20 Quotes by Ian Tregillis

It was the kind of place where hard drinkers came to wrestle their demons while fallen angels drank alone in dark smoky corners.

Is it beautiful?”“Really weird. But don’t get hung up on the angels. They’re mostly assholes.

The Stemwinders made the most bizarre ratcheting sound, like the stripping of gears combined with the metallic whine of an overstressed steel cable.

A Power sidled into the diner.Say what you will about them, but they know how to make an entrance. An inky shadow wrapped in a lashing rain of ash and sleet, it rode on 144,000 constantly flickering legs of forked lightning. This particular jasper’s proper name was the basso profundo thrum of dark matter winging through the void, the fizz of neutrinos boiling off a moribund blue supergiant, and the bitter-tangerine taste of a quadrillion-dimension symmetry group. But I called it Sam for short.

Someone had awoken METATRON: the Voice of God.I knew that dame was trouble the minute I saw her.

Raindrops misted the Ridderzal’s immense rosette window. Water dripped from the architectural tracery that turned the window into a stained glass cog. It streaked the colored panes of oculi and quatrefoils depicting the empire’s arms: a rosy cross surrounded by the arms of the great families all girded by the teeth of the universal cog.

The first encounter report had come from some weak-tea heiligenschein type charting the edges of the quantum information paradox in realities with anisotropic causalities. (Kids these days. Whatever happened to popping down to Earth to play burning bush to a roving band of shepherds?)

The wind fluttering the pennants atop the outer keep and teasing Berenice’s hair carried the loamy smell of damp earth, the fresh scent of the river, and, even now, a ghostly chemical astringency. The miasma wafted from the battlefield.

A cork isn’t useful unless you have a place to put it.