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“Breathe,” instructed the person pounding her back. “Breathe. In and out. Easy.” After a minor eternity, she was able to breathe again. Her chest ached and her throat felt raw.
This is why you need a CPAP, Slate. Apnea is bad news.
“Well,” said Caliban. “This has been…educational. I suppose we should report this attack to the—Slate!” “What?” “Are you going through their pockets?” “I’ll wash my hands.”
What a great line! Slate is awesome.
“I’ll wash my hands.”
If the wolves eat all our sheep, where are we going to get mutton?”
Exactly!
“Prayer is for the one who prays. It would be a monstrous arrogance to think that my prayers might sway the heart of a god.”
Amen.
How dare he tell me about his awful past at a particularly relevant moment? The nerve of the man! Slate grinned sourly to herself.
I like how Slate can be honest with herself.
The rag-and-bone gnoles dug in the gutters, moving out of the way if a human came near. They reminded Slate of crows settling on something dead. Nothing wrong with that. Be a much nastier world if not for crows.
Sooner or later Slate is going to find herself in one of those cages. I expect she’ll be thankful for gnoles then.
Slate didn’t have to be on ground level. There was only one thing that was ever that shape. The grave-gnoles loaded the body into the dog-cart and pulled it away. After a few minutes, the square began to fill up again, but Slate wasn’t around to see them, because she was hurrying over the rooftops in hot pursuit.
Just gonna take a moment here to mention how much I am enjoying this book. Thank you T. Kingfisher!
“Yes, well. The thing is that in gnolespeech, he’d be saying twenty different words. The vocal component is only part of it. The rest is in the ears and the whiskers and the posture and maybe some other things I don’t know how to ask about. But because we only recognize the spoken word, we don’t understand all the nuance.”
This is something I respect in an author, the ability to craft a non-human race unique and truly different. The gnoles are becoming REAL.
Amadai dug up the clocktaurs and then he vanished. The Artificer’s Guild locked up his notes. Why? Did he vanish because the other people involved decided he was inconvenient?
Or is he in charge?
“Little Miss Slate,” crooned a voice in her ear. “We know it’s you.” There was a knifeblade just pricking her back, above the kidneys. Slate wasn’t worried. If her attacker meant to kill her, she’d already be dead. She pulled at the arm, but that was reflex, her body fighting back. Sparrow must have guessed, and saw the chance at a really big payoff. Damn. Damn, damn, damn.
This was inevitable.
I know I’m going in a crow cage. I suppose now it’s just a matter of how many body parts I’m missing before I go.
This is the trick, to make sure you survive what you know you can’t avoid.
“You,” said Boss Horsehead. “You, at last.”
Cool line to end a chapter on.
Oh, it’s all stupid anyway. Here I am worrying how I’ll earn my bread, when I’m going to die of thirst in this cage in the next few days.
You are a THINKER, Slate. You make plans. You could easily replace Horsehead and run the city. And that would be a great book, wow! One I would love to read. But I’d rather you get out the cage with your eyes intact.
“Joke’s on you, you bastards,” she muttered. “I’m an accountant. I don’t have an imagination.”
Oh hey now, that’s not fair. I’m sure that there are imaginative accountants. Just, only in certain areas.
“You really need a shield against people like me. Or a pike. Pikes are good. The farther away you keep me, the better.”
Caliban is cool.
When a ridiculously handsome man decides he thinks you’re beautiful, maybe you should just shut up and enjoy it instead of trying to talk him out of it.
Or even a moderately handsome one, eh?
In the morning, the grave-gnoles came to take them away.
Another good chapter ending line.
They stared at it. It was gigantic, far bigger than the wonder-engine they had seen in the Vagrant Hills. The notion of destroying it seemed laughable. Where would they even start?
Probably not the “Black Cauldron” method of destruction. We don’t have the least son of a king handy.
The head, impossibly, turned toward Slate. “Don’t…talk about me…as if…I’m not…here…” breathed the man impaled by ivory.
Creepy.
“Demons hate each other. And they’ve all come unbound now! All the demons are loose!” “Yes,” breathed Brenner in his ear. “They are.” The assassin was standing much too close, close as a lover. Caliban jerked back, startled. “Brenner? What…” Brenner smiled, and something else smiled out at Caliban through his eyes, something ancient and terrible and…familiar. The rune-demon’s voice was changed by passing through Brenner’s throat, but Caliban would have known it anyway. “Remember me, shining one?”
Oh that’s just not right. I like Brenner.
By the time she actually hauled herself over the dead bodies—which should have been disgusting, but by this point was just the sort of day she was having—she
Just another day in paradise.
“As you wish.”
Grin.
