The Buttoned Sky

As night fell, Lady Nirea left her father's house by the servants' door. She was dressed in the miner's clothes she had worn the previous day, and carried a gigantic portmanteau...

"Read it again," said Revel, bending his scarred face beside the girl's sleek one, staring hard at the printing as if by concentration on it he could learn to read right there,...

With thirty men at his back, Revel went down the valley at a crouch; slipped up the rock shelf to the eastern entrance of the great mine of Rosk, protected from the gentry's vie...

They took Revel to the top of a hill just behind Ewyo's mansion. He was stripped to the buff, but on his feet were stout sandals of horsehide in triple thickness, so that he cou...

John staggered to his feet. "Brother! Maybe I was wrong. That was an atomic city-buster if I ever heard one--and when the Tartarians were over here, I did. Maybe the coal isn't...

Lady Nirea was puffing and blowing and clawing her way through endless miles of creepers, thorns, and brushwood. She wished Revel were carrying her now, even if it meant the los...

Revel was sitting beside the hole in the wall, now filled with rocks, of course; he had replaced the four small guns in his belt and found, by breaking open the chest they'd lai...

Revel saw the lead horse, a piebald brute with hoofs like mallets, coming at him. The squire atop it was leaning down with the mane whipping his cheeks, smirking at Revel as he...

The day that Revel killed a god, he woke early. There was a bitter taste in his mouth, and a pain in his ear where somebody'd hit him during a shebeen brawl the night before. He...

Revel the Mink and his eight troops crouched in the dark entrance of the mine. The night was black, clouds had obscured the moon, and only the occasional pinpoints of globes dri...

There were seven hundred silent men in the amphitheater of the forest, and more came in each minute, slipping from the trees without a sound, taking seats on the sloping grass....

The Lady Nirea thought a moment--she never attacked any new problem without thinking beforehand--and then she began to struggle. This rucker who had her over his shoulder, with...

Revel was plowing through the brush like a wound-crazed bear. Jerran came behind, shouting directions, for Revel's impatience would not be stilled enough for him to follow anyon...

The squire was clad in a sky-blue velvet coat, long and loose with a row of big silver buttons down the front, a cabbage rose on each flared lapel, a thick fall of silver lace o...

When Revel was due for a rest space, he went through the blue-tinged dusk of the mine, cleaned his arms and face at the washers, scrubbing the coal dust from his big hands, and...