The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [185]
The prose hints at debauchery as closely as the censors will permit. The illustration on the facing page shows the poppy bar as an inky filth of shadow and drugsmoke. Its male denizens are crudely sketched, twisted foreign-featured ghouls squirming like worms away from the streetlight framed in the open doorway. The women are fleshy and beautiful in a way that requires Chalch, who's marched more than a few sallow poppy-junkies in and out of their cells in his time, to suspend his disbelief. The Detective wears a long black robe, and he shaves his head before he goes down into the darkness, for purposes both sacred and hygienic; he has no other particular features. Chalch always imagines him looking rather like a sterner and older version of Enif, though no torture that even the Detective himself could devise could make him admit it.
When questioning women the Detective usually only yanks at their lustrous hair. Sometimes that excellent man simply fixes them with his fierce eyes and tells them that they're whores for the city's enemies and the shame is enough to break them. In this month's story the latter suffices. He says Remember the Inundation and the woman confesses through gratifying sobs and the Detective's off racing against time to the Temple of Nartham.
The door to the constabulary station is always open, like an idiot's mouth. From the front desk Chalch can see the sandstone steps, and across the street the empty lantern-lit park. Music drifts in, and cooking smells, and sweat, and the report of firecrackers, disturbing Chalch's reading. A man comes in to complain that he was robbed of his balloons, his livelihood, by something that seemed at the time to be a miraculous floral Transfiguration, but that he's since decided must have somehow been a con of unusual sophistication. Every year they get worse! What's Chalch going to do about it?
Otherwise the evening is pleasingly quiet.
The Detective's a pious man. That's good. Chalch is too busy to have much time for gods but he likes holiness in his fiction. What god exactly the Detective favors is always left artfully vague, though many of Ten Thousand's artists like to draw locusts swarming in his shadows, and a dissident few used to like to pose him in the magisterial stance of Jaggenuth, Giving Judgment.
Nartham is no real god, but a kind of composite of all horrid foreign gods, of everything Riarnanth despises and fears. So He's dirty and lazy and idle, but He's full of fanatical intensity. He despises money and business but He's a cheat. He's a dry and dusty desert thing but He threatens the Flood Once More. He's been a mosquito, and a lion, sometimes She's female, sometimes It's a confusion, but this month He's male. This month His temple's hidden in a slaughterhouse and guarded by slithering bloody-jawed garials. We have turned your proud city's wealth against you, the priests say, because they're there to say things like that. The Detective kills two garials with knife and gun, and manhandles the priests at the altar. Surely the priests were expecting him to. This sort of thing is pretty much Nartham's most sacred and inevitable ritual. This is what He's for. The Terrorist's hidden by Bangma Bay, they tell him. He holds a woman hostage this time.
The evening's eerily quiet. Call this a Festival? The park across from the station remains empty as a graveyard. If anything it's grown darker and less festive as the time's ticked by, as one by one the tree-lanterns appear to have dimmed or dropped like overripe fruit. It's almost a relief when Constable Hamoy brings in a troupe of thieving foreign jugglers to be shown, pleading and groveling, to the cells. By the time they're safely down for the night Chalch has forgotten his place in his magazine, so he goes back to the beginning, where the Detective, exemplary citizen, paragon of spiritual refinement, shows that he loves the city so well and so sensitively that he senses the danger to it from the tiniest of signs ― that the shift-whistles are ten minutes late on Poonma Way, and yet there are