The New Weird (54 page)

As he stepped down to the street, his beatific smile was unaffected by the missing Dardarbji tool, the violence planned against his enemy, his own danger. It was the nature of the locust god that Majin should devour his enemy or be devoured by him; either outcome would be a sacrament, and the difference between the two signified less than the empty-minded roar of dry, imaginary wings.

VIEW 5

Constable Chalch and the Ten Thousand Heroes
| FELIX GILMAN

THE DETECTIVE’S CLOSING IN on the Terrorist. It's only a matter of time. A battle of wits that can have only one outcome. There will be a showdown at midnight on the bat-winged echoing roof of the Battidarmala station; or maybe at noon on the cliffs in the bright mists of the waterfalls so high above the city that only the bravest heroes or the iciest villains could even breathe the air, could even dare to open their eyes. There the Detective and the Terrorist will make their speeches, but you can skip ahead, turn the pages, you know where your sympathies lie and you've read it all before. Get to the dance of fists and knives those elegant men will perform for you. The Detective will collect another sacred wound. What will the Terrorist's last words be when he falls? What will they be this time?

The magazine is called
The Ten Thousand Heroes of Riarnanth.
Everyone knows the Detective and his magnificent monthly adventures. Constable Chalch turns another yellow fragrant page and the cheap ink stains his fingers.

Half an hour ago Constable Enif left the constabulary station, strode off into the streets, full of pluck and zeal and clever plans.

Chuzdt favors Enif tonight! Constable Chalch, less clever than Enif, but wiser, will not go out on the night of the Festival, when the streets are a-swarm. If he sits at his desk all the sights of the city will come to him. Pickpockets, poppy-fiends, brawlers, libelers, profaners, abusers of beasts, prostitutes without license, cheaters of measure, public defecators ― Chalch will process their arrests. That's as much of the Festival as he cares to see, and more of its stinks than he cares to smell. If no one's looking he'll maybe take a bribe or two in lieu of whippings; Chalch must marry soon or his poor mother may weep her way into the madhouse, and a constable's wages are not generous.

Who'd go out on the night of the Festival? Not Chalch. The station is warm and sticky-sweet with incense, and well-warded against evil spirits. Chalch sits with his feet up on the desk and his sandals off. He opens a tin of jellied locusts and returns to his magazine.

Just now the Detective's entering a poppy bar, in the shadow of warehouses. A hush settles over the reeking crowded darkness. It always does, wherever he goes. Probably, Chalch imagines, the Detective must think the whole world's like that, silent, expectant ― the same way rich men must think the world's friendly. In the Detective's world no words are ever spoken until he begins asking questions, bending back fingers, pulling out nails, gouging out eyes with his powerful thumbs; and then there is only ever one possible answer. What a pure and simple world he must live in!

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 no riots, which can only mean.

Busybody Constable Chirag from the constabulary on Toop Street comes up the steps. He's full of energy and nerves. He cradles a folder from which papers threaten to spill. Self-importantly he calls for an "exchange of information." He's been walking all over the city. People are uneasy. His folder's full of witness statements, anonymous tips, records of the import into Riarnanth of some unfamiliar engines and organs bred for unusual and highly specialized purposes. Something's afoot. Can't Chalch feel it? Chalch cannot. What has Chalch heard, at the station on the corner of Preem and Lall? Nothing.

"All right then, Chalch. All right. What's Constable Enif heard?"

"Nothing."

"Where's he gone?"

"Don't know."

They stare at each other; then, shrugging, Chirag goes off into the night.

Good! Go and play hero if you want, but do it on your own time. Chalch, putting his feet up, feels a warm glow of self-satisfaction. A small victory!

The Detective slips silently through the docks, down by the black water of the bay at midnight, his sandals.

Out of the corner of his eye, Chalch notices a piece of paper on the floor. Because he's duty-bound to keep his station neat, he sighs, folds his
Ten Thousand
away, and comes round the desk to pick it up.

It must have fallen from Chirag's folder. It's a wax-stamped ribbon-bound record of the delivery of ― Chalch has no idea what the word is, it's one of the words the breeders of stomachs and other industrial organs use, spore-something ― to a place in Tsongtrik banlieue, on Djudrum Lane, down by the Canal of Symmetries.

With great reluctance Chalch recognizes the address. Constable Enif was over in Tsongtrik poking around only last week. Chalch remembers it because Enif came back to the station and asked, cleverly: Why would a Septon of Chuzdt be seen visiting a little broken-down doss-house on Djudrum Lane? To which Chalch, wittily, had replied: Perhaps he was hungry?

Ah. Damn it. This leaves Chalch in a quandary. It's probably nothing important. It's almost certainly nothing. He'd send Constable Hamoy to go running after Chirag but Hamoy has temporarily absented himself, clever lad. It's surely nothing.

Sighing, he puts on his cap and sandals and steps out into the night, holding the piece of paper out as if by waving it he can entice Chirag back, and maybe save himself the walk.

No sign of Chirag outside; he must be halfway down Lall Street to the next station. The steps are bare, the street empty, the park across the street silent and dark. The thick leaves of the palm trees droop in the heat like Chalch's elderly aunts. The branches of the pipals hang heavily, too, and there are shapes in them, dozens of eyes that glint in the light of the remaining lanterns.

Ah. Well, there's
one
mystery solved. No wonder the park's been empty of Festival-goers all night: the trees in the park are full with monkeys. Monkeys balance on the branches in stiff threatening little regiments. Monkeys hang by their arms. Monkeys sit on the backs of other monkeys. All of them regard him with grave black eyes; their heads are round and white-tufted, luminous, owl-like, intense.

Salps! In the darkness, on the other side of the street, Chalch can't make out the salp-sacs knotted in the white fur, but he knows they're there; this is not natural behavior for monkeys.

One of the salp-ridden creatures unties another paper lantern and it flutters dimming and dying to the ground.

Chalch takes a step forward. The creatures appear to be watching him. They appear to be judging him. He feels like he's on stage, and he's forgotten his lines. He feels like he's back at his examinations, which did not go at all well last time.

"Well, what do you lot want?"

They don't answer. His face flushes.

"Get lost, will you?"

They don't move. Well, it's their city too, in a way.

Chalch decides enough is enough. They make his skin crawl. Walking that gauntlet of still black eyes is beyond the call of any man's duty. He screws up Chirag's stupid invoice and goes back inside, where it's well-lit and fragrant and cool.

So of course what's waiting for the Detective in Bangma Bay is a trap. It's a good one this month: locked in the belly of the ship by which the Terrorist came into the city, the Detective chokes on its acids and the miasma of half-digested seaweed and krill, and waits cross-legged to be consumed. Apart from the Terrorist, the ship is full of hungry foreign workers, cargo, tribute. It's usually a ship that brings the enemy; ships are frightening, the sea makes people remember the Inundation, when the city was once, unforgettably, unforgivably, really vulnerable, really wounded ― what, is the Terrorist going to come in by train like an ordinary man?

At the last minute, as always, the Detective breaks free through the intervention of the gods. Yeshe, Opener of Ways, tells the iron door to cease obstructing that holy man and it becomes a curtain and swishes apologetically aside. The gods will always come to Riarnanth's aid; there is never any true danger. When Enif pokes fun at Chalch's reading habits, Chalch likes to point out the valuable moral lessons these stories teach.

Now the Detective draws his knife and goes out into his city to enact his city's vengeance once again, one more time. But Chalch has to step outside too, because a string of firecrackers goes off in a nearby street, then another, and another, bursting over and over with a persistent monotony that's irritating at first, then strange, then frankly disturbing. And when he's finished shouting
Stop That!
to no one in particular, and returned to his desk, some bastard's stolen his magazine!

The bloody salp-monkeys? Hamoy?

Never mind. He can wait 'til tomorrow to buy a new copy from the man at the stand on Preem. He knows how it ends, anyway; it ends happily.

Chalch sits at his desk, looking out into the murmuring warmth of the night, and without entertainment he quickly grows uneasy.

VIEW 6

Golden Lads All Must...
| HAL DUNCAN

KERTEL PERFORMS HIS ABLUTIONS with a haste that counters thoroughness and a thoroughness that counters haste, praying to Chuzdt, the Locust God, to Yeshe, the Opener of Ways, to Nartham the Ever-Remade, to Hazrin and Pakzish, the Great Lovers, and even to the Dardarbji deity, Jaggenuth ― as foolish as that is: Let my song be clean and pure as the fields you have scoured, Chuzdt; let my heart open fully and the song pour freely from it, Yeshe; let the notes skip in a dance of change, joy turned to sorrow, sorrow turned to joy, as flowing-formed, unbound, unbindable as you, Nartham; let it draw Doumani to me, Hazrin, as Pakzish is drawn to you, and, O, Pakzish, as in your heart you tremble for your lover's touch, so let Doumani tremble for my words; and even you, Jaggenuth, even you, if you must judge me, judge me good. Good enough to be a Golden Songboy.

Outside the garret window, the sun is lowering in the east, painting the pagoda roofs and domes and minarets of Riarnanth in a late-afternoon hue that is, to Kertel, the very colour of music, the gold of Doumani's Songboys ― not the gaudy metal lustre of gilded statues and gauche carriages of the high-born, but rather sunlight on sandstone, firelight on marble. It is the colour of the cliffs that tower over Riarnanth and of the city itself, radiant in that too-short time before the Path of Sunset ― the bridge of molten light that stretches from the far horizon and the half-sunk sun, over the Verminous Sea and Bangma Bay, to the docks and shores of Riarnanth ― shimmers and dissolves into the dark of night, and the Festival begins.