Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

244 years
The time from
1776 until now
And also the time
I hope coincidentally
Between the founding
Of the Roman Empire
And its fall into
Tyranny and civil war

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“And then?”

“Then, sir, the Imperial and Royal Equenauts will seep in from the flanks and trap the retreating enemy.”

“What about the machine guns?” asked the Crown Prince.

“You mean, what if the enemy has machine guns, turns them heavenward, and blows our equenauts and their pegasai out of the sky?”

“Yes,” the Crown Prince said. “What about that?”

“Well, sir, that would be damn unsporting. I don’t think even our enemies would stoop to such unthinkable actions.”

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No mere street-guard, the Kingsman was outfitted in armor and girded with a sword, and over every leather strap and belt the words of the law were pressed. The idea was to remind any who might harbor certain ideas that when a Kingsman became involved, he was girded with the law and the steel to back it up.

Still guttersnipes liked to joke that the Kingsmen were so staid and rulebound that they needed a dictionary to get dressed in the morning.

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“I accept,” Napota said. “My freeblades are at your command. But there is always a warning I give to every new employer, and I would give it to you now.”

“Is it about the so-called code of a freeblader?” said Vob. “All that sellsword swill about no allegiance, no masters, save to coin?”

“If you’re implying that we can be hired away, I think you’ll find that’s bad for business,” said Napota. “No, we are yours for the duration.”

“Then what?”

“Freeblades work for money. If we’re dead, we can’t spend it. So we will fight for you, but we will not die for you. My freeblades are my family; risk their lives needlessly, throw them away, or commit them hopelessly at your peril.”

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“You’ll have to forgive me,” Sanchez said. “I’m not used to dealing with…fat detectives.”

“I’m a conglomeration of fats that accreted, precipitated, and gained sentience,” said Detective Adam Fatberg, lead detective at the Lipids, Cholesterol, and Emulsions desk of City Central PD. “Who better to handle grease-related crimes?”

“I suppose,” Sanchez said. “I’m just the landlord, though. I had no idea that the tenants were running an illegal grease-rendering racket.”

“We’ll know just how illegal once we get the numbers on the grease in your tenants’ illegal traps,” burbled Adam.

“Detective Fatberg!” cried one of the techs. “We just got the lab results back. That grease? It isn’t animal–it’s human!”

“Oh lard,” Adam said. “Looks like we got a greasy thug on our hands.”

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The man came, they say, from the north. Borne on a canoe down the flank of the Silver Sea with its tides, grievously wounded, a man named Tiris Essiba was found. By all rights the journey to find aid should have killed him, yet he clung to life stubbornly until reaching the hamlet of Alaynayn from which he had set out nearly two years before. None of the porters he had taken with returned, nor did his guide, one Farciya Riodeoro.

Znaga, one of the old trappers that also served as priest and historian when need be, tended to the man’s wounds. He had been, this Tiris, a scholar of the great explorer Le Aauin, and his ravings bore some resemblance to her own. Tiris had, he claimed, ascended to the Dreaming Moon even as he lay on the north shore of the end of the world. He spun a vivid travelogue, full of danger and bestial despair, which he hungrily recorded with the paper and ink Znaga provided him.

“I feel I must soon depart, or to fade away, or to be made to disappear,” he said at length to the old man, once his writings neared their end. “Perhaps it is the will of Vloles that whispers be preserved, and for that we explorers are permitted to tell our stories.”

“And then, having told them, to vanish?” asked Znaga.

“Perhaps,” Tiris said. “Perhaps.”

The day after completing his writing, Tiris vanished from his room. There was no sign of struggle, but all his possessions were missing, as was the canoe in which he had arrived. All he left was his book, and a small amount of payment to old Znaga for his ministrations.

With little use for such a book, Znaga gave it to a friend, who bore it hence to Korton-beneath-Køs, there forever to reside in the Dark Library. Those who, in latter days, consulted the nameless volume called it by many names, but the Moon of the North is perhaps its best-known and most evocative.

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The voices of Vloles spoke together, in unison. A city of billions, united beneath living battlements. Unknown, unknowable, and yet here, now, and present.

“Were it easy,” Vloles said. “It would be meaningless. Were it impossible, it would be equally so. Welcome, then, and take your places with the others.”

“Is this the Next Dream, the Dream-to-Come, the Deepest Dream?” Farciya said. Tiris could feel himself drifting away from her even as the great turrets of Vloles came into sharper focus.

“Perhaps,” came the answer. “Perhaps.”

Tiris could now feel himself drifting away, drifting apart. The arms of immortal Vloles were wide, its gates thrown open, and he was welcomed even as he was extinguished thereby.

Light and sun faded from frozen Harbiyyah, and he opened his eyes, painfully and tearfully, upon the rocky shores with the smell of his friend’s blood mixed with that of the salt, the sea.

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“F-Farciya…” Tiris croaked. He crawled toward her motionless form, gasping as the seashore gravel scraped across his wounds, leaving a furrowed scar in his wake. “It’s here. I see it.”

Farciya did not move or respond. She was still, her lifeblood dashed out upon the stones by the claws of the frost-paguros. Tiris gasped at the sight, and sobbed a moment even as the light that he had been seeking played over him and the Dreaming Moon arose, unseen and ignored.

“May you find your peace in the Next Dream, the Dream-to-Come, the Deepest Dream,” he said softly.

“And may you find it as well.”

Farciya reached down and gently lifted Tiris up. He watched, stunned, as he continued to mourn over his fallen friend’s body even as he ascended. It was as Ad Dakhla had written, as Le Aauin had witnessed; the ascent to the Dreaming Moon was a sort of cleaving, of two ways taken at once.

“Why…? How…?” Tiris muttered.

“I do not know,” laughed Farciya. “Perhaps we will soon learn.”

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The light.

The light.

Tiris couldn’t shut it out, as much as he wanted to slam his eyes shut and sink away from the pain and into darkness. But it was no use; before such radiance his eyelids were useless. He opened them, wincing as his pupils slammed shut.

Days and cold sunlight had been lengthening throughout the trek, but now the noon sun hung, suspended. It was at the center of a great halo, a rainbow ring, with a blazing sun of its own at each of the four corners.

And looming, behind it all…? Perhaps, just perhaps, the suggestion of a luminous moon, a crater-pocked landscape upon which perched immortal Vloles and the end of his journey.

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The land continued, narrow and rocky, as the frost-paguros continued their relentless pursuit. Tiris and Farciya had abandoned their sleds, their provisions, their fuel. All they carried were the clothes on their backs and a knife apiece as they made their final dash northwards.

Staggering over brown and lichen-covered rocks, they soon saw the deep white-flecked blue of the sea in front of them, as well. Trapped, herded onto a peninsula at what might have been the furthest north it was possible to walk in the dreamlands, they were set upon by their pursuers.

A frost-paguro batted Tiris aside like a toy as he tried to stab at it, casting him, limp, upon the gravel shore. Farciya, in rushing to his aid, sunk her own knife into the back of another, which responded with a savage strike of its long claw, opening up lines of crimson on her chest as she skidded to a dead stop mere yards from the water.

Though their intruders were unmoving and vulnerable, the frost-paguros did not press the attack. Instead they retired whence they had come, huffing noisily in the thin, cold air.

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