The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [43]
My first impulse was to charge with them. But then I had turned my horse and was trotting back towards the valley and the border, praying that, if I ever got to safety, I would not be too badly contaminated.
The Braining of Mother Lamprey
SIMON D. INGS
IT WAS A COLD MORNING, two days before Jape Day, and little children were eating the eyeballs of corpses in Blood Park. Ashura the apprentice cycled past the onlookers and the hawkers selling sweetmeats, alive to the wind in his face and the vibration of the bike beneath his body. It was a wonderful day to be alive in this of all cities, and Ashura smiled into the sunlight that dappled the narrow street.
He rounded a corner into Grape Street, where the vintners held court, readying themselves for the coming festivities. He dismounted and pushed his bike past the steaming chutes and the open cess-run at the centre of the road, dazzled by the coloured light reflected from shop windows.
It had rained that night, and the cobblestones were slick with a greenish slime, exuded as if from the pores of the rock itself: a characteristic of the streets of GodGate. Ashura slid and slipped and skipped along, lifting the heavy frame of his bike as he crossed the open sewer, and made for the end of the run of shops. In a narrow doorway shadowed by bird-nested eaves he paused and rummaged in his breeches pocket for the rusty key.
In the shadow cast by a casement window high up in the peach-plastered building, half a dozen street urchins were making a pile of their turds. They moved and squatted with cat-like gestures and their sharp, wet teeth flashed when they laughed.
Ashura's fingers found the key. He pushed the door open and entered, pulling his bicycle in after him. He leaned it against a banister-rail and clattered up the rickety staircase. At the top he knocked, then waited respectfully.
"Enter," came a querulous, age-cracked voice. Half-cringing, Ashura opened the door. It squealed on dry hinges. His master stood within, head cocked like some huge carrion-bird to watch the entrant. Beady-eyed and ancient, he stood in robes that were more for protection from the chill than for reasons of tradition. There was a pallor to him today, a strange pastiness to his much-wrinkled flesh. Ashura ascribed it to the warlock's recent diet of chaffinch brains.
"Did you fetch it?" he demanded of Ashura.
Ashura nodded to his master, almost bowing. "I did, sir." He held it in his capacious pocket, a stoneware jar capped by a thick pitch seal; a jar just large enough to hold something disquieting. His hand shook as he held it out at arm's length, proffering it to the master.
The old man whipped out a hand with surprising agility and snatched the jar from him, as if he feared Ashura would drop it. For his part, the apprentice breathed a sigh of relief. He hoped that Master Urkhan would let him leave before he put it to use; to some things he had no wish to be apprenticed.
There was a rattle and a clatter from the yard. Urkhan whirled and tottered to the window. "Look at that!" he screeched, with a voice like an ungreased fiddle bow.
Ashura winced. Dutiful, he approached the window. Someone or something had knocked over Urkhan's capacious rubbish bin. Feathers blew about the yard. Little bird bones lay strewn in a heap over the cobbles. "Babies! Ferals! No-goods!" the warlock shouted. "We should make the Blood Park fence twenty-foot high!"
He turned from the window and twittered. Straight away Ashura felt a vicious itch behind his eyes: Urkhan had placed wards on the room when he first arrived at this city. It was unpleasant; Ashura drew away from his master hastily. Urkhan stopped twittering and the itch subsided. The window at which they stood shook in its frame as a ward passed through it on its way to clear up the mess.
"Ee, it has taken long enough," said the master, rubbing the pot Ashura had given him with a parched hand. He glanced at the boy with sly, squinting eyes.