The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [128]
So: there was a carcass, of which one could no longer detect who or what it had been when it was alive, so decomposed were its features. But I no longer felt sick, although I saw one of the mothers poking about in its pile of dross. For that was where the mother sought nourishment for her heirs, her snout buried in the stinking carcass, and look! There glistened a dark droplet, which one of the little ones drank, and after a moment the second received its share, and the third; no one was forgotten.
And here, then, was their work: to distil pure nectar from such filth, to extract from the slimy liquid of death health, strength and new life.
How could I ever complain about what took place in the Hades of Tainaron. Truly, it is a laboratory compared to which even the greatest achievements of the alchemists are put to shame; but all that is done there is what the earth achieves every year when it builds a new spring from and on what rotted and died in the autumn.
"Have you seen enough?" someone asked behind me. I turned and saw Longhorn, who was standing at the mouth of the corridor, looking at me in a troubled way. I do not know whether his expression was caused merely by the stench, which my own nose hardly sensed any longer, or whether it was real grief. For his friend had just died, and I had hardly spared a thought for his feelings. But when our eyes met, I, too, felt the bite of suffering.
The kindness of his eyes! How had I never noticed it before. And they were so dazzlingly black, so wise and alive.. But in fact I have seen just such a gaze before, and more than once. I have seen it ― do not be shocked ― in your eyes, too, different as they are. I have encountered it ― or seen it pass me by ― among acquaintances and strangers, at parties, in department stores, in my own home, in trains, on stations and in lecture halls, shops and cafes; in summer, in the great lime trees in the park, where cast-iron benches have been placed for the citizens; and I am sure that at unguarded moments it has also resided in my own eyes.
That it ever disappears! It was the impossible, and unbearable, thing that, as I turned to look behind me and met Longhorn's eyes, was relentless in us both, and the strange meal we were following as onlookers offered no solution.
The soundless glitter of immense treasures ― That it could be extinguished and sink into the cold mass of raw material is if it had not been anything more than the moisture of lachrymal fluid on the surface of the cornea..
"Come away," said Longhorn, with unexpected softness, and we left Hades without looking at each other again.
The Ride of the Gabbleratchet
FROM The Modern World, PUBLISHED AS Dangerous Offspring IN THE UNITED STATES
STEPH SWAINSTON
I WAS STANDING on the cold Osseous steppe, where the horse people come from. It was twilight and silent; the sky darkening blue with few stars. Around me stretched a flat jadeite plain of featureless grass. A marsh with dwarf willow trees surrounded a shallow river; deep clumps of moss soaking with murky water and haunted by midges. Far on the other side of the river a silhouette line of hazy, scarcely visible hills marked the end of the plain.
In the distance I saw a village of the Equinne's black and red corrugated metal barns, looking like plain blocks. Between them was one of their large communal barbecues, a stand on a blackened patch of earth where they roast vegetables. A freezing mist oozed out between the barns to lie low over the grassy tundra.
I couldn't see any Equinnes, ominously because they spend most