“Let me tell you what I see,” he said. “Just so you know.”
“Good.”
“If I passed you on the street I believe I’d think you were a woman”—he cocked his head—“though maybe not. I suppose it’d depend on the light, and how fast you were walking.” He laughed. “Oh, shit,” he said. “The more I look at you the more I see, and the more I see—”
“The less you know.”
“That’s right. You’re not a man. That’s plain enough. But then. . .” He shook his head. “Am I seeing you the way you really are? I mean, is this the final version?”
“Of course not. There’s stranger sights inside us both. You know that.”
“Not until now.”
“We can’t go too naked in the world. We’d bum out each other’s eyes.”
“But this is you.”
“For the time being.”
“For what it’s worth, I like it,” Gentle said. “I don’t know what I’d call you if I saw you in the street, but I’d turn my head. How’s that?”
“What more could I ask for?”
“Will I meet others like you?”
“A few, maybe,” Pie said. “But mystifs aren’t common. When one is born, it’s an occasion for great celebration among my people.”
“Who are your people?”
“The Eurhetemec.”
“Will they be here?” Gentle said, nodding towards the throng below.
“I doubt it. But in Yzordderrex, certainly. They have a Kesparate there.”
“What’s a Kesparate?”
“A district. My people have a city within the city. Or at least they had one. It’s two hundred and twenty-one years since I was there.”
“My God. How old are you?”
“Half that again. I know that sounds like an extraordinary span, but time works slowly on flesh touched by feits.”
“Feits?”
“Magical workings. Feits, wantons, sways. They work their miracles even on a whore like me.”
“Whoa!” said Gentle.
“Oh, yes. That’s something else you should know about me. I was told—a long time ago—that I should spend my life as a whore or an assassin, and that’s what I’ve done.”
“Until now, maybe. But that’s over.”
“What will I be from now on?”
“My friend,” Gentle said, without hesitation.
The mystif smiled. “Thank you for that.”
The round of questions ended there, and side by side they wandered on down the slope.
“Don’t make your interest too apparent,” Pie advised as they approached the edge of this makeshift conurbation. “Pretend you see this sort of sight daily.”
“That’s going to be difficult,” Gentle predicted.
So it was. Walking through the narrow spaces between the shanties was like passing through a country in which the very air had evolutionary ambition, and to breathe was to change. A hundred kinds of eye gazed out at them from doorways and windows, while a hundred forms of limb got about the business of the day—cooking, nursing, Grafting, conniving, making fires and deals and love—and all glimpsed so briefly that after a few paces Gentle was obliged to look away, to study the muddy gutter they were walking in, lest his mind be overwhelmed by the sheer profusion of sights. Smells, too: aromatic, sickly, sour and sweet; and sounds that made his skull shake and his gut quiver.
There had been nothing in his life to date, either waking or sleeping, to prepare him for this. He’d studied the mas-terworks of great imaginers—he’d painted a passable Goya, once, and sold an Ensor for a little fortune—but the difference between paint and reality was vasts a gap whose scale he could not by definition have known until now, when he had around him the other half of the equation. This wasn’t an invented place, its inhabitants variations on experienced phenomena. It was independent of his terms of reference: a place unto and of itself.
When he looked up again, daring the assault of the strange, he was grateful that he and Pie were now in a quarter occupied by more human entities, though even here there were surprises. What seemed to be a three-legged child skipped across their path only to look back with a face wizened as a desert corpse, its third leg a tail. A woman sitting in a doorway, her hair being combed by her consort, drew her robes around her as Gentle looked her way, but not fast enough to conceal the fact that a second consort, with the skin of a herring and an eye that ran all the way around its skull, was kneeling in front of her, inscribing hieroglyphics on her belly with the sharpened heel of its hand. He heard a range of tongues being spoken, but English seemed to be the commonest parlance, albeit heavily accented or corrupted by the labial anatomy of the speaker. Some seemed to sing their speech; some almost to vomit it up.