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“The majority of the crowd had looked human from a distance, but once she was among them, she had her doubts. Some were human shaped but had green or blue skin. A number had horns rising from their foreheads, short and pointed as antelopes'. One woman walked by with a rack of antlers that would do any stag proud, and small black birds seated on each tine, wearing silver collars around their necks. Others were not even human shaped. A trio of boards in starched collars, walking on their hind legs, went grunting past. Six white rats, each nearly three feet tall, carried a palanquin on their shoulders. And who could guess what lay beneath the pale braids that covered that figure from head to toe?”

“Stephen woke up stiff and sore and his first thought was that he was a miserable bastard of a man who'd hurt a woman who deserved a whole lot better. It wasn't until he'd gotten up and downed some tea that he realized his first thought on waking hadn't been about not getting out of bed forever. 'It seems that I am being dragged back into the feeling world whether I want to be or not. I only wish guilt had not been the hook to drag me with.”

“The king gathered himself. It felt as if the tomb was breathing in. The painted warriors lifted their swords and the archers let fly their arrows, aimed at the dust-wife. They were trapped in the wall and it should not have been possible for them to reach her, and yet for a moment, it seemed as if she would be drawn in to the wall, as if the arrows must reach her... Moonlight flashed as she held up her staff and the painted arrows fell apart in to scattered pigment across the floor. I will not bend! hissed the dead king, rising from his throne. 'Then you will break,' said the dust-wife, and slammed her staff across the painted wall.”

“The Toothdancer looked like a stork or a heron, with a long hard bill and a curved, mobile neck. He wore a tattered black suit, with feathers sticking out of the holes, and his hands were very human. When he turned his head, Marra saw half a man's face below the beak, as if it were a mask, and yet his eyes were clearly a heron's, the colour of new-minted coins, and set back from the beak like a bird's.”

“The glamour settled around him and left a smell like burning dust. Marra saw the outlines of flesh, a shadow of fur, and then Bonedog shook himself and he was a great gray dog with a skull like a battering ram and a blaze of white across his chest. His tail was still a narrow, bony whip but there was fur across it. He had immense jowls and when he looked up at Marra, they all sagged into a gigantic smile. 'Oh, Bonedog,' she said. He licked her hand and she could feel his tongue, not quite substantial but more than it had been.”

“... her teeth had begun to dance. They twitched in her jaw like living things. She shrieked, not in pain but in horror, her mouth suddenly full of wiggling bone, as if she were in one of those nightmares where all her teeth fell out at once. It was like chewing and squirming and wiggling a loose tooth, wrapped all together, in time to the pennywhistle's tune. She tried to bite down hard, hoping to still the awful dance, but it was worse, much worse, all the teeth rattling against each other, her skull filling up with the sounds of chattering. Oh god oh god no no no no NO! It most of her teeth were dancing, the one bad molar was kicking. It felt as if it were battering against her cheek and the rest of her teeth, like a bird at a window, slam, slam, slam. The Toothdancer leaned in closer and played more quickly. Marra wanted to scream in denial, but if she opened her mouth, all her teeth would dance out. Oh god this was worse than anything worse than the blistered land, that had been outside, and this was inside her skin inside her face- With a popping sensation, the bad tooth pulled itself free of her jaw. It landed on her tongue, bouncing like an insect and began to batter against the backs of her lips. Marra yelped at the sensation of hard, crawling life loose inside her mouth. She tried frantically to spit. The Toothdancer dropped the pennywhistle, leaned in, and plucked the tooth neatly from the surface of her tongue with his beak. He turned and dropped the tooth, wet and glistening, in to the tooth seller's palm. Then he bowed very politely to Marra, patted her arm, and walked away.”

“He was a wooden puppet. Some kind of marionette, Marra thought, the kind that traveling performers used to entertain very young children. He had the carved hands and the clacking jaw, the articulated arms and legs. But the only string on him was a black cord that looped Miss Margaret's throat, and the puppet held it in one hand. He moved as they watched. It was a slow, considered movement, like a tortoise turning its head in the sun, and it set Marra's nerves crawling.”

“... she moved through a cloud of light as if it were dust. Her footsteps kicked up motes of brilliance. The light roiled around her feet and trailed behind her, refusing to settle. She carried a severed hand in her right hand. Her left wrist ended in a stump, not bloody, simply there. The motes of light seemed to gather near it, briefly forming fingers, then falling back to the ground again.”