Worlds to play, cards to import

A swarm-vermin of the Granlands that wears the chaff it scatters, stripping stooked grain from inside the sheaf while the field looks whole.

Mats of pale grasping weed in the slow reaches of the Riverspine that close on whatever struggles in them — the drowned men's hands of a thousand barge songs.

A slow mud-and-straw thing that stands in resting fields wearing a scarecrow's shape, eating carrion under the moon — fed and left alone, by long agreement.

A shambling accretion of spoiled grain and sack-dust that forms in neglected warehouses — Granton's word for a ledger cheated and a floor unswept.

The Granlands' name for the vast, cunning rat-colonies of the great silos — held by everyone below a certain age to be ruled by a crowned rat no one has ever produced.

The city population of the Pyrelands beadthief — a glossy black thief-bird of the Pyre Quarter that steals Veskarn memorial beads for its nest — the most hated two ounces of feather in Coronal.

A knee-high larder-thing that nests in malthouses and mills, eating sweepings and vermin — tolerated, fed, and blamed for everything.

The feral black dogs of the Granlands field-margins — the oath-lapsed feral offshoot of the Perjured Hound lines, now hunting the harvest's edges in disciplined, unsettling silence.

A colonial boring mollusc that riddles barge hulls at their moorings, and the Sedge clan's most honestly hated enemy on the water.

A slug of the Songspire print-shops that drinks fresh ink off type and page, leaving pale ghost-lines through the morning's sedition.

A heat-loving spider of Glasshouse Row that spins glass-fine web in the kiln-lofts — prized, cursed, and milked for the strongest thread in the city.

A long-limbed ambusher that dens in canal locks and weir-gates along the Riverspine, feeding on fish trapped in the chambers — and on the dogs and drunks of lock-keeping.

A hog-sized snapping turtle grown fat in the canal races, beloved of onlookers and feared by every dog on the Millrace Steps.

The fat, docile bloodleech bred in the Physic Gardens' ponds — Rootden's most useful monster, farmed, graded and sold like produce.

A wolf-sized hare of the wheat oceans, blamed for flattened circles and failed fields — while it quietly eats the voles that actually ruin harvests.

A rasping river-mollusc that fouls rudders and steering-oars in the slow reaches, grinding them to lace mid-passage — the barge trade's pettiest and most timely enemy.

A slow yellow mould-thing of the Rootden tenements that spreads through damp walls and sleeping rooms, drinking breath and warmth — poverty's own vermin.

The huge, thieving, gang-flying gulls of the Silverside Shambles, wise to knives, bells and butchers, and utterly unafraid of all three.

Finger-thick larvae that breed in warm quench-water and chew iron scale — the reason no smith in Ferruhm leaves a blade in the trough overnight.

A flue-dwelling smoke-thing of the Ferruhm forges that feeds on heat and creeps out of cold chimneys — lately blamed, wrongly, for the Iron rot itself.

A low-tide mimic of the Saltmarches that stands out on the flats wearing the half-remembered shape of somebody's drowned kin, waiting for the kind-hearted to walk out to it.

A cold light that paces the towpaths of the Riverspine by night, drawing tired eyes toward the water — the rivers' patient, luminous liar.

A coin-eating mite that blooms green across stored bronze and copper in the Brine Banks' vaults — the one thief in the Saltmere that cannot be bribed.

The great rooks that have nested in the Concord Tree since the swearing — counted, named and read like weather by half the city.