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The distrikt dreamed through the day around him.
Her fingers itched. She could steal half his stock and leave before he noticed. Could swipe the dreams right out of his head.
The others nodded. “Yes,” a few whispered. There was no ritual beyond what felt right, and nothing did.
Their eyes glistened in the light of new-risen stars.
Time broke after that, and she tumbled from moment to moment through the dream.
She was quicksilver and smoke and swift water.
But he was gone, like her family, like her gods.
Love the simplicity of this
I had to take a nurse hostage to get them to give me a goddamn newspaper.”
This is transmetropolitan coded
Her dreams the last few weeks had been dark and drowning.
What happened to you? the boys and girls would say. Myself, she thought, and showered, and gritted teeth rather than accept the pain.
She suddenly found the window and its view more interesting than the blacks of Jace’s eyes.
“Are you sure you didn’t dream these words later, or imagine them at the time? You were far gone when we pulled you clear. And the healing process can cause hallucinations.” “I know my own ears.” “And I know mine enough to doubt their evidence. Never trust an eyewitness, Kai. Or an earwitness, I guess.”
You’re damaged, Jace might as well have said, or: you are damage.
Across the dark room, a voice lower than she’d thought a human voice could be moaned like the breaking of the world.
a sharp-faced Kavekanese woman who hadn’t yet remade herself, bright eyed with an elegant voice, verses slipping tense and tenseless from Kathic to Archipelagese and back.
This is one of the best sentences I’ve ever read.
Across the table, Mako raised his whiskey to the level of his milk white eyes, and made a sound Kai had learned to call a laugh: rocks ground to sand, storm water beating a cliff face, works of man crumbled to dust.
He woke from a bad dream to find himself on stage, naked minded, before a room of men and women cheering.
Drink and anger pounded a rapid tattoo on the drum of her heart.
“Mainlanders have a saying about good intentions.” “Road to hell’s paved with them?” “I’ve been there,” he said, “and it ain’t. But even wrong sayings have a point. Maybe you should take it easy.”
As the carriage passed Kai tipped an imaginary hat to the roan. Craftwork bound and directed the horse. Did it know it was born to a life of service? Did it know how its world was made?
Days past, but not past remembering.
This time she let herself look, if not quite at him, at least near him. Three deep wrinkles cut across his forehead. A disbeliever, a raiser of eyebrows.
“And you’ve been operating for?” “About three years now. Founded four years ago, but it took us a while to get rolling. You know the drill. Paperwork, demons, more paperwork because of the demons.”
The stone accepted her. She knew its secret name, and it knew hers. This mountain was formed when gods and humans first rose from the earth. Men and mountain were made of the same stuff. For those who knew its secrets, the stone itself was a gate, and this gate had not been closed to her. Yet.
Falling, again, and always.
“Excuse me.” It had a voice of blades and wind.
“You’re not hard to find.” “Artists learn not to be. Obscurity is our mortal enemy.
Her sallow, up-all-night expression made her seem ten minutes’ hassle short of serial murder, and with Mako she was counting down the seconds.
The next week, at the reading, he spoke thunder words with a hurricane voice.
He pulled his hands from his pockets, and set them on his hips. Gallantry, Kai thought, always looked ridiculous.
Island time flowed like cold honey.
She withdrew deep into herself. Breathed so slowly a flower petal set under her nose would not have fluttered.
Old houses’ decaying remains rose amid the green: mossy wooden hillocks with stone foundations, skeletons of discarded lives.
She stared into the matte, into her own shadow, and knocked.
The pilgrims he stole from are the kind of people who wander into your village and look around and say, This is an awfully nice entire population you have here, it’d be a shame if something were to, you know, happen to it.
A road crew hauled up broken cobblestones, cemented new ones into place. Laundries flew a war’s worth of surrender flags from clotheslines.
“All poets are soldiers. We fight our wars across centuries.”
“Even if you live sixty years on one block, the block moves around you.”
Ghosts whistled past her ears as she walked, beneath her arms, between her fingers. She ignored them, because one could not hear ghosts in waking life, and if so why listen to them in dreams?
From the outside, she thought, writing looked as interesting as dying.
fabric was black and unstained as the space between high stars at midnight.
Crossing the ward burned like a bath in cold iron. Spiderwebs of light and lightning spread around her.
The mattress was soft as wet sand.
Drowning sailors on the battered raft of her mind threw sacrifices to the adrenaline storm:
“What do you have against keys?” “People with keys worry about keeping locks locked.”
Silence, and water.
The words came automatically, as she rolled time like a marble in her hand.
Cold snatched her down into the night beneath the world.
Whatever else one might think of poets, they are excellent barometers for metaphysical shenanigans. Not as good as proper prophets, but these are fallen times.”
Morality was easy to impose in the face of eschaton.
