own breath carried the scent of him. “You told me that was the smell of God,” Dominique told the priest. “But where is it coming from?”
The priest still wept. “His flesh was made grain, and this is what we take as our Eucharist. The flesh of God.”
Dominique remembered the taste of the grain sliver on her tongue, and squeaked with frustration. Why did she think an old man would come back as a mouse or a bird? What better destiny was there than to be wheat?
She remembered the golden expanse of the ripe ears of wheat, the singing of women, the even thumping of the threshers. She thought of her grandfather, when he could still leave the house, walking behind the reapers, picking up stray ears fallen to the ground, smelling them, chewing their milky softness with his toothless mouth. And then, she missed home.
She comforted the mice the best she could, telling them of Buddha and his protective dogs, but she never told them that the flesh of the grain was her grandfather’s, that he came back to her in the taste of wheat and the communion of mice.
She spent the night and the next day digging new burrows, and collecting what grain was left in the field, so her mouse brethren could have shelter and the Eucharist. But her heart called for her to go home, until she could resist the urge no longer.
Dominique was tired. Her small feet screamed with pain as she crawled back into the village. She wanted to be human again. She remembered vaguely the words of a round gentleman, punctuated by sharp barking sneezes of his small needle-teethed monsters. But she could not recall their meaning, she could not remember how she became a mouse, her feeble memory overpowered by the taste of wheat.
The only recourse left to her was to do what all mice did in a situation like that. She skittered along the row of straw-thatched houses, listening, looking. A sharp, salty smell attracted her attention, and she circled a small house, its doorway decorated with wilting, frosting garlands of wheat and oak boughs. Newlyweds.
She found a narrow slit between two planks by the door, and squeezed inside. It was warm and the house was filled with smoke from the dying embers in the woodstove. Two people lay in the bed, asleep, naked.
Dominique’s nose twitched as the smell grew stronger, and she followed it up onto the bed, light on her feet, scampering across the folds of the sheepskin covers.
The sleeping woman shuddered but didn’t wake up as the tiny mouse claws ran along her thigh.
The smell was overwhelming now, and the mouse closed her eyes, and squeezed into a narrow, moist passage that smelled of sea. The woman moaned then, and the soft walls that surrounded Dominique shuddered.
She reached a widening of the burrow, and entered a warm, unoccupied cave. There, she curled into a fetal ball, tucking her long tail between her legs. Soon, her tail would fuse with the walls of her fleshy cave, and she would become a small person, with black liquid eyes and restless jaws of a mouse.
CHERRYSTONE AND SHARDS OF ICE
I sat with my face in my hands; not due to inebriation, which was greater than what my finances allowed, but less than what I wanted it to be. My distress was caused by a combination of events that involved the crooked militia, a slick merchant, and a deceitful woman. As a result, my financial and moral state left much to be desired; so I drank on credit.
Just as the world was starting to soften around the edges, a shadow fell across the stained tablecloth of the restaurant table. I did not look up. While I was not a man to avoid the inevitable, I still did not relish the sight of my doom’s portents. I wanted to see neither goons, nor the ungrateful bitches.
“Excuse me,” said a male voice directly above and far, far from my bowed head. “Messer Lonagan?”
The address was polite enough to make me raise my gaze. Two thugs in the uniforms of the Areti clan grinned at me with as much sincere joy as a shark that spotted a flounder.
“Yes,” I said, too smart and too experienced to lie. “What can I do for you?”
“Venerable Mistress Areti desires to see you.”
I sighed and took another sip of my wine. “I’d rather stay where I am. I had the most wretched day, and surely the Venerable Mistress can find someone better qualified than I.” Not that I liked turning down a paycheck, but Areti’s gold to a businessman was like a millstone to a swimmer.
One of the thugs grabbed my right wrist, pressing it against the table where it rested. The other goon opened his jacket, extracting a pistol with a heavy handle, flipped it in his hand with a rehearsed motion, and brought it down across my fingers—lightly, but with enough force to give me an idea of how much it would hurt when he did it in earnest. His eyes glinted with a malicious promise.
“Please don’t break my hand.” I felt tired rather than scared. “I need it.”
“Will you come then?”
What was a man to do? I followed them out of the restaurant, into the streets filled with silvery mist highlighted by an occasional hazy sphere of a gas lamp. On our way, we took a shortcut and skimmed along the edge of the deaders’ town, where ghostly dead man’s birches shone through the droplets of moisture in the air, their branches studded with tiny green flickers, the condensation weeping silently down their trunks.
We walked across a wooden bridge that creaked and resonated under our feet. I smelled something musty, and a moment later spotted a dead beggar, who sat in the middle of the bridge, reclining by the guardrail. His eyes bulged out of his swollen dark face, and his thick purple tongue protruded where his lower jaw used to be, but was now gone, lost forever. He would not walk around for long, and seemed to know it—his white eyes were turned upwards, greeting the stars as they sprinkled across the darkened sky.
“Filthy rat,” said one of my guides. “He probably died a beggar.”
“Likely,” I agreed, and couldn’t look away.
The other guide spat, propelling a gob of saliva and phlegm that landed with a satisfying smack onto the beggar’s left eye. “I can’t believe it. They are everywhere nowadays—their part of town just keeps on spreading.”
“That doesn’t require a great deal of faith, to believe that,” I said. “The dead will always outnumber the living.”
“How’s that?”
“You live, you die. Everyone who’s now alive will end up in the deaders’ town. Even you, so be nice to them.”
The guards huffed, but their gazes slid off the beggar and turned downward, to the slats under our feet. One could live in this place and be carefree only if he did not think of his inevitable demise, the inexplicable one-way traffic. I couldn’t ignore this silent but constant shuffling from one side of the town to the other; I couldn’t forget that the deader city swelled with every passing year, encroaching onto the town of the living. Soon, the alivers’ town would be but a fleck in the sea of rotting flesh. I was never carefree.
I shook my head and stepped off the bridge onto the quartz pavement, where the gaslights were installed with regularity, and the trees emitted no deathly glow, but cast deep, cool shadows, soft as crushed silk. A light perfume of jasmine scented the night, and soft singing came from nearby—the sort of thing the alivers enjoy.
The Areti manor squatted squarely on the hillside, its windows shuttered, but a soft glow of lamplight seeped around the edges, beckoning. The three of us entered the hallway. Darkness pooled in the rounded recesses of the walls, and my soft-soled shoes seemed too loud. There didn’t seem to be any people here, just echoes. There were no doors either—just curtains that billowed in the entryways, blown about by the dusty winds that skipped around the manor, unchallenged.
“In here,” one of the goons said, and pulled open a curtain decorated with a beaded dragon. Its eyes glinted in the firelight that reached from within.
I entered a vast hall drenched in shadows. “Venerable Mistress?”
“Right this way, Lonagan.” She reclined on a chaise made of solid oak, and still it creaked under her weight. The fireplace cast a semicircle of orange light, and I stepped closer.
Her face was oval and pretty, with large doe eyes and a prim, full-lipped mouth. Her long auburn hair curled
