While Silhouine and their captor conduct an increasingly far-fetched conversation, Yael looks around. They’re still in the city: she can make out Grandfather Gate through a glassless window. No passersby–the second floor, then? Or higher? Her hands are bound. The guards are burly but few.
She can get out of here, but she probably can’t take Silhouine with her.
Sigh.
“Inexpensive melon?” she tries, in her native language, in case he knows any of the old code words. “Unfortunate plover?”
The man in the red cassock freezes, alarmed. “Did she just cast foreign magic on me?”
“Yes!” says Silhouine.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
This is the Flood. There’s a lot of expensive data in it, most of which you can’t read because of extremely large numbers. You could maybe figure the numbers out if you had more time than the lifespan of the universe.
These are the Nameless. They slumber in the deep. They dream of things lost and unknowable, of casual anathema, of alphabets whose mere numerals can erase your mind; they are quantum, though they cannot be quantified.
They dream of numbers from beyond time.
Do you see where this is going?
This is Ashlock. She’s terrified.
She really, really should be.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
“I’d love to have you as our guest at the seaside,” says Stavros.
“Would you?” says Xylia, at which point the demon of courtesy jams a hot spike into her antitragus.
“I mean,” she says, teeth grinding, “that’s so generous, but we couldn’t possibly–”
“Oh, I insist,” says Stavros, desperate, literally spurred on by a demon of his own.
“You’re too kind!” Xylia shrills.
The lights of the lobby pulse; with relief, they nod to one another and begin to navigate back into the theater.
“We’re three minutes early,” the stage manager reproves.
“You’ll live,” says the demon of small mercies.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
“You must consider yourself quite the sartorial expert,” Gieves smirks.
“Not everybody has to train their sartors to be evil!” says Hawkes.
“You’ll never win the Savile Tournament with your soft-sew methods!”
“Houndstooth!” says Hawkes. “Attack!”
“Mungo,” snarls Gieves, “destroy them!”
The sartors burst out of their dressforms; Mungo’s grunge attack skids narrowly off Houndstooth’s stain-shield. They whip tape around, taking each other’s measure, and the shears come out.
When the scraps clear, all that remains is a hacked t-shirt and a trucker cap.
“No!” cries Gieves. “He was my last accessory!”
“Back to Hipster Island,” Hawkes sighs.
Friday, February 19, 2010
“We didn’t mean to burn your stuff it was my friend’s fault and he turns out not to be a very good friend plus we don’t have anything to give you to make up for your loss so we can skip that part,” is what Silhouine manages to get through, when they pull off the hood, before she has to breathe.
The man in the red cassock has his smirking mouth open wide, but he has to pause to run through all that.
He shuts it.
He gets to the end and opens his mouth once more.
Then he shuts it.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Chrestomancy is the art of divination through Diana Wynne Jones books, and it’s difficult when the store has such a limited selection.
“Ridiculous,” says Harvey, fanning a copy of Howl’s Moving Castle with a MAJOR MOTION PICTURE sticker on it. “She just put out a new book.”
“They have priorities other than your prophetic needs,” says Satchel gently.
“Shortsighted ones,” says Harvey, checking the Ws for misshelved copies of Eight Days of Luke.
“Just try this,” she says, opening the discarded Howl’s to a random page.
“Oh, confound it all!” Sophie yelled.
Harvey nods. “Precisely.”
“You set that up,” Satchel scowls.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
“My hands don’t hurt,” says Zach, staring at them. “Why don’t my hands hurt? Or my feet–”
“Shut up,” says the Vulpine Phalanger, hustling him down an alley constipated with protesters. “Don’t talk. Don’t question. Do exactly as I say and you might get to bore your grandchildren with this story, understand?”
Zach opens his mouth, shuts it, and nods.
She stops and turns back. “No talking. No questions.”
Zach nods again.
“No. Talking.”
Zach nods, slowly, one final time. She turns to start walking again.
“But why don’t my hands–”
“I don’t know why he didn’t kill you,” she says.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
(503) I just wonder about the source of this whole phenomenon.
(1-503) ?
(503) I mean, EVERYBODY uses it. What they actually post to the site must be a fraction of the stuff they receive, but that fraction–all these young drunk wits and their sheer unrelenting joy in debauchery. Their joy in shame, for that matter! The Algonquin Round Table is still around, it’s just been distributed and had its names changed to protect the guilty. If Twitter is a cultural bandwagon, this is the counterculture, and what does that say?
(1-503) …so much longer than a real txt
Monday, February 15, 2010