“’Ware!” called the girl at the top of the mast in a pure, high voice but stillness fell upon the child and Elkannar’s Laddy before she could raise her mallet to strike the alarum bell. If she had not been securely tethered she would have fallen to the deck and perished. In the vessel’s engine well […]
“Aantselitsha,” Eret’s mother whispered as she died in the hospital’s sterile coldness. Keep it alive. Or maybe “Re-ignite it.” Eret barely knew the word root — life/light — and wasn’t positive on the prefix. Their language. Mattaghelit. Five millennia of history, and its last speaker now lay dead in a Sunatnight hospital, Atsaldeian voices all […]
I hadn’t had a minute, since getting off the airship, to put down my carpet bag and close my eyes. But Dr. Clarence Fullerton was intent on showing me the entire encampment before I rested. He never paused to allow me a word in edgewise, although at that point I was so exhausted I couldn’t […]
Tully brought the skiff in from the south. The blue mountains of Maya’s feet rose against the sky, each toe adorned with a massive gold ring inlaid with cobras crowned with lotus blossoms. By the looks of the gold and white flags, the feet had already been claimed by the Vatican. It must have galled […]
(i) Candlemas On the Monday, Grace put the advertisement for the new apprentice on the door of their chambers; on the Tuesday, she had a couple of interested, and uninteresting, respondents; and on Wednesday, it was the seven hundred and thirty-first Candlemas of the City of London, so Grace went out with all the other […]
Transfer orders reached me in active storage—awake but shelved, and attentive only to the smaller sounds of silence: the hum of ventilation shafts, the occasional click of distant footprints, the minute grind of locks on other doors. Call them my meditative years—four and a half, give or take, since the last serious incident on Loris […]
Bathsheba took me possessively by the hand once we reached the Roma Street Parklands. My captress had not needed words or physical restraints to bring me here, even if our journey had been somewhat delayed due to mutual satisfaction. She had unfurled her wings after a night of slow-dancing to an improbable Bollywood-rockabilly mash-up band, […]
People most in need, need the most help, my father used to say. That’s what I thought when I saw the Corporate bleeding on my porch that night. I gave it a soft kick. It didn’t move, just lay broken in the firelight coming through my front door. But something moved inside the wound in […]
In those moments before, in the dark of the woods, we were near perfect likenesses of each other: faces round and curious, not having lost the plumpness of youth; eyes brightened by the possibility that lay at the end of our journey; coats buttoned up proper and bags carrying all we thought we needed still […]
The rap of metal upon metal rang within the small cabin, startling me. Knocking before entering was a courtesy the Jews on the transport neither expected nor received. “Rabbi Makal? The Captain requests your presence.” At sight of the officer, I nearly dropped my chumash, and the words of the Psalm were immediately forgotten. “‘Requests’, […]