Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

“But I don’t want to stay here with you,” Emmie tells her, even though part of her does, the part that doesn’t really want to know how the story’s going to end, the part that’s more afraid than homesick. “I want to go home. I want to go home and be with Deacon.”

  “Then you must watch your steps, and you must make these choices with great care. You must decide if you will help Soldier again, and if you’ll build the bridges the hounds desire of you.”

  “I keep saying that I don’t know how to build a damn bridge,” Emmie tells her and pulls her hand free of the sand.

  The black-skinned woman is silent for a moment. She stands silhouetted against the evening sky, the moon like a bright coin hung above her head. She seems to be admiring whatever it is that she’s drawn in the sand, the complex arrangement of lines and curves and curlicues that Emmie can only just make out in the moonlight.

  “There was a great war here once,” the woman says. “You know that, don’t you, Emmie?”

  Emmie nods her head. A yellow scorpion as long as her middle finger has crawled out of the sand where her hand was buried only a moment before, and she watches it skitter towards the edge of the shapes drawn on the dune.

  “I was dreaming, and Pearl showed me. Or I thought I was dreaming. She said it was a war to drive the ghouls out of the wastelands.”

  “It was that, and other things. In a sense, it has never actually ended. In a sense, it never will.”

  The scorpion pauses at the edge of the outermost line the woman has traced in the sand and stirs at the night air with its pincers.

  “The warriors still battle in the sky, Emmie. You’ve seen them, too. Sea and sand, waves washing against the edges of this place, and two demons tearing at one another, two demons perched upon the edges of two maelstroms, one always in flame and the other always in shadow.”

  “Yeah,” Emmie says, still watching the scorpion and starting to feel sleepy. “I saw them. She showed me.”

  Light has begun to leak from the sand, streaming up from the designs traced into the dune, brilliant, blazing ribbons of crimson and turquoise, amber and tangerine, the deepest, purest blues Emmie’s ever seen. The ribbons swirl and dip and swiftly rise, each color racing all the others, twining tightly together, then breaking free again. The scorpion has stopped waving its pincers about, and it vanishes beneath the sand.

  “Forgive me,” the woman says, stepping into the light. “I have grown too weary of my own secrets. I cannot carry these things forever.” And the colors wash over and through her, and Emmie realizes that the ribbons aren’t merely light and color, but music, too. Each hue a different voice, and together they form a vast and clamorous symphony, a drowning roar of harmony and discord that rushes forward only to shatter against some shore she can’t quite see. The woman holds her arms up, and the ribbons of color and sound wrap themselves about her, playing her ebony flesh like the strings of a thousand guitars and violins and cellos.

  “Close your eyes,” she says; Emmie can hear her very clearly above the music, can hear her as clearly as if there were no music at all. “Quickly. There’s only a little time left.”

  And Emmie doesn’t ask what the woman means about time. She shuts her eyes, but the colors are still there, the colors and the music and the woman standing like a lightning rod planted at the center of it all. The night has disappeared, as have the stars and the moon and the sky, the desert and the dry, dusty smell. If I open my eyes, Emmie thinks, will the world come back, or has she taken it away forever? But then the ribbons of light are moving even faster than before, the music become a perfect cacophony; the black-skinned woman holds out a hand, and Emmie only hesitates a moment or two before she accepts it.

  “The hounds tell a story about me,” the black-skinned woman says. “They teach it to all the changelings, to keep them close, to keep them slaves, to make them afraid to even wish for what the Cuckoo has taken from them.”

  And then Emmie is standing somewhere else, somewhere just beyond the high Arabian dunes, the cracked and wind-scoured bed of a lake or inland sea dried up a thousand or a million years ago. There’s a dead tree nearby, its charred trunk jutting from the heart of a roaring fire, and the body of a young girl hangs from its lowest limb, a noose pulled tight about her broken neck. Three naked women dance around the fire, and they aren’t alone; there are other things dancing with them, feral, loping things with canine faces and bristling fur. The fire licks at the dead girl’s feet and legs, and Emmie understands without having to be told—the girl hanging from the tree is the black-skinned woman, and it wasn’t the desert sun that burned her dark as pitch. Then the three women become crows and fly away, but the ghouls continue dancing around the burning tree and the body of the girl. Their howls and coarse laughter fill the night.

  “They call me a traitor,” the woman says from somewhere behind Emmie. “They know it’s not that simple, but find half a truth more useful than the whole.”

  “I’m sorry,” Emmie says, not wanting to see any more of it, not wanting to hear the hounds or the wind or the hungry, crackling sound of the flames gnawing the girl’s corpse. She would cover her eyes, but she knows this isn’t something that she’s watching with her eyes and so it wouldn’t do any good.

  “Look closer, Emmie Silvey, and see through the myth the hounds have fashioned here. Look deep and see all there is to see.”

  And she’s about to say that she has already, and that she’s seen more than enough of it, thank you very much, when the night ripples like a stone dropped into still water, breaking some subtle masquerade, an illusion Emmie hadn’t even guessed at. There is not one tree. There are dozens of trees studding the floor of the dead sea, each strung with its own body, each rooted in flames. There are hundreds or thousands of dancers, and the sky is filled with crows.

  “Oh,” Emmie says, a very small sound coughed out like the breath being knocked from her lungs. “Oh.”

  “I was a traitor,” the woman says, “but it was never the hounds that I betrayed.”

  Overhead, the murder of crows has begun to sing, cawing triumph in their brash crow voices.

  “In those days, the ghul were growing weak, their powers diminished by the long war with the djinniyeh, and the Children of the Cuckoo had plotted together and appointed an hour when they would finally rise up, as one, against the hounds.”

  “But you,” Emmie whispers, “you told the ghouls it was going to happen. You told them.”

  “I loved them,” the woman says. “They were all I knew and all that I could comprehend. For all I understood, freedom was nothing more than another wild beast waiting to devour me, no different in my eyes from the jackals and the leopards. So, yes, I went to my mistress, and I warned her.”

  The air stinks of woodsmoke and searing flesh, and the wings of the crows batter the air until Emmie thinks even the sky will begin to bleed.

  “But they killed you, too,” Emmie says. “They killed all of you, just to be safe, didn’t they? Just to be sure.”

  “Yes,” the black-skinned woman replies, “all of us. Just to be sure. They had to be absolutely certain that they’d found out all the renegades. And then they rewarded my loyalty by naming me the sole conspirator, only me, one foolish girl child who’d defied them because she was selfish and weak and wanted what other children had. They feared what might happen if the truth survived that night, if their slaves knew that once upon a time all the children had turned against the Cuckoo. If changelings knew such a thing were even possible, it might happen again.”

  Emmie turns away, because there’s nothing else she needs to see. “Why are you still here?” she asks.

  “They wanted the alchemist to capture this moment, what they’d made of this moment, so that they wouldn’t have to rely on mere words and imagination, so that the Children of the Cuckoo could each and every one watch my death again and again and again and all fear the same fate or worse. But time’s slippery, Emmie, even for wizards. Even for those who can spin hours and days
like spider silk. And I have long guarded this night against them. They will not have it, ever.”

  “Please send me back now,” Emmie whispers, close to tears, and the shade named Esmeribetheda grips her hand and drags her free of the night of fire and crows and dancing ghouls. They stand together at the center of the drawing in the sand, their feet smudging and rearranging the countless grains into something new and necessary. Esmeribetheda holds Emmie close as the ribbons of color and music weave a bright lattice around them.

  “What’s coming,” Esmeribetheda says, “it’s a choice that you must make for yourself and for your own reasons and no one else’s. But I needed you to see. I needed you to know this.”

  Emmie, bound in light and trilling crystalline notes, in the horror and sorrow of what she has seen and what the black-skinned woman has told her, feels the cold sinking into her again. The same cold she felt when Miss Josephine touched her forehead, and she knows what’s coming and braces herself for the jolt. Esmeribetheda wipes the tears from Emmie’s face and then pushes her all the way back to the yellow house on Benefit Street.

  Soldier stands on the topmost of the foldaway stairs leading into the attic, and Hester, the brown girl, the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles, is sitting on her milking stool, exactly where Soldier first saw her. And just how long ago was that? Soldier thinks, the last thing she wants to ask herself, but asking it anyway, it and all the questions that come tumbling after it: Was that a long time ago, when I was a child? Was I a child a long time ago? Was it only three years ago, when I was a child?

  The girl’s holding an antique gold pocket watch, and its ticking seems very, very loud in the stillness of the attic. When the alchemist’s daughter sees Soldier, she looks surprised, surprised and perhaps a little disappointed, but not alarmed.

  “Oh,” she says. “It’s only you again. I thought perhaps it was someone else. I thought perhaps you’d died in Woonsocket.”

  “You were there, weren’t you?” Soldier asks her. “You were there, and you helped me. You untied us. How—”

  “Did I?” the brown girl smiles. “Well, then, that’s my own business, isn’t it? I had my reasons. Besides, you haven’t even said thank-you.”

  Odd Willie mumbles something impatient from the stairs behind Soldier, and so she climbs the rest of the way into the attic. He follows, and she sees that he’s drawn his gun.

  “I really don’t think you’re going to need that,” Soldier tells him and points at the .45.

  “Yeah, well. Chance favors the prepared,” he replies. “Isn’t that what you said back at the museum?”

  “Whatever,” Soldier says and wonders if there’s a way to pull the stairs up after them.

  “How did you escape?” the brown girl asks. “I mean, how’d you get out past George Ballou?”

  “I killed him. I think maybe I killed them all.”

  The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles nods her head and asks another question. “Did they catch her?”

  “Did they catch who?”

  The girl frowns and rolls her eyes, then slips the watch into a pocket of her black dress. “Emma Jean Silvey. Did they catch Emma Jean in the railroad tunnel? She has something that belongs to my father, and I would very much like to get it back.”

  “The kid’s with us,” Odd Willie says, staring up at the massive pine beams supporting the roof of the yellow house, half-hidden in the shadows far above their heads. “You know, it’s a whole hell of a lot bigger up here than it ought to be.”

  “Well, I don’t see her,” the brown girl says.

  “Miss Josephine wanted to talk to her,” Soldier replies. “You remember me?”

  “Of course I remember you. You’re Soldier. You’re the one the Bailiff brought to see me. The nasty little brat who dropped the wildebeest.”

  “That happened? That really happened?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. That Noah’s ark is my responsibility. I’m supposed to keep it safe. It was made in Italy by Signior Anastagio Baldassario Moratti in 1888.”

  “Is there any way to pull these stairs up from here?” Soldier asks her, and the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles sighs and stands up.

  “What possible difference does it make?” she asks, straightening her dress. “Is someone chasing you, too?”

  “Jesus goddamn bloody Christ,” Odd Willie says and glances back down the stairs. “This kid’s even more annoying than the other one.”

  “Can we shut the trapdoor?” Soldier asks again, starting to think maybe guns aren’t such a bad idea after all.

  “There’s a crank over there, mounted on the wall. But don’t turn it too fast or it gets stuck. And don’t let go until you feel it catch.”

  “Thank you very fucking much.” Odd Willie snorts, and Soldier squints into the attic gloom until she spots the hand crank.

  “If we close it, how’s Emmie supposed to find us?” Odd Willie asks her, and Soldier shrugs.

  “Maybe it’s better if she doesn’t. Better for her, anyway.”

  Odd Willie shakes his head and runs his fingers through his hair, slicking it down flat against his scalp. “I swear to fuck, Soldier, I hope you’re planning on telling me what the hell’s going on someday real soon. ’Cause I’m getting awfully damned tired of trying to figure it all out for myself.”

  “Who are you, anyway?” the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles asks Odd Willie, and he snickers nervously and wipes at his nose.

  The hand crank squeals and groans and pops, dry-rotted rope and rust and neglect, and Soldier half expects it to come apart at any moment, sending the stairs and the trapdoor crashing to the hallway below. The stairs are still half-extended, and now she’s having to strain to turn the crank. “Odd Willie,” she says between gritted teeth. “This is Hester—”

  “Pearl,” the alchemist’s daughter corrects her.

  “—Hester,” Soldier grunts, “this is Odd Willie Lothrop.”

  “I see,” the brown girl says. “I’ve heard stories about you from Barnaby.”

  “I never fucked a dead cat,” Odd Willie tells her. “If Barnaby said that, he was lying.”

  “He said it was a live chicken. Either way—”

  “—it’s a goddamn lie. Soldier, if you shut that all the way, it’s going to get awfully damn dark up here.”

  “You should have brought a lantern,” the brown girl says. “Usually they bring lanterns when they come. It was silly of you to have forgotten.”

  “It was a whole lot sillier, girlie, that we didn’t bring a ball gag and a pair of handcuffs,” Odd Willie says and goes to help Soldier with the crank.

  “Crap. It’s locking up on me,” she tells him. “The damned thing probably hasn’t seen a drop of oil in at least a hundred years.”

  “Oh, not quite as long as all that,” says the brown girl. “My father used it all the time, and I used it, too. He always kept it in good repair.”

  And Soldier thinks how much easier it would be to give up and let the winch start turning counterclockwise, letting the old rope un-spool, and when the stairs were down again, she could go back to Miss Josephine, could go all the way down to the basement and the tunnels and the ghouls. Then they could figure out what to do with Emmie Silvey, and Soldier would never have to face whatever’s waiting for her in the attic. She could find a pint of cheap whiskey and save the truth for people who don’t have to go looking for courage and resolve in a goddamn bottle. She could accept her fate and wash her hands of the whole mess, turn Emmie over to Madam Terpsichore and Master Danaüs. She belongs to them, anyway.

  Just like me, she thinks. Just like Odd Willie. Then there’s a dull crack and a fainter thump from somewhere inside the winch, and it stops turning altogether, leaving the attic stairs suspended halfway between up and down.

  “Now you’ve gone and broken it,” the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles says indignantly. “Do you break things everywhere you go, or only when you come up here?”

  “Everywhere I go,” Soldier re
plies and takes her hands off the crank handle; her palms are red and tingling. Well, she thinks, I guess that fucking well settles that.

  “Piece of shit,” Odd Willie says. “It was probably broken to start with.”

  “It most certainly was not,” the brown girl snaps at him. “It worked just fine. It was right as rain, as long as you knew how to handle it.”

  “Soldier, I’m gonna fucking shoot her if she keeps this up much longer.”

  Soldier stops staring at her palms and glances at Odd Willie. “You can’t. At least not until later on. She’s the reason we’re stuck up here. She’s—”

  “—had quite enough of the both of you,” the brown girl says. “You’re ungrateful and rude, and I don’t think you even have permission to be up here. I don’t think the hounds even know.”

  Odd Willie laughs and spits at the foldaway stairs. “Look, kid, I don’t care what she says; either shut up or get shot.”

  The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles glares at him silently for a moment, her mouth hanging half-open in dismay. Then she narrows her eyes and crosses her arms. “You can’t shoot me, changeling. No one can hurt me. Ever. There are rules here, Mr. Lothrop.”

  Odd Willie flips the safety off his gun, then flips it back on again. “Lately,” he says, “I’ve noticed that the rules don’t seem to mean a whole hell of a lot.”

  Soldier looks at the stairs, one last, exasperated glance before she gives up and turns to the alchemist’s daughter. “Pearl,” she says, “no one’s going to shoot you. No one’s going to fucking hurt you. But you need to try to be just a little more helpful. The more you cooperate, the sooner you’ll be rid of us.”

  “I don’t even know what you want.”

  “I want you to tell me what happened when I was here before, when the Bailiff sent me up here.”

  The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles uncrosses her arms and smiles a hard smile that’s really more of a smirk. “Maybe I was going to tell you. But now I’ve changed my mind. Anyway, that’s a secret,” she says to Soldier. “That’s a very important secret that I’ve promised never to tell anyone—especially not you—because there are rules.”