Five days and not a word.” Gleia stabbed the needle through the soft black material, pricked her finger, and jerked it away before blood could stain the cloth. Sucking at the small wound, she laid the shawl aside and swung around on the window seat where she’d taken her work to save on lamp oil, ...
A long oval room filled with tables, glass cases, crates, bales, alcoves with viewscreens and reasonably comfortable chairs (several not made for bipeds’ behinds); shelves cover most wallspace, gaps where things have been taken away, otherwise a chaotic collection of small items. The room is clut...
Still locked in the remnants of deep, deep sleep, she felt a surge of fear that went slow and powerful down her legs, bounced against her soles, rose again in a mighty tsunami of terror that blasted her out of her paralysis. She flung her body out of the bed, landing on the floor, hopelessly tang...
Blankets are hung over every aperture, the air is thick with smells: old fish, the oil in the lamp, man-sweat, a lingering hint of incense too redolent of norit for the comfort of either. Outside, the wind is blowing hard; the boat rubs against the wharf, breathing and flexing and creaking, caugh...
Aleytys flipped her free hand at the rutted road unreeling beneath the horses’ plodding hooves. Abruptly she yawned, eyes widening in surprise at the effect of the clear, cold morning air. “This road goes along the edge of the lakelands,” Kale said gravely. After their confrontation the night bef...
Rallen Firesky. Sun: Nepoyol Planets: 1. NAMELESS. a blob of molten rock smaller than a mid-size moon, close enough to Nepoyol to spend most of the time brushing his corona. 2. NARAZAT. the dark sister, twin to Rallen, though much hotter, marginally habitable, some life, mostly fungal and bacteri...
or GETTING IN AND OUT OF DUM BESAR. She walked along the dusty road, strolling through a warm golden morning, leading a neat little jennet, a genuine beast, one that wouldn’t shed its skin and turn into a hostile Min. This beast was expendable as was everything it carried, part of her disguise as...
Her instinct was to send it back to the kipu with a biting rejection. Sensing her anger, Burash put a hand on her shoulder, his fingers tightening with unspoken warning. The guard waited, eyes fixed rigidly forward, antennas jolting uncomfortably in small agitated circles. “I consider,” Aleytys s...
Some were laboring now and would soon die, unnoticed cells dropping from the body of the vast beast. The herd across the river plunged in, swimming and drowning indifferently, moving around the city to settle on the north side. The other herd narrowed and lengthened as the great valley narrowed. ...
The dying. The burning. The toppling minaret. The drums and chanting. And the sleep-coma. Aleytys slipped off the bunk and stretched, working out the kinks that came from sitting still too long. She bent over Maissa frowning at the deep bloody bruises where the maddened woman had tried to tear fr...
She was nine years old, several inches taller, content with her life in the tower. She wore tunic and trousers, new ones, fetched from somewhere by the Noris’s invisible servants. The patterns in black and white woven into the belt were strange to her; she’d used the mirror to search the tundra f...