Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt

bridge. The other roads would force us to ford the river.”
    The queen’s temper was equable. She went to sleep at night, and she woke in the morning, and the sleeping sickness had not touched her.
    The maggots’ rustlings, and, from time to time, the gentlesnores and shifts of the sleepers, were all that they heard as theymade their way through the city. And then a small child, asleep on a step, said, loudly and clearly, “Are you spinning? Can I see?”
    “Did you hear that?” asked the queen.
    The tallest dwarf said only, “Look! The sleepers are waking!”
    He was wrong. They were not waking.
    The sleepers were standing, however. They were pushing themselvesslowly to their feet, and taking hesitant, awkward, sleeping steps. They were sleepwalkers, trailing gauze cobwebs behind them. Always, there were cobwebs being spun.
    “How many people, human people I mean, live in a city?” asked the smallest dwarf.
    “It varies,” said the queen. “In our kingdom, no more than twenty, perhaps thirty thousand people. This seems bigger than our cities. I would thinkfifty thousand people. Or more. Why?”
    “Because,” said the dwarf, “they appear to all be coming after us.”
    Sleeping people are not fast. They stumble; they stagger; they move like children wading through rivers of treacle, like old people whose feet are weighed down by thick, wet mud.
    The sleepers moved toward the dwarfs and the queen. They were easy for the dwarfs to outrun, easy for the queento outwalk. And yet, and yet, there were so many of them. Each street they came to was filled with sleepers, cobweb-shrouded, eyes tightly closed or eyes open and rolled back in their heads showing only the whites, all of them shuffling sleepily forward.
    The queen turned and ran down an alleyway and the dwarfs ran with her.
    “This is not honorable,” said a dwarf. “We should stay and fight.”
    “There is no honor,” gasped the queen, “in fighting an opponentwho has no idea that you are even there. No honor in fighting someone who is dreaming of fishing or of gardens or of long-dead lovers.”
    “What would they do if they caught us?” asked the dwarf beside her.
    “Do you wish to find out?” asked the queen.
    “No,” admitted the dwarf.
    They ran, and they ran, and they did not stop from runninguntil they had left the city by the far gates, and had crossed the bridge that spanned the river.
    A woodcutter, asleep by the bole of a tree half-felled half a century before, and now grown into an arch, opened his mouth as the queen and the dwarfs passed and said, “So I hold the spindle in one hand, and the yarn in the other? My, the tip of the spindle looks so very sharp!”
    Three bandits, asleepin the middle of what remained of the trail, their limbs crooked as if they had fallen asleep while hiding in a tree above and had tumbled, without waking, to the ground below, said, in unison, without waking, “My mother has forbidden me to spin.”
    One of them, a huge man, fat as a bear in autumn, seized the queen’s ankle as she came close to him. The smallest dwarf did not hesitate: he loppedthe hand off with his ax, and the queen pulled the man’s fingers away, one by one, until the hand fell on the leaf mold.
    “Let me just spin a little thread,” said the three bandits as they slept, with one voice, while the blood oozed indolently onto the ground from the stump of the fat man’s arm. “I would be so happy if only you would let me spin a little thread.”
    The old woman had not climbedthe tallest tower in a dozen years, and even she could not have told you why she felt impelled to make the attempt on this day. It was a laborious climb, and each step took its toll on her knees and on her hips. She walked up the curving stone stairwell, each small shuffling step she took an agony. There were no railings there, nothing to make the steep steps easier. She leaned on her stick, sometimes,to catch her breath, and then she kept climbing.
    She used the