Summer in Orcus

by T. Kingfisher

The house had gigantic scaly legs like a bird. They went up past Summer’s shoulders and they ended in clawed feet as big as bathtubs.

The bird legs didn’t seem to attach to the house in any way that Summer could see. They vanished instead into a tangle of pipes, which were probably plumbing, but which looked suspiciously scaly, as if they had also been made out of chicken feet.

(Summer’s mother, in addition to being wrong about books, would also have been quite surprised to learn that her daughter was a very different person at school than she was at home. This is a common problem among parents.)

she made her way across the desert by scorpion-light.

“So maybe I’m ambitious,” said the weasel. “Nothing wrong with ambition, is there? ‘Shoot for the moon,’ everybody says, ‘if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.’” He spat, a motion almost too tiny for Summer’s eyes to follow.

this struck her as the sort of pun that a grown-up would make, expecting a child to find it hysterically funny.

It is difficult to walk across an enchanted desert and then be thrust into someone else’s sense of humor.

“Too much of it and you forget the taste of fear, and that’s a dangerous place.

Zultan very much does not like to lose his place.

with a voice like swan wings,

a lizard shot across her path. It was black with narrow cream-colored racing stripes, and its tail was as pure and brilliant blue as the sky.

Odd, though. Not proper. Cuts up my peace, I don’t mind telling you.” He glanced at Summer and added, “Makes me uneasy, I mean,” but she thought cuts up my peace described the situation very well.

“I may die.” “Oh, I shouldn’t think so. Nowhere near sticking your spoon in the wall just yet.”

For one horrible moment, Summer felt as if she had gone down to the secret chamber of her heart and found her mother writing on its walls.

WOW.

she folded her arms and said, very grimly, “This is a pun, isn’t it?”

It is a great relief, when one has thrown away normal life in search of their heart’s desire, to know that one is doing it right and isn’t going to get yelled at for going the wrong way.

looking too closely, they might have passed as real horses. From thirty feet, even viewed through ferns and bracken, they were clearly something else. Each one of them had eight legs, in two sets, front and back. She could not see their hooves. They had no tails or manes, and the faces—oh, there was something badly wrong with the faces.

Each of the eight-legged horses had a large round eye, like a black stone set into a little cup of bone, and then under it, another cup of bone and another smaller black stone, and another— They’ve got four eyes, she thought. Or eight, since there’s four on this side. The horse is really a spider, or part spider, or something spidery,

She thought of her mother saying, “Fine. Don’t tell your mother what you’re thinking,” and felt the edge of some emotion so vast and complicated that she did not know what to call it.

Tell me about your journey, and start a little before the beginning, because we are usually wrong about where things begin.”

“Magic is like rain,” said Glorious. “Dragons are like mountains. Or wolves. Magic may happen to a dragon, but mountains are not made of rain.” Summer digested this. It sounded very simple, but it would probably have made more sense if she knew more about dragons.

Don’t worry about things that you cannot fix.

We sow madness wherever we go.

The better you are, the farther you can fall.

Come from a race of angels and about the only thing you can be is a devil.”

She woke feeling strange, and oddly glad to be a girl. It was not a thing that she thought about often, or at all.

’Cept the shrikethrushes, of course, and they’re all a bit dicked in the nob, if you ask me.”

There were red lines across his legs and his muzzle.

Aslan

It was the sky that altered as they travelled, changing from blue to a strange, diffuse white, like clouds with no rain in them.

It was utterly mad and she knew it was mad—positively dicked in the nob,

I wanted to write a story where someone acted at least a little like I would.

A scene where someone really listens and tries to reassure someone else…could I do that? Would that work? Would the readers feel cheated or baffled or lost?