The Big Meow

Hwaith inflated himself to what seemed three times any Person’s right size, and let out a hiss that sounded like an understreet steam-main breaking. The malignancies tumbled over one another to get away. As they did, Rhiow licked her nose nervously – though there was no way around what she had to do — and then cried out the last word of the spell one last time. Light flashed and sizzled blindingly all around them, far brighter than the last two times. The malignancies fell to the ground, twitching.

Rhiow and Hwaith exchanged one quick triumphant glance over the bodies of their enemies. And then Rhiow, looking past Hwaith, realized in shock that not only the malignancies were twitching. So were the buildings all around them. “Uh – ” she said.

Even as she spoke, the nearest one started coming down in an ugly wet slumping-into-the-street that she had no desire to be anywhere near. “Come on!” Rhiow cried, and the two of them leapt over the fallen malignancies, came down again on some of them, jumped again, hissing and spitting in disgust, and fled down the street among the still-twitching bodies of many more.

A few seconds later, that part of Thirty-Third Street was all one puddle of shivering, blood-dark ooze. Behind them as they ran in the direction of Broadway, more of the buildings fell, and still more, in a series of slurping, liquid collapses. The nearer buildings, with more solid material in them, still shook unnervingly but eventually settled. By the time they hit Broadway, and areas representative of parts of the Silent Man that were still undamaged, everything had solidified and stood still and quiet. But that unsettling red moon still stared down Thirty-Third at them, glaring and sullen, like the eye of a Person who has been argued into silence for the moment but intends to come back to the subject later.

Rhiow stood there a moment, looking down the street, and then shook herself all over. “That was completely disgusting, and I need a bath,” she said, aware that she probably sounded pitiful, and for the moment not caring.

“Yes it was,” Hwaith said. “And so do I. So let’s get out of here.”

Rhiow sighed. “But one thing first. We have to stop in Times Square.”

“All right.”

They walked it, not hurrying, seeing the dark city start coming back to life around them, at least in the Silent Man’s dream-image of his inner self: real ehhif walking the streets again, real traffic rolling, traffic lights changing, the brilliance of the glare of the intersection of Broadway and Eighth Avenue reasserting itself. Hwaith just walked by Rhiow, not demanding explanations or doing much of anything but look around at the surroundings and their fellow pedestrians as they went: men in fedoras and pretty women on their arms, others wearing long dark coats and furtive looks, ducking into the stairwells of below-ground apartments or meeting to whisper on streetcorners. The stores began to have lights again, the shadows crept aside out of the street to huddle in their proper places in doorways and side alleys, and finally Rhiow and Hwaith came out into the brilliance of Times Square.

There Rhiow made her way over to the front of One Time Square, still in this time the home of the newspaper. Around it the news ticker showing nothing but periods kept making its placid way. Here, as she reached out with a string-manager’s energy detection senses into the heart of the Silent Man’s city-as-self-image, Rhiow knew she would find the conduits for the strictly pain-sensing aspects of his nervous system. Like much else in the City, they were buried under the road: she could see them there, long bundled lines, glowing with the messages they carried.

“Bear with me a for a second,” Rhiow said to Hwaith, sat down, and closed her eyes. Once settled, she ran her consciousness down into the conduits and tried to make some choices about which ones to affect and which to leave alone. The problem was that the Silent Man’s sensorium as a whole was extraordinarily interwoven as far as pain was concerned. But then all his life’s been about sensing what’s going on with those around him – rooting out their pain and nailing it down on paper. It’s all wound up with who he is and what he does: channeling that pain…

Nonetheless, for the sake of what he would be doing in company with them over the days to come, Rhiow did what she had to. She spoke the words in the Speech that would reset the Silent Man’s afferent nerves’ sensitivity to pain stimuli to a somewhat lower level. Finishing, she opened her eyes and saw, all around her, the glare of Times Square dimming down. Only the periods on the “zipper” sign kept their brilliance: but the rest of the place gently dulled itself down to something that resembled a brownout. The shadows that had been chased to the edges of things started to creep back.