Carpe Jugulum

yesterday.”
    “Oo, that woman! I passed her in the street this morning! She could’ve said!”
    Nanny poked her pipe back in her mouth as though stabbing all uncommunicative gossips. “How can you break both your legs falling off a donkey?”
    “It was going up that little path on the side of Skund Gorge. He fell sixty feet.”
    “Oh? Well…that’s a tall donkey, right enough.”
    “So the King sent down to the Omnian mission in Ohulan to send us up a priest, apparently,” said Agnes.
    “He did what ?” said Nanny.

A small gray tent was inexpertly pitched in a field just outside the town. The rising wind made it flap, and tore at the poster which had been pinned onto an easel outside.
    It read: GOOD NEWS ! OM WELCOMES YOU !!!
    In fact no one had turned up to the small introductory service that Mightily Oats had organized that afternoon, but since he had an-nounced one he had gone ahead with it anyway, singing a few cheerful hymns to his own accompaniment on the small portable harmonium and then preaching a very short sermon to the wind and the sky.
    Now the Quite Reverend Oats looked at himself in the mirror. He was a bit uneasy about the mirror, to be honest. Mirrors had led to one of the Church’s innumerable schisms, one side saying that since they encouraged vanity they were bad, and the other saying that since they reflected the goodness of Om they were holy. Oats had not quite formed his own opinion, being by nature someone who tries to see something in both sides of every question, but at least the mirrors helped him get his complicated clerical collar on straight.
    It was still very new. The Very Reverend Mekkle, who’d taken Pastoral Practice, had advised that the rules about starch were only really a guideline, but Oats hadn’t wanted to put a foot wrong and his collar could have been used as a razor.
    He carefully lowered his holy turtle pendant into place, noting its gleam with some satisfaction, and picked up his finely printed graduation copy of the Book of Om. Some of his fellow students had spent hours carefully ruffling the pages to give them that certain straight-and-narrow credibility, but Oats had refrained from this as well. Besides, he knew most of it by heart.
    Feeling rather guilty, because there had been some admonitions at the college against using holy writ merely for fortune telling, he shut his eyes and let the book flop open at random.
    Then he opened his eyes quickly and read the first passage they encountered.
    It was somewhere in the middle of Brutha’s Second Letter to the Omish, gently chiding them for not replying to the First Letter to the Omish.
    “…silence is an answer that begs three more questions. Seek and you will find, but first you should know what you seek…”
    Oh well. He shut the book.
    What a place! What a dump . He’d had a short walk after the service, and every path seemed to end in a cliff or a sheer drop. Never had he seen such a vertical country. Things had rustled at him in the bushes, and he’d got his shoes muddy. As for the people he’d met…well, simple ignorant country folk, salt of the earth, obviously, but they’d just stared at him carefully from a distance, as if they were waiting for something to happen to him and didn’t care to be too close to him when it did.
    But still, he mused, it did say in Brutha’s Letter to the Simonites that if you wished the light to be seen you had to take it into dark places. And this was certainly a dark place.
    He said a small prayer and stepped out into the muddy, windy darkness.

Granny flew high above the roaring treetops, under a half moon.
    She distrusted a moon like that. A full moon could only wane, a new moon could only wax, but a half moon, balancing so precariously between light and dark…well, it could do anything.
    Witches always lived on the edges of things. She felt the tingle in her hands. It was not just from the frosty air. There was an edge somewhere. Something was beginning.
    On the other side of the sky the Hublights were burning around the mountains at the center of the world, bright enough even to fight the pale light of the moon. Green and gold flames danced in the air over the central mountains. It was rare to see them at this time of the year, and Granny wondered what that might signify.
    Slice was perched along the sides of a cleft in the mountains that couldn’t be dignified by the name of valley. In the moonlight she saw the pale upturned face waiting in the