There is an ache within the Captain. A silence where a voice of wonder and curiosity should speak. The absence left when the Machaenum stole their soul of air with a blade of liquid light. Veled, the fourth quarter of their being, who had longed for the vastness of the world. Now they are only three.

Kayta withdrew her arm from the thick liquid, the leather straps that bound the amputation now jet black. Salt peppered my carapace; near-misses kicked up sand sprays. Kayta, shielded for the moment, crouched, drew deep breaths. I picked up her detached hand, held it against my thorax.

A moment longer, Rallos watches in disgusted fascination as the vile man-beast's body twitches and lurches as he puts his muscles into grinding something in a large mortar and pestle before him. Reagents, no doubt, for some rite or malicious magick.

Most of the teeth in his jaw didn’t belong to him—after one-hundred and eighty years and a small mountain of corpses, he lied through other people’s teeth. He’d pulled them out of the mouths of other mages, mostly dead ones.

Nonar leafed through the pages of the notebook, trying to connect with the long-ago long-dead engineer who had worked with a different magic to sew worlds together. The drawings there were precise. Free. Accurate. Really, what harm would it do if she drew? What harm would it do if she couldn’t draw?

Perrin would have preferred to cleave off his own fingers rather than accept the commission the count was asking of him. But Marie was waiting, and she had made a request. “My wife believes that by seeing one of my statues, she might love me. If you would let her come to the château, see one of them...”

And then she was running after the retreating ocean waves as they sheeted from the beach, as it curled under like an enormous sunlit tongue. Louise jumped into the color, into the wet, certain she had never seen anything so beautiful, until the skin, emboldened by the water, swallowed her whole.

A wind picked up, and a half-torn poster of the Scrimshander flapped on a lamppost. The caricaturist walked over to it, reached out to rip it up into pieces. One word was partially legible above the face, and the way the poster flapped in the wind made the word there, gone, there, gone, as if flashing. Strike—

Jiteh remembers when Gurteh, father of the spring's tithe, broke down sobbing and refused to drink. The sloths skinned him as they had the tithe and added his flesh to the broth. Each villager was then made to drink two spoonfuls. No one has refused since.

Amarine wanted to plant a garden and was wild with her plans. Shai watched her wife's lips as she went on and on about which vegetables would winter well. Amarine had chipped a tooth yesterday while chopping wood, and it gave her beauty a feral quality. Now she looked dangerous, and Shai liked catching glimpses of it while she talked.

Rana read the woe that wrapped the man—a swarm of blood scorpions that writhed beneath his flesh. Woe was a reciprocal thing. The more you inflicted upon others, the more you gathered. The Goddess’s judgment was quick. This time she imagined a sewing-needle half long as her forearm. Reaching into her satchel she withdrew a fine opaque thread of woe and sewed it into the man, weaving it between the scorpions.

Reilitas clutches tightly her wrought-iron railing as the city guards throttle the thieves and rioters. Wherever she looks she finds destroyed the things she has made. The ambassador's tiled vases are smashed; she had spun them wide to hold his banana trees. The golden automaton in the shrine of the god of prophecy, which she had helped a foreign machinist assemble, has lost all four of its arms, and its topaz eyes have been plucked. A dress that must be her work, woven for a virgin consecrated to the temple, is ripped and fouled in the street.

There was no stopping that porcupine-headed diva once she set her course. Cinrak straightened the hem of her tailored suit jacket and eyed Loquolchi's riding garb: a batwing dress straight out of the Rat-oyal costume department, all white froof and flop. Surely a tripping hazard.

She glanced up at the miniature maze her creation would have to navigate, a spherical cityscape of shell and chrome-colored fossil levitating above the table. A pressure-headache hum of whispering thoughts brushed against her mind. She usually didn't get headaches and she was already struggling with one. The judges' thoughts made her nauseous to go along with it all, but it wasn't like she could tell them to stop.

Ukeme knelt again at the table, took brush in hand, and paused above the first sheet of reed-paper. He wondered why he felt such hesitation. Words woven in cloth could protect bodies and hold spells; words on paper were merely words. But words on this paper could make him a scholar.

I’ve come for you, Jeremy; you, and my arm. The rats brought back to me everything I lost, except that. I’ve already searched Grandma’s house: the cellar and the attic, the dank room beneath the stairs, the cupboards and the chests, the hidden spaces between the walls and floors. But I’ll find you, brother; you, and that wayward limb of mine.

The day before the money finally ran out, I did come across a tantalising possibility which, one of these days, I really must get around to following up, since it might just be the missing ingredient that would make all the difference; but of course I was in no position to do anything about it at that time, so I sold the glassware for even less than I paid for it and wandered into the centre of town, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

I hoped this was more than pretense, since our survival might soon depend on her. Father could conceal his peachwood sword easily enough, but there was no way I’d be allowed to bring my jian into the magistrate’s presence. I took my own precious bawu for no good reason that I could think of. I knew only Mei Li could reliably conjure a weapon out of hers at need; so far all my attempts at this transformation had come up short.

The perceptive kobold peered around the corner and, seeing me, grinned, exposing quite a lot of pointed teeth. "Nom de solelh! My good friend! My friend Mr. Swift! I did not expect to see you so soon!" I set down my glass and crossed the hall to her, taking her hand in both of mine.

I struggled with the thought that one day my anger would emerge. Perhaps my father had been sweet as a boy and even as a young man; perhaps his true temperament had arrived with the first pains to plague his back or his first gray hair or the placement of a crown upon his head. I dreamt myself a monster, half bear with long claws, half serpent with two poisonous fangs behind my lips. I slept less and less for fear that I would wake and the nightmares would have transferred themselves into the waking world.