THE SACRIFICIAL GOAT, WITH polished hooves, horns dyed red, coat washed pearly white, was tethered to the back of a ribbon-draped truck. The crowds along Gran Vía were cheering as it passed, shaking their fists, throwing scoops of mud and dung, spitting chewed reddish wads of the local leaf, shouting words of anger and encouragement.

Father John wiped the sweat from his face and pressed the cloth until it dissolved, then rested his gloved hands back on the sash frame of the top window at the Pandera presbytery, leaning out to watch the procession pass five stories below him. Behind the goat truck came witchwomen clattering teeth and beads, a gamboling clown, skull-faced conjurmen, jostling flags. Then the firefly glitter of excited children waving chemlights. Then the women, widow-black and keening like gulls. Here and there, he recognized the faces of some of his own parishioners.

A voice behind him said: “These people aren’t like us, John. Sit down, sit down. What’s the point in watching them if it bothers you so? Bella will be bringing the tea up in a minute…”

The procession flowed on between the houses. Colors ran like an oil-rainbowed river, red, silver, and gold from luminous fabrics; then came shimmering images from screens slung over donkeys trailing wires and powerpacks. Cartoon monsters and coupling bodies soared, half-solid, into the air. And what were the people singing? John strained his ears to catch the words accented with the guttural Magulf dialect. But even with the translat he always kept hooked to the belt of his cassock, he found the Borderers hard to understand, and the translat would be worthless now: the voices that drifted up with the seaweed smell of massed Borderer humanity ebbed and pulsed like static. The sound was formless, the yawning breath of a mouth surrounded by the clattering heartbeat of bells and drums.

He turned away from the window.

Amply seated, his feet propped on a soiled cushion, Father Felipe studied John though silver half-lidded eyes. “You’ve upset them,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? Upset them by refusing to get involved in their carnival. A lad came to the door here only the other day and asked—”

“It’s not my duty to please these people.”

“Ah, duty!” Felipe rumbled gently with laughter.

John pulled a chair across the gritty floor and sat down. Outside, he could still hear the rumble of the procession. “Animal sacrifice is pointless…wasteful. You think I should misrepresent the Church by seeming to approve of it?”

Felipe scratched absently at a food stain on his cassock. The room was half dark already, and the tiny glowing spines that ran along the fingers of his gloves made a reddish blur. John glanced down at his own gloves, which were still veined a leafy green; he had several more hours before he’d need to pull the thread along the cuff and incinerate them.

“I’ll tell you a little secret,” Felipe said. “I used to join in that procession—when these legs here would let me. Wave that big censer from the back cupboard in Santa Cristina’s chancelry.” He chuckled at the memory. “I’m sure the children used to put some sort of drug in it.”

It was no secret. The children had told John about it when they came up Santa Cristina’s hill in the smoky dusk one evening as he was closing the church and asked him to bless the goat. The old priest was just playing games—or perhaps even acknowledging in a roundabout way that his precedent had put the new and younger man in a difficult position.

“Ah!” Felipe cocked his head and beamed. “Here comes tea.” All John could hear was the sound of the procession drumming like rain, but Felipe had somehow got hold of an expensive ear implant to counter his deafness. He heard everything.

After a long moment, the door from the stairs creaked open and Bella backed into the room with a jingle of china.

“Bless you, my girl. Gunafana…”

The presbytery maid lowered her head. She had on a thin blue housecoat stained with sweat across the back, arms, and shoulders, and long-sleeved gloves of cheap cotton. Now that winter had ended, she’d also taken to wearing the impregnated facemasks they sold down at the Alcalá souk.

“And spicecake, I see. I really don’t know how you do it. Bella, my dear, you’re a marvel.”

“Thank you, Fatoo.”

“And I suppose you’d rather be out there, eh, my child? Joining in the fun?”

“No, Fatoo. This is my work.”

“Of course! You see, John—here’s another one who understands duty…”

John saw the attentiveness that came into Felipe’s eyes as the young Borderer woman leaned to place the teatray on the low table. Every day those rheumy silver irises sparkled with sudden life as they studied the curves of her breasts.

Bella stepped quickly back. She crossed her arms. Her facemask sucked in, blew out. Framed by it and a fringe of black hair, her big chestnut eyes remained blank. Felipe liked her to wait here with them each afternoon as they took tea, but John hadn’t grown used to having human servants.

“Tak,” Felipe said. “You might as well get on with whatever it is you’re doing, Bella.”

Bella lowered her head again. “Yes, Fatoo.”

Felipe watched the sway of her rump as she turned and left the room. The door closed. Her footsteps faded down the stairs as, outside, the carnival procession was now also fading, giving way to the sigh of the hot, ever-present wind. The ceiling fan ticked slowly overhead, circling shadows across Felipe’s face, stirring the strands of hair that he smoothed across his bald pate.

“You’re not the first one, John,” he said, “to come here, to disapprove of these carnivals.”

“I can imagine.”

“I remember there was a blond-haired lad…” Felipe knotted his hands as he searched for and failed to find a name. His fingers squealed faintly, damp with condensation and sweat. “Anyway, he thought he could change things.”

“Didn’t you ever want to do that?” John asked. “Change things?”

“Of course.” Felipe took the teacup, blew at the steam, then propped the cup on his belly. “In my youth, I thought I could be anyone, do anything. Of course, I’ve lost that feeling now.”

“And doesn’t that bother you?”

“Of course it does. The Endless City shakes so many of our safe European conceptions. Life here is put to chance in a way that we barely understand. How many funeral rites do you think I’ve performed down at El Teuf? Little scraps of flesh that hardly had a chance at life gobbled up by the mouth of that big incinerator…”

“Don’t you get angry?”

“We’re here to be the shepherds of souls, not to burn with anger. Remember what Epictetus said.”

“I don’t want to lose my anger. If I lose that, I’ll be accepting things exactly as they are.”

“And tell me, why should this world need your acceptance?” Felipe slurped his tea, clattering the cup on the saucer. “We’re here for other reasons, my son. Believe me, this isn’t the priest in you that’s speaking—it’s the man. I know, my son, that you have your doubts, your troubles. I understand that. Truly, I understand and I sympathize. But that doesn’t…”

John let it wash over him. They’d talked this way, oh, far too many times before in the six months he’d been here. It never got them anywhere. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t engage anything in Felipe beyond this clever, weary, seen-it-all philosophizing. The old priest had spent too many years in the Endless City, lying back in the haze of the whisky and trisoma that he took to deaden the pain in his failing legs.

“John,” Felipe said, crumbs trembling on his lips as he fished through his pockets for a flask to add to his tea, “this seedcake really is excellent. Lent or no Lent, you must try.”

John reached to the old priest’s plate and took a bite. It had the bitter, salt-sour taste of the reeking kelpbeds down at Chott from which the flour was processed. He forced himself to swallow.

After the evening service and the cleaning of the paten and the chalice, John locked the shutters over the windows of the church of Santa Cristina. Most of the glass and the original roof had been destroyed long ago by the weather and were now patched with panels and sheets. Still, even if the pillars were tidemarked with damp and the floor was crumbling to rubble, Santa Cristina had managed to survive the centuries. He’d read up on its history back in Millbrooke Seminary when he’d first heard that he was to be assigned here. Or had he read it on board the shuttle? Now he couldn’t remember—any more than he could remember what the old analogue guidebook had said. Built by the Templars, sacked by the Merindes…Or was it the Berbers, the Saadians, the Alouites?

He paused beside the stone crusader in the east chancel. Time had eaten away the features, the cloak, the shield. Now, noseless and age-corroded, with hollow sockets for eyes, the figure resembled a skeleton more than anything else. He touched the stone with his gloved hands, crumbling away a little more. He didn’t mind the decay of the church, this statue, the looted ornaments, the smell of damp that in another hour or two would override the lingering odor of incense and the characteristic sweat-smell of his departed Borderer congregation. The church was old anyway, dying.

The sound of scuffling and scratching came from the high arches as the large black indigenous birds squabbled for nesting space outside on the roof. The votive candles and chemlights of the side chapel of the Inmaculada gave a flickering, cheery glow. It was one of the few bright spots in the rambling church: Our Lady wearing a blue dress and a quizzical smile, surrounded by an oddly Christmassy pile of tributes. Her eyes were greenish brown, like the Bellinis and Titians he had seen in Paris museums. Christ and Our Lady had faces like those he saw here on the street, with a strange gaze of brown or green or blue. Drawn towards the statue as he always was, he noticed that a blackish rime had formed in the outstretched palm of her right hand.

It was probably dried blood, like the fresh red trail he’d found leading to the church’s oak door one morning last winter when there’d been snow, and a purplish internal organ that had been left dripping on the altar rail. Looking closer at the candlelit pile that surrounded Our Lady, he saw chewed baby teethers, wedding rings worn thin, cheap and treasured prosthetics. An unworkable hand. False teeth. The gleam of a glass eye. Cobwebby scraps of hair. These undying bits of the dead never accumulated the gritty dust that settled everywhere else in the Magulf: his parishioners were always picking them up, rubbing them with callused fingers and whispering Madre. He thought of Saint Paul in Athens, of the shrines and idols in that city full of unknown gods. Did they represent false images—or other pathways towards the light? Paul had been clear enough in his condemnation, but after all these centuries, after the death in the poisoned weather of half the world and with it the other great religions that had once vied with Christianity, there was still no real answer.

On a rusty stand beside the altar was a plate for offerings and prayers. As usual, it was well stocked. Each card crackled out its message as he picked it up. He could only make sense of a few on first hearing. The cards were thin and cheap—and even when his parishioners tried to speak clear European, the clotted Magulf vowels still came through.

A woman, with the sound of a baby crying in the background. “To Lady. Pray the soul of our son Josh.”

Another woman. Something about the roof of her shack blowing in.

A man, in tears, too choked to say anything at all.

To get anywhere near understanding the rest, John had to take the translat from his belt and hold it close. Each time a card spoke, the translat’s screen flickered and the power meter sagged before it barked out the words. The translat didn’t get on well with the speech cards, but its flat, Eurospeak voice eventually echoed each message.

“Please mercy and forgiving. In the name of the gods.”

“Pray now for rain, and for my friend Delo. As it was in time of the Dark King. Amen.”

One card had pinned to the back of it a small plastic bag filled with titanium bolts. “For Jesus,” it chirped, and the translat gave a clear but tinny echo a moment later. “Please remember.”

Remember what? For whom? He gazed up at the face of Our Lady. She was smiling and sad, self-absorbed, and her carved lips always seemed to be holding back the same eternal secret. He wiped the rusty stand and then the main altar rail with a fresh dysol-impregnated cloth from the pack he always carried with him, an anointing that was part of the ritual of reassurance that took place between Borderer and European even when there were no witnesses. Then he changed gloves. Pulling at the thread and dropping the old pair to the floor, he watched them flare and dissolve, and brushed away the ash with the toe of his shoe.

He destroyed the unused wafers. Normally he would have gone through at least two of the sealed packs in an evening service, but today the congregation had been limited to a few old women, a few old men, and the babies that they’d agreed to look after while the rest of the people enjoyed the carnival. He’d had half a mind to acknowledge the fact during the service, even try—through the translat, or by testing his own stumbling command of the dialect—to crack a joke. But when he gazed down at those strange eyes, and at those warm and gnarled hands that he could never touch, the silence had closed in.

Freewheeling, his cassock flapping, he cycled down the cobbled hill from church.

These empty zigzag streets had once belonged to a town with its own name and history. The Endless City stretched along the north coast of old Africa, reaching through the dried-up regions of the Nile and the ancient battlefields of the Holy Land as far as the Black Sea before finally tapering out in the frozen wilderness of the Russian Plains. For the most part, the urban sprawl was narrow, hemmed in by mountains and the wildfire desert, pressed up against the gray waters of what had once been called the Mediterranean and was now named the Breathless Ocean. In this easterly part known as the Magulf, where John worked, the coastlines of Europe and old Africa almost touched. It had once been called Morocco—or possibly Algeria. The maps had blurred long ago.

Typically by this time on a warm, reddish dark spring Magulf evening, the candles and the cooking flames and the chemlights would be glowing, the streets would be spilling with beggars, vendors, fights, snake charmers, family arguments, scurrying children. Tonight it was much quieter. The alleyways were empty—even the dogs were single and furtive. Everyone who could manage to get there was farther down the hill in the old plazas, the bombsites, the open spaces. Enjoying the carnival.

He slowed and dismounted where the slick cobbles steepened and broke into a stairway of rubble between the houses, joined halfway down by the flow of what had probably started out as a stream somewhere up in the Northern Mountains. He picked his way with care, lifting the bicycle over a rock and banging his ankle in the process, conscious of the gaze of an old Borderer woman sitting at a window above him. She was watching the carnival’s flickering lights, listening to the squawk of untuned trumpets and the thump of drums and firecrackers that filtered up along this damp maze.

“Hello,” he called, looking up. “Gunafana. What can you see up there?”

He’d asked the question slowly, but the woman only blinked back at him. He was considering raising his voice or turning on the translat, when she spoke.

“Go home, baraka. We don’t want you here,” she said. “Get back to your own hell.”

She pursed her thin lips and spat. The saliva plopped on a mossy stone beside his feet, stained red from her chewing the koiyl leaf.

Then, with more accuracy, she spat again.

He had two calls to make that evening. He visited the homes of a few of his parishioners each day, even though those Borderers who were prepared to embrace the faith he represented were often unwilling to accept him personally. The only invariable exception came when someone was seriously ill. Then, the Borderers wanted him, and not simply because of the clinic he ran each morning from the old post office in the Plaza Princesa next to the bombed-out towerblock. Even when the doctor’s medicines and scans had been exhausted, they wanted John to pray and touch his silver cross and mutter to Jesus, Mary, and the Lord.

His first call was down the hill on the Cruz de Marcenado, one of the main streets that bisected this part of the Endless City in line with the coast. Here, the music was louder—he was closer to the carnival’s glittering fringe. Cooking smoke was rising over the patched rooftops, the light in it gleaming on the rancid lakes of winter mud that still filled the middle of the thoroughfare. A couple ran out towards him from an alleyway, laughing, hand in hand, the boy pulling the girl against a show of weak reluctance, her shirt flapping open to show her sweat-shining breasts. Riding his bicycle along the sticky pavement, John stopped; for a moment he thought that they hadn’t noticed him. But the boy and girl had the same unerring sense for the presence of a European that all Borderers had. They halted and turned, their laughter momentarily stilled. Under a starless Magulf sky, they studied him with grave and questioning eyes. Then, laughing again, they ran on.

John propped his bicycle against the wall in a nameless street, leaving it unlocked in the certain knowledge that its obvious cost and newness would warn any light-fingered Borderer kids to keep clear. He banged hard on an old doorframe. After a pause, the burlap nailed over it was jerked aside.

“Fatoo. You here. Please, he get worse.”

He hesitated. Then, turning the translat to Transmit, he followed the woman inside.

She led him down a low corridor and into the one ground-floor room that was home for her and her family. He heard the familiar scurrying rustle of departing cockroaches as she turned up the lantern.

The air stank of sickness. There was a cheap, newish sofabed, a methane cooker in an alcove topped by a few cans of Quicklunch, the drip of a water purifier in the corner. A screen hung at a slight angle on the wall, and in it hovering figures moved with a distorted impression of depth. She was picking up some faint transmission from Europe: through the jittery fuzz, he recognized the tanned, smiling faces. The silver eyes.

He asked, “How is he?”

A moment later, the translat’s electronic voice declared How ice uhe? To John, it seemed a reasonable rendition of the Magulf dialect, but he didn’t doubt that, booming out in this hot, dank place, it sounded as artificial to the woman as the translat’s European sounded to him.

“He’s worse, Father.” She pulled back the blanket that screened off one corner of the room to show him her son. “Have you brought any medicine?”

“No. No medicine.”

…meed-shun.

He studied the little figure that lay before him. The boy was about six or seven—the woman’s only son. His name was Daudi. And her name, he how remembered, was Juanita. Unlike many of the Borderers who came to his morning clinics, Juanita had already been one of the regulars at Santa Cristina when her son fell ill. Usually it was the other way around. They’d turn up at the clinic, and if a treatment worked, they’d show an interest in Christianity. Even if things continued to get worse, the Borderers would often offer to take the sacrament in case John was holding something back from those patients who didn’t embrace his faith.

“Will he live?”

She’d asked him that question several times before—even that first morning when she brought Daudi to the clinic. Then, Daudi had still been able to walk, although he was weak, dazed and bleeding from the gums and colon. After the buzzings and drillings of its consultation, the clinic’s doctor, which for once had been almost fully operational, confirmed John’s fears of acute myeloid leukemia.

“Will he live?”

“He’s very ill. It’s cancer, a disease that can’t be cured. It’s a cancer of the blood, leukemia.”

…bludrut.

“In Europe? Even in Europe, he can’t be cured?”

“In Europe, cancer is different.”

“There is no cancer?”

He took a deep breath, feeling the sour wash of his own body heat. Juanita was standing at the usual safe distance the Borderers assumed, two or three steps from him—which in here meant that she was on the opposite side of the room.

“No,” he said, “not in Europe—not until we grow old. There are these things, Juanita, special viruses in our blood, implants along our spines, inside our bodies. That’s why I can’t…”

Her brown eyes stared back at him as the translat repeated his words.

“I’m sorry, Juanita. Daudi’s going to die.”

“Will you pray for him?”

“Yes…of course.”

“Then pray for him. Pray for him now.”

John looked down at the child on the bed. He’d dealt with several leukemia cases and in his own laymanish way had become a kind of expert. The first case he’d had was a woman with lush, jet-black skin, still young enough to possess the bloom of beauty that Borderer women so rapidly lost. She’d come to him as they always did—too late. He still attempted treatment, but the ancient cytotoxic drugs that Tim Purdoe in the European Zone at Bab Mensor had synthesized for him were never intended for use outside a hospital, and the woman died anyway—pretty much as Tim had told him she would—but probably more horribly, from the green fungal growth of some secondary infection. He’d learned his lesson then; that the desire to help in useless cases was a selfish attempt to deal with his own guilt.

He unscrewed a flask of holy water and reached out towards the stained, sunken bed. The woman let out an instinctive gasp, but he knew she wouldn’t stop him from touching her son. At least not as long as he kept his gloves on. His sheathed fingers brushed the boy’s forehead, the skin as thin and pale as the bone it scarcely covered. Daudi was comatose, but for a moment the sunken eyelids seemed to quiver.

Speaking the too familiar words, pausing after each line for the translat to repeat them in a form that Juanita would recognize if not understand, John felt a sudden impulse to rip off the gloves. To heal, to touch. He shook his head and continued…

In the name of God the almighty Father who created you.

In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who suffered for you.

In the name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out upon you.

Go forth, faithful Christian.

As he spoke, the hot, silent room seemed to whiten.

The other call he’d planned to make was also on the edge of oldtown. Even he, a European, avoided going too far out in the Endless City at night, but he felt he was starting to acquire some feeling for navigation in the sprawling, unmapped, and ever-changing slum. It came from a mixture of many things: from the position of the sun when its glow could be discerned through the clouds, from the gritty feel of the almost constant southerly wind, from landmarks like the broken minaret of the Moulay Mosque and the rotted tower of his own Santa Cristina—or from the strength of the distinctive reek of the kelpbeds.

Down through the gateway in the old medina wall. A glimpse between the buildings of a tangled roof-fall all the way to the shores of the Breathless Ocean, where the kelpbeds gleamed in a break of moonlight like shattered green ice. And then right, and right again—into the blaze of the carnival in the Plaza El-Halili.

Too late, he realized the way he’d come. Inextricably entangled with the surrounding alleys, souks, and streets, the Plaza El-Halili was one of the bigger squares in the lower part of oldtown and usually crowded. But he’d never seen it like this. The buildings swam in a haze of light and smoke. People were everywhere. Bells and iron pots, drums and pipes were tooting and clanging. And there were the conflicting smells of incense, booze, the reek of stalls piled with fish, the fumes from fires, the sweet, teeth-aching aroma that came off graveyard piles of sugarballs in the shape of skulls, the smoke from tubes, the sweat-steam that sprayed off dancing bodies.

The instant that he stepped from the shade of an archway out into the light, the Borderers noticed him. They paused in their dancing, in their selling of wares and picking of pockets, in their arguments and their laughter. They fanned back and away. The sense of his presence passed through the square in a chilly, inaudible whisper.

Blue, green, and brown eyes studied him. Mothers reached down to grab the hands of children. Nearby music stopped, hanging on a discord. He nodded pointless thanks, wheeling his expensive bicycle through the space that parted for him, the battery coil slung beneath its crossbar and glowing, the big soft tires plowing through mud and litter.

Down the slope of the square, away from the frigid sphere of his influence, a stage had been erected against the castellated walls of the old Kasbah. The rusty scaffolding was draped with silks and flags, colored with smoky-pink chemlights, drifting fluorescent globes, endless shimmering ribbons. A play was in progress. A huge, leering mask loomed over a shrieking band of children. Their faces were blackened and their thin bodies smeared with ash. Their shrieks sounded alarmingly real.

“Hey, Fatoo,” someone shouted out.

He saw a Borderer youth towering over the hunchback woman nearest him. The youth’s hair was tangled with beads, and a cosmetic implant pulsed bluish red through the skin beneath his rib cage, like a second heart.

“Fatoo, you come anyway, huh? You here, and join in? Tonight…”

The lad was smiling—and John could see no trace of irony in the smile. Borderers weren’t like Europeans anyway; they usually said exactly what they meant. The people around John began to nod and laugh. To beckon. The invitation spread. Koiyl-stained teeth grinned. Someone else laughed and pointed at the sky. Yes, come on, Fatoo. Join in. Skay. Come and share with us. Cum. Share…

John shook his head and pushed on towards the escape of the nearest archway. He passed quickly into the shadows, away from the carnival to where the blind walls and windows glistened in the faint red light of the Magulf sky and rats and caroni birds fought over something in the mud and the pulse of light and music faded.

He turned on his bicycle’s front light, kicked in the standby motor, and rode slowly uphill. He could remember harvest carnivals back in Hemhill when he was a child, the great painted wagons, the good smell of the corn in the church beforehand, the Sunday perfume of the women, the beery breath of the men. And he remembered laughing and wrestling with Hal in the churchyard grass when the service ended, the two of them tumbling down the hill towards bright canopies, clangorous carnival engines, all the sweet discord of the fair. Thinking of vast European grainfields, the smell of dust, the hum of the compound in the valley that signified the end of summer, John dismounted from his bicycle in a dank Magulf square.

It was steeply enclosed on all sides, and in the center was the mouth of a communal sewer. His ears still rang from the carnival, but that only increased the sense of silence. Could everyone have possibly gone out tonight? Surely there had to be people other than the ill, the infirm, and the odd European priest who didn’t want to participate.

He climbed the sagging steps and found the right door. It was open. Inside, he had to rely on touch. There was a passageway—a left turn?—definitely another set of stairs. He stumbled on through the darkness. The silence around him was no longer absolute. There were the creaks and stirrings that came from the flexing of the jelt floor and walls—also from the disturbance his passage was causing to the old building’s many nonhuman inhabitants. He paused. Normally, there would be lights, kids in the corridors, music blaring…

But for the glow of his gloves—now pale red at the tips—and the faint light that came from the small personal monitoring screen of the watch set into the flesh just above his left wrist, the darkness was absolute. A few more steps, and he had to stop. Perhaps he should go back. He’d visit old Banori on the way to the clinic tomorrow morning. After all, the difference was only one night…But then he heard a sound, a low moaning that could have come from the livestock that the Borderers sometimes kept in their homes, but could just as easily have been human. He took another step forward. His right foot banged something, and he reached out to grab a wobbly stair rail. He began to climb.

The landing was illuminated in the glow of a chemlight from the one open door, and he saw the dim shapes of waste barrels and of the water butts that in times of rain were fed from the roof by an elaborate system of pipes; otherwise they were filled laboriously by bucket from the pump in the yard. Such arrangements were always the subject of much local argument. It sometimes struck him that this was almost their primary purpose, especially as the things regularly broke through the weak floors to either comic or disastrous effect.

The open door was the one he wanted. He crossed the landing towards the light and entered.

He saw instantly that he’d come too late. Banori’s corpse sat facing him from the old high-backed chair, its eyes already sunken and lifeless in the chemlight’s dying radiance. The room was in an odd kind of mess, but John had picked his way around the furniture towards the body before the truth dawned. Even in the soupy atmosphere of a Borderer tenement, the place was filled with the bland, salty reek of blood. Black sprays of it garlanded the walls. They were still wet, scrawled by a strong, sweeping hand into hieroglyphs whose meaning he couldn’t even guess at.

He looked around. He crossed himself. Whatever else it was that witchwomen did for the death rite, they generally left the place looking like an abattoir—although, as far as he could tell without undertaking a pointless analysis, the blood hadn’t been the old man’s. Not that it mattered now. In death, Banori smiled. He was wearing his best clothes, with his white hair slicked neatly down. He also had a set of teeth in, something John could never remember him wearing in life. Or perhaps the teeth were just another part of the ritual. They’d probably end up with all the other teeth in the chapel of the Inmaculada at Santa Cristina.

By Felipe’s account, Banori had been a church regular even before John’s arrival in the Magulf, a true Christian, turning up every Sunday at Mass propped on his walking stick until a succession of strokes finally grounded him to his flat. The neighbors complained about his cantankerous and unsanitary ways, but as far as John could tell, they had always made sure that he had the necessities to live. And every week or so, John looked in. Usually, he offered to say prayers or Mass, and Banori would decline—in an accent that strained even the abilities of the translat—saying that he was close enough to God, to Scuro Rey, to be past that kind of thing.

Now, he’d gone the last mile. Maybe another stroke—but more likely he’d had enough of the indignities of age and got hold of something to end the pain. Peering at the clenched and smiling lips, John saw the glitter of tiny glass flakes that might have come from a crushed vial, and a sticky bubble that looked too black to be simply blood. Whatever it was, the presence of the witchwoman who’d scrawled these walls could hardly have been coincidental. It seemed as if this Church old faithful had finally chosen the witchwoman’s comforts over those of a priest when he decided to bring his life to an end.

John pulled off his gloves. What difference could it make here? He took out the flask of holy water, flicking away the beetle that had crawled out from the sleeve onto the old man’s hand. Once again, John began to recite the too familiar words: May Christ be merciful in judging our brother…

He heard the moaning sound again—obviously some pig or goat on the floor above. The clump of feet. The footsteps faded, then suddenly grew loud and close, bringing with them the moaning and a bizarre, Christmassy jingle of bells.

He ceased his blessing and spun around to look at the open doorway behind him, which was blocked by a shadow.

“There’s a dead man in here.” He buried his bare hands in the pockets of his cassock. “I’m from the Church of Santa Cristina. Do I—”

The figure spat out a chain of sound that lay far beyond his understanding of the Magulf dialect.

“Look—danna-comma—I don’t understand—”

Still muttering, the witchwoman stepped into the room. John was torn between shock and curiosity—he’d never seen one at such close quarters before—and the first thing that struck him was the feverishly intense body heat she gave off. Even at two or three meters, it was like standing close to a fire. And then her eyes. She had some sort of fringed cape over her head, and the rest of her face was deep in shade, but the eyes were like wet slate and impossibly big. He tried to calm his breathing.

The witchwoman was breathing heavily, too. Her shoulders were shuddering, heaving, jingling the forest of silver and gold that hung on her. There were boxes dangling from the knotted ribbons, tiny cages that contained chittering insects, gilded skulls. The whole thing made a tinkling, whispering cacophony, like the crackle of frost…a flock of panicked sparrows…a thousand windchimes caught in a breeze. Then the pebble-bright eyes blinked back at him, and every sound stopped at the same instant.

In sudden, absolute silence—the chirping of every insect hushed, every bell magically still—the witchwoman stepped towards him.

“I suppose you and I…” His voice came out as a whisper. “We have something in common. We see to the needs of the dead.”

The witchwoman studied him. More slowly this time, she spoke again. He still couldn’t understand a word, but the voice was young, and he saw now that she wasn’t as he’d imagined such creatures to be. All he could see of her face was her eyes, but through the silent curtain of bells and insect cages and the elaborately woven smock beneath, a sense of youth and physical power beat from her almost as strongly as the body heat.

Rocking gently, the witchwoman began to moan. And with her movement, the insects resumed chirping, the bells jingling. Tiny flashes of light sparkled through the swaying veils of her smock.

He stared. The noise seemed to pulse and sway with her movement, filling the room. The sound of it was as compelling as her heat and her scent. Glittering, unearthly, musical.

He saw her hands emerge from the frayed golden cloth around her waist and penetrate the chattering curtain of cages and bells. Transfixed, he watched her turn her palms towards him. They were bloodied red, and each bore a wide gash, a yawning mouth, a wound; like stigmata, a vulva.

He felt cold air break on his sweat-covered palms a moment before he realized that he had drawn his hands out of his pockets, and that he was reaching out towards the witchwoman.

Her eyes stared back at him.

Clearly, she said, “Touch me, Skiddle. Here—take my hands.”

She was amused. Unafraid. He swayed and took an unthinking step backwards, bumping into the arm of the chair where Banori’s corpse sat. That broke the spell. He ducked and ran out of the room, tumbling down the stairway, slamming from side to side along the main corridor. He slid down the steps into the mud of the square, falling to his knees. He could still feel the witchwoman’s presence behind him, but the square was silent, and when he looked back, the tenement doorway was empty.

Somewhere, a dog began to bark. The air was spinning. Faintly, he could hear music. Wiping the mud off his bare hands onto his cassock, he mounted his bicycle and hurried away.

Pedaling along empty Gran Vía through the litter of tubes and chemlights left by the afternoon’s procession, he saw that Felipe’s top-floor light still shone from the Pandera presbytery. He parked his bicycle, kicked off his boots. He climbed through the freshly roped cobwebs of two empty stories that led to the building’s inhabited quarter, and made his way along a corridor by the light of a bare electric bulb. Bella was obviously still up, too; it was always her final job to switch off the generator before turning in. Or perhaps she was out like everyone else tonight, enjoying the carnival.

He paused outside the door of Felipe’s room. He could hear voices inside. Felipe’s phlegmy rumble, then Bella’s soft vowels. The pad of footsteps.

He stepped back in the moment that Bella opened the door.

“Ah…” She was in her nightgown, but still wearing the facemask. “Fatoo John.” She glanced down at his bare, mud-smeared hands. With clumsy, cotton-gloved fingers she reached to button the collar that had loosened around her neck.

“Ah, John!”

Over Bella’s shoulders, John saw Felipe sitting propped up in bed, surrounded by pillows, with the usual whisky tumbler and blisterpacks of trisoma on the table beside him.

“Fancy a word? Come in, come in.”

John shrugged, then shook his head. “I’m tired. I’ll go to bed.”

“The Lord bless you tonight, my son…”

In his own room, he combed his hair rigorously, shaking out the dead husks of the lice killed by the phylum-specific poisons secreted from his skin, then washed himself with the greasy soap and bowl of tepid water that Bella had put out. He rubbed hard at the lump beneath his right armpit, where his powerpack projected slightly from the flesh, and at the watch’s indentation in his wrist. Then he found himself leaning forward, peering into the mirror on the wall, studying his eyes. The whites were bloodshot tonight, the lids faintly trembling. Close up, the irises seemed translucent, like misted glass against a bright sky. Sometimes he imagined he could detect the blue that he guessed the silver pigment probably disguised in someone with his dark hair, his pale coloring.

The ceiling light blinked out as Bella switched off the generator on her way to bed. He turned from the mirror, pulled the shabby curtains back from the window, and completed his toilet in the red wash that came from the Magulf sky. There were voices along Gran Vía now. Singing, laughter, and the splash of footsteps as the revelers made their way home…

He dropped his cassock into the wicker box in the corner from which Bella took the washing. He picked up the translat. The red standby light was still glowing. He pressed rewind. How long had it been? An hour? The translat searched, stopped, searched again. Bella murmured Fatoo John…, and he heard the labored sound of his own breathing, the swish of tires as he cycled back through the empty streets to the presbytery.

Search. Stop. Search. His own voice, speaking a blessing for Banori. May Christ be merciful in judging our brother… Forward. The sound of moaning, footsteps from the floor above. He ran it on a few seconds. The jingling. Even through the translat’s small speaker, it sounded like more than simply insects and bells.

Then the witchwoman’s initial exclamation. He took the volume down, went back, pressed play. The red light flickered, the power meter sagged. For an extraordinary time, the screen flashed Wait. He waited for translat do its usual job of breaking any mystery by reducing all words to the dispassionate phonemes of Eurospeak. Finally, the screen announced: File not accessed. Try another language.

He stared at the bland message. So she hadn’t been speaking the Magulf dialect—or any of its close variants. He supposed that that shouldn’t come as too big a surprise. After all, even the Church still occasionally resorted to Latin. It was probably some garbled variant of an old African language, and maybe if he saved the data and accessed the net, he might get somewhere with it.

He ran the recording forward half a minute. He wanted to hear how she’d managed to speak so suddenly and clearly in European, in a voice that was so strong and that came—not that it was really possible—from his own past. He heard the jingling bells. The silence. The jingling again. The swaying. The moaning. The squawk of his own voice. The stutter of his agitated breath. Then the thump of feet and furniture as he stepped back into Banori and tumbled out of the room.

He ran it back again. And again. Whatever had happened, whatever words the witchwoman had said to him, the translat hadn’t recorded. Touch me. Had he imagined it? It was easier to think so.

The screen flashed: File full. Store/Erase?

Crouched on his bed, with the Magulf sky flickering beyond the window, Father John selected Erase.