The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [44]
"I did," said Ashura, stonily. "He told me it was best raw with lemon."
His master ran a pale tongue over crumpled lips. He walked across the room as if his old bones ached, cradling the small pot. Beneath the stuffed alligator and the bronze orrery that hung, verdigris-stained, from the rafters, he paused and placed the pot at the fulcrum of a strange ideogram inscribed on the floor in wax melted from a red candle. Ashura cleared his throat.
"What is it now?" said Urkhan, tetchily. "Have you not ― "
"If it please you, Master, I have not slept since yesterday night. Might I have leave.?"
"Yes, yes, begone at once. I have work to do." The master brushed him away with a flapping motion of his hands as he concentrated. Ashura, knowing his luck to be in, made for the door as silently as he could and pulled it to behind him. The master would expect him back as soon as his business was concluded.
Ashura broke into a cold sweat at the thought. Truly Urkhan is puissant, he thought, but I want none of it at such a price! Still, the day was young and the master would be busy for hours yet ― time to do as a young apprentice would.
Outdoors it was still cold, but now the chill was welcome. He passed his bike and walked out into Grape Street.
The urchins squatted around the pile they had made, and one of them pressed something pale and blood-stained into the writhing dung. A stiff breeze blew across the street, carrying with it feathers and flecks of down.
Soon enough, the excrement shuddered and bubbled. The urchins drew back. A blackish, segmented thing flapped free of the quivering mass and swooped up into the rectangle of sunshine visible between the houses. It hovered there, taking form, shaping itself around the bones of the salvaged chaffinch skeleton with greater and greater facility. The crude flaps of its wings sheened in the light and blossomed with rainbow colours. It made a tentative, fart-like noise and was gone. The urchins' whoops of delight echoed in his ears as Ashura made his way down the chilly thoroughfare. He grinned and shook his head. Kids!
He sobered when he saw the mourning party, traversing the central square. They wore cheap cloth of traditional green and carried kitch-enware ― pots, ladles and knives ― all burnished to a high sheen. Poor people, making much of the death of one of their number. Now, who would command that kind of attention?
He turned up a side-street, keeping to leeward of the central sluice. Ahead he saw a party of cessbeaters.
"Ashura!"
He cast a cautious eye over the three men. Some of his old comrades had never got over their jealousy at his recently acquired status of warlock's apprentice. He was sure to have a rough time at their hands on Jape Day, if not before.
"Ashura!"
The voice was familiar. Belatedly, he recognized Culpole. He grinned and walked over.
Culpole and his colleagues were covered head to foot in excrement. It writhed over their gloved hands and jerkins, groping blindly for new form. Where it touched skin, though, it withered and fell. Cessbeaters regularly smeared themselves with a charmed ointment made to quell rotten matter's zest for life. They dipped their hazel brushes in a similar ointment and swept the walls of the sluices with it. This retarded the foul matter's growth till it was well past city boundaries.
"Still no patron, Culpole?" Culpole was a would-be poet. When they were children, just past the feral period, Ashura talked spells and enchantments while Culpole murmured softer, more subtle magics. It seemed for a long time that Culpole would be the more successful of the two. It hadn't worked out that way, but their friendship was as strong as ever.
Culpole shook his head sadly. "I had great hopes of Frenklyn the Steward, but he wanted favours other than words from me. They say his sperm is so potent he has made men pregnant."
Ashura sighed. "You were wise to think better of that alliance.
Tell me, who's the funeral party for?"
"Mother Lamprey," another cessbeater replied.