But at last, penniless and footsore, she came to the Bay of Dreams.
* * *
The trail twisted through a fragrant pinewood whose trees occasionally opened to tantalize Cat with a glimpse of the gray and choppy ocean and then hid it away again. She walked alone, deep in argument.
“So Raven betrayed you. So what? You knew she was a trickster.”
“She was still my friend.”
“Stop obsessing about irrelevancies and answer me this,” Helen said. “You’ve given up on your fantasy of ever being a dragon pilot again. It’s conceivable that you’ve even stopped wanting it, though I doubt that very much. You’ve picked up enough skills along the way to keep yourself out of the Conspiracy’s clutches forever. So exactly what the bleeping fuck are you hoping to accomplish here?”
“I don’t know. I just feel I have a duty to follow this thing through.”
“I give up. I wash my hands of—”
“Hey, look. We’ve arrived.” Cat had picked up a walking stick on entering the woods. Now she laid it down again, along with a copper penny as a thanks-giving to the genius loci of the woods for the loan of her staff. Ahead of her was Oceanus, vast and flat, and over it storm-dark clouds that billowed up into the sky forever.
The shore was where land, air, and water met on equal terms to wage never-ending wars of conquest upon one another. The air sent squalls to scourge the ocean and churn its surface to froth, the water sent waves to assail the earth and carry away its substance to undersea exile, the land sent sand to build up beneath the water and push it away, and both land and water conspired to roil the air with updrafts. When the tides retreated, they left behind a fringe of claws and pincers, shields, armor, broken pikes, and shattered legs to mark the border of the battlefield.
Despite that, Cat’s heart lightened as she stepped onto the stretch of sand between the scrub pines and the sea. Drawing in a lungful of air tinged with salt and a touch of sulfur from the marshes to the north, she felt for an instant absurdly happy, as if for the first time in her life she were breathing free. She laughed for the sheer joy of laughing. Perhaps things were going to be better from now on. But even if they weren’t, she was going to act as if they were.
* * *
Cat carried the key to the ocean on a piece of cotton string about her neck. The pennywhistle she kept in a fist shoved into a windbreaker pocket. She looked to the right and saw the pinewoods dwindling into marshland. She looked to the left and—
“That can’t possibly be a coincidence,” Helen said.
A long rock jetty curled into the water, forming a spiral that made three circuits before ending in a circular platform at its center. After a moment’s consideration, Cat walked out to the platform. There, she lifted the pennywhistle to her lips and played “The Green Hills of Avalon,” as Raven had advised. Nothing happened at first. But she kept playing, off and on, until at last a line of bubbles cleaved the ocean as a triton came from the deep sea to swim the spiral to its center. He burst clear of the water before her, scattering droplets on her face and upraised hands. The hair on his head and chest and groin was green as kelp, his muscles were crisply delineated, and since he wore no clothing, his erection was all too obvious.
Cat put down the pennywhistle and formally said, “I claim safe passage to—”
A jaunty leer split the triton’s green beard and he grabbed his crotch. “You want a ride, babe? I got your ride right here.”
“See this?” Cat showed the lout her sickle. “Give me a hard time and this will make that ride a lot less eventful than you were hoping it would be.” Staring meaningfully at his junk: “If you get my drift.”
“Haw!” The triton threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, ouch! I like you, hot stuff. Maybe you have rape fantasies? I can fulfill them like you wouldn’t believe.”
“We’ll never know.” Cat tapped her toe. “You here to help or do I have to call someone else?”
“Climb on my back, babe. Second-best way to travel there is. Gonna have to charge you for it, though.”
They dickered a bit, settled on a price, spat into their hands and shook on it. “Do you have a name?” Cat asked.
“Pelagius.”
“Mine is—”
“Don’t care!” The triton bent over. He smelled of semen and raw oysters. Cat climbed onto his back. “You better have some way to breathe underwater,” Pelagius said, “because otherwise this is gonna kill you something bad.”
“I’ve got—”
“Don’t care!” Pelagius laughed and dove. With a swirl of bubbles, they were below the surface.
* * *
First the water was green and as clear as glass with gape-eyed fish and eels that swam like ribbons twisting in the wind. Then it darkened and filled with fleeting shadows and sudden pale shapes that loomed up out of nowhere for a startling instant before falling away back whence they had come. Finally (and this had to be one of the benefits of the key Cat carried), it grew clear again and they were flying above wild forests of giant kelp interspersed with straight-edged quilt-lands of cultivated fields dotted with barns and farmhouses and the occasional small town with a white marble temple to the Goddess at one end and a tumbledown scattering of cribs and taverns at the other. She saw tidy ricks of salt hay and merchildren chasing a whale’s shadow across a meadow. “These are our lands,” Pelagius said, “tilled and settled by proper fish-tailed folk. No walkers allowed.” They put on a sudden burst of speed and the towns, fields, and forests blurred beneath them.
“What just happened?” Cat asked.
“We came upon a ley line and tapped into its energy. See, ley lines are kind of a cleavage in the natural energies of the world through which—”
“I know what ley lines are. I aced geomancy in the Academy.”
“Well, lah-de-dah. Pardon me for answering a question.”
“I just didn’t know there were ley lines in the ocean.”
“Stands to reason, dunnit? You got ley lines in the land and ley lines in the sky—and land, sea, and sky are just three sides of the same coin, right?”
The ocean floor zipped past and the lost city of Ys rose up before them. Cat had expected a fantasia of opalescent towers and rose-red city walls, a cross, perhaps, between the legendary city of Petra and a coral reef. What she saw through a darkening murk (“Pollution,” the triton commented and she felt his shoulders shrug beneath her clasp) was great black slabs of skyscrapers and enormous white cranes moving slowly as Calder mobiles in a still room to build more. The city streets curved and curled in upon themselves, thrusting up spiraling coils of high-rises higher and higher. In parks bright with seaweed strolled women with iridescent scales and men whose skin was a brazen green. Unlike the merfolk, they walked on two legs, wore clothing, and held themselves as urbanites.
Downward the triton gyred, coming to a stop with a puff of sand just above the ocean floor. “Here’s where you get off, sweet cheeks. I don’t wanna accidentally wander over the city limits. Bad things happen to them as do.” There was a wicked glint in the triton’s eyes. “Guess I shoulda told ya that upfront.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference.” Cat dismounted. She handed over the last of her coins, then on an impulse added, “Do you want the sickle? Now that I’m here, I have no use for it.”
But the triton was gone. So she let the thing fall to the ocean floor, yet another piece of scornfully ignored tribute from the land to its sister domain.
The road leading into Ys was empty of traffic—nobody, apparently, went to or came from the city for any purpose whatsoever—and slick with algae. Walking cautiously, Cat followed it inward. A sign proclaimed the city limits. Shortly thereafter, she was passed by a wagon that rode on pontoons rather than wheels and was drawn by draft horses that were half fish. Pedestrians whose cloaks billowed out behind them appeared by ones and twos, became dozens, and grew to such numbers as would have graced a major market town or regional capital. Not a one of them so much
as glanced at her, though it must have been obvious from her clothing that she was an outlander.
Propelled by nothing more than hunch and Brownian motion, Cat walked onward. Wherever her brother went, he would insist on being in the middle of things. So she headed for the center of the city, where the buildings were tallest.
Cat walked for a very long time.
Weary and on the verge of giving up for the day, Cat was about to start looking for a hostel when she realized that she was standing before the very place she had been searching for: the tavern whose façade had been a part of her father’s collection of building fronts back in Château Sans Merci. Seen from the street, it seemed a nostalgic fantasy of medieval life. But it was merely one of a run of shops and restaurants built into the ground floor of what was surely one of the tallest and grandest buildings in town. Fingolfinrhod would never lodge in a tavern. But, finding himself in one, he might very well book a room in the nearest appropriate locale. So Cat bypassed the inn and walked into the building’s lobby instead.
“Can I help you?” a receptionist said in a tone that suggested she didn’t much care whether she could or not. Then, when Cat had told her who she was looking for, “Penthouse suite. Elevators are to your left. Use one of the last three; the others don’t go to the top floors.”
A swift ascent later, Cat stood in the foyer to her brother’s rooms. She rang the bell. It reverberated slowly and prolongedly. After a long wait, the door opened. “Oh,” said a butler. He was stout, pale-skinned, forgettable. “A visitor.” Then, “Do come in.”
An octopus the size of Cat’s fist that had been lurking on the elevator’s ceiling darted past her, looking for prey. Annoyed, the butler flicked out a pristine handkerchief to shoo it out a window and then waft to nothing the ink cloud it had left behind. “Wait here, please,” he said and disappeared into the suite’s interior.
After a bit, the stout nondescript reappeared, gesturing for Cat to follow. He opened a door, said, “The master,” and withdrew from Cat’s awareness. She stepped into a room suitable for informal entertainments. One wall opened into a balcony. There, an elf-lord stood, hands behind his back, staring out across the city. He was tall, elegantly dressed, saturnine in posture, hauntingly familiar-looking. He turned at her approach.
“Father!” Cat cried in astonishment.
“No,” Fingolfinrhod said, smiling sadly. “It’s only me.”
He embraced her formally. Cat hugged him back so hard that tears squeezed out of her eyes. At last, Fingolfinrhod said, “Well. What brings you here? I haven’t much time, as it turns out. But we can go out to dinner somewhere and talk.” Then, with a spark of his old self, “Or we could stay in and stare at each other sullenly, if that’s what you’d prefer.”
“Oh, you. You never change, do you, Roddie? I’m so glad. For a second, I thought you’d changed.” Then, “Finn, everybody thinks you’re dead. Thought you were dead. I was afraid you might be dead.”
“Well. It’s only a matter of time, after all.”
Holding him at arm’s length, Cat searched Fingolfinrhod’s face but found no answers in it. “Why are you so gloomy? Stop it! You need some wine. Rustle up a bottle and a couple of glasses and we’ll get tipsy and catch each other up with our adventures. Okay?”
* * *
They talked and drank and talked some more. From the balcony Cat could see that Ys was laid out in curls and coils so that its obsidian-black buildings, taken together, had a swooping recursive magnificence. At this height, the people in the streets below resembled tiny crabs scuttling across the ocean floor. Once, in the murky distance, Cat fancied she glimpsed a giant serpent or eel twisting its way through the city streets.
“I’m afraid I can’t help clear your name,” Fingolfinrhod said after Cat had poured out her history and her heart. They were midway through the second bottle. “Father’s death created a temporary crack in the world and I made the mistake of slipping through it. I’m adapted to the sea now. Three minutes out of water would kill me. Perhaps a notarized statement would suffice…?”
“No. It wouldn’t. But maybe that’s all for the best. Tell me about your life here, big brother. Tell me that you’re happy.”
“You can change the context,” Fingolfinrhod said with a wry twist of his mouth. “But not the substance. I am no happier here than I was on the surface. I never told this to another living being save Dahut, but eight months ago the soul surgeons diagnosed me as having early-onset transcendence. A year from now, two at the most, I’ll be gone. The only ways I can think of to delay it are so repugnant that I refuse to entertain them.”
Cat took his hand. “Tell me what they are, Roddie, and maybe we can work something out. You know that I’d do anything to help you.”
He looked at her.
“Oh,” Cat said, and released his hand.
Fingolfinrhod began to laugh. After a bit, Cat joined him. They both laughed so long and hard that Cat feared she would be unable to stop.
“Enough,” Fingolfinrhod said at last and, with a touch to her shoulder, calmed Cat’s emotions. By which sign she knew that, willingly or not, and officially uncertified though his title remained, he had grown and matured into his role as the Sans Merci of Sans Merci. For an instant Cat wondered what Father had been like when he was young. Then, with the easy, racist phrasing of his class, her brother said, “Well, the kobold is in the henhouse now, to be sure. For both of us. You need my testimony while I’m every bit as trapped as ever I was back home. However, it’s just barely possible a trade could be arranged. I know some very powerful … let’s call them entities who are extremely fond of certain antiquities. Do you still have Father’s stone?”
“I lost it, I’m afraid. Somebody I trusted stole it from me.”
“That’s a pity. The Stone of Disillusion was a Class Three artifact and one of the treasures of our house. There’s no telling what we might have gotten for it. Well, no use crying over spilt seed or shed blood, as Father always used to say. I’m sure it wasn’t acquired honestly in the first place.” With sudden decisiveness, Fingolfinrhod stood. “We need a fresh perspective on this matter. I’d like you to meet my landlady.”
On a sideboard, a crystal orb sat upon a silver base worked with dwarven craft into the shape of a crashing wave. Fingolfinrhod laid a languid hand upon the orb’s surface, summoning light into its interior. With a solemnity foreign to Cat’s experience of him he said:
“We were born apart, yet together are we in the undying present.
We shall be together when the white sails of death pass overhead.
Let there be a bridge between our otherness,
And let the tides of Oceanus flow beneath.”
There was a sighing noise outside, like a gentle wind passing through a pine forest at twilight. Cat spun about and saw the black glass balcony turn to shadows that reassembled themselves into a bridge that reached across the intervening street to touch, as lightly as a kiss on the cheek, the penthouse opposite.
She followed Fingolfinrhod across it.
They stepped into a spacious living area as tasteful and therefore unremarkable as any Cat had ever dwelt in. There, an elf-lady was just finishing arranging a bowl of anemones. Putting down a shaker of krill, she turned at their approach. She had the darkest, deepest eyes Cat had ever seen. They were like pools of liquid sin.
“This,” Fingolfinrhod said, “is my landlady and my mistress, Dahut merc’h Gradlon.”
* * *
All the world swam in Cat’s vision. She touched the wall to steady herself. “Are you…?” Cat began. Then, “You’re not the Dahut. The one who…”
“The terrible vixen who corrupted the people of Ys, you mean?” Dahut’s lips twisted in a dark and mocking way. “Who made its citizens as arrogant, amoral, and licentious as herself, forcing the Sons of Lyr to smash down the seawall and drown the city in disgust? Look at me—am I any of those things? Beyond the ordinary run of vice, I mean. History is written by those wh
o are anxious to prove that because they are innocent, it couldn’t happen to them. It could. It did. To my people and to me. We did nothing to deserve the doom that came down upon us. But when the Goddess conspires against you, where do you go to register a complaint?” She embraced Cat lightly. “I am certain that you and I shall be the best of friends.”
“I’m sure that we will,” Cat lied.
“You’ve been drinking.” Dahut sniffed Cat’s mouth. The action, though offensive, was curiously impersonal, like a Manx queen offering her butt for inspection. “The good stuff, too! Château d’If. Your brother must care passionately for you. You should taste the swill he pours for me.”
“What a sense of humor the gal has,” Fingolfinrhod said, not smiling. “Be nice to my sister, old thing. She’s made of worthier stuff than you and I are.”
“Do you see how he treats me? He came here as a refugee and I took him in—”
“In more ways than one.”
“Ugh! There is no talking to you.” Dahut turned her back on Fingolfinrhod and said to Cat, “You and I will talk instead. You may ask me anything. I will refuse you nothing.”
Cat considered the offer. “Very well,” she said. “Tell me how Ys came to sink beneath the waves. The true story, I mean.”
* * *
“No one knows exactly how long ago it was. Time is strange here, where no one dies and no children are born. On rare occasions, there come visitors from the surface. Before they die—for they are not bound to the city as are we, its citizens—I inevitably ask them what they have heard of the catastrophe. Always, it happened sometime in the distant, dateless past. Always, it was my wickedness that was its undoing. Now and then, a sailor drowns and the body is brought to me so I can eat the brains and … Oh, do I shock you? Different lands, different customs. I assure you, in my small city-state ritual neurophagy has always been the prerogative of royalty. We ingest the brains of the worthy dead and from this learn not only their deeds but their skills and lore as well. From sailors and visitors alike, I determined that the true history of Ys has been erased and in its place a legend artfully inserted. One involving naked dancing, public orgies, and other crowd-pleasing fantasies that ensure any attempt to set the record straight will be met with resentment and denial.
The Iron Dragon’s Mother Page 26
