Hrangit resolved to pay a visit to the shrine of his sept's god, Yeshe. Surely he would get answers from her. . . .

Doumani hoisted his vina aloft like a baton. His lads looked so splendid, he could hardly decide which to bed tonight.

"Now, boys, 'The Potter's Lament'! And don't let it lag! Practice is the key! We have to sound good if we're playing at the Factors' Dance tonight!"

Goza left the yogurt vendor behind, and headed straight for the nearest constabulary headquarters, at the corner of Preem and Lall. The farther he got from his usual haunts, the more his appearance changed. His burly limbs seemed to unkink, his manner became less deferential. On the steps of the official building he began peeling fake scars and sores from his body, throwing the rubber prosthetics into the street.

By the time he approached the front desk where a fat uniformed constable sat reading a cheap pulpish magazine, Goza the beggar showed forth as a virile fellow, all self-assurance and wit.

"Chalch! Listen up! It may be nothing, but I just encountered the most unlikely pilgrim. He swore at me using a Dardarbji epithet. What would one of his kind be doing here for Festival?"

Valvay sipped at a fresh cup of tea, his tenth that day, and fingered a sample garial hide from the latest lot. Exquisite, supple, beautifully patterned. This would make some rich woman a fine pair of shoes or handbag or belt. And enrich Valvay considerably in the process.

All was right with the world.

The door to Valvay's office opened, and Safiya looked in. Her short black hair framed an intelligent face the shade of Valvay's tea.

"Any last task, sir? I'll be going shortly."

Valvay waved his assistant on her way. "No, no, I wouldn't keep you on the first night of the Festival. Go, and have a good time."

The familiar whistle sounded just then, signaling the end of the shift.

Safiya said, "Thank you, sir. You enjoy yourself as well. I understand the Factors' Dance will be extra-special tonight."

"Yes, Septon Anjai Mace is the sponsor this year. He beat out Septon Majin Panaranja in the Trials of a Thousand Delicacies. I understand there were some hard feelings, but I anticipate nothing but jollity."

"I am happy for you and the other Factors."

As she turned to leave, Valvay said, "Do you have that protection I gave you? You persist in living in that horrible neighborhood, even though I've offered to find you better lodgings."

"I can't leave my parents, sir, and they absolutely refuse to move."

"Oh, all right. But the offer stands!"

Safiya closed the door.

Valvay sighed, and wondered if he'd ever manage to seduce the girl.

Safiya walked down Poonma Way, at ease with her thoughts. Valvay was so transparent. He was only after one thing. Maybe she should give in. But he was married, and so much older - Ah, well, she needn't decide now!

She considered how she'd spend her evening. She had to shop for supper first, for her parents, Ratna and Karst, and herself. Cook and serve it, of course. Chat with her folks. Then there were a few accounts she hadn't finished, and which she had taken home. She patted her big garial shoulder bag one of the poor-quality castoffs, sold cheap to employees to feel the sheaf of papers within. But after all that, she'd be free to go out and celebrate with her friends.

Growling noises broke into her imaginings.

Dogs! A familiar nuisance.

Safiya took down her bag and thrust a hand within.

There, in the alley mouth - Three salp-ridden curs, working at a victim!

The boom from Safiya's pistol echoed like a thunderclap. Manfully, she worked the chambers to line up another round with the firing pin.

But the dogs were already gone running. If she had even hit one, it hadn't hindered them.

Safiya bent over the unconscious bloody man. Some poor pilgrim. What to do? She couldn't just leave him. But no one else was about. Get him out of the alley anyhow..

She reached down, gripped him under his arms, and pulled him out to the street.

This was really going to put a crimp in her evening.

VIEW 2.

Cornflowers Beside the Unuttered CAT RAMBO CAT RAMBO

AT THE END OF the longest summer days, the light stretches thin as lace until it breaks to release the blue shadows swelling insistently beneath it. Along the many-named canals, swallows and bats flicker and flutter over the turgid waters.

A madwoman swayed at the tiled edge of the Canal of the Unuttered, a string plucked by indifferent glances. Her gown was smeared with rust and black oil, and a mysterious scattering of blue cornflowers, wilting, heat-crumpled, lay around her filthy toes.

Her shadow pooled like liquid on the hot pavement and wrinkled in the cracks. Ants crawled from it like bits of darkness, going about the evening's business. The salps watched her from the safety of the alley's mouth, measuring the rates of the passersby, calculating the angle to grab a wrist or ankle. They spoke in guttural whispers, words shaped to the needs of their mouths, the cartilage whistle and squeak and thrum. She smelled of heat and cheese, iron and vinegar, a smell that called to the dog bodies and lured them forward, nipping and jostling at each other. One whined, a high-pitched need in the gathering shadows, but the woman did not turn even as they scuffled and slunk their way back, an erratic pendulum swinging closer, closer.

She did turn at the sound of whistling, a lethargic melody that only the whistler would have recognized as "Riarnanth's Dirge."

Hrangit barely saw her through the shadows. His mind was automatically cycling through the song, lips shaping the notes of their own volition, giving himself time to think, to puzzle out the source of the pall lying over him. At the intersection, the only light between the high buildings was provided by a battered crank lantern that no one had turned recently. Wishing he had a knife or gun, he reached out and swung the handle halfway through its arc as he passed. It shuddered brighter, just enough for him to glimpse the form, like a puppet dangling on invisible cords, on the edge of the canal.

"Here now!" He grabbed an elbow and found it unpleasantly pliant, almost rubbery as she swayed back toward him. At the contact, the gloom that had been pursuing him clenched hard and fast as an unexpected blow, so like a vise that he thought "Better hire an exorcist," thinking for a moment that he had been ambushed by one of the little doom-ghosts that haunt the canals at night, the suicide wraiths who usually lie like moonlight on the water and only ensnare those who look directly at them.

He heard yelps and whispers behind him, a forward scuffle that made him pull her sideways, into the brighter light of the lantern and let go, letting her spill, cornflower petals drifting from her hands while he grabbed the crank and spun it with a panicked, ratcheting whir so fierce he expected sparks to fly out from the gears. It came apart and bits of metal flew across the ground with a clash and jingle, others plinking one by one in crescendoing arcs, in the turgid canal water, never to be seen again.

The salps conferred in their alleyway, whining and peeing against the cool bricks as they talked. One, mouthing his stick, was silent, eyes and ears attention-twitched back and forth between the words of the others.

It had been the smell, the elusive, alluring smell of her. Dropping his stick beside the oily bricks, the silent one licked up the blue petals beside the canal and came back with them clinging to his whiskers, brilliant against the dirty fur.

They were confused, and in the globes where the parasites swam, they stirred and coiled and the salty fluid around them tasted of steel and confusion. One became so overloaded by conflicting signals that the dog body flopped to the ground and convulsed in the dust, spasming back and forth while the others whined sympathetically. Finally the fit passed and the salp spun in its chamber, bruised but relieved to find the membrane surrounding it intact.

They pushed forward, following Hrangit as he shed cogs and gears in his frenzy to tug the madwoman away toward a broader, better-lit avenue, where the crowds resumed. The salps curled close to the shaggy necks as long as the dogs did not move too purposely, there was a good chance they would not be noticed, and any pursuit would be slow and two-footed.

All he had wanted was to visit Yeshe, to go into the courtyard that always seemed quieter than it should be, and to sit in the shadow of the god, half spider, half elephant, half something else. The statue had been carved decades ago, maybe as long as a century. His father claimed to have figured out whether or not he wanted to marry (the answer was no) while sitting there, and his great-uncle claimed that while he was sitting there, the god had spoken to him "Quite a long conversation, and so pleasant spoken, you would have thought him an old friend." The old man had been given to speaking to the god in his later years, and Hrangit remembered being lectured, the rheumy eyes fixed on a point just beyond his shoulder with a terrifying fixity that had given him the constant urge to spin and confront whatever ectoplasmic wonder the senior was witnessing. But the few glances he had stolen had revealed only air transfixed by the pinpoint glare, and in time he had come to think of the habit with false nostalgic fondness, forgetting the stomach-twitching anxiety the old man's stare had always induced in him.

It had always seemed conceivable to him that the god might choose to talk to him in turn, and that he would be a far better conversationalist than any other member of his family. Indeed, he had saved away two or three very funny but tasteful jokes and several anecdotes of the sort he thought that a female god might enjoy, steering away from the topics of politics and the divinity of rulers and toward the absurdity of toads and clouds. Every time he had sat beside Yeshe, he had felt the silence seep down into his very bones and then assume a waiting patience, as though this, this might be the day in which the god would at long last open her eyes and greet Hrangit in tones mild but familiar.

With a sigh, he let go of this pleasant dream and let his mental vision of the god sink back into silence as he and the madwoman emerged into the louder drub and hum of the crowded street. Street children, dusty hair and big eyes, were grouped around a dhosa cart, begging for scraps from the vendor, who did his best to ignore them while fulfilling the orders of the paying members of the crowd. From far away the crackle and pop of a string of firecrackers overcame the oil sizzle and clink of coins, even though the sun had yet to set, and the pleasant, savory wind became tainted with sulfur and gunpowder.

The crowds were frenzied, an eddy from one place to another, a factory shift changing perhaps or a performance of some sort letting out, maybe a gathering going somewhere, where, he couldn't tell, but he kept his hold on the madwoman's sleeve as the crowd pulled him along, washed him through the street like a paper boat on a stream. He thought he heard her saying? singing? something, but when he shouted and gestured incomprehension with his free hand, she gave him a sweet, bewildered smile. He noticed her eyes were as blue as a midday sky, the blue of answered prayers and sunsets in fairy tales just as an enormous woman in a yellow sari jostled past, features working with emotion, and severed the grasp of their hands.

He pushed his way after her, swimming through the crowd with awkward flailing motions that may have slowed more than sped him along. He saw her over the crowd, then through a gap between two white-robed men, then glimpsed her pushed in the direction of the central fountain. He followed up the twelve worn steps, running, half-falling, not sure why he was so terrified at the thought of losing her.

He reached her at the peak of the stairs where she stood beside a balloon vendor. She fell back into his arms laughing, a deep guttural laughter as her body fell apart into thousands of brilliant blue petals, a drift of color that danced on the breeze like a dust devil long enough for him to gasp. The balloon vendor said something intelligible and let go of the strings, letting the red balloons soar upward, faster than birds. The air went still and the petals fell, carpeting the stone in a bright, slippery flood that made him stumble and go to one knee, the vendor clutching at his shoulder for support while the unnoticing crowds continued their dizzy swirl and the balloons fell into the darkening sky.

VIEW 3.

All God's Chillun Got Wings SARAH MONETTE SARAH MONETTE

JIN DOES NOT REMEMBER a time before she was Jin.

She knows that there must have been such a time, for no salp would be wasteful enough to attach itself to a puppy, and salps themselves have a complicated life-cycle, in only one phase of which do they require symbionts. So there was a dog, and there was a salp, and they were not always one.

But now there is Jin.

Barring disease or disaster, a salp's host will live as long as the salp remains in its symbiont phase. What happens after that, Jin doesn't know. She's seen the transformation, the salp fighting its way free of its protective sac, all claws and teeth and wet-glistening membranous wings; she's seen the new creature called a salp no longer, but instead a dhajarah launch itself, screaming, for the sky, and the dog, which a minute ago had been a friend, a fellow-soldier, collapse to the ground, a lifeless sack of bones and fur.

But no dhajarah has ever returned to talk to a salp. She doesn't know if her friend Mutlat, if her friend Ru, are still themselves as they hurl themselves across the sky or hang in their rookeries in the vaults of the cathedrals, the railway stations, the cavernous, reeking warehouses that bulk along the docks. She doesn't know if she will still be Jin.

Most of the time, she doesn't worry about it.

Goza the Beggar was a good fellow, but people didn't want to talk to him, no matter how many times he swore truthfully! that he wasn't contagious. So when he left headquarters, it wasn't as Goza the Beggar, but as Azog the Hoodlum.

People talked to Azog, whether they wanted to or not.

He worked his way through the less desirable quarters of the city, following the line of the railroad, cajoling, threatening, bribing, in a couple of instances resorting to violence, more to relieve his steadily growing frustration and to stay in character than anything else. No one seemed to know anything, although people were definitely nervous. Everyone was willing to tell him the omens their mother's best friend's son-in-law had seen, or the dream their sister's second husband's granddaughter had had. Discord among the gods. Yeshe's name came up a few times, Jaggenuth's over and over again, and that tied right back into that very peculiar pilgrim encountered next to a yogurt cart, a pilgrim in Riarnanth for a festival his people did not celebrate.

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." 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."