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It started in mud, as many things do.
Red fog, gray earth, sky the color of old bones: Paul Jonas was in hell—but it was a very special hell. Not everyone in it was dead yet.
Try to think about getting out. About really getting out.”
“Try to think about getting out,” the yellow-eyed man had said. “About really getting out.”
Things became even more complicated after Paul died.
He was dead, but his head hurt. He was alive, but a red-hot shell fragment had ripped through his helmet like a knife through cake frosting.
Paul Jonas sighed. He had walked around the tree five times, and it showed no sign of becoming any less impossible.
Memories were swimming just below the surface of his conscious mind, closer than ever but still as strangely unfocused as the many-towered vision before him.
“Ad Aeternum.”
Latin: to eternity
It was all a dream, of course—perhaps just the last hallucinatory moments of a battlefield casualty—but as her voice crept into him and settled itself like something that had found its home, he knew that he would never forget the sound of it.
Butter-ball and Nickelplate—they are the cruelest.”
And the grail, whatever it might be—he could feel the idea of it, swimming just beyond his grasp like one of the bright fish. . . .
He lifted the object and let it catch the last rays of the sun. The green feather sparkled, impossibly real, impossibly bright, and completely untouched by mud.
There were some people in whom weakness, once it had appeared, grew like a cancer.
If politicians ever find a way to tax light, she thought sourly, they’ll probably set up waiting rooms for sunbeam inspection, too.
Christabel Sorensen was not a good liar, but with a little practice she was getting better.
“If I’m very, very good,” he had told her, “someday they may let me get into that Cadillac, little Christabel. I’ll close the garage door real tight, and drive home.”
That was the problem about lying—if people started checking up, things got very complicated.
He exited, and was Orlando Gardiner once more.
He had seen . . . a city, a shining, majestic city the color of sunlit amber.
This vision had been alien but relentlessly modern, a metropolis with elaborately decorated buildings as tall as anything in Hong Kong or Tokyokahama.
What was a fourteen-year-old kid supposed to do after he’d been touched by the gods?
Sometimes medical science does not have answers, only guesses.
Trenchsoul. When all that makes you a person festers and dies.
Things had made sense once. He couldn’t quite remember such a time, but he could not let himself believe anything else. The world had been an ordered place.
It was the Slough of Despond. It was the ninth circle of hell. And if there was no salvation at the end of it, then the universe was a terrible, ill-constructed joke.
Coming forward out of the blanketing mist were two shapes, one large, one small.
Mullet came nearer. He seemed bigger than before, immensely round and strangely muscled. His mouth wouldn’t close all the way because there were too many teeth.
The two figures before him wavered and distorted, Finch growing even leaner and more spidery, Mullet swelling until his head disappeared down between his shoulders.
“The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it.”
Sometimes people need reasons for things, even when there are no reasons.
is your two servants, Tefy and Mewat, who trouble your worshipers with their evil behavior.
All that’s upright will turn out wrong. .
The fourth was not quite as tall but monstrously bulky, as though someone had dressed a hippopotamus in a white suit and given it a round, bald, human head.
Long has paled that sunny sky: Echoes fade and memories die. Autumn frosts have slain July.
Ever drifting down the stream— Lingering in the golden gleam— Life, what is it but a dream?
But he hadn’t, really. And that was part of the problem.
“Everything must be hidden in plain sight. But I despair sometimes—I can only speak to them in whispers, half-truths, bits of tattered poetry. I know how the oracle felt. . . .”
“I think the people of the Early Race are near. Or perhaps it is the Hungry One, the one burned by the fire.”
Here in this horrible place, children were being used to catch other children.
The warm air still surrounded him, but he felt a moment of inner chill. Where had he been? He had a memory of a dark, terrifying place, but what he had been doing there or how he had left had slipped from his mind.
The very lack of things to remember meant that their absence did not worry him long.
The bird never came close enough for him to see it completely clearly, but neither did it disappear from sight.
The voice, when it came, was smooth and almost childishly sweet, but it raised the hairs on the back of Paul’s neck.
The voice was full of kind reason, but something else moved behind the words, something greedy.
A blind fear gripped Paul. He wanted to scream at whatever stood outside to go away and leave him in peace.
There was another creak and the latch rattled in its socket. The invisible stranger continued calmly, as though the rattling were something quite unconnected.
Joiner and Tusk, those are our names.
An image came bubbling up through his panicked thoughts, a picture of an empty place, a vast expanse of nothingness in which only he existed—he and two things that hunted him. . . .
“It’s not so easy to travel through the Squared,” said Gally.
