The Affair of the Mysterious Letter

Surely a public servant cannot be so cynical!" "Have you met the public?

in my experience, everybody hurts everybody. The trick is picking the kind of hurt you want to live with.

Oh, Captain.” Ms. Haas extended her arms, allowing a small swarm of spiders to drag a pair of long gloves up her arms. “What is the point of doing battle against dark forces if you can’t look your best while you’re doing it?

Ms. Haas," I protested, "I do not wish to commemorate our failure with confectionery." "Failure? I never fail. I just sometimes lack the impetus to pursue success as rigorously as I might.

Do we have an actual plan?'     'Certainly.' She sounded faintly affronted. 'We shall attend the salon in the guise of Mr. Lutrell and his faithful secretary. That's you. Then I'll draw the subject aside in order to ask her some questions about her latest work and use my art, guile, and intense personal charisma to lead her into confessing any role she might have had in the blackmailing of Eirene.'     'That doesn't sound like a plan, so much as a sequence of conversations with tremendous scope to go wrong.'     She rose imperiously from the chaise. 'I am the sorceress Shaharazad Hass. I never go wrong. I merely achieve things in a manner I had not intended.

My companion made a noise that, in an aerated environment, would probably have come out as a weary sigh. 'Honestly, I remember a time when being violated by a monstrosity from the abysmal darkness was something you really had to work at. Young people today have no idea, do they?' She paused. 'That is to say, young people twenty years from the time we've just departed will have no idea, will they?'     'Tell me about it,' Miss Reef flicked her tail disdainfully.

paintwork. I was not so fortunate. To be reprimanded by one’s landlady is never pleasant, but when the censure in question is delivered in an atonal buzzing from within a partially skeletonised cadaver, within which a teeming mass of insects swarms and moves with ungodly purpose, it can be quite disheartening.

I shall tell you a liberating and terrifying truth, Mr. Wyndham...This cosmos which we inhabit is vast and indifferent. Every law, every teaching, and every tenet by which you might choose to live your life is a fiction that exits only so long as those around you agree upon it. In reality, you are entitled only to what you can take, duty bound to do only what you cannot avoid doing, and protected only by what power is in you to protect yourself.

The witch smiled in a fashion that was hard to read, having all the character of affection but coming from a face designed for nothing but malice.

I’m afraid I must admit that during my university days my roommate and I once broke into the Hall of the Learned and decorated each of the statues with a comical hat. The university never got to the bottom of the matter, and it has sat ill with me ever since.

by an extratemporal jezail, a fiendish weapon whose bullets displace themselves in time and space, meaning the injuries they cause recur unpredictably. Although I am quite well most of the time I shall, on occasion, be afflicted with a stabbing pain in my shoulder or my leg or, most peculiarly, by the recollection of such a pain in the distant past, long before I had even thought of going to war. Such a condition made me unfit for military service.