The New Weird

by Ann VanderMeer; Jeff VanderMeer

  Jaggenuth's name, and anger, and barely whispered, the Factors' Dance. Something about the Factors' Dance, but no one knew what.

  The third time he threatened to break someone's arm, it wasn't Azog at all. Not Azog the Hoodlum or Goza the Beggar or Enif the Constable or any of the other masks he slid between himself and the world like a shadow-show's colored screens. Just Nashira, who barely recognized himself in the mirror any longer.

  Dseveh was performing at the Factors' Dance. Dseveh of the great dark doe's eyes and the wicked fox's smile. Dseveh with his voice like sunlight through raw honey. Dseveh who made all Nashira's charades and stratagems at once petty and worthwhile, worthwhile insofar as they could be used to keep Dseveh safe.

  Dseveh who laughed at him for his romantic ideas ― laughed, and then kissed him because no one in Dseveh's life had ever wanted to keep him safe before.

  And for Dseveh, Nashira wrapped himself tightly in Azog and went down to the garbage dumps in the triangle between the Torpid Canal, the railroad, and Bangma Bay, where the salp-infested dogs denned and rutted and fought each other in the sweltering heat of midday. As informants went, the dogs were refreshingly, blessedly direct. If they knew something, they would say so. If they didn't, they would say so. And then probably try to eat him, but that was all right. He could handle it.

  It was actually marginally safer to approach them on their own territory than to try to accost one in an alley. The latter tactic would get you eaten first; the former made you intriguing.

  Azog had come to the dumps ― the Fester, they were called by those unfortunate enough to live nearby ― often enough that the dogs recognized his scent. Jin was waiting for him when he crawled out of the culvert.

  I'm on a first name basis with a salp and its host, Azog thought, shivered, and said, "Hello, Jin."

  "Hello, two-legs," Jin said, tilting her head to watch him with her one working eye. "What do you want?"

  Azog told her about the peculiar pilgrim, about the rumors and fears. About halfway through, Jin sat down, and Azog felt a sense of relief that told him how anxious he had been. When he had finished, and was looking at her with a head-cocked curiosity that mirrored her own, she told him first about an encounter between a dog-pack and a woman made of cornflowers ― "Lini still isn't back in his right mind," she said with a snort ― and then turned her head and yelled, "Pimyut!"

  Another dog emerged like a magic trick from the nearest pile of garbage and limped over.

  "Tell this two-legs about the other two-legs," said Jin. "Tell him about the smells."

  "And about the bitch who shot me," Pimyut said, half growling.

  "Shot you?" Azog said, sounding as appalled as he could, and Pimyut, gratified, showed him a long shallow graze along her left shoulder and told him about a man in an alley off Poonma Way near the garial factory, easy pickings, and then the bitch with the gun, and all the things the man had smelled of, at least half of them foreign.

  "Give him the sandal," Jin said.

  Pimyut whined.

  "Can't eat it," Jin said.

  "Goj says ― "

  Jin stood up, her lips drawing back from her teeth. "Give him the fucking sandal."

  Pimyut rolled to display her belly; courteously, Azog looked away, and didn't look back until Pimyut had returned with a broken-strapped sandal which was incontrovertibly made in Dardarbji. It said so on the sole.

  "Thank you," Azog said, bowing first to Jin, then to Pimyut. "I will make the usual arrangement with Ravay the butcher ― "

  Jin made a noise, a noise he'd never imagined a dog could make. He lurched back, and Pimyut lurched with him, both of them staring as Jin crumpled and the sac on her neck writhed and bulged and finally tore, and a glistening black shape launched itself, fierce as a poisoned arrow, at the sky.

  They stared for a long time at the heap of fur and bones that had been Jin. Then Pimyut shook herself as if she'd just emerged from the water and said, "So, two-legs. Ravay the butcher?"

  She screams it to the sky, to the gods who may or may not be listening.

  She is still Jin.

  VIEW 4

  Locust-Mind | DANIEL ABRAHAM

  ONCE, IN THE DAYS before he had dedicated his inner self to Chuzdt, Majin Panaranja had had many alternatives. He might marry, or again he might not. He might take the man living in the small rooms across the alley as a lover, or he might not. He might have become a policeman, joining one of the morality squads that would beat men caught in the company of unescorted women. He might have learned to sing or to read or to grow living things. He might have left wicked and blessed Riarnanth and taken to distant, dust-paved roads. He might have lived in an alley and eked out his existence stealing gull eggs from the cliff face. He might have grown rich by selling slaves or gained spiritual merit by freeing them.

  Once, in the days before he had dedicated his inner self to Chuzdt, Majin Panaranja had been a young man of infinite possibility and great promise. It was a burden he had been relieved, at the time, to set down.

  Walking now through the close streets of the Tsongtrik banlieue, his mind was filled with the constant, wordless mantra that was the true name of Chuzdt and his mouth and eyes were set in a constant, beatific smile. He wore a grey robe large enough to cover the blisters where the locusts that made up his god had been inserted into his opened flesh. He did not wish to be recognized.

  Unease touched him; it was a human concern, and a falling away from Chuzdt. He paused for a moment, closing his eyes, and practiced devouring the thought until he was once again pure. A woman cursed at him mildly for blocking her way. Majin smiled without feeling either bliss or dismay and returned to his path.

  The door at Number 50 Djudrum Lane showed that some former inhabitant of the building had been dedicated to Yeshe. Six hundred and fifty-four spider-black eyes considered him as he stood before it. With Yeshe, always six hundred and fifty-four. He knew no reason for the number's significance. He waited until, with a sigh of resignation, the door swung open.

  Within, the house smelled sour with neglect. The low rumble of its plumbing suggested some stray infection afflicted its works and had never been tended to. The light that flickered from the heavy iron lanterns was as blue and cold as the moon. Irshad stumbled into the room, his hands taking the broken-wrist pose of prayer. Majin imagined what it would be like to eat the man; skin lifting from flesh, flesh from bone. In his mind, he took the small, frail body apart, lifting each organ to his own mouth with the joy of a toddler exploring taste for the first time. Majin returned the prayerful pose.

  "Septon," Irshad said. "Something has gone wrong. The Dardarbji tool never came. I didn't know what to do."

  Majin accepted the information, letting it fall into the constant clicking maelstrom of his consciousness, letting it be torn apart by the aspect of Chuzdt. Slowly it occurred to him that this eventuality would require a human mind with all of its faults and peculiar abilities. He looked

  down and, with a sense of profound nausea, forced himself to think.

  "Did he discover that we were in collusion with his masters in Dardarbji?" Majin asked.

  "I don't know, Septon. He never came to accept his assignment."

  Majin nodded. The plans for the Factors' Dance would have to be adjusted. He found himself annoyed that years of planning against his rival, the Septon Anjai Mace, could be derailed by so small a thing as a missing Dardarbji. His sense of clarity grew as he considered, a bubble rising through water.

  Septon Mace might have discovered the plot and had the tool from Dardarbji disposed of or imprisoned. The Dardarbji might have discovered that he was a pawn sacrificed by his own masters in the exchange Majin had engineered. Or perhaps the poor, foreign fool had fallen prey to one of the thousand, thousand dangers of Riarnanth. He might even now be smoking mint poppy in the dens of the Salvationists or suffering vivisection at the hands of whatever band of black artists had most recently adopted this unsavory form of political protest. His mind tr
aced the possibilities, weighed them, and made a decision.

  "We will move ahead without him," Majin said. "It will be more difficult, but not impossible. I believe I have sufficiently mastered the techniques he would have taught us, all on my own, thanks to sharing the god-mind. So if the Dardarbji does arrive, kill him. If the Septon Mace does not arrive at the dance, we will stop the plan then. Not before."

  "Yes, Septon," Irshad said, and scurried away again.

  Majin stood silently, his fingertips caressing the lumps in his flesh, feeling the insect twitch and jump at being disturbed. As always, thinking as a man thinks had left his mind impure. Like shoots of spring grass, thoughts and memories pressed up into the light. The face of a girl he had loved once. The song his mother had crooned when lulling him down to sleep. A shrill regret that he had become a septon rather than study law or trade. A bone-deep, wordless sense of loss. The pale, greenish flesh pushed up into him, and its roots tickled at a buried anguish and rage that constantly threatened to undo his training. Majin ate each thought, clipping it back with chitin mandibles until it died again, and he was once more pure.

  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 w
hich 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.