Arrows are cheap; you're expensive.

We've the new hard-steel, though why they're all so hot to pay twice the price when men're soft as clay and even wood will pierce the boldest belly, I can't say.

Reasons never matter, once Death comes cold and bold and takes the living by the hand. You count up your dead, every one.

Bandara was not an easy place to return to: it could hide from the common worlds whose periphery it inhabited. But Bandara never had, in all its years, completely disappeared.

I must decide if you deserve to die.

If it was true today, it might be untrue tomorrow.

"Godling? Demigod?" Lysis nearly howled. "You'd be beaten black and blue in Thebes, and staked out overnight for claims like that. In Sparta, the secret police would ambush you, violate you, skin you alive and use your skull for a drinking cup."