"So," I say. "You're from the future."
"That's the short of it. And that I'm going to kill you."
"How did you get into my apartment?" I ask. Maybe I should call the police.

They've made us speak Hlerig.
They've made us wrestle sounds slippery as fish or burly as bears through our throats. They've made us stumble through conversations, even human-to-human, that we can hardly say. We can't pronounce our names. 

The bastards come with the water hoses. Clever flesh: cleverer metal, they spew and spray a rain toxic to their gears, their delicate systems, the tiny pockets of living data in their nerveless electronic systems. But the mechanikae have pork grease this time, all along the chinks and cracks of their systems. They have tallow, too, and are secure.
Oh, the tidings. Come closer, frail little sinew-sacs, the mechanikae whisper in their hiss-click language; 'tis time to celebrate.

Lady Shove had been dying since before Princess Bite was born. At first she had been dying secretly, but as Princess Bite grew older she was less able to hide her slow decay. Lady Shove had encephadaknes, a mysterious degenerative disease that occurred only in men. This was deeply unfair, as Lady Shove had never thought of herself as a man, and she had shed that awkward seeming when she was twenty-five years old, six years before Princess Bite was even born.