She came back, sat down again, and handed him a rock. “Break it,” she said tonelessly. It was a rock, not hardened mud, and though he might have broken it with another rock or metal tool, he could make no impression on it with his hands. He returned it to her whole. And she crushed it in one hand. He had to have the woman. She was wild seed of the

“I kill, Anyanwu. That is how I keep my youth, my strength. I can do only one thing to show you what I am, and that is kill a man and wear his body like a cloth.” He breathed deeply. “This is not the body I was born into. It’s not the tenth I’ve worn, nor the hundredth, nor the thousandth. Your gift seems to be a gentle one. Mine is not.”

Wild seed always had to be destroyed eventually. It could never conform as children born among his people conformed.

“I cannot kill him—or even understand what there is to kill. I have bitten him when he was in another body, and he seemed no more than flesh, no more than a man.” “You never touched him,” Isaac said. “Lale did once—he reached out in that way of his to change Doro’s thoughts. He almost died. I think he would have died if Doro hadn’t struggled hard n

“People grow old. They die.” “All of them,” he agreed. “All but you and I.” “You die constantly,” she said. He got up and went to sit beside her on the sofa. Somehow, she kept still, subdued her impulse to get up, move away from him. “I have never died,” he said. She stared past him at one of the candlesticks on the mantel. “Yes,” she said. “I shou

Doro seduced people. He made them want to please him, made them strive for his approval. He terrified them into submission only when he could not seduce them.

He lifted her with the strength of his arms alone and carried her to the great soft bed, there to make the children who would prolong her slavery.

Daly spoke them—words in the seed people’s own language asking them whether they were followers of Doro, whether they were “Doro’s seed”—and Doro released Daly’s wrist. The slaver had said the words perfectly and none of Doro’s seed villagers had failed to respond. They were, as Daly had said, difficult people—bad-tempered, more suspicious than mos

He focused his attention on her, and she began to rub her hands. The hands were bird claws, long-fingered, withered, and bony. As he watched, they began to fill out, to grow smooth and young-looking. Her arms and shoulders began to fill out and her sagging breasts drew themselves up round and high. Her hips grew round beneath her cloth, causing him