Down and round and down and-

– and he was flying through the air. He’d tripped, missed his grip on the rail, and the ground floor far below rushed up to meet him.

‘You two will be the death of each other!’ Ma always said. Zasperating! She said that too-

He struck the floor. Game over.

Sister’s quick temper went away and never returned after that night. And Ma never again voiced the word ‘zasperating’. Of course it did not occur to her that its sudden vanishing from her mind was because her little boy had taken it with him, the last word he’d thought. He’d taken it, as would a toddler a doll, or a blanket. For comfort in his dark new world.

Benuck Fill sat watching his mother wasting away. Some kind of cancer was eating her up inside. She’d stopped talking, stopped wanting anything; she was like a sack of sticks when he picked her up to carry her to the washtub to wipe down all the runny stuff she leaked out these days, these nights. Her smile, which had told him so much of her love for him, and her shame at what she had become-that horrible loss of dignity-had changed now into something else: an open mouth, lips withered and folded in, each breath a wheezing gasp. If that was a smile then she was smiling at death itself and that was hard for him to bear. Seeing that. Understanding it, what it meant.

Not long now. And Benuck didn’t know what he would do. She had given him life. She had fed him, held him, kept him warm. She had given him words to live by, rules to help him shape his life, his self. She wasn’t clever, very, or even wise. She was just an average person, who worked hard so that they could live, and worked even harder when Da went to light in Pale where he probably died though they never found out either way. He just never came back.

Benuck sat wringing his hands, listening to her breathing, wishing he could help her, fill her with his own breath, fill her right up so she could rest, so she’d have a single, final moment when she didn’t suffer, one last moment of painless life, and then she could let go…

But here, unseen by any, Was the real truth. His mother had died eight days ago. He sat facing an empty chair, and whatever had broken in his mind had trapped him now in those last days and nights. Watching, washing, dressing. Things to do for her, moments of desperate care and love, and then back to the watching and there was no light left in her eyes and she made no sign she heard a thing he said, all his words of love, his words of thanks.

Trapped. Lost. Not eating, not doing anything at all.

Hood’s hand brushed his brow then and he slumped forward in his chair, and the soul of his mother, that had been hovering in anguish in this dreadful room all this time, now slipped forward for an eternal embrace.

Sometimes, the notion of true salvation can start the eyes.

Avab Tenitt fantasized about having children with him in his bed. Hadn’t happened yet, but soon he would make it all real. In the meantime he liked tying a rope round his neck, a damned noose, in fact, while he masturbated under the blankets while his unsuspecting wife scrubbed dishes in the kitchen.

Tonight, the knot snagged and wouldn’t loosen. In fact, it just got tighter and tighter the more he struggled with it, and so as he spilled out, so did his life.

When his wife came into the room, exhausted, her hands red and cracked by domestic travails, and on her tongue yet another lashing pending for her wastrel husband, she stopped and stared. At the noose. The bloated, blue and grey face above it, barely recognizable, and it was as if a thousand bars of lead had been lifted from her shoulders.

Let the dogs howl outside all night. Let the fires rage. She was free and her life ahead was all her own and nobody else’s. For ever and ever again.

A week later a neighbour would see her pass on the street and would say to friends that evening how Nissala had suddenly become beautiful, stunning, in fact, filled with vitality, looking years and years younger. Like a dead flower suddenly reborn, a blossom fierce under the brilliant warm sunlight.

And then the two gossipy old women would fall silent, both thinking the same dark thoughts, the delicious what-if and maybe-she notions that made life so much fun, and gave them plenty to talk about, besides.

In the meantime, scores of children would stay innocent for a little longer than they would have otherwise done.

Widow Lebbil was a reasonable woman most of the time. But on occasion this gentle calm twisted into something malign, something so bound up in rage that it overwhelmed its cause. The same thing triggered her incandescent fury, the same thing every time.

Fat Saborgan lived above her, and around this time every night-when decent people should be sleeping though truth be told who could do that on this insane night when the mad revelry in the streets sounded out of control-he’d start running about up there, back and forth, round and round, this way and that.

Who could sleep below that thunder?

And so she worked her way out of bed, groaning at her aching hips, took one of her canes and, standing on a rickety chair, pounded against the ceiling. Her voice was too thin, too frail-he’d never hear if she yelled up at him. Only the cane would do. And she knew he heard her, she knew he did, but did it make any difference?

No! Never!

She couldn’t go on with this. She couldn’t!

Thump thump scrape thump scrape thump thump-and so she pounded and pounded and pounded, her arms on fire, her shoulders cramping. Pounded and pounded.

Saborgan should indeed have heard the widow’s protest, but, alas, he was lost in his own world, and he danced with the White-Haired Empress, who’d come from some other world, surely, to his very room and the music filled his head and was so sweet, so magical, and her hands were soft as doves held as gently as he could manage in his own blunted, clumsy fingers. And soft and frail as her hands were, the Empress led, tugging him back and forth so that he never quite regained his balance.

The White-Haired Empress was very real. She was in fact a minor demon, conjured and chained into servitude in this ancient tenement on the very edge of the Gadrobi District. Her task, from the very first, had been singular, a geas set upon her by the somewhat neurotic witch dead now these three centuries.

The White-Haired Empress was bound to the task of killing cockroaches, in this one zoom. The manner in which she did so had, over decades and decades, suffered a weakening of strictures, leaving the now entirely loony demon the freedom to improvise.

This mortal had huge feet, his most attractive feature, and when they danced he closed his eyes and silently wept, and she could guide those feet on to every damned cockroach skittering across the filthy floor. Step crunch step crunch-there! A big one-get it! Crunch and smear, crunch and smear!

In this lone room, barring the insects who lived in terror, there was pure, un-mitigated joy, delicious satisfaction, and the sweetest love.

It all collapsed at around the same time as the floor. Rotted crossbeams, boards and thick plaster descended on to Widow Lebbil and it was as much the shock as the weight of the wreckage that killed her instantly.

Poor Saborgan, losing his grip on the wailing Empress, suffered the stunning implosion of a cane driven up his anus-oh, even to recount is to wince!-which proved a most fatal intrusion indeed. As for the Empress herself, well, after a mo-ment of horrific terror her geas shattered, releasing her at last to return to her home, the realm of the Cockroach Kings (oh, very well, the round man just made up that last bit. Forgive?). Who knows where she went? The only thing for certain is that she danced every step of the way.