The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [47]
Late that night, with the moon full and lime green through his window, Ashura got out of bed and began to dress. He bound his feet in leather thongs, then pulled on stout boots. He slipped on a jacket made from oiled canvas. It was worn and not as tough as he would have liked, but it was all he had. He tied polished black chaps around his trousers. He had bought them to impress womenfolk. Tonight, they would serve a more practical purpose. Life, new form, it was an infection here, and of course the children carried it. Life was strong in them.
He went to the sink and armed himself with a razor. He padded down the stairs, careful not to wake the other sleepers in the tenement. He did not take his bicycle, but trotted light-footed towards the dark centre of the city, and Blood Park.
Decorations had been hung over the city's main thoroughfare in preparation for the Jape Day festival. Immense jointed papier-mache heads painted in clown's colours rocked in their wire cradles, sending shadows scudding across the moonlit street. They grinned at him, and
Ashura shuddered. They winked and squealed their wire hinges. The red paint around their full lips was black in the moonlight, and gave to the line of each huge mouth a skeletal spareness. Their jaws swung open and closed. A row of bats clung to the lips of one, till a sudden gust swung the gaping, star-filled maw shut with a hollow, wooden concussion. The bats fled and plummeted into a side-alley.
The houses which fronted the flagstoned alley bulged like the buds of unnaturally huge flowers, or the pregnant bellies of giants. Timber balks two storeys up held the walls apart; flags and bright streamers covered the dark timber, only now they were colourless and tatty in the pitiless light. They wove about themselves with undersea slowness, like stranded things.
For comfort, Ashura thought back to former festivals. The memories were childlike, unclouded by the shadow of Urkhan. On Jape Day young girls earned pennies setting trip-wires across the streets. In the hours before dawn they suspended buckets of water and powder dye and paint in ingenious, thoroughly insecure harnesses between the rooftops of this most ancient and fertile of cities ― and this was but the beginning.
Throughout the day townsfolk set trap after trap, large and small, for their fellows. Ashura's street came together to nail the contents of a grandee's mansion to its sun-baked roof. At lunchtime, someone sent an intricate clockwork spider marching up his trousers. Ashura responded by slipping a tight-wound elastic snake beneath a councillor's travelling blanket as he watched the city's navvies dismantle an iron bridge. Ashura followed the workmen when they took the girders away, and watched them rebuild it so it strung together the houses of notorious rivals.
In the evening, trouveres played the lute, jesters juggled flaming brands, grinning crones sold nosegays for tuppence and witches and warlocks demonstrated their arts in night-long shows of tricks, fireworks, curiosities and miracles..
But not Urkhan.
Not Urkhan, not this year, and Ashura feared to know why.
The gate and fence of Blood Park were guarded night and day to prevent errant wizards from practising restricted arts. He, a wizard's apprentice, had no choice but to enter Blood Park surreptitiously by the section of fence furthest from the gallows and least carefully patrolled.
They had given Mother Lamprey the funeral rites of an ancient as a mark of respect. He could see from a distance feral children swinging on the fresh rope.
He climbed up the high barbed fence walling in the bodies of the city's dead.
Nothing died in the city, not without a struggle. Mother Lamprey had explained it to him once.
GodGate was the nub, the centre, the very place where the world's change from death to bloom