SIMON D. INGS.

IT WAS A COLD MORNING, two days before Jape Day, and little children were eating the eyeballs of corpses in Blood Park. Ashura the apprentice cycled past the onlookers and the hawkers selling sweetmeats, alive to the wind in his face and the vibration of the bike beneath his body. It was a wonderful day to be alive in this of all cities, and Ashura smiled into the sunlight that dappled the narrow street.

He rounded a corner into Grape Street, where the vintners held court, readying themselves for the coming festivities. He dismounted and pushed his bike past the steaming chutes and the open cess-run at the centre of the road, dazzled by the coloured light reflected from shop windows.

It had rained that night, and the cobblestones were slick with a greenish slime, exuded as if from the pores of the rock itself: a characteristic of the streets of GodGate. Ashura slid and slipped and skipped along, lifting the heavy frame of his bike as he crossed the open sewer, and made for the end of the run of shops. In a narrow doorway shadowed by bird-nested eaves he paused and rummaged in his breeches pocket for the rusty key.

In the shadow cast by a casement window high up in the peach-plastered building, half a dozen street urchins were making a pile of their turds. They moved and squatted with cat-like gestures and their sharp, wet teeth flashed when they laughed.

Ashura's fingers found the key. He pushed the door open and entered, pulling his bicycle in after him. He leaned it against a banister-rail and clattered up the rickety staircase. At the top he knocked, then waited respectfully.

"Enter," came a querulous, age-cracked voice. Half-cringing, Ashura opened the door. It squealed on dry hinges. His master stood within, head cocked like some huge carrion-bird to watch the entrant. Beady-eyed and ancient, he stood in robes that were more for protection from the chill than for reasons of tradition. There was a pallor to him today, a strange pastiness to his much-wrinkled flesh. Ashura ascribed it to the warlock's recent diet of chaffinch brains.

"Did you fetch it?" he demanded of Ashura.

Ashura nodded to his master, almost bowing. "I did, sir." He held it in his capacious pocket, a stoneware jar capped by a thick pitch seal; a jar just large enough to hold something disquieting. His hand shook as he held it out at arm's length, proffering it to the master.

The old man whipped out a hand with surprising agility and snatched the jar from him, as if he feared Ashura would drop it. For his part, the apprentice breathed a sigh of relief. He hoped that Master Urkhan would let him leave before he put it to use; to some things he had no wish to be apprenticed.

There was a rattle and a clatter from the yard. Urkhan whirled and tottered to the window. "Look at that!" he screeched, with a voice like an ungreased fiddle bow.

Ashura winced. Dutiful, he approached the window. Someone or something had knocked over Urkhan's capacious rubbish bin. Feathers blew about the yard. Little bird bones lay strewn in a heap over the cobbles. "Babies! Ferals! No-goods!" the warlock shouted. "We should make the Blood Park fence twenty-foot high!"

He turned from the window and twittered. Straight away Ashura felt a vicious itch behind his eyes: Urkhan had placed wards on the room when he first arrived at this city. It was unpleasant; Ashura drew away from his master hastily. Urkhan stopped twittering and the itch subsided. The window at which they stood shook in its frame as a ward passed through it on its way to clear up the mess.

"Ee, it has taken long enough," said the master, rubbing the pot Ashura had given him with a parched hand. He glanced at the boy with sly, squinting eyes. "An' did you tell him as I said?" There was menace in his voice.

"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, Truly Urkhan is puissant, he thought, he thought, but I want none of it at such a price! 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. 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.

"The oracle?"

"The one," the stranger replied. "Someone threw a pot out a window as she stepped into her alley. Brained her dead."

Culpole shook his head. "I'd have thought it would take more than crockery to dash the brains of Mother Lamprey. She was a wise one."

"Life was hot within her," affirmed the stranger. "When she walked past Blood Park they say flowers bloomed in dead men's groins."

"And Mother Runnell?" Ashura enquired.

"She's in mourning, naturally," Culpole replied. "Last I heard she was silent at the funeral and left the feasts early. She's taken it bad."

Ashura glanced up at the sun. Just enough time left to investigate. "Look, Culpole, I'll catch you later. I must run."

He walked off, somewhat guiltily; he shouldn't have left Culpole like that, so hurriedly. Culpole had been close to Mother Lamprey, and it was ill-luck that his duties as cessbeater had kept him from the hanging and the wake. Ashura well remembered how Culpole used to pass on stories she told him about the Old Time, when the tide of things was still turned to dying and Science held sway.

Ashura thought of the scientists he had seen wandering the city -pathetic creatures full of half-remembered schemata and faked ritual, their ludicrous labcoats torn and crammed with totemic pens, their heads filled with some gibberish called mathematics.

Respect them, Mother Lamprey had said to him and Culpole once, when their post-feral laughter rose too high and cruel at her description of them. "They walk the paths of the dying at a time of bloom; their systems are misplaced. But come the next millennium and their time will have come again. Then our broomsticks and elixirs will be as risible to the good folk of the world as their mechanics are now." Wise old woman. Strong old woman. Dead? Strange.

Foxtongue was leaning against the entrance to the Walking Eye tavern. Her shirt was open; her tender breasts and her child-swollen stomach glowed in the sun as if they would melt the cotton around them.

Ashura caught his breath and strode over to her.

"I came as soon as I heard," he announced, hoping she'd take his blushes for signs of exhaustion and effort. By the wry look in her eyes there wasn't much hope of that.

"It's been a long time, Father-to-be." Her voice was like honey in climax.

He forgave her the sardonic remark instantly. "I.I'd like to see Mother Runnell."

She smiled and led him through the tavern. It was nearly empty, Ashura noticed; the regulars must all be at the funeral feast. Round the back of the inn, in a brick yard thick with dust and weeds, sat the shawled bulk of Mother Runnell. She turned rheumed eyes to meet him. She did not smile and, even given the present circumstances, he found that disconcerting.

"Foxtongue, leave us. Go mend your Jape Day dress or something," she commanded, and there was an edge to her voice Ashura hadn't heard before. Foxtongue flounced back into the inn, causing Ashura a final pang.

"And so," the oracle said, observing him through clouded green eyes. The silence stretched. In spite of himself, Ashura found himself surveying her huge bulk.

Mother Runnell had been pregnant with the same child for some twenty-eight years. It was nowhere near adult size more the size of a feral. Nonetheless, it made an impressive addition to the woman's natural bulk.

Mother Runnell was that rare phenomenon, an oracle; a permanently pregnant seer. The townsfolk came and told her stories, rumours, gossip, opinions and Mother Runnell passed the messages on in her blood to her ever-underdeveloped child. The child in turn would mull over the flavours of the world outside, and dance in Mother Runnell the likely outcome. Mother Runnell and her fleshly charge could not predict major events, but they could predict people's fortunes with shivering accuracy.

"I don't want your condolence, Mite," she said at last.

Mite his nickname as a post-feral, dropped in early adolescence and not heard since then. Ashura lowered his head. He'd stumbled upon some hurt, some worry. Quick of temper and of wit he might be. But life on the streets had told him well when to bite his tongue.

"You've chosen a strange course, Mite. I wish you were Mite once more, so you could choose again. You may well hang your head in shame."

"Not shame, Mother, puzzle "

"Silence!" She'd meant it, presumably, to be an imperious command, but it came out tinged with hysteria and the weakness of an old woman. "You are a pander, a tool of evil work. We " she stroked her belly -"cannot say whether you are aware of this, but we fear the worst."

"I keep my eyes open," said Ashura. "But I cannot see through locked doors, or closed minds."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning Master Urkhan is a wily, mischievous old bastard whose very eyes don't trust each other, hence the squint."

Mother Runnell grinned, very briefly, very warmly. Then the cold, worried mask was back. "So. Have you heard about Mother Lamprey's death?"

"That's why I'm here, to say I'm sorry."

"Aaach," she snapped, "I didn't say, 'that she died,' I said 'about her death.' Of how she died, boy. Do you know how?"

"Brained by a pot."

"Have you any idea how tough old Lamprey was?"

"That...occurred to me, too. It must have been a damn large pot."

"You tell me. Neighbours saw the thing fall, that's all. Can't say after it hit that they gave it much thought."

Some reflex made Ashura glance up into the sky. He did a double-take. The clouds there were pink-edged. He was late. "Mother Runnell, I must go now."

"Your good master requiring more favours of your good will?"

"Well I am am his apprentice." his apprentice."

"More deliveries?"

Ashura stood up and dusted himself down. "No doubt." The next second he was staring at her. "How, how."

"What was in the pot, Ashura?" And all of a sudden Mother Runnell's eyes didn't seem bleared at all, but emerald and piercing. And all of a sudden Mother Runnell's eyes didn't seem bleared at all, but emerald and piercing.

"A dead ancient's brain," Ashura replied in a whisper.

"How do you know?"

Ashura looked at the ground, abashed. "I don't know. I didn't look, if that's what you mean. I can only surmise that's what it was from what I heard behind locked doors."

"Ahh," she said, and started rocking, back and forth, very slowly, "you do keep your eyes and ears open, young Mite, after all. I'm glad to hear it. Your life may depend on it, someday." Ashura shivered at the pronouncement but the oracle's smile was warm. "Now come, tell me, what was the brain for?"

"Master Urkhan's old wards are wearing down. He made them from squirrel and cat and other small animals. He's made new ones from chaffinches, but he hasn't used any of them. I think he's after something a little stronger."

"A ward from the ka ka of a dead man?" of a dead man?"

Ashura nodded, blushing.

Mother Runnell tutted. "Oh, Mite, what have you got yourself involved in? You know that's a restricted practice. If the burghers heard. Who provided the brain?"

"Trimghoul."

"The psychokine?"

"The same."

"And where did he get it?"

"From Blood Park, so he said."

"And do you really believe him, Ashura?" Ashura, his correct name. Seriousness. Mother Runnell's questions were in deadly earnest.

Did he believe Trimghoul? He thought of the man, astride his skittish gelding and shrouded in his habitual garb, an unnerving costume of black net that covered him from head to foot. Things started slotting into place inside Ashura's head, forming a pattern he didn't much care for not at all.

His tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. "What must I do?" he stammered.

"Act upon your suspicions," she replied simply. "That's not so hard, is it?" Something cold slithered down Ashura's spine.