The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [146]
Third: the big one sat down on his chest, pinning him to the ground (as if he was capable of doing anything anyway).
And it was then that the real pain started.
Little Sister liked to keep her blade raw and jagged so that, when she cut somebody, it was going to hurt, which is exactly what she was intending now. She took a grip of Whorefrost's penis and started sawing through it with a lazy vigour, and the screams of Whorefrost confirmed the fact that her intentions were being well met.
Whorefrost may have been bleeding to death already, due to the gushing stumps of his missing arms, but he was going to die by choking on his own cock. Little Sister made sure of that when she rammed it down his throat; and, to this extent, no one could fault her for not remaining true to her word.
The removal of Whorefrost's cock had been a piece of butcher's work, deliberately undertaken with a fastidious lack of care. The removal of his testicles, however, was a different affair, whereby Little Sister demonstrated an expertise and slight of hand that was worthy of a master surgeon. She sliced open his egg-sac and eased the testicles into an alchemical container that would keep them nice and fresh for whatever purposes they had in mind.
Which is why the Sisters of No Mercy were already making their way south, to the City of Thrills, to rendezvous with their linear informers ― the Covenant of Ichor.
Things were things happening in the City of Thrills. Things were always happening in the City of Thrills.
But not like today.
Up until now, the City of Thrills was a vacuum of architectures avoiding collapse. Now, however, it seemed like the collapse was inevitable.
But it wouldn't be the buildings. No. The feeling of collapse was wholly concentrated on the people ― not the people people, but the other people.
Some of them were here.
The Light That Never Shines could feel it, as surely as she would feel a knife in the guts.
Guts? Why was she thinking Guts?
In spite of the prodigious range of her mathematical genius, the Light That Never Shines had only a vague presentiment of why she was feeling the way she was now. But she was seldom wrong, so it seemed right that she should expose her feeling to the failsafe scrutiny of a few calculations.
She stopped to take a seat outside a winery where some poets and philosophers were sitting on stools arranged around half a dozen massive barrels. She bought herself a skin of wine and proceeded to knock it back like there was no tomorrow.
Maybe there wouldn't be.
When she had reduced herself to a suitable level of artificial calm, she wrangled through the various permutations and, within an hour or so, had come to a conclusion.
Some of them were here. But the odds, she reckoned, were in her favour.
She gazed into her tumbler and began to brood. Then one of the poets from an adjacent barrel took notice of her (you could tell he was a poet because of his wide-brimmed hat). He rose and took a seat beside her, the way that linear people sometimes do.
"Are you lonely, friend?" he asked, setting a fresh-filled skin of wine on the barrel before them. "Are you a poetess? Is that what ails you? I can well understand the burden of fashioning words into things of beauty. It is my trade, too."
She looked at him as placidly as her anxious mood would allow.
"No, she said. "I'm."
The poet frowned. "What, my friend?"
"A mathematician."
"Oh," said the poet, "I see."
But the Light That Never Shines could see he couldn't see anything. "And what can your mathematics tell us of our world?" he asked. "Can it tell us as much as poetry?" "It can tell us that we're doomed."
"Well," he laughed, "if that's the case, then so can poetry." "But mathematics can tell us when." The poet stared.
"Lady Mathematician," he said, "I wonder if you are not a poetess, after all."
"No," she said. "But if you come with me I'll show you what I am." She adjusted her skin to make herself more alluring. The poet gasped. Even if I cannot show you why.
The Light That Never Shines walked