Desdemona and the Deep

by C. S. E. Cooney

  Clapping a hand to her forehead, she cried with artful incredulity, “Oh! I almost forgot!” and began pulling him around to the end of the auction tables.

  “Can it possibly merit mussing me? Stop dragging, Desi!”

  “Stop moaning, you wet blanket! Try to act excited—you should be! You’ll adore this!” Desdemona covered his face with her ringed fingers. “No, no, don’t you dare look; it’s a surprise!”

  Chaz’s lacquered lashes curled closed against her palms. He had always been biddable, more or less. Give or take a few incidents. Now that she was about to beat him to smithereens and stomp on whatever remained, Desdemona felt a fresh rush of tenderness toward him.

  “Open them!”

  Taking her hands away, she watched the bleakness vanish from Chaz’s round blue eyes. At the sight of the final auction item, his cheeks, under their thin layer of powder, bloomed with the double roses of reverence and rapacious cupidity.

  “It’s Elliot Howell’s latest!” Desdemona crowed—though of course Chaz could see that at a glance. “An eleventh-hour donation for tonight’s auction. I didn’t tell you he’d pledged a piece because I didn’t want to excite your hopes. Artists, you know. Not to be relied upon.”

  Of the two of them, Chaz was the true lover of art, a connoisseur and collector. Desdemona might rather be called “a collector of artists.” She enjoyed keeping company with the knacksies and the crackerjack set; she liked their conversation, their vision, their vulnerability, their superb egos. The quickest way to an artist’s heart, they say, is through their work—and Desdemona could afford the price of purchase. But most of her knowledge of that world came from Chaz. No one in Seafall, high society or low, knew that her main motivation to learn about art was for the pleasure of outbidding him at auctions such as these, of ferreting out undiscovered treasures from conservatories, universities, sidewalks, and basements before he could and then tormenting him with her ownership of them. To this end, Desdemona kept abreast of all the latest trends, attended gallery openings, and had cultivated her reputation throughout Seafall as a tastemaker. Only Chaz suspected she was a fraud. But bless his pearl-buttoned lips, he never said a word.

  Now he breathed, “Is Howell . . . is he . . . is it . . . part of a new series?”

  Chaz was staring at the sarcophagus-sized piece of painted wood like an altar he wished to offer libations to. Desdemona lifted her slim shoulders a scant half inch. “He didn’t say.”

  “I had no idea the Voluptuists were working in encaustics!” Chaz raved, flushing even pinker. “I’ve been following the revival of encaustics ever since those murals were discovered at the Mount Ashanu excavation. But I had no idea that he, that Howell . . . ! Has anyone in Southern Leressa done such a thing in the last five hundred years?”

  “He’s the first I know of,” Desdemona confirmed for him, grinning at his pleasure and amazement. “Howell says electricity makes working in encaustics easier for him than it would have been for the artists of Ashanu half a millennia ago. He seemed a bit sheepish about it, actually.”

  Elliot Howell was one of the founding members of the Voluptuists, a small but strident movement in the art world that emphasized brilliance of palette and brazenness of brushstroke and incorporated phantasmagorical elements married to the mundane. Voluptuist art was a direct reaction against the last generation of Illusionists, who were obsessed with turning two-dimensional canvases into something you believed you could walk through. Illusionists endorsed the divorced reality of the three worlds. The borders were broken down, their work pronounced, the passes blocked. Every mural, every fresco, reminded you, meticulously, that what you thought was a doorway was really only a blank wall after all. Voluptuists, on the other hand, frolicked in the living guts of any world they could get their hands on, interbraiding realities in an eruption of color and motion. Legends from dusty old nursery tales, like the Bull with Five Horns, the golden-spined Keythong, the Abarimon with its backward feet, or the Bog Sisters Three, walked hand in hand with newspaper girls and one-armed foundry workers. What was vital was capturing the daily bizarrerie of a life mythically perceived.

  Desdemona had first stumbled upon Elliot Howell during a shopping expedition. He was painting a street scene from a little easel he’d set up on Alderwood Wharf, his back to the water, facing the Fish Market. It was still called that, though it didn’t sell fish anymore; those stinking stalls of history had all been replaced by upscale shops not even a pirate queen could afford. But in Elliot’s painting, instead of high society girls like Desdemona swinging in and out of the shops laden with bags and bandboxes, there pranced a mix of goblin and gentry creatures, every one of them dressed in couture fashions showing off their scales, chitin, feathers, and rainbow-paned wing membranes. The cheek of it, the colors, snagged her eye. She hired him on the spot to paint her formal portrait, which she unveiled at her twenty-fifth birthday gala.

  Chaz said later that he only forgave her for discovering Howell first because otherwise—and this thought kept him awake nights—he might never have been discovered at all.

  Not long after Desdemona’s gala, Dean Alessandra Mallister, hounded by her son, appointed Elliot Howell the artist in residence at Besant College of Fine Arts. She gave him a raise, a university housing stipend, and every encouragement to produce as much art as possible. Soon, galleries all over the islands and mainland roared for his work. “Elliot Howell”—the newspapers leapt to quote Miss Desdemona Mannering—“is one of the greatest artists of the Orchid Age.” She knew she wasn’t perjuring herself to say it either; Chaz had told her so.

  “Horned Lords, she’s beautiful.” Chaz could not rip his gaze from the painting. “What did Howell say about her?”

  “Not much. He was in a rush to get back to Mrs. Howell. They have a new baby or something. That wife of his!” Desdemona shuddered. “She never fails to give me the heebie-jeebies. Those eyes! Those tattoos! Anyway, he dropped it off as is and said he hoped it would help the cause. I got the impression he was happy to be rid of it. It is creepy—even for Howell.”

  The encaustic, painted in pigmented wax medium on a wooden panel, depicted a young woman, or womanlike creature, in a cage. She was too tall and thin to be comfortably human. She looked akin to the creatures lounging overhead in the night-colored panels of the coffered dome ceiling. Her skin was silvery-green, which shimmered in contrast to the dull iron bars that imprisoned her. She had far too many fingers on her hands. Her nails were curved like sickle knives, filigreed in copper. Her eyes were the color of bruised berries, and her cobra-lily lips were slightly bared, as if about to bite. Behind her lips gleamed a set of seed-pearl teeth, sharp as a shark’s. Something in her face reminded Desdemona of that Phossy Gal with the black hair like hers. Some fierceness.

  “She’s—she’s allegorical?” Chaz surmised. “Not from the gentry mythos, I don’t think. See those hands? That skin? No, she’d be a goblin. Right out of Bana the Bone Kingdom. The World Beneath the World Beneath, where the desperate travel to barter for their heart’s desire.” He swallowed, making his white piqué bow tie bob. “I wonder why she’s behind bars. You shouldn’t keep goblins under iron—or gentry—it hurts them. She’s hurting. Look at her eyes . . .” he trailed off.

  “I know her name,” caroled Desdemona, who did not care to look again at the fierceness and fury and cunning in those eyes. “It’s on the bid sheet.” She read off the painting’s title with éclat. “Susurra the Night Hag. Sounds goblinesque to me!”

  “What’s the highest bid?” Chaz asked, very softly.

  Desdemona told him.

  She did not tell him it was her bid, or that what he was about to spend on the painting would more than settle the score over the rum. She also did not tell him that whatever amount of money they shunted toward the Factory Girls with Phossy Jaw Charity, it would not be enough. No more than the booze she’d shortly be consuming at the Chiamberra like a uni freshman on her first binge would be enough to assuage the guilt and
self-revulsion she’d been suffering all evening. But it would be something.

  “Triple it,” said Chaz.

  2: VOICES AT MIDNIGHT

  JUST AFTER TWELVE, Desdemona’s chauffeur dropped her off under the porte cochere. She sang out an inebriated good night and ran lightly for the door. But as she entered the vestibule of Breaker House, she froze.

  Just off the front entrance to the right, the library was ablaze with electric lamplight. When she heard her father’s hammer drill of a tenor, Desdemona’s expression slammed closed like a portcullis. She slipped off her heels, hooked them against her hip, and glanced over her shoulder, contemplating whether to leave by the front door again. This ran the risk of drawing the unwanted attention to her exit that her entrance had not rated.

  But an irritated curiosity soon melted her full-body freeze. Why was her father even here? According to his printed schedule (which Desdemona received as regularly as her mother’s duty rosters), H.H. should be with the Countess in their penthouse suite at Mannering Tower, luggage packed, tickets bought, farewell till next summer. At this hour, he really ought to be lounging on the sofa in his dressing gown, toasting his mistress, and mocking the absent Mrs. Mannering, who, according to him, had only the fire of social reform to warm her bed at night. (Desdemona knew better, of course. Aunt Audrey, wife of Mrs. Mannering’s older brother, was more than just her mother’s “dear friend and colleague.”) But instead of being safely ensconced in his tower, on the eve of departing for the mainland, her father was here, in Breaker House’s library, holding forth at length to some unknown person.

  “I’m closing on a purchase of White Raven Island,” came his clipped bray, baleful and self-assured. “Three thousand acres. Most of it dunes. Sitting idle. No one there but a bunch of inbred bug-eaters living out of their lobster pots. Papers are speculating I bought it for industrial sand mining.” H.H. chuckled. “Let me tell you, boy, that brought down a flurry of liberals on my head. Already lobbying the Chancellery to shut me down. Lousy dirt-muggers. Protect our precious coasts! But not out of our own pockets, oh no! Seven hells take ’em. It’s not sand I’m after.”

  He paused, as if expecting a response.

  There might even have been one that Desdemona could not hear—on the other end of a telephone line, perhaps? She pricked up her ears.

  “Bitumen,” her father said flatly. “Crude bitumen. Coal’s on its way out. World wants oil, and I want Candletown Company to provide it. After the troubles last summer over the railway, my employees at Merula Colliery took a cue from the United Locomotive Engineers. They’re organizing. My own people! The Mine Workers Labor Union, they call themselves. Saboteurs. I’m paying my weight in cash for security. The Merula’s about tapped out anyway. It’s all become . . . unnecessary.”

  Another inviting pause. Another forbidding silence.

  Desdemona crept closer to the library. She peered through the crack of the barely open door. There was H.H.’s broad back, bent forward. His arms were braced against a rosewood and malachite console table. He was much closer to the doorway than to the fireplace under its marble mantel, which took up most of the eastern wall. Nevertheless, that was where all of his attention was focused.

  H.H. jabbed at a map on the console table. A noise like the report of a bullet. Desdemona nudged the door open another inch. Who was her father talking to? He was nowhere near the handset.

  “Here. White Raven Island. Northeast of Winterbane Archipelago. Where I want my bitumen. Call it up, like you did the coal. You can deposit the oil in the sand itself—we’ll extract it that way first. But I’ll want to drill by and by, so make sure there’s a rich reserve of crude below that. I’ll pay your tithe. I’ve some three hundred fifty, four hundred strong men working for me in the coal mines. They’ll go down into Merula Colliery in about four hours—you know where. You take your tenth of them. I’ll dispose of the rest.”

  You opened the doors for this?

  At last, a reply! From the fireplace, no less. A stranger’s voice. Desdemona simultaneously wanted to wince away from and lean into it. She listened, hard. Bent all her being to listening.

  “I’ve read the contract!” H.H. blustered, picking up what looked like a roll of blueprints lying next to the map and shaking it open. Even from behind, Desdemona could tell it was not typical engineering bond paper, but something creamier and heavier, more like parchment or vellum, highly decorated on both sides, like a page ripped out of an ancient illuminated manuscript. Flapping it at the fireplace like a red cape at a bull, he said, “The agreement—”

  Was necessary in time of war, the other voice interrupted. Signed in fire and sealed in blood. Had my ancestors foreseen it would be used to bind me thus!

  “Well, it is,” H.H. sneered. “And will continue to be. Desdemona will marry one of these days, and I’ll make sure her son knows the contract inside and out! You’re mine to command—I’ve read all about it!” he said again. “So long as I offer you fair trade, you have to deal with me.”

  The voice that was a brand that was a scar that was an ache did not reply.

  H.H. snorted into the eloquent silence. He tried to roll the hunch out of his shoulders, for he was not a man who cared to cower, but his body would not unbow, and he held the contract before him like a shield. But what was in the fireplace that frightened him so?

  A glimmering beneath the mantelpiece caught Desdemona’s gaze. Like a head turning her way. A glint of green—eyes narrowing in close attention. She saw his shape then. Tall, and . . . thin. Ludicrously, inconceivably, irrationally thin. A ribbon of smoke. A strip of black silk. The glow of live coal, if one burned emeralds for fuel instead of carbon.

  Are you your father’s daughter or your mother’s?

  He was talking to Desdemona, from the fireplace in Breaker House’s library. For her ears only. If “talking” could describe a voice that was almost pure seismic activity, a roaring pillar of nearly invisible fire.

  H.H. was still droning on like a helicopter powered by hornets, but his words did not seem to penetrate. Desdemona stared past his hunched shoulders, into the fireplace, into the flames that were not flames. Too white. Too black. Feeding on nothing. Illuminating nothing. Brilliant all the same. Were those his eyes? Was he waiting for an answer?

  Minutes ticked by. The question hovered in the air between them.

  Are you your father’s daughter or your mother’s?

  She did not know how to answer. And then she had no more time, for her father had crumpled the map on the console table with one hand and was shaking the rolled-up contract with his other, roaring, “Bitumen! Rivers of it! Make the White Raven run black with it! Kalos Kantzaros, King of Kobolds, hear me! I, Harlan Hunt Mannering, command you. Take as many miners as you want in exchange. I don’t need them anymore. They are the tithe. That’s the bargain.”

  His words seemed to complete some ritual. The crushing, comfortless attention of the fireplace snapped away from Desdemona. Something happened to the flames. Something green.

  Hardly breathing at all, Desdemona backed away, all the way into the vestibule. Then, dashing through the dark expanse of the entrance hall, she fled up the marble staircase. Her bare feet left damp smudges on the stone steps. They disappeared like ghosts in her wake.

  3: CANDLETOWN COMPANY DISASTER! 356 SOULS LOST!

  DESDEMONA SPREAD BOTH HANDS flat over that morning’s copy of the Seafall Courier. They did not tremble. She inspected her nails, still glowing from yesterday’s manicure. On her left hand, she wore two rings of amber, one her right, a ring of smoky topaz. Her left pinkie tapped the headline.

  She read the article through twice: headline, byline, lede, body, conclusion, then straightened up on a sharp inhale.

  It was the first breath she’d drawn in a minute and a half. The gasp hurt her lungs but cleared the black spots that danced like typeface across her vision. Moving like an automaton, Desdemona picked up the phone and rang her father’s office.

  His s
ecretary answered, of course; H.H. was gone that morning to the continent with Countess Lupe Valesca. They were traveling deep inland to one of his properties, a villa on the river island of Kalestis, where it would take relay couriers or possibly signal fires to reach him.

  Desdemona knew this. Just as H.H.’s secretary knew it was Desdemona when she asked, without announcing herself, “What happened?”

  The secretary, an efficient young epicene named Landry, who lived for their work, never slept, sweated, fretted, or ate—or didn’t seem to, at any rate—answered right away, smoothly.

  “Our official position, Miss Mannering, is that we do not know. There was an explosion at Merula Colliery. Coal dust. Possibly firedamp. No one can say with certainty. All the witnesses are dead.”

  “When you say all . . .” Desdemona velveted her alto to a low burr, letting the ellipsis telegraph her fury. Chaz might have run from such a sound. But Landry, accustomed to H.H.’s fusillades of perspiring outrage, did not hear any significance in her pause.

  “Three hundred fifty-six workers went into the mines at four thirty this morning.”

  “How many have been recovered?”

  Landry’s pause throbbed. “Expert rescue teams are being brought over by rail from Southern Leressa. We’ll know more shortly.”

  Desdemona’s voice sank even lower, like some golden beast of the veld catching sight of a passing herd. “Oh?”

  “Before he left, Mr. Mannering ordered his foremen to seal all the pitheads to contain the fire. No rescue efforts have yet been made. We are to wait for the professionals. Right now it’s too dangerous to attempt any rescue, especially when it is unlikely there are any survivors.”

  “I see. In your next telegram”—Desdemona smiled all the way through the phone, as if she could somehow shove her rictus through the wires down Landry’s graceful throat—“please congratulate my father on an impressive tithe.”

  “I beg your pardon, a what?”