In any case the top of the font was covered with a grille held down by a couple of bricks – from underneath came contented croaking sounds. A gout of pink shot through an interstice and speared a fly out of midair, paused humming-taut for an instant, then snapped back. Daniel removed the bricks and pulled up the grille and looked at, and was looked at by, half a dozen of the healthiest frogs he'd ever seen, frogs the size of terriers, frogs that could tongue sparrows out of the air. Standing there in the City of Death, Daniel laughed. The generative spirit ran amok in the bodies of rats, whose corpses were transmuted into flies, which gave up their spirit to produce happy blinking green frogs.