The Demon and the City

was hairless and white, with a gaunt, tapering body and no sign of genitalia. Its narrow head was eyeless, with a slit for a nose and a gaping hole of a mouth, lined with teeth like a lamprey. Yet despite its unfamiliarity, it felt . . .known. He had experienced this thing before, and recently.
    The maiden, disregarding Chen's warning shout, was scrambling down from the carriage to stand in the road.
    "Heavenly Emperor," she said faintly. "Shur?" Her face was aghast, and abruptly Zhu Irzh remembered where he had met this thing before. It looked different, but he knew it. He would have paid good money to bet that this was the spiritual remnant of the immortal that Jhai Tserai had captured and held at the Farm. Next moment, his suspicions were confirmed. The thing's razor-sharp tongue shot out in the direction of the maiden and the creature charged.
     

Thirty-Seven
    Paravang Roche went to the temple at the appropriate time. He bought the goddess a bunch of flowers at the station: chrysanthemums tawny in their roll of paper, smelling of spice. A proper show of obsequiousness should help matters along. As he went through the door of the temple he saw that the priest-broker was there before him, kneeling perfectly still, his forehead touching the ground before the outstretched arms of the smiling deity. Roche knelt beside him and waited until he had completed his prayer. The broker uncoiled from the floor and looked at him.
    "You."
    "Indeed," Paravang said.
    "Do you have the money?"
    "Of course I don't have the money. These things take time. But I will have it, make no mistake about that." Make a good display of confidence, Paravang thought, and maybe he'll go away without asking too many awkward questions. But the priest-broker's eyes narrowed.
    "And how do you propose to manage that?"
    "Family," Paravang said, with perfect truth.
    He could tell that the broker wanted to believe him, and yet could not quite make the leap. He smiled serenely at the old man, trying to give an impression of untroubled unconcern, and eventually, with a last suspicious glance, the broker shuffled off to the duties of the day, leaving Paravang alone in the temple.
    Paravang laid the flowers before the statue of the goddess and prayed for success rather perfunctorily. The rites might have to be duly observed, but his confidence in Senditreya's powers was at an all-time low. He did not spend long in the temple, therefore, but took off down the street to a narrow alley filled with remedy shops and a butcher's. He had first come here years before to defuse a ch'i war, and the butcher still owed him a few favors. Before the butcher's door, he paused for a moment and collected himself before going inside.
    The butcher was a short, slight man with an unhealthy plumpness. Indeed, it was more than plumpness: Paravang, with a distaste he found difficult to conceal, could see the outlines of breasts beneath the butcher's bloodstained overall, and yet the butcher was unmistakably male. Rumor had it that this was caused by continual exposure to the illicit hormones found in the meat that this particular establishment specialized in, but it had one singular advantage. The butcher was an accomplished sorcerer, and his shifting gender apparently lent him powers that a normal man would have found difficult to attain. Years ago, Paravang had read an article about Siberian shamans who cross-dressed, and he supposed that this was a similar kind of thing.
    The butcher looked at him out of reddened eyes.
    "Oh, it's you. What do you want?"
    "I need your services." Paravang and the butcher regarded one another for a moment with mutual disdain.
    "You'd better come in the back, then," the butcher said at last.
     
    The explanation took less time than Paravang had feared. The butcher, Wo Ti, did not bother to ask why Paravang needed the money. Perhaps he'd already heard about the issue of the revoked license: news traveled fast in certain quarters. When Paravang told him that it was essential to conjure forth the spirit of his dead mother, Wo Ti merely grunted and informed him that the time was highly auspicious, given the proximity of the Day of the Dead, but the price would be high. Paravang haggled, and beat the butcher down from outrageous to simply extortionate. He spent the rest of the afternoon in the pawn shop, persuading the broker that a vase really was Tang dynasty and not a cheap knockoff (an episode of some frustration as here, for once, Paravang found