I could barely imagine a transgression for which the justice of the Globe would prescribe exile as a remedy. It would have to be something so extreme that all of society could in some way be hurt by it yet sufficiently abstract that there was nothing Doctor Souvenir could do to make it right. In the end, I could only think of one possibility: maybe Souvenir was bent on unearthing some evil from the Globe’s buried past. Maybe he was dabbling in weaponry.
With Moud she crosses arid wastes where the swirling sand blasts the feeling from her skin, scrub forests where the luminous sap that has dripped from the broken moon-pieces pools in fallen leaves, and fields of tall grass where snakes play their warning music by strumming the little harps strung between their fangs with their forked tongues.
Only Azrael knew it wasn’t luck. He’d watched the game in the reflection of the bottles before he’d turned around, and he’d seen Nick palm a card in one hand and drop a card out of the sleeve of another. Nick was good at his tricks at least good enough that none of the others had noticed. But Azrael was an angel and had seen all the tricks before.
Nachli filled her senses one last time with the vibrant colors and complex aromas of the living world, then pressed a fingerful of the bread spirit against her tongue and began the recitations. Soon she was balanced on the knife s edge between the worlds. The table itself seemed to stretch out into infinity; at some point, she discovered she was seated in the middle of a long road between two columns of diffuse light. If she concentrated on her memory of her body sitting at the feast instead of what her senses were currently telling her about the Famine Lands, she could feel hands resting on her shoulders as if through many thick layers of cloth. They were comforting but so distant.