It’s how he sees it, Rhiow thought. His body as an island in the dark… and the dark encroaching. She flicked an ear at something she heard in the darkness down Thirty-Third: something scrabbling, a moment’s metallic banging, then silence again.
She knew what would make that kind of noise in her own world, but what it meant to an ehhif she couldn’t be sure. Rats… It was a signal. To go down there… or stay away? She couldn’t discount the possibility that the Silent Man’s unconscious mind might be aware of her intrusion on some level. It’s just a question of whether he’d see it as benign. But having come this far, I don’t think I can allow that to affect what I have in mind…
Rhiow started walking down Thirty-Third. Down that way, in this time as in her own, was Hell’s Kitchen. But in this time the place was much closer to deserving the name: a neighborhood – if that was the right name for a place so un-neighborly – home to gangs and crooks of all kinds, whorehouses and sweatshops, mob-run factories and unsavory bars, gambling dens and dives. It was a place that Rhiow gathered from Urruah that the Silent Man had come in a strange way to love as he devoted so much of his working life to chronicling its ways. But ‘Ruah also said the stories the Silent Man told about the place, for all their dry humor, were dark at the heart. A lot of pain, a lot ofdeath… with always the Shadowed One’s laugh at the end – a co-opted ehhif version of it. And the pain acknowledged… but always, the ehhif trying to make it bearable. So of course what she was looking for would be down there. All that remained was to discover the shape it had taken this time.
As Rhiow headed down Thirty-Third, the sense that someone was watching her got stronger and stronger. Not just one someone: many of them. The fur stood up all down her spine, but she refused to stop and shake it down into place again. She would not give what watched her the satisfaction. Soon enough I’m going to have more to worry about than my fur, Rhiow thought as she made her way down the street, glancing from side to side at the dark buildings, all stained brick and cracked concrete, the unlighted windows. Dirty glass from them lay shattered on the sidewalks. The street, what she could see of it under the layer of pooled smog, was a patchwork of potholes, dug-up places that hadn’t been mended, open manholes from which the covers had been stolen. Here and there a building was missing from the street entirely, reduced to rubble piled up in the lots where they’d stood. On either side of these their neighboring buildings tottered, their adjoining walls pulled away to reveal empty fireplaces, ancient cast-iron radiators hanging in space, wallpaper peeling away and flapping in the cold night’s wind, staircases all open on one side with the stair-treads hanging down into the void. In the rubble that was all that was left between them, dark things shifted and rustled.
Rhiow licked her nose nervously. This was the Silent Man’s body telling her what was happening to it, the destruction of basic infrastructure. But much more was going on. As she kept walking and the street kept darkening, the only light now coming from an ugly bloated red moon setting over the river down at the far end of Thirty-Third, Rhiow started seeing more movement inside the derelict buildings. Inside the dirty windows she could hear things moving. As she went, and that reddish moonlight seemed to get stronger, she started seeing the movements inside them as well. Lumpy shapes in tissue-colors of dark red and spotty dark pink and fat-ivory, rounded, bulbous, glistening a little sometimes – they were getting bolder, pushing themselves right up to the windows, right through the broken places. Eyeless, they nonetheless peered at her, and though faceless, their expressions were mocking as they leered and tittered at her.
Rhiow’s lips wrinkled away from her fangs in distaste. She itched to assemble some minor wizardry that would blast the nasty things away from the windows and put a stop to their snickering. Best wait, though, she thought. No point in wasting energy I might need later… On she went down Thirty-Third, crossing Eighth Avenue and heading for Ninth. Above her, the sky lost the last reflection of city light, went starless. Around her, the structure of the buildings themselves was beginning to shift, and the watching, leering tumor-shapes were no longer just inside them, but starting to appear on the otherwise deserted sidewalks – first just a few, then in groups. By the time she reached the middle of the block between Ninth and Tenth, the edges of the buildings were starting to go unnervingly soft.
By Tenth, the buildings were all built of ehhif tissue– stressed cartilage and bone, perforated organ tissue struggling to repair itself after being attacked again and again by the cancerous cells running wild inside it. But it was not doing well. Everything looked shabby, tattered, inexpressibly weary. And all around her, the tumorous growth insidethe Silent Man was running riot. In the tumbledown ruins of the worst-damaged organ-buildings, individual cells rustled and cheeped and burrowed like rats, undermining, consuming, destroying. Outside, larger clumps and clusters of them, wearing blunt rounded eyeless mockeries of ehhif shapes, were gathered on the sidewalks, staring at Rhiow as she went past. Some weird in-body imagery of the Silent Man’s, Rhiow thought. If he sees his body sometimes in dream or imagination as a city, why wouldn’t he see the cancer as a neighborhood in it? And a bad one. Populated by criminals, by bootleggers and bad seeds. Yet in the Silent Man’s stories, Urruah had insisted, the bad guys often had good buried somewhere at their cores, and were sometimes compelled by circumstance or persuasion to remember it. Working in that idiom, could even cells gone mad for multiplying themselves remember whatit was like to be normal? It’s worth a try —
Rhiow kept going, and the ehhif-shaped tumor clusters and many of their more mobile single-cell“pets” started coming down off the sidewalks and slowly gathering behind her as she went, the crowd rapidly swelling. They weren’t much bigger than Rhiow was — tiny by comparison with real ehhif. But there are so many of them. And they have me seriously outnumbered. If they should decide tocome after me…
That wasn’t a thought to be having right now, here in the heart of what was certainly a candidate to be declared one of the worst “bad neighborhoods” Rhiow had ever been in. Trying to demonstrate a calm she absolutely didn’t feel, Rhiow kept on walking until she came to the middle of the intersection of Thirty-Third and Tenth, pretty much the heart of the worst part of Hell’s Kitchen in that time, all surrounded by crumbling four-story brick apartment buildings and blind-windowed shops that sold nothing. There she sat right down and allowed the crowd that had grown as it followed her down Thirty-Third to gather around her. They had left an uneasy space around her, maybe as long as she was, and Rhiow was glad of it, seeing that the cancer, even in its unthinking way, was uncertain of what she might do or intend.
Rhiow curled her tail around her forepaws and waited for the rustling and the muttering to die down a little. Finally,“I am on errantry,” she said, “and I greet you.”
The silence that followed the Avedictory was deafening, and told Rhiow more than she needed to know about how receptive this audience was going to be to her suggestions. Never mind, just plunge in–”A change is coming to your world,” she said. “It’s going to end.”
“A long, long time from now,” said the multifarous voice of the cancer from all around her. Every one of the ehhif-mimicking clumps and individual cancer cells around her buzzed with it, an unpleasant itchy sound that made Rhiow want to scratch her ears. She restrained herself.
“In terms of your individual lifespans,” Rhiow said, “yes, that’s true. But in terms of your host’s lifespan – a very short time indeed. I’ve come to you on his behalf.”