They passed an office building that had become a sleeping face, a genderless Easter Island countenance. There was more life in this part of the town too, sapphire-eyed animals, sleek cats looking at them from windowsills. Kosonen saw a fox crossing the street: it gave them one bright look and vanished down a sewer hole.
Then they turned a corner, where faceless men wearing fashion from ten years ago danced together in a shop window, and saw the cathedral.
It had grown to gargantuan size, dwarfing every other building around it. It was an anthill of dark-red brick and hexagonal doorways. It buzzed with life. Cats with sapphire claws clung to its walls like sleek gargoyles. Thick pigeon flocks fluttered around its towers. Packs of azure-tailed rats ran in and out of open, massive doors like armies on a mission. And there were insects everywhere, filling the air with a drill-like buzzing sound, moving in dense black clouds like a giant’s black breath.
“Oh, jumalauta ,” Kosonen said. “ That’s where it fell?”
“Actually, no. I was just supposed to bring you here,” Pera said.
“What?”
“Sorry. I lied. It was like in Highlander: there is one of them left. And he wants to meet you.”
Kosonen stared at Pera, dumbfounded. The pigeons landed on the other man’s shoulders and arms like a gray fluttering cloak. They seized his rags and hair and skin with sharp claws, wings started beating furiously. As Kosonen stared, Pera rose in the air.
“No hard feelings, I just had a better deal from him. Thanks for the soup,” he shouted. In a moment, Pera was a black scrap of cloth in the sky.
The earth shook. Kosonen fell to his knees. The window eyes that lined the street lit up, full of bright, malevolent light.
He tried to run. He did not make it far before they came, the fingers of the city: the pigeons, the insects, a buzzing swarm that covered him. A dozen chimera rats clung to his skull, and he could feel the humming of their flywheel hearts. Something sharp bit through the bone. The pain grew like a forest fire, and Kosonen screamed.