Even through the smoke, it smelled sour in there. The corpse lay on its back, one arm twisted beneath it, the other splayed, hand open. He was black, elderly, his hair gray and unkempt, and he wore nothing but a loincloth and sandals, one of which had been kicked off. A bottle lay empty beside hi...
They were amber and alive, and fastened on him with something like fury. Darwen was momentarily spellbound, then the caryatid came to lethal life, the sword swishing savagely through the air. He leapt backward through the unlocked door as the blade sliced into the doorframe, scattering splinters....
I buckled myself into my harness and hooked its lanyard to the cable which ran alongside the great chain links. The chains formed a long, slow swag several hundred yards long between the towers of what will be—if it ever gets finished—Bar-Selehm’s first suspension bridge. The saddles on the tower...
I followed the running troops down the corridors and through a series of doors and courtyards that brought me out into the evening air, across a broad and chaotic street, and up a flight of fifty or sixty steps to the walls of the White City. The ramparts were wide enough for the town’s defenders...
Renthrette had banged on my door, and while I lay still, pretending not to be there, it occurred to me that this was the first time she had actually wanted to come in. The irony was almost unbearable. It was going to take three people to maintain surveillance on the remain...
It wasn’t the scale of the place—the vast, vaulted nave thronging with tourists—or even, strictly speaking, its age. It was the history that announced itself everywhere you looked. It was, Thomas thought, impressive to the point of being oppressive. In this building every monarch of England had b...