CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness by Mike Allen

outflung limb. The flesh was cold.
    She drew the first blanket around her shoulders and dragged the remaining covers from the corpse. Bundling them to her chest, she crept to the next alcove along the street. She wrapped herself as tightly as she could, tucking her legs against her chest and pulling the blankets over her head, holding them closed with her single hand. After a time, her shivering stilled and she felt something approaching warmth.
    She slept, and her dreams were filled with the black stone features of her mate.
    * * *
    Consciousness returned slowly. The clatter of hooves punctured her dreams, then the creak and crack of a cart following, the drum of passing feet, random snatches of conversation. With a start, she came fully awake.
    She raised her head to peer beneath the blanket’s fringe, blinking against the morning light. The rain had ceased, but the clouds remained heavy. The street was filled with people.
    Most were Yng’finail, the city’s current masters, red of skin and silver-pale of eye and hair. Slight figures wove among them, coal black skins stark against white robes and shining gold-in-gold eyes—Gil-Gadin, she had seen their like beneath the angel’s tower. A trio of brown-skinned warrior women stalked past, their spiny manes held erect, open vests displaying the scars left by severed breasts.

    Others in the crowd were stranger and less human. She remembered them, the cruelly fashioned playthings of the Avalae. Folk with the furred heads and naked tails of rats, scuttling on four limbs or two as the need took them, their eyes the glowing gold of Gil-Gadin. A hairless Yng’finail, pushing himself awkwardly along on a serpent’s coils. A gargoyle leaning on a cane, too old to fly anymore, her once powerful wings twisted with arthritis, copper feathers tarnished green.
    All of them, human and less so, had an agitation about them. They moved with a step more hurried and a nervous indecision, both, that on a different day might have been absent. Tempers were quick as people got in each other’s way. But only threats and curses were exchanged. It seemed no one had the stomach for trading blows.
    A rumbling beat penetrated the hubbub. It resolved into the sound of dozens of feet—booted, hoofed or clawed—treading in not-quite-unison. A company of soldiers marched by, their armour an irregular assortment of lamellae and baked leather, only a handful with helms of any kind, the rest in felt caps or bareheaded. The weapons on their shoulders made an ugly forest of mismatched steel.
    “And what’s this, cluttering my step?” said a deep voice, startlingly close.
    The door had opened behind her. A cassocked figure filled the frame. Blue human eyes glared down at her from a horned bovine face. Sparse hair covered a hide as thick and dimpled as citrus peel. She had seen his kind stand like colossi on the last day of Avalae while Yng’finail Reavers slaughtered their lesser brethren around them, until weight of numbers and iron blades brought them down, too.
    “Be gone,” the minotaur said, lifting an arm to strike backhanded.
    She scrambled back, shaking her good arm free of her blankets. She raised the stone hand in warning while she got her feet under her. The minotaur’s eyes widened as she retreated into the sunlight.
    He followed, raising his hand again, but palm outward this time. “Wait.”
    But she was already running. A carthorse flapped its neck frills in warning as she skipped in front of it. She ducked the half-hearted swipe of the carter’s crop and pushed on through the crowds.
    The cobbles were cold and slippery wet, her feet bruised and aching from her running the night before. She soon slowed to a hobbling walk. She had no direction in mind, no knowledge of the city beyond the plaza where she had stood. She passed terraces of shops and houses walled with brick and stone and black iron plate, others roofed in bright canvas to resemble the sails of ships. Others still were