Deep in the abyss of the Unholy Bazaar, in a shop that reeked of death and god-blood, Sparrow lay screaming in a web of rope and unbreakable silk.

Around her, the Aunties bustled: sawing and rinsing and hammering; cursing, grunting, and muttering; welding metal to flesh and magic to skin. Their infernal machines sputtered, guttered, mauled, tore. Great gouts of Sparrow’s god-blood splashed boiling to the floor, twisting, and clotting. Where it fell it spawned little puff-cheeked spooks: her bald, unlovely army of Childlings.

Sparrow watched them in the tired lapses between screams: their rolling play and incomprehensible chatter, bumpy heads and owl-like eyes, their propensity to smash and crash and eat all the things. Dead or alive, thought or action—it did not matter. If it existed, the Childlings would eat it. They might eat her too, given half the chance, but she dangled too high above them for now, suspended from the ceiling, limbs all knotted together in artful shibari.

Sparrow’s screams filled every damp, rotten nook of the Bazaar. With her god-sight, she knew that denizens of the Bazaar paid lazy heed. Next door, a woman pulling her lover into a boiling bathtub paused, shivering once as Sparrow’s shrieks dragged cool fingernails down her translucent spine. Across the street, the girls that sold their faces froze mid-tug, nostrils flaring above loose lips and unfixed teeth as they sniffed at the rank scent of burning bone. The strange meats piled atop the Bazaar’s steaming food carts began to move, slipping and sliding as if each raw, bloody cut had glut itself to life on the sweet marrow of Sparrow’s anguish.

Yet no curious neighbor came out to help; no patron from the bars lining the streets looked up from their drinks. The street-cart vendors danced a contortionist cavort to catch their escaping meats, but they too drowned Sparrow out with their exhortations.

And no surprise: screams were part of the natural soundscape of this Bazaar, this odd blink of a place that sat squat and sprawling beneath the sewers of Crimson City. Here the holy gloss of the City’s lacy streets was absent. Here the glistening towers and benevolent gods gave way to smugglers who sold pestilence and madams who entrapped demons.

Here the unwritten understanding was that anyone who walked these streets walked alone.

And so Sparrow howled and bellowed, secure in the certainty that no one would check on her. No one would interrupt this grim undertaking. Every nook here sold a terror, every cranny a nightmare: what was one more shriek to those who lived here?

While Sparrow hung, the Childlings gazed up at her and mimicked her shouts. Some of them stuck their blue tongues out to catch the fine mists of her blood, bloated bodies knocking into each other like marbles. Every half an hour or so, an Auntie vacuumed them up and took them out to the incinerator, where they died squeaky noisy deaths.

Over the sound of this vacuum, Sparrow stopped screaming long enough to speak. “Can you go any faster?”

“What’s the hurry?” Auntie One asked. “It’s going to be weeks before you can walk after this.”

Auntie Two pressed her electric saw to the jut of Sparrow’s tailbone. Magic flowed in purple squiggles from the instrument to her shoulder, a zig-zagging race that was blinding to watch. “Besides, you’re no assassin, little fool.”

“What did your client promise you?” Auntie Three asked. “Gold? Magic? No magic in the world warrants all this, my doll.”

They were terrible old things, the Aunties. Too comfy in their reeking workshop palace of stained pink sofas and glitter lava lamps. Too cynical and set in their ways. Their work in the Unholy Bazaar—making and remaking bodies—had turned them salty and tough, like cured meat.

“Yah,” said Sparrow, who liked to think she still had ambition. “If you can’t work any faster, just shut up. I’m paying you enough, aren’t I?”

The Aunties laughed like geriatric hyenas.

Sparrow closed her eyes. The anesthetizing censer smoke that they sometimes waved under her nose willed the workshop away, summoning in her mind’s eye a dream of a pristine, snow-laden thoroughfare. It was a familiar place, a gigantic plaza at the heart of Crimson City, the hallowed ground where processions took place. In her dream, the procession-goers were dressed in billowing red organza, crowns of crimson upon their haloed heads. Lanterns floated shock-pink in the air, blinking long-lashed eyes as their hollow bodies lit the nightscape. Weaving through the crowd, lotus-eyed spectral attendants handed out sugarcane juice and jaggery, their limbs suffused in gentle, pearly light. Sparrow walked through the snow, her footsteps staining it red, peering over the crowd to catch a glimpse of her, the Protector of Crimson City, the God in Red, the Lady Splendiferous—

Auntie One interrupted the mind-picture with a sudden tug on the ropes holding Sparrow. “Who’s your mystery client, anyway? Not one lump of flesh in this Bazaar who can pay this much for our work.”

“Must be from the City,” Auntie Two mused. “What’s he promised you, sweetling? Tell us. Come on, now, must’ve been quite the prize for this to be the price.”

Auntie Three did not speak. She was bent over the ruin she had made of Sparrow’s back, slurping roc bone soup betwixt fitting gold bolts where Sparrow’s skull had been halved. Sparrow could tell she was curious; she wanted to know why anyone would put themselves through such an ordeal. The answer was what it always was—worship, power—but Sparrow had a feeling that Auntie Three might be disappointed by that.

“Jus’ saying,” said Auntie One. “You’ve been here for hours, doll. Might as well give us something to gossip.”

“Tell us something we can tell the next girl we tie up.”

Sparrow writhed at the touch of a needle. “Not any of your business, is it?” she hissed. “Busybodies.”

“Oh, none of our business, is it,” Auntie Two laughed. “We cutting you up here. We making you new. We be curious, eh?”

“I told you already,” Sparrow said, exasperated. “I’m going to kill the Red Parasol.”

“Sure you are,” cackled Auntie One. “What’s in it for you, though? That’s what we want to know. That’s the sweetmeats of this whole deal, isn’t it, darling?”

A pause, and then Auntie Two started up the vacuum again. The Childlings scattered. Sparrow spat blood from her mouth, grimacing.

“Is it want, mayhap?” Auntie Three wondered. “Poor little god stuck down in the City’s bowels, jealous of the Red Parasol’s power. Is that what you want? Worship and adoration? Crimson City beneath your feet?”

“Yah,” Auntie Two pointed to the Childlings. “Your god-blood even do anything other than whelping these cheese-puffs?”

“No,” Sparrow admitted. “But that’s why you’re making me more. More than I am. That’s what I paid for.”

“That’s what your client paid for, little god,” the first Auntie corrected. “Best make your move before the pain fully fades. That way, when the Parasol rips you apart, it will still feel like mercy.”

Sparrow’s annoyance subsumed her pain for a few seconds. “And when I succeed?”

“If you succeed, la, bring us her corpse. God-parts sell for good money—especially if it’s a god as well-loved as the Red Parasol.”

“I’ll bring you her head,” Sparrow said, with trembling bravado. “The rest I’m giving to the highest bidder.”

Auntie Three methodically swung the censer, allowing Sparrow once again to slip into her dream, to conjure platoons of trumpeters and singers on the zoetrope of her mind’s eye. A quorum of priests, swinging censers. Dancing girls in nine yards of twisting silks, bells at their feet, flowers at their wrists. The procession moving, pulsing—and at the very rear, in a cloud of bitter orange perfume, a gleaming palanquin, draped in silks of searing red.

Her.

Her—the Red Parasol, Crimson City’s grand carmine god.

Sparrow’s mark.

The Red Parasol was Crimson City’s principal god, its patron glorious. A thousand prayers strengthened her blood every day; a thousand hands reached toward her palanquin in ecstasy. Her magic engorged itself on countless offerings—incense and silks and bells, wafers of rice, pots of honey, and potent black wine. The glow that emanated from her moon-like face and her long white braids came from the power of that worship, the glister of belief. The Parasol’s power was sublime, nonpareil. The criers at the temple shrieked all day about the scorching power of her holy third eye.

But it wouldn’t hold against the sparkling new terrors of Sparrow’s Auntie-given arsenal.

These were modifications of iron and hellfire, not merely worship and god-blood. With every cut, every incision, every trigger of their fiendish saws, the Aunties were welding Sparrow to a darker destiny.

And in Crimson City, power sought power.

If Sparrow struck a killing blow, the Parasol’s magic would abandon her. It would rush out and look for the next most powerful thing to a god—a god-killer. By simple osmosis, that one act of murder would fill Sparrow with an endless stream of the Parasol’s magic: a fount; a frothing, potent river.

Kill the Red Parasol, the client had sworn, and Crimson City is yours.

Soon, this pain would be behind her. Soon, Crimson City would worship her.

All Sparrow had to do was murder another god.

• • • •

Sparrow was the god of Unsavory Characters and Underhanded Methods.

People came to her when they wanted dangerous voices silenced, dangerous things pilfered. She worked with embezzlers, scammers, defrauders, and every type of cheat, watching them saunter in and out of her revolving door and knowing she would not be able to resist. She needed them. She bled for them, gave them her Childlings, and then they walked out of her shop with nothing more than a paltry prayer. Those prayers were footnotes, afterthoughts—nothing like the fierce, rapturous scorch of prayers they gave to the Red Parasol when they wanted good things, light-drenched things like family, love, and health. In contrast, the prayers they spared Sparrow had no meat on them, no marrow, merely a postscript of thanks rather than an effusion of gratitude.

Left starving for adoration, Sparrow’s god-blood had been running thin for years. There was a time, long ago, when she could still afford a sanctum and a hall in Crimson City. These days she scrounged for baser jobs, pushing herself deeper into the City’s entrails, finding herself spat out repeatedly into the festering maw of the Unholy Bazaar. It rankled her: how the Red Parasol bathed in the rose-jam luxury of honeyed worship while she, Sparrow, crawled in the slimy dark, transfiguring her magic to rot, knowing full well that in rot at least hid some value.

Sparrow’s Childlings were small and squat, soft enough to squirrel through holes and up chimneys. They stole, mugged, and burgled. They squeezed themselves into valves and vents, keeping rubbery ears peeled for secrets—the kind worth extorting someone with. For the sake of Sparrow’s employers, they twisted their fingers into keys, to break into safes. For her neglectful worshippers, they held diseases in their mouths, to spit black into the faces of unsuspecting business rivals. And when they were of just no more use in these unsavory pursuits, the City’s people disposed of them in rivers and sewers. There they floated, lamp-eyes gaping at the grayscale of the sky, neck stems snapped, faces crushed. Sparrow fished their bloated corpses out with nets, afraid of being charged by the City for polluting waterways.

But then the client had come to her. Sparrow liked to think he had seen something else in her, a hunger maybe. A raging, seething need for more. Her ambitions: for her face to be etched in the galleries of Crimson City’s towers, for her name to be on everyone’s lips.

For prayer, worship, and shrines to be built for her.

She liked to think that this was why he had paid to transform her. Because Sparrow wanted, so much, that sometimes she thought it showed in her soul, glittering in the oily dark of the Bazaar like an esca-lure.

The client had come to Sparrow a month ago, clad in rough ramie and white gauze. His gaze had rested with callous disdain on the hovel that was her shop. His brow had creased at the small, greasy vials she bled into, and the guttering lanterns keeping vigil over the broken corpses of Childlings she hadn’t yet found time to burn.

The client wore a rhinoceros mask, with a red mouth and crooked teeth showing through the gap at the jaw. The gloves on his hands were carmine, sleek, and slender, the tips of them capped with metal nails that shrieked against Sparrow’s countertop. Sparrow knew better than to ask for his name. He wouldn’t say, and if she pressed, he would find some other pathetic god; someone else willing to bathe in blood and bone for the Parasol’s pitiful end.

This City had too many gods and more than half of them were hungry for prayer.

The client’s voice was a harmony of many alloyed tones; speech low and faltering as though rarely used. “Goddess,” he said—and she called him he because the many voices conspired to make him sound thus. “Do you not tire of this damp, cold place?”

Sparrow was cleaning bone and spine. These she collected from the carcasses of her Childlings, looking for any little spark of prayer squirreled away in the marrow. People remembered gods when they were up against difficult odds, and anyone buying Childlings usually was. Sometimes she would find half a prayer, or a sweet lick of a divine entreaty tucked into the soft parts of a snapped femur.

“I know those like you,” she said, elbow-deep in meat. “You hatch a scheme but lack the fire to see it through. So you come here, whispering promises, looking for whoever’s willing to stick their hands in your muck. What do you want?”

That red mouth under the rhinoceros mask smiled. “I want to give the Red Parasol what she deserves,” he said. “You know what that means. You know how others chafe under the yoke of her rule.”

Sparrow was interested. “And if I feel the same?”

“Then you and I should do business.”

His tone was light, accent soft in the ways of the upper-city gods. Sparrow peered at him, suspicious.

“And you—what will you get from such a thing?”

“I have the money. I offer you power. You can take or leave the job. Anything beyond or before—that’s not for you to know. Is that acceptable?”

That was acceptable.

At the beginning of their partnership, just like the Aunties, Sparrow tormented herself wondering who the client could be. The question clamored at her the way her Childlings did, toothless, twisted, and insistent. But the client wore his mask, and his costume hid the contours of his body. Besides—hundreds and hundreds of gods in Crimson City would benefit from the death of the Parasol. She starved them all, didn’t she? Kept the heat of true worship from them. Her glory was too much, too intense; nothing mattered in a City bathed in the wash of her halo.

Besides, the Parasol had enemies in other places. There were other cities, with other pantheons; other places in this world richly populated with gods and monsters and the men who distributed power to both. Some years ago, a thalassocracy lorded over by six-thousand different Gods of the Waves had attacked Crimson City, each of their ships cresting a tsunami tall enough to topple even the Parasol’s throne. Only the sheer power of worship had allowed the City to drive them back.

And so Sparrow did not balk at the client’s request. If nothing, the Unholy Bazaar had imbued her with a keen sense of competition. If Sparrow hesitated, he would simply walk down the street and find another god.

Of this, at least, she was certain.

• • • •

Six weeks after her appointment with the Aunties, Sparrow flew into Crimson City on the jerking glow-spine of a sky worm. She had ripped it out herself for the occasion. Bit gory, some would say, but Sparrow was here to assassinate a god. The situation demanded some style. Besides, there was a certain calming rhythm to the jerky, pseudopodal clicking of the worm’s gleaming vertebrae; the tuk-tuk noises it made soothed her as it caterpillared in the sky. Sparrow held her skirts with one hand and her lantern out with the other. A procession of Childlings bobbed behind her like a trail of bald, over-blown balloons.

Below Sparrow, the monumental crimson towers of the City slashed the sky. Their thirty-tiered, rotating stone edifices were sculpted with tales of two hundred thousand gods from the past. Everyone’s divine aunt, uncle, and cousin was up there, carved into eternal glory. Every god worth a prayer had a phalanx, rising from the sun-limned clouds: The Blue Lotus, who had raised the City from the frothing waters of a blood-red sea; The Dolorous Wasp, who had cleaved a part of the moon to quell the sea’s revenge. Their stories and their faces were etched, eternally, in gleaming stone, carved into history for every citizen to see. The Red Parasol herself had twenty frescoes dedicated to her: warring against the sea, against the sky, leveling a sword against lesser gods like Sparrow that dared to challenge her.

But all that could change today.

If all went well, one day Sparrow’s visage would be etched on one of these gateways. Her thin face and lamp-like eyes would stare dourly at passing travelers, frightening them into colliding with a raincloud or two.

Kill the Red Parasol, and then you will be the City Goddess.

Once on the ground, Sparrow moved silently through the crowd at the procession. She bared her teeth at the varicolored birds that fluttered from the silk fans of dancing girls. She spat at the parade of lanterns with their painted faces and spinning golden runes. She ignored the vendors with their soups and exotic meats and ducked past the dramaturgists in their snake hoods and body paint. A six-foot tall granite nose walked past her, dressed in festive reds, a full head of flowing marble hair perched atop it.

Sparrow kept an eye out for a god in a rhinoceros mask. City superstition commanded that everyone came to these things with their faces veiled. There were lions and dragons, tigers and tapirs, partridges, and phoenixes. The menagerie whirled and spun around her, cloaked in the incense of sandalwood and clove, clothed in silks and chiffons and tulle all dyed varying shades of red. Sparrow herself wore a veil: a fall of silver with a slash for her eyes, a curved beak where her mouth should be.

Drums pounded. Platforms of musicians plucked at bows and sang songs in the glory of the Red Parasol.

The crowd jostled her. The smell of bitter orange blossoms wafted in the wind. Sparrow craned her neck over a man in a parrot mask.

The Red Parasol was coming, palanquin held aloft by her own elegant, floral-limbed Childlings. Someone pointed, crying out in religious ecstasy. A murmur and a wave of nudging followed as people tried to push closer to Her.

Today, the Red Parasol’s robes were marigold-bright, crawling with lush, drooping spider lilies. They matched the burning jewels braided into her plaits. Above her head, the eponymous red parasol whirled, her lacy halo of crimson light and arcane symbols.

Sparrow began to move.

She slipped off her gloves as she went, flexing the sharp, hell-smelted metal of her fingers. Her biomechanical nails dripped black ink to the ground, where it hissed corrosively in her wake. Around her stomach, the curl of her tail and stinger shifted—a dense, nefarious weight. If she looked out the corner of her eye she could see it: a glimmer of nacreous metal, but the Aunties had worked enough magic on it to make it invisible to anyone but her. Beneath the skin at her back, iridium quills quivered, their cutting tips oozing with toxins from her new venom glands. At a command, wings would furl. Claws could rip.

Even if the Red Parasol saw her coming, Sparrow’s strike would be too strong, too hard to deflect.

A cry went up, “All hail!” and more shouts of veneration followed. Sparrow pushed past a group of lesser gods, gritting her teeth against the headache from gathered divinity.

The Red Parasol’s face was painted white, her mouth a bright, incandescent red. From the tips of her braids swung globes of crimson light, casting her skin in a bloody glow. Around her eyes, a damp cloth was knotted, protecting the City from the scorch of her gaze, her holy third eye. She sat still and straight on the palanquin as it moved, her back straight as a knife, and all around her worshipers cried, praying, whispering her name.

Sparrow cast her gaze out one last time, searching for the client, wanting him to know. See, she wanted to shout, you invested well. Fire and venom coiled like snakes in her remade body. Fangs emerged from her gums, dripping bane. She moved like a shadow, like liquid, her body and all its new accouterments slick and sinuous, waiting to punctuate the end of the Red Parasol’s life.

Now.

As the Red Parasol reached for a brass-cast statue, held up as an offering, Sparrow reared back and struck. Her stinger sparked out and plunged, deep, into the gauze of the Parasol’s robes.

Crimson City froze: a drop of blood in a lake of ice.

And just like she had dreamed, Sparrow heard the world stop. Genuine emotion rippled across that painted face: Sparrow could not make out what it was.

Sparrow jerked forward as the Parasol fell, still impaled on the stinger, body slipping off the palanquin and onto the cold, hard earth.

They lay, for a moment, together. Like lovers.

Then the silence broke.

“Once more,” Sparrow whispered, repeating the client’s instructions. “Once more, for good measure.”

She pulled the stinger out. She struck again, and this time they both screamed—the Red Parasol with pain, Sparrow with equal measures of terror and glee. Under her robes, the Parasol was wearing thin armor, but it cracked like eggshells under the stinger’s assault. Her skin gave away. Her heart resisted, then tore, and a plume of god-blood exploded from the Parasol’s chest. Sparrow’s waiting Childlings jumped into the fray, guzzling, bodies twisting and changing as their bellies bulged with it.

The Parasol gasped, speared, blood burbling where the stinger pierced her. Her legs kicked out. Her gloved hands crept up to pull the weapon away, fingers fluttering against slick metal.

But then, as Sparrow watched barely blinking, the damp blindfold fell from the Parasol’s eyes.

The criers at the temples were wrong: beneath that blindfold was no scorching third eye, no fire-spewing rubies of power. The Red Parasol had no eyes at all. Crystals grew from sockets where her eyes had been, crimson and jutting from puffy, pestilent skin. Cracks of impossible darkness veined the skin under white paint, clear where the drain of oozing carbuncles had washed it off. Her struggle against Sparrow’s stinger had dislodged the Parasol’s wig of braids—beneath it, her scalp was spotted, swollen, abscesses carving deep runnels into the thin skull.

As Sparrow watched, the Red Parasol’s lips curved, impossibly, in a smile.

In that smile, Sparrow saw a red mouth and crooked teeth, looking at her from under a rhinoceros mask. “You,” she gasped. “It was you?”

The Red Parasol spat blood into the crowd. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, in the client’s deep, layered voice. “What took so long?”

Impossible. It was impossible. “But why—?”

The Parasol gurgled, reaching for Sparrow, her mouth a chrysanthemum hole. “This City,” she burbled, “its worship eats us raw.”

Sparrow tried to yank the stinger away, but the Parasol held fast, pushing it deeper into her heart.

“The more blessings we give, the more prayers we get, the worse it reshapes us. Remakes us into what they want.”

Around them, the drumming was increasing in tempo. Crimson City had unfrozen again and was pressing closer around them, gripping them both in the tight vice of worship.

Something surged through the metal conjoining them. A whisper of power, red and corrosive; the river that Sparrow had been promised. As she screamed, trying to back away, the whisper grew to a shout, a torrent of darkness swimming through that tail and into Sparrow. In that torrent she heard the City’s myriad voices, seeking divine permission for every war and every injustice they meted, every throat they crushed in the Parasol’s name, every man they punished for breaking a rule she did not make.

“There’s no getting away,” the Parasol said. “There’s no way out. The City runs on belief. It needs a god to worship, but it doesn’t need our minds. Only our names.”

Sparrow shrieked, pinned to the Red Parasol’s power like a butterfly under glass. It was divine, profane, reaching barbs toward her brain. Around her, citizens were taking their masks off in reverence, their awe and worship writ in their gaze, each of them rapt as they waited for a victor in this bloody dance.

A gush of black spilled from the Parasol’s eyes. “Did you think you were unlucky, forgotten, and unknown in your alley?” she asked. “Did you think more of their worship would make you bigger, better? You wanted Crimson City—take it! It’s all yours.”

The stinger slipped out of the Red Parasol. Sparrow’s Childlings came to smother her, sucking blood from the Parasol’s wounds, growing brighter, larger, crueler. Sparrow twitched at one end of the tail, the power smothering her mind, crushing it smaller and smaller. Corrosive corruption ate like rust at her insides. Her vision went dark, and something pushed up through the soft of her eyes, swelling against the jelly of her sockets. Her skin burned; the beak of her mask melted into it, becoming part of her.

Praise be, the City whispered, ever so fickle, ever so worshipful. Praise be to the new god, The Venomous Beak.

Sparrow jerked and trembled, limbs no longer her own, a marionette on someone else’s strings. The City’s prayers and magic were in her, remaking her into something far newer, something the Aunties could never—a benevolent puppet for the City to love and blame.

“May you find strength one day,” the Parasol chuckled. “May you find the strength to get yourself a successor!”

With those words spoken, the Parasol fell still, the last of the City’s caustic magic crawling from her and into Sparrow. There it curled, fetal and healthy, swelling in her tissues and gnawing at her bones, its teeth tough and long with the power of the City’s belief. She felt it move her, arranging her neatly against the cushions of the palanquin, feeding her mouth with sweet, fresh offerings of fruit and meat.

All hail, all hail—first in whispers, then a roar. All hail, all hail, the Venomous Beak!

Sparrow’s Childlings tossed the husk of the Parasol’s body to the ground. The trumpeters began to play. The dancing girls hesitated a second, but then their ribbons began to twirl, and the men in the animal masks followed. The Childlings picked up Sparrow’s palanquin and crushed the Parasol underfoot.

As Sparrow sat, trapped in the coils of her own power, songs of praise for Crimson City rose on the wind.

The procession began to move again.