Such a playful and random dotting delighted Dradin so much that he began to follow the spray of mushrooms.

Their trail led him to a narrow avenue blocked in by ten-foot-high gray stone walls, and he was soon struck by the notion that he traveled down the throat of a serpent. The mushrooms proliferated, until they not only grew in the cobblestone cracks, but also from the walls, speckling the gray with their bright hoods and stems.

The sun dimmed between clouds. A wind came up, brisk on Dradin’s face. Trees loured ever closer, darkening the sky. The street continued to narrow until it was wide enough for two men, then one man, and finally so narrow—narrow as any narthex Dradin had ever encountered—that he moved sideways crab-like, and still tore a button.

Eventually, the street widened again. He stumbled out into the open space—only to be met by a crack! loud as the severing of a spine, a sound that shot up, over, and past him. He cried out and flinched, one arm held up to ward off a blow, as a sea of wings thrashed toward the sky.

He slowly brought his arm down. Pigeons. A flock of pigeons. Only pigeons.

Ahead, when the flock had cleared the trees, Dradin saw, along the street’s right-hand side, the rotting columbary from which the birds had flown. Its many covey holes had the bottomless gaze of the blind. The stink of pigeon droppings made his stomach queasy. Beside the columbary, separated by an alleyway, stood a columbarium, also rotting and deserted, so that urns of ashes teetered on the edge of a windowsill, while below the smashed window two urns lay cracked on the cobblestones, their black ash spilling out.

A columbary and a columbarium! Side by side, no less, like old and familiar friends, joined in decay.

Much as the sight intrigued him, the alley between the columbary and columbarium fascinated Dradin more, for the mushrooms that had crowded the crevices of the street and dotted the walls like the pox now proliferated beyond all imagining, the cobblestones thick with them in a hundred shades and hues. Down the right-hand side of the alley, ten alcoves had been carved, complete with iron gates, a hundred hardened cherubim and devils alike caught in the metalwork. The gate of the nearest alcove stood open and from within spilled lichen, creepers, and mushroom dwellers, their red flags droopy. Surrounded by the vines, the mushroom dwellers resembled human headstones or dreamy, drowning swimmers in a green sea.

Beside Dradin—and he jumped back as he realized his mistake—lay a mushroom dweller that he had thought was a mushroom the size of a small child. It mewled and writhed in half-awakened slumber as Dradin looked at it with a mixture of fascination and distaste. Stranger to Ambergris that he was, still Dradin knew of the mushroom dwellers, for, as Cadimon Signal had taught him in Morrow, “they form the most outlandish of all known cults,” although little else had been forthcoming from Cadimon’s dried and withered lips.