Escape Pod 67: Life in Stone


Life in Stone

by Tim Pratt

After ascending 72 flights of iron stairs, creeping past tentacled sentinels lurking in pools filled with black water, and silently dispatching wizened old warriors armed with glaives and morningstars that proved a close match for his pistols and poisoned glass knives, Mr. Zealand at last stumbled into the uppermost room of Archibald Grace’s invisible tower. All Zealand’s earlier murders were mere journeyman work compared to this final assassination, the murder of a man who’d lived for untold centuries, who’d come to America and enslaved Buffalo spirits, who’d built this tower of ice and iron on the far side of the Rockies as a sanctuary and stronghold for his own precious life.

About the Author

Tim Pratt

Tim Pratt

Tim Melody Pratt (genderfluid, any pronouns) lives in Berkeley, California with spouse Heather Shaw and their son River.

Pratt’s fiction and poetry have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American EroticaThe Year’s Best Fantasy and HorrorThe Mammoth Book of Best New HorrorStrange HorizonsRealms of FantasyAsimov’sLady Churchill’s Rosebud WristletSubterranean, and Clarkesworld, among many other places (for complete details, see the bibliography). She writes a new story every month for patrons at Patreon: www.patreon.com/timpratt

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About the Narrator

Serah Eley

Serah Eley is a chaos spirit who first appeared in 2013, from the right cerebral hemisphere of a former podcaster named Steve Eley. Best known as the founding editor and host of Escape Pod, with the famous signoff “Have Fun,” Steve realized he was having more fun as Serah and gave her the body for transition and general mayhem.  Now much prettier than Steve and at least seventy percent weirder, Serah lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her spouse Sadi and collects stories too fantastic to be fiction. If you ask nicely she may even tell some of them. Very nicely.

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