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FROM "THE BONE-CARVER'S TALE"
(published by Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine)

One night, some months before the monsoons, the bone carver Sajit Xuan-Ti left his house, made from the whittled ribcage of a whale, and walked down to the black sand beach which had been his, and his alone, for six years. He had awakened from dreams of Angkor Thom, the great religious city to the North, and had seen the visages of its rulers broken along the boundaries of the land of Kampuchea, where the Mekong River flows into the China Sea.

The weather was hot and dry, and even under the cooling glance of the moon he felt restless. During the day, the sails of junks at sea had seemed to droop. Now his sarong stuck to his skin as he paced the beach, hoping for a flash of bone amid the shells and seaweed. Often, he would find crocodile skulls, or the streamlined spines of dolphins. These he would gather, bring back to his house, and treat with a distillation of ginseng root, camphor oil, and dried copra.