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For the first time the Man Dressed in the Moon s “On the contrary, my diminutive friend And call , don’t you?”

He gathered ether we passed through a thick door and down a long, winding staircase that doubled over and back upon itself, so that it seemed to ascend and descend at the same time I could not tell where ere, except that the walls beca very deep underground Finally, we eed into a room filled with people of all shapes,

sexes, and descriptions They were leaned against the walls like rolls of carpet, blond ainst sweet-skinned child In and ae creatures: Basilisks and Leucrotta and Monopods with their single huge, twisted feet jutting aardly into the freezing air—for the roo Their eyes were serenely shut

The Man Dressed in the Moon gestured expansively at his collection “Choose! Every possible combination of features is represented here—will you have breasts or a beard? Will you have the dark skin of an Eastern Prince? Will you have a child’s slender arive up that wretched little forhtly as a bride’s bodice! It is noa lamp from one table to another We must simply kill you, snuff out your little breath, and all will be well Let me tell you how it is done…”

MY PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS HAD RIGHTS OVER THE bodies of hulided over the surface of the first ocean’s face From the primal water the Yi rose, and we suckled at the rim of the Moon, which in those days touched the sea and churned the salt waves beneath

Moon taught us how to die We had to learn it by rote and practice—it is not an easy thing for us The others, the sun-children, die so naturally and gracefully; for us it is like solving a difficult equation without pen or paper

Moon taught us that it was our right to take the bodies of the dead—ere hers, and just as the night was her province, the cold and the dead were ours It was her gift to us, you understand, so that we could taste every kind of life, from the meanest to the most exalted All the secrets of bloodless flesh she showed to us in the first days of the world She showed us that it is possible to swih coral; death clears a place for us But one cannot swi sea; the swimmer and the water must be equally mortified So, in order to pass from flesh to flesh, we had to learn to die

The first of us did not succeed—they went under the waves and breathed easily, instinctively They went into the fire and becah cliffs and their shoulder blades unfolded into wings like origa They cut open their veins with bone knives and found thehtened and an to despair The sun-children were prodigies: They died easily all around us, like daisies in winter

I was the first to discover it I sat beneath Moon withthe problem It seemed to me that ere a race of suicides—it was only our own bodies we flagellated, our own skin we re If we instead helped each other into death, if we e the feat

I went to one of le me, to put out my eyes and burn my heart in a clay kiln My theory babbled out of er was I to become the first of er and curious, and put her sli until I crumpled at her feet like a discarded blanket

Thus was the firstthe Yi The celebration lasted for seven days and nights; the silver lanterns swayed and saltzes were played on chalcedony pipes Our star-spattered world was suddenly a cacophony of death as we leapt froht limbs of the sun-children Of course, once we had died the first tiht But we found that the longer we remained in our new bodies, the more they came to resemble our old ones: The color seeped frorew pale as shadowless craters After a few years in the body of a ain

Of course, the sun-children, both human and monster, were terrified by this power I cannot say why—certainly they had left the bodies, they no longer had any rights to theal charter But they turned froray, pockmarked cloaks so that they could tell us apart from their dead beloveds in the years before we turned the flesh back into our own Once, they captured a boy not long dead while the Yi in hih to resist them They kept him in a dark well, away fro oil and thumbscrews and insidious poisons until he revealed soh never, of course, the technique of traveling into cold flesh These torturers went to Al-a-Nur and poured mortar into the foundations of the Tower of the Dead, where they practice a mutilated form of our art

In the midst of our ecstatic dance from corpse to corpse, Moon came down to us while we slept, and spoke into the shell-ear of each Yi She promised that when one of us—just one—had tasted every kind of life the garden of the sun’s world could prepare for us, we could return to her, and dwell in a sea of light, cradled forever in her opaline arms

And so we leap high, our starlit toes touching briefly on each form, human and monster—and we seek out every shade of claw and eye, so that we ht and Moon’s primal pale

THE MAN DRESSED IN THE MOON LOOKED DOWN at me with his blanched eyes and s