow travelers wandering across the desert on their hands and knees, with temples so black and shimmering that she can’t quite make herself look at them.

Tirene was so relieved not to smell roses upon waking that she almost found it difficult to care whether they would be able to find magic or metaphor to get rid of the shadow lady. This pleasant sensation was dispelled halfway through her breakfast of oat cakes, maple syrup, and berries, when the shadow lady swept into the sunny taproom.

JACQUENETTE: Monsieur Cartwright! Early?

WHITLOCK: (aside) An identical response! Perhaps free will is a mere illusion. On the other hand, she's an automaton.

(JACQUENETTE slaps him.)

JACQUENETTE: How dare you employ such a term for a lady!

WHITLOCK : How dare you eavesdrop on an obvious aside!

My love reveled in winter's sunbroken days, when the light spills to the fresh-fallen snow to stab a person in the eyes. Gugán flit from path to stone, a trickster comfortable with his Raven heritage. I, as Eagle, startled at every shift of snow, caught always unawares in the bright sun as he pelted me with clumps of melting cold.

John Halpern knew it should be a heavy weight on his conscience, to wake up and know that he was going to kill a thing that used to be a man. Whether it was or wasn't was a topic of much internal contemplation for him as he walked up the long path to his brother-in-law's house to ask for help. The fact that his brother-in-law was himself a devil-man did not escape him.

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.