Stretched flat on the beam, shivering with cold in the various layers of shirts she wore, Starhawk had time to do a deal of thinking. The rats kept their distance—she’d swat at them when nobody was in the hall below to hear—but the roaches and spiders didn’t. After all the other events of the nig...
Rudy asked. Ingold did not answer at once. In the black mists that now filled the Vale like a sea of clouds, all sounds were changed; some were muffled, and others were thrown into a curious distinctness, so that the clink of a single bridle bit or the sharp chuff! of a ho...
With her boots extended toward the enormous blaze that was the only illumination in the shadowy common room, Starhawk scanned the few travelers still on the roads in this weather and decided that she and Fawn would take turns sleeping tonight. Inns in this part of the moun...
But a week after her first visit there, Gil took the downward road again, as cautious as a hunter of leopards, conscious of Maia's warnings about the kind of man who might succeed him in command of the Penambrans. The watch on the road was still kept, but far less strictly...
But now Luke truly released his anger, let go of it let it rise like steam, to be absorbed and defused by the stars. There was entirely too much anger afoot that night anyway, deliberately being stirred up, raised like a magician raising power back in that house. Rid of it, Luke was able to think...
Dr. Bedford Fairport fidgeted with the cuffs of his gray cotton gloves and flinched away from a stout blond policeman who came through the station-house duty room with a musically inclined drunk in tow. Much was made of Vienna’s reputation as “The City of Music.” Asher wondered whether this was w...
– whoever that was – would be at one of the warehouses that lined the river below Peters Street. The code was a simple one, but the neighborhood, upstream of Canal Street in the American sector, was one to which he didn’t go any more than he had to. He could think of few b...
Either advancing or retreating, the soldier must be steadfast, and all is well... In hiding, he employs wizards and diviners, and all is well... “POOR BLAKE.” CHRISTINE turned her face from the daffodil lights visible through the dark trees and the occasional mosquelike turrets, medieval towers, ...
The rising winds that lashed his clothing against his flesh fanned the flames into yellow banners among the thrashing oaks. A salvo of gunflashes spouted out of the windows of the garçonniere wing; a moment later two figures burst through the French doors, sprang and scrambled over the gallery ra...
January put his head out of the narrow passway between houses, scanned the still silence of Rue St. Louis. By the dim reflection of the oil lamp at the next intersection all was still; a heavy stillness rank of heat and stench and mosquito whine. A cat darted from an alley, bolted across the stre...
Antryg drew rein beside a fallen one to whose lower extremity earth still clung. The pit where it had until recently been planted was a torn, black hole in the long grass. Looking back along the line of them, Joanna saw how straight they ran, to the top of a distant hill, and down into the unknow...
As Caris steadied her down the last few feet of rope, he could feel her shaking all over. Though he would rather have died than admit it, his own hands weren't too steady either. He wasn't sure whether the place Antryg had picked for concealment from the approaching troops wasn't worse than an op...
said the Icefalcon, his voice no louder than the stirring of wind in the grass that curtained the rims of the maze of coulees through which they rode. “At the Moot, after Noon had gone up to the Haunted Mountain, I overheard Blue Child tell one of her friends, ‘I will see that you get Little Danc...
Even in the shelter of the small courts and pillared colonnades on the west side of the Hall, visibility wasn’t much better, the thick haze of hot, gray dust adding to the blackness of the night. Ghostly flashes of dry lightning illuminated the murk, but gave no clear light. &nb...
Or dreamed of him, bringing a dragon back to life. He had a wizard-boy with him. High summer twilight drenched the sky, though midnight was only an hour off. In that blue clarity even the desolation of Cair Dhû seemed beautiful. Jenny had reached the place to find a band o...
—The duration of the spell, for though such things wear away in time, yet some residue will linger unless the Caster returns to undo what was done. —Whether the spell will be touched by daylight, wind, rain, the phases of the moon, and the rising and setting of the stars V...
“The door…” Rhion whispered, his mind still cloudy, his numb hands fumbling with the Spiracle as Sara and her father dragged him away into the dark of the cellar. “Cover it back—” “Screw that! Come on !” A second’s thought told him she was right. Th...
The morning after their hunt for the grim-harrowed child, Jaldis slept long and heavily and woke weak with fever. Their little stock of medicinal herbs had been one of the things left behind in the attic of the Black Pig; Rhion hunted patiently through the snowy thickets and roadbanks for elf-doc...
Rudy slumped back against the clustered pilasters framing the open archway from the villa's main reception-hall out to its entryway and shut his eyes. But nothing could block out the wild glare of the torches, the screaming that went through his head like a hacksaw, and the dizzy sickness of fati...
Heart pounding with fear of snakes, wildcats, and nests of sleeping hornets, he groped in the crotch of the brooding dark shape, wreathed with fog and Spanish moss, and almost at once his fingers touched cloth. It was a slave's blanket, not his own, wrapped around a good store of ash pone and dri...
Quashie still lay unconscious, though Jeanette had gone. Waking on his corn-shuck pallet, January listened for a time to the young man's breathing, and by the grimy light of a half-burned kitchen candle checked the dressing he'd put on the bloody welts. Then he went to work in the mill, hauling w...
Asher closed the iron grille behind him, turned the heavy key, and followed Simon back into the deserted vestibule, where Ysidro was fastidiously poking among the papers of the desk. The vampire paused to regard him with dispassionate eyes, and, as so often with Ysidro, Asher found it impossible ...
By sunset of the day of his death word went out to all the city of Bel that the King had been slain protecting the Lady Trey from the very demons against which he had warned the people the day before. Even before the horrified Palace Guard brought in hurdles to carry away ...