Bilbo had escaped the goblins, but he did not know where he was. He had lost hood, cloak, food, pony, his buttons and his friends.

"First I should like to know a bit more about things," said he, feeling all confused and a bit shaky inside, but so far still Tookishly determined to go on with things. "I mean about the gold and the dragon, and all that, and how it got there, and who it belongs to, and so on and further."

"Bless me!" said Thorin, "haven't you got a map? and didn't you hear our song? and haven't we been talking about this for hours?"

Seven Cities was an ancient civilization, steeped in the power of antiquity, where Ascendants once walked on every trader track, every footpath, every lost road between forgotten places. It was said the sands hoarded power within their susurrating currents, that every stone had soaked up sorcery like blood, and that beneath every city lay the ruins of countless other cities, older cities, cities that went back to the First Empire itself. It was said each city rose on the backs of ghosts, the substance of spirits thick like layers of streets, forever laughed, shouted, hawked wares and bartered and prayed and drew first breaths that announced death. Beneath the streets there were dreams, wisdom, foolishness, fears, rage, grief, lust and love and bitter hatred.

They never found her body but i rummaged through the back copies of the society magazines my old nanny kept in a trunk under her bed and tracked down her photograph. The sharp muzzle of a pretty, witty, naughty monkey; such potent and bizarre charm, of a dark, bright, wild yet wordly thing whose natural habitat must have been some luxurious decorator's jungle filled with potted palms and tame, squawking parakeets.

Nights had darkened their colour; their irises were now purple, matching the Parma violets in front of her mirror, and the pupils had grown so fat on darkness that the entire dressing-room and all those within it could have vanished without a trace inside those compelling voids.

Walser had not experienced his experience as experience; sandpaper his outsides as experience might, his inwardness had been left untouched.

Jo, men tenk om det vi kaller kjærlighet ikke fantes før. Tenk om den ble oppfunnet først nå, av oss to? At alle andre har ventet på at den skulle vise seg, innbilt seg at de hadde den, snakket om den og sunget om den og trodd på den akkurat som mennesker tror på Gud. Men at den bare var et rykte, et ønske, en vanvittig drøm? Og at det er først nå, etter alle disse århundrer av menneskelig lengsel og ensomhet, etter alle disse sangene og bøkene og forholdene og samleiene og ekteskapene og skilsmissene og stevnemøtene, at det er først nå, med deg og meg, at kjærlighet har oppstått i verden?

'when we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel around the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.'

And for all of Us, mother meant different things. For me it was a soft breast, cold fingers, the voice of a god with two faces - Naha, Yeine - whispering words of love. For Shahar it was fear and hope and cold eyes warming, fleetingly, with approval, and a single hug that would reverberate within her soul for the rest of her life. For Deka - ah, my Deka. For Deka, mother meant Shahar, a fierce little girl standing between him and the world. It meant a child-godling with old, tired eyes, who had nevertheless taken the trouble to smile kindly at him, and stroke his hair, and help him be strong.

The universe is a living, breathing thing. Time, too. It moves, though not as mortals imagine. It is restless, twitchy. Mortals don't notice because mortals are restless and twitchy, too. God's notice, but we learn to ignore these things early on, the same way mortal newborns eventually ignore the lonely silence of a world without hearbeats. Yet suddenly I notice everything. The slow, aeons-deep inhalation of the stars. The cracle of the sun's power agains this planet's veil of life. The minute scratching of mites too small to see on Shahar's pristine white skin. The lazy, buzzy jolt of hours and days and centuries.

We've never needed such things, Ahad. If we want a mortal, we appear somewhere and point at one, and the mortal gives us what we want."

"You know, Sieh, it's all right that you haven't paid attention to the world. But you really shouldn't talk as though you have."

You have a choice." I lifted my gaze to the shifting firmament above. The gradient - night to day, day to night - did not change at a constant rate. Only mortals thought of the sky as a reliable, predictable thing. We gods had to live with Nahadoth and Intempas; we knew better. "You can accept yourself, take control of your nature, make it what you want to be. Just because you're the god of vengeance doesn't mean you have to be some brooding cliché, forever cackling to yourself and totting up to what you owe to whom. Choose how your nature shapes you. Embrace it. Find the strenght in it. Or fight yourself and remain forever incomplete."

There's no way for you to speak as we do, no. But there are other ways to convey information besides speech and writing. Hand signs, body language" - they glanced at each other and I pointed at them - "meaningful looks! What do you think magic is? Communication We gods call to reality, and reality responds. Some of that is because we made it and it is like limbs, the outflow of our souls, we and existence are one and the same, but the rest..."

It had been a long time since I'd played. Too long. I was forgetting who I was amid all this worrying. Better to leave the worry behind, stop caring about what mattered, and do what felt good. Like all children, I was easy to seduce.

That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

Jared absorbed the new pain, idly wondering if a soul could bleed to death, if that's why he felt so weak and hollow.

Having been a pleasure slave for the past nine years, he couldn't remember why he'd ever wanted to get into bed with a woman.

Even Nothing cannot last forever. He might have been there, been Nowehere, for ten minutes or for ten thousand years. It made no difference. Time was an idea for which he no longer had any need.

How was the funeral?" he asked.

"It's over," said Shadow.

"That shitty, huh? You want to talk about it?"

"No," said Shadow.

"Good." Wednesday grinned. "Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned to suffer in silence. You hungry?"

Cunt again? It was odd how men like Suggs used that word to demean women when it was the only part of a woman they valued.