The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [179]
Growling noises broke into her imaginings.
Dogs! A familiar nuisance.
Safiya took down her bag and thrust a hand within.
There, in the alley mouth -
Three salp-ridden curs, working at a victim!
The boom from Safiya's pistol echoed like a thunderclap. Manfully, she worked the chambers to line up another round with the firing pin.
But the dogs were already gone running. If she had even hit one, it hadn't hindered them.
Safiya bent over the unconscious bloody man. Some poor pilgrim. What to do? She couldn't just leave him. But no one else was about. Get him out of the alley anyhow..
She reached down, gripped him under his arms, and pulled him out to the street.
This was really going to put a crimp in her evening.
VIEW 2
Cornflowers Beside the Unuttered | CAT RAMBO
AT THE END OF the longest summer days, the light stretches thin as lace until it breaks to release the blue shadows swelling insistently beneath it. Along the many-named canals, swallows and bats flicker and flutter over the turgid waters.
A madwoman swayed at the tiled edge of the Canal of the Unuttered, a string plucked by indifferent glances. Her gown was smeared with rust and black oil, and a mysterious scattering of blue cornflowers, wilting, heat-crumpled, lay around her filthy toes.
Her shadow pooled like liquid on the hot pavement and wrinkled in the cracks. Ants crawled from it like bits of darkness, going about the evening's business. The salps watched her from the safety of the alley's mouth, measuring the rates of the passersby, calculating the angle to grab a wrist or ankle. They spoke in guttural whispers, words shaped to the needs of their mouths, the cartilage whistle and squeak and thrum. She smelled of heat and cheese, iron and vinegar, a smell that called to the dog bodies and lured them forward, nipping and jostling at each other. One whined, a high-pitched need in the gathering shadows, but the woman did not turn even as they scuffled and slunk their way back, an erratic pendulum swinging closer, closer.
She did turn at the sound of whistling, a lethargic melody that only the whistler would have recognized as "Riarnanth's Dirge."
Hrangit barely saw her through the shadows. His mind was automatically cycling through the song, lips shaping the notes of their own volition, giving himself time to think, to puzzle out the source of the pall lying over him. At the intersection, the only light between the high buildings was provided by a battered crank lantern that no one had turned recently. Wishing he had a knife or gun, he reached out and swung the handle halfway through its arc as he passed. It shuddered brighter, just enough for him to glimpse the form, like a puppet dangling on invisible cords, on the edge of the canal.
"Here now!" He grabbed an elbow and found it unpleasantly pliant, almost rubbery as she swayed back toward him. At the contact, the gloom that had been pursuing him clenched hard and fast as an unexpected blow, so like a vise that he thought "Better hire an exorcist," thinking for a moment that he had been ambushed by one of the little doom-ghosts that haunt the canals at night, the suicide wraiths who usually lie like moonlight on the water and only ensnare those who look directly at them.
He heard yelps and whispers behind him, a forward scuffle that made him pull her sideways, into the brighter light of the lantern and let go, letting her spill, cornflower petals drifting from her hands while he grabbed the crank and spun it with a panicked, ratcheting whir so fierce he expected sparks to fly out from the gears. It came apart and bits of metal flew across the ground with a clash and jingle, others plinking one by one in crescendoing arcs, in the turgid canal water, never to be seen again.
The salps conferred in their alleyway, whining and peeing against the cool bricks as they talked. One, mouthing his stick, was silent, eyes