City of Last Chances (The Tyrant Philosophers #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Vidsya Sirovar: slender, elegantly dressed. A cat person, both in that she loved the animals, and that she had something of their quality. Not a straight line to her – sit her in a chair, and she’d pool at a louche angle. Constantly seeming drunk and careless. Too young to be important or to take anything seriously, though in truth, she was forty now and some of that youth was applied at the mirror each morning. A public rake and clown, coasting by on Armiger money and family sway. In private: a player, like steel wire. The beak of the Raven.

How terrible, how disruptive to the world, to love someone who might one day love you back!

“We have a dialogue,” the hellieur said. Hellieur. It was an Allorwen word. Not a mere conjurer, but one who negotiated and assessed infernal contracts. A demon repairwoman.

The foreigner has taken things from the satchel at his belt. A little square of waxed canvas spread out before him as he kneels. A tiny, hooded lamp with a steady green-yellow light like a firefly’s. A brass compass. Four little cones of incense. A box of Ilmari ‘Leaping Demon’ matches. He lights the incense with brisk movements. Stares at the compass as its needle spins. Stares at the lines of pale smoke that seem to make writing in the air. He has a book, dog-eared. She sees little tables there, set out in script impossibly regular, beyond any scribe’s hand. He packs everything away again, pinching the incense out, turning a switch to kill the lamp, wrapping it all in the canvas. “There’s a…” he says, and stops.

had been days. There was a whole history in between he couldn’t guess at. It didn’t help him. He didn’t care. It wasn’t a part of his story. Human lives lacked any satisfactory narrative. He had seen enough corpses to know that.

It’s always the uprising tomorrow. Only when tomorrow becomes today, the uprising stays tomorrow. Convenient that way. It’s like always having the dinner but never needing to wash the dishes.”

Cheryn had been an ambassador for the Vultures, meaning she went off with a roving brief and cut deals with Herons and Shrikes and various Lodge families. And because she’d been Evene’s picked woman, she went and collected money from shops and drinking dens who were desperately keen to contribute to the effort against the Pals. Because not being patriotic was one of the chief causes of catching on fire.

Ilmar, City of Last Chances, City of Bad Decisions, the Port to Nowhere. The last escape from any trouble you might happen to be in, gateway to a thousand worse places. Once, there was a forest. One day, there will be the forest once more. Until then, Ilmar.