The Door to the Winterlands

"We were twelve," I tell Dishes. His parents named him Richard, and he went by Rich to most people, but to me he'd been Dishes since we'd gone through every one of his mother's good Corelle dinner plates that October night. Neither of us believing the crossbow actually worked.

Dishes unzips the long gym bag with a sound like the end of my world. "Tell you the truth, I thought I'd find the Door a lot sooner." He drops a scabbarded sword on my desk. The sword clangs in a very real fashion against the wood, and I look past his lean, hungry frame through my glass wall into the cube farm. No one turned to look. Yet.

"Jesus. This is my job, Dishes. How I feed my kids. You trying to get me fired?"

"You're not hearing me," Dishes says. He comes to the edge of the desk I'm standing behind. Fixes me with his watery blue eyes. "I found the Door."

Winner, Winner

Win a place among the worlds' first commerical time travlers, the email said, busted words and all. No entry fee!

The mail had been routed to my spam folder; there was no way it was anything other than a half-pound of horseshit. But I was tripping balls, and this was the funniest thing I'd seen in a month. I gave them a throwaway email address as a goof.

Even the followup mail that came to the throwaway a couple of weeks later, that was just a goof too. You know how it goes. I gave bullshit "information", didn't give my bank accounts or anything identifiable (I'm not stupid)... but I wanted to play them for everything I could, you know? Maybe I'd get a good /r/spammerbait out of it.

So we went back and forth for a while, and I was getting all sorts of funny stuff. Just a goof.

Until the guy in the suit shows up at my house.

A Goddess All Made of Words

Once upon a time there was a goddess in the shape of a girl, who danced barefoot in moonlight while the words of the worlds swirled around her and through her. From sunset to sunrise she would dance, and when her dancing was done and her hair and her body were limp with her sweat, the words would be scribed upon her skin, black lines on pale skin, all the words in all the worlds traced fine as spider silk upon her, and each day the words would fade in the sun only to be redrawn by the light of the next moon.

Seven Days With the Dragonriders

On the first day of my captivity, Essen showed me the rows of the dead. Laid head to toe and draped in white muslin, flies buzzing drowsily in the cold air around them, there had to be fifty of them. All very thin, but all different lengths. Some very short indeed.

I steeled myself into expressionlessness so the hitch in my chest could not be seen. The Brothers of the Sun were the ones with the dragons. If they chose to wage war against the Empire--

Essen left me in the cold room with the buzzing flies and the silent rows. That was the first day.

The Unicorn Thief

The griffon was screaming at the fat man outside its cage. The fat man's hands were swollen with scrip. The seller's dark eyes were round with possibility.

Callie slid past them into the market proper, the braided horn warm between her breasts. Hoping the old lady would still be there. Hoping she'd found another unicorn.

Hoping she hadn't.

Fears of a Clown

In the bed before him, her hands were thrown above her head as if she were a drowning woman in need of salvation. With the portal's green light washing over her in waves, it was an apt comparison. Chuckles couldn't help but smile, but it wasn't a happy smile at all.

He took a breath and bent near, painfully aware of the sour tang of his own sweat and the greasepaint's bitter odor. But the drugs had done their work, and she did not so much as twitch at the smell of him. Chuckles carefully placed the white knight on her nightstand for her family to find, and let the breath free.

"Here we go, then," he told himself, and picked her up. He stepped into the portal.

On the other side, Dr. Mendoker waited, gowned and gloved in the gleaming operating theater. "I was worried," he said gently.

Fighting Demons

Zhang Pi wakes to the snores of the apprentices. Slipping from his straw bed, he pads shoeless past the forge, to Master Ma's sword in its place of honor on the smithy wall. The simple white hilt smolders red in the forgelight.

When the others awake, this will seem a thievery. It is regrettable. But Pi's sword was  left behind, with his true name.

Pi grimaces, and lifts the sword, and does not feel the slightest eagerness at its perfect balance in his hand.

The Next Big Dragonslayer

"Thing is," Ril tells Norry, "I'm not even sure she wants a new broom. But day after day--"

"Lannald will give you credit," Norry says. "Let tomorrow worry about itself. A happy wife makes a happy husband, I say."

Ril shakes his big head ruefully. "I'm more than this," he says, sweeping his hand to take in all of Slayer's Rest. "One day, Norry."

"One day we'll all eat cake and--hold on. Who's that, then?"

That is the tall, fierce-bearded man leaning casually against the bar, talking to Jick, the owner.

"Dunno." Ril squints through the torch-smoke. "Looks tough enough. Think he's a slayer?"

"We're about to find out," Norry says.

Black-Clock Dreams

Yuri learned of the old man from Gregor, who had it from Peter Samovitch, whose prababushka forbade him to tell anyone what she knew. Ordinarily this hearsay would carry all the consequence of a sugar cube, but everyone knew Peter's prababushka for a witch, and a powerful one at that. When she finally died at one hundred and thirty-two, baking cookies for her pravnuks, the residents of every village for fifty kilometers had braved the bitter cold for her pogrebal'nyi. Hers were not words to be taken lightly.

And so the distance has passed under wheel and under foot, and now Yuri finds himself a hundred and fifty kilometers north of Volsk, standing outside the old man's door, one gloved hand in the air and the other clenched around the pistol in the pocket of his fur-lined parka. A large black bell hangs from the iron hook by the door.

Yuri inhales deeply so that the cold bites his lungs. When he exhales, the moisture turns to snow that whips away on the wind. He breathes again. He is not ready for this.

The Novice Conquers the Rhythm...

Thorn leaned over the study desk, eyes squinched in concentration, tapping the words out against the wood with the sides of his thumbs. The air smelled of musty parchment and his tutor's spicy perfume. From the enclosed carrels around him came similar tapping, quietly furious. Exams were coming.

Leaning over his shoulder, Abby was a petite furnace with long dark hair that tickled his cheek.

"A novice revenges the rhythm?" he guessed.

"Close," she murmured, her voice gray velvet in his ear. He felt her hair move against his face. Then she was reaching past him, to indicate a group of scratches on the scroll. "Try this bit again."

A Clockwork Vengeance

A Clockwork Vengeance

In the corner of Cornelius Drudge's room, the massive clock counts away the hours of the night, its brass gears meshing smoothly, each chuck of the escapement another miracle.

The fixer has carefully folded up the frayed sleeves of his tweed jacket and tipped back his ancient bowler. His wrinkled hands bathe one another, a fly set to dine on a battlefield corpse.

By the half-empty green glass bottle on the table before him, he has been drinking. By the blown veins in his eyes and his nose and his hoary cheeks, he has been drinking for quite some time.

Across the narrow table, overflowing the apartment's other battered wooden chair, sits  Maximilian, with his eye patch and his hangdog lower lip. In his impassivity Maximilian might have been painted by an Old Master, Still Life with Muscle and Scar.

The Run to Traitor's Gate

The Cut was stalking Yavi from stall to stall through the Rain Market, so close it might as well have been stitched to his shadow. The Cut was more than just irritating. It would be his death if he wasn't careful.

Once, the Cut had been Simon from Beggar's Gate, Simon who shacked so close to Yavi's family that they could have wiped each others' asses without raising their arms. But that was then. Now,  Simon was a nameless soulless gods-be-damned Cut, with nary a flicker of recognition in his eyes for Yavi the dirtlow he'd once been brothers with.

Yavi slid down an alley where the shadows were darker. The Cut followed. He turned into the crowd around Cripple's Gate before doubling back along his path. The Cut stayed with. Damn it to the thirteenth hell.

Nacker had told him to meet up at Traitor's Gate at the gloaming. Show up late and you were on the other side, and once Nacker and his crew had their hands on the pishlak, well, you wouldn't want that. But Yavi couldn't show up with a Cut on his tail. Not if he didn't want a good sharp stoning for his troubles.

In the center of the Rain Market, in the press of the dirtlow, Yavi wheeled on the Cut, looked up. Way up. "Oy. Cutty."

The Cut--not Simon, never again Simon--looked down at him, its moon-face almost aglow against the sooty overhang of the upper tiers. Impassive beneath the mask of stitches that held it together.

"I ain't eaten in three days. I'm hungry enough to fry my own asshole in butter. If I could afford butter. Or a knife. Which I can't. So step off, eh?"

He was only half lying. The knife tucked into the small of his back was as sharp as a dragon's tooth. But his insides had been so long empty that the gutaches and headaches and dizzy were old friends.

Victory's Lament, or, a Comedy of Terror

The trell hiked up her skirt and lowered herself onto the privy seat. Constant licked his lips, leaning over the black basin on his table, the better to watch the image on the water within. Better than I'd hoped for. The image was beyond good. It was perfection. He could see every hair in the downy white fur leading up the trell's lean, muscular thighs. And the faintest suggestion of the heaven between.

Beneath his robes, Constant was granite. But he would not touch himself. With his wife in her laboratory down the hall, that would be suicide.

But he was so very uncomfortable.

Well. Maybe just a little.

Ghost Weather

Thin white clouds have been skidding across the sky all afternoon, and Bryce is well ahead of us, chasing them up the switchbacks toward the pass. Mom and I are taking our time, pedaling alongside one another. Still working hard, the Rocky Mountain air too thin for anything else. But the trail is wide and there's breath enough for Mom to talk at me.

"What happened," Mom says. "Bryce and I are working it out, Sarah. He's a good guy. Can you just trust me on that?"

Above us, Bryce hits the last switchback and starts the climb toward the cliff-dwellings he told Mom about that morning. He'll be crowing when we get there.

Or maybe he won't. "Mom." I point over the pass. Dark clouds are piling up on the other side.

"Oh, haggis." That's Mom, right there.

"Can you make it?"

"Can you keep up?" Teasing and concerned both.

"Try me." That's me. Tough girl.