Desdemona and the Deep

by C. S. E. Cooney

  “Perhaps?” Desdemona echoed faintly. “That’s all the assurance you can give me? Perhaps?”

  Nyx the Nightwalker flipped her palms sky-side. Her palms were lineless. Nebulae bloomed there.

  “Perhaps is enough to dream on. And dreams, after all, are the substance of the Valwode.”

  5: CHAMPAGNE AND FURS

  A POET, SAID MRS. HOWELL, is always drunk. She is drunk on words. She is drunk on love. She is drunk on ego, on her very desire to write a poem: to be transported to a place of pure experience, and afterward, in some future tranquility, to record her ecstatic displacement, confining it to precise stanzas, measured and purified and distilled to an essence meant to be shared with others, transporting them in turn. A poet is in love with the world. She is like a virus born of love; she must travel to live, and her vehicle is poetry. Was it any wonder a poet is the preferred candidate for travel between the worlds?

  Desdemona was not a poet. She could not write a poem to save her life—much less the lives of the thirty-six survivors of the Merula Colliery massacre. No matter how desperate she was.

  What she had, she reckoned, were the ingredients necessary to imitate a poet. A sizable ego, for one. A cellar full of champagne, for another. And she had Chaz, whom she loved. Put ego and drunkenness and love all together, and it made a recipe for poetry. Anyway, it was all she had to go on.

  Chaz joined her at Breaker House at eleven that evening for, he thought, a private party. He was dressed in his Manu Lirhu evening gown and as gorgeous as Desdemona had ever seen him. Properly gussied up, girdled, cinched, and padded, Chaz had curves that she could have killed for. His gown, naturally, was a work of art: a sequined metallic ivory caftan with train, with a matching beaded bandeau threaded through his waist-length wig of red curls.

  At Desdemona’s request, Chaz had brought Susurra the Night Hag with him. His chauffeur rolled it into the room on a hand truck, propped it against the billiards table, and left with orders to return at noon the next day. While Chaz hovered cluckingly over these proceedings as though he could not bear to be more than three feet away from the painting, Desdemona poured out three flutes of champagne. Carefully setting the first in front of Susurra, she handed the second to Chaz and upended the third in a breathless tilt down her own throat.

  “A fine way to treat fizz!” Chaz scolded. “How many have you had?”

  “Not nearly enough.” Desdemona gestured with her empty glass. “You look ravishing, darling.”

  His eyes softened with gratitude. His voice lost its edge. “Thank you.” Twirling in front of her, he teased: “Admit it—if I’d worn this last night to the Phossy Gals Follies, not a single hyena in Tracy’s cackle would’ve voted against me.”

  Desdemona sniffed. “I might have paid them to vote for you, if I knew it meant you’d buy me a ten-thousand-monarch bottle of Liberty afterward.” She bared her teeth at him. “How was it, by the way?”

  Chaz’s shrug was a continuous sweep of light from shoulders to feet as his sequins flashed in sequence. “Rum is fine. I prefer cognac in general, you know.”

  “Oh,” she growled, “I know. Thou gentry babe!”

  Snickering at the insult, which implied the kind of mixed parentage that could have gotten you burned at the stake in centuries of yore, Chaz poured himself and Desdemona each another glass. She, meanwhile, pushed a chair against the billiards table and clambered onto it, where she stretched out on her back. Her silk taffeta trench gown was the same salmon-gold color as her champagne. Her feet were bare—bare as a Gentry Queen’s! She crossed her legs and stared at the mosaic ceiling, which reeled above her gently. The billiards room, with its walls sheathed in gray-green marble, always made Desdemona feel as if she were underwater. She raked the green baize of the table with her manicured nails, smiling to think how H.H. would skin her with acorn cupules if he found her treating his favorite piece of furniture like a picnic surface.

  “Hand me the cheese plate, would you, moppet?”

  Chaz obliged. Desdemona selected a wedge of triple cream, a slice of hard sheep’s milk, a pat of goat cheese with honey, and a mound of deeply marbled, mineral blue—“The Feisty Wold”—her favorite. A righteous heel of sourdough and a fist-sized cluster of red grapes complemented her meal. She dug in right away, viciously tearing at the bread and devouring it, crunching into the grapes, stuffing the various cheeses down in a way that was almost criminal. After all, she had no idea when—or if—she would ever eat again. At the thought, she sighed.

  “What?” Chaz asked from the floor.

  “Cheese,” she said.

  “Cheese,” he agreed, gruntling into his crumbs.

  Dangling her head over the edge of the table, Desdemona smiled upside-down at her best friend, who was splayed out in all his glittering glory at the foot of the encaustic. Firelight animated the pigmented wax. From behind her painted cage, the silver-green goblin girl watched intently with bruise-purple eyes. The sharps of her teeth glistened. Was she smiling? Or was that the grimace of unfathomable hunger?

  I know your father, Desdemona wanted to tell her. I met him in my fireplace, and he asked me a question.

  I have a question for you, too, Susurra seemed to say. Come a little closer . . .

  “What are you looking at?” Chaz asked, his voice loud as a fire alarm.

  Startled, Desdemona jabbed a finger at the painting. “Her. The Night Hag. We were having a private discussion about fathers.”

  “Fathers?” Chaz wrinkled his perfectly made-up brow.

  “Yes. She likes hers. I don’t like mine. We are trying to understand each other.”

  “What are you talking about? Who’s her father?”

  “Don’t you know anything?” Desdemona asked unfairly. “She’s the twelfth daughter of Erl-Lord Kalos Kantzaros, King of Kobolds and all the goblinkin. She’s a prisoner, and doesn’t know if she’ll ever see her father again. Looks horn-mad about it, doesn’t she?” Flopping onto her back, she muttered, “Don’t know why. If someone told me that spending a few years in an oubliette was a good way never to see my father again, I’d take them up on it in a dovetail shuffle.”

  Chaz’s plucked brows arched in outrage. “You’re off your trolley!”

  “I am?”

  “You’re, you’re making this up!”

  “Why would I?” Desdemona flipped onto her side to watch as Chaz sat up, gesticulating wildly, spilling champagne on his clocked silk stockings.

  “I spent hours last night scouring my library for any mention of Susurra the Night Hag. Hours. I have the biggest collection on Three Worlds mythology in the whole city—maybe even on all the islands. You know what I found on her, Desi? Doodly-squat. Now you, you can’t just get me drunk and make pronouncements about the nomenclature of aesthetic symbolism like some iconographic expert on the Voluptuist movement. Cite your references!”

  Desdemona kicked her legs up in the air. A crinklefall of pinkly gold taffeta rustled into her lap. “Nixie Howell.”

  Chaz leapt to his feet, his skirts a fuming boil of gleaming ivory. “Poppycock! You can’t stand her. You leave any room she enters. Now I’m to believe she’s giving you lessons in obscure Three Worlds allegory?”

  Desdemona giggled to keep from crying. How beautiful he was! How darling! How much she would miss him.

  “That’s all in the past, Chazzy. Mrs. Howell and I are fast friends. Why, we dined together today at the Chiamberra—and you wouldn’t believe it, but the maître d’ bowed her out when she left! As if she weren’t barefoot and wearing a dishrag for a dress besides!”

  “I believe it,” Chaz replied dreamily. “She has brio.”

  “I have brio!” Desdemona retorted.

  “Not like her.”

  “Humph.” With some difficulty, Desdemona extricated herself from the embrace of the billiards table. Her plate fell to the floor; she left it where it lay. “Wish me luck!” she sang out, setting off across the room at a pitched swagger.

  Chaz’s h
and shot out to grasp her ankle. “Where are you going?”

  “To the lav. Where’d you think?”

  “Don’t know.” His voice sounded disconsolate. Far away. “I don’t know, Desi.”

  Kicking his hand aside, Desdemona stepped lightly on his forehead with one bare foot. “Don’t worry, snookums. I’ll be right back.”

  “Will you?” he asked plaintively.

  “We still have half a mag of champagne. ’Sides. S’not twelve yet.”

  His voice trailed after her. “What happens at twelve?”

  “I turn into a poet!”

  * * *

  She did use the lav, but mostly she wanted an excuse to be alone for five minutes with the telephone in her dressing room. She contemplated the rotary dial and sighed. Everything was always just the smidgiest bitty harder after—how many now?—X number of flutes of champagne. Flushing the toilet. Brushing her teeth. Now this. But it had to be done. A poet was brave. A poet called her mother on what was potentially the last night of her life.

  “Ring,” Desdemona muttered as the phone rang. “Ring, ring, ring.”

  According to the scandal rags, Mrs. Tracy Mannering lived all alone in a two-bedroom flat, cooked her own meals, and answered her own phone. But Desdemona had never caught her mother home alone, not once, any time she randomly dropped by for a visit or rang her up on a whim. Tracy was always surrounded by relentless women and so busy with her charities and organizations that she only ever ate out, writing her meals off as a business expense. The only thing Desdemona had ever seen in her mother’s zinc-lined icebox was a lone jar of olives. If it wasn’t Aunt Audrey answering Tracy’s phone, it was some other fashionable suffragist with a G & T and an agenda.

  “Hiya! Tracy’s house! Who’s this?”

  Just her luck. Her mother’s personal assistant—the youngest hyena in the cackle.

  “This is Tracy’s daughter,” Desdemona mumbled. “She home?”

  “Probably. I think. Unless she went out—Trace? Hey, Tracy!” A second later she chirped, “One mo’. She’s comin’. Dolores, right?”

  “Desdemona.”

  “That’s right. Here she is!”

  “Desdemona.”

  Her mother’s normally welcoming bugle was a trifle wary. Desdemona rarely called, and usually only for favors or for money or to beg off from some onerous duty Tracy had inveigled her into. Desdemona leaned her forehead against the mouthpiece. She grasped the handset in both hands as if it were some slender neck she wanted to strangle and knocked the receiver against her forehead like she wanted to bludgeon herself to death.

  Strident but tinny, her mother’s voice called out through the line, “What’s wrong? What’s that sound?”

  Settling the phone against her ear again, Desdemona breathed heavily into the mouthpiece. Finally, she said, “You read the papers.”

  “Every morning,” Tracy replied, briskness replacing her concern. “The Seafall Courier and the Leressa Gazette. The world is a war zone, Desdemona. We must arm ourselves with knowledge!”

  “The worlds,” Desdemona corrected her mother. “The worlds are war zones. All three of them. Right? Right?”

  “Are you . . .” Tracy paused and said forebodingly, “Desdemona, are you drunk?”

  “Since when are you a teetotaler? No, don’t answer. Tracy,” Desdemona said seriously, “tell me truthfully. Do you know about H.H.’s deal? No lies now, or I’ll scream.”

  Tracy paused, as if collecting her thoughts. “His deal? Which one? Your father has so many—most of them as foul as his cigars.”

  “The deal, Mother. The Mannering deal. The deep one. There’s a contract,” she said, “an old one, with illustrations, and a voice in the fireplace, green fire, earthquakes, and something, something about calling up coal—at first it was coal—but now it’s oil, H.H. wants oil on the island, and he’s traded, he’s traded—”

  “The tithe.” Her mother’s voice was low. “Yes. I’ve seen the contract.”

  “What?” Desdemona said stupidly. “You mean you know?”

  She had not, she realized, believed her mother could know. Or knowing about it, believe in it.

  “It’s one of the reasons I . . . I left him. Finally. He keeps the contract in his safe. He thought I didn’t know his combination, but of course I did. I was looking for his correspondence with the Countess one day—I needed evidence, grounds for a divorce. I never found them, but I found that. Unfortunately, he caught me. And explained. At length.” Her voice was grim.

  “How could you . . . how could you let him . . .”

  “Desdemona,” her mother said more firmly, “there are twenty women in my apartment right now, organizing staffing for the Southern Leressa Convention Respecting the Prohibition of White Phosphorous in Matches, all paid out of my pocket. Another dozen are coming tomorrow to help me make signs for our march outside Merula Colliery, protesting the gross delay of the rescue effort. I do what I can, and I use your father’s provision funds to do it. As a moral counter to his reprehensible policies, it is never enough. But I had to decide—a long time ago—that my concern is for this world. The one I’m leaving to you and to future generations. Any other world will simply have to take care of itself.”

  “But . . .” Desdemona shook her head, forgetting her mother could not see her. “But they’re not really separate, are they? Not when, when the miners . . .”

  Somewhere behind her mother’s sigh, a chorus of women shouted Tracy’s name. She called back to them that she was coming.

  “Desdemona, I have to go now.” Tracy paused. “Try to get some sleep. I’m sure you’ll feel better in the morning—when you’ve slept it off.”

  “I’m sure you’ll feel better,” Desdemona countered, “when you wake up tomorrow and I’ve gone to the deep.”

  “Well,” Tracy said dryly, “if you’re going to go stampeding through worlds, Daughter, the best maternal advice I can offer you is: dress warmly.”

  Desdemona ground her teeth. “You bet. Bye, Trace. Have fun on your little march. Maybe bring a few of your favorite Phossy Gals. They make good press!”

  She slammed down the phone. When it started ringing a few seconds later, she ripped the cord out of the wall socket and threw the whole telephone across the room. Then she went to her wardrobe.

  * * *

  Desdemona paraded at a stately pace into the billiards room, trailing every fur she owned. There was the baum marten boa and muff she had worn on her rounds today, her favorite mink scarf, her belted coat of silver fox fur with twenty tails scalloping the hem, her sable collar and cuffs, a circular cloak of green velvet lined with chinchilla fur, a weasel wristband, an otter-skin cloak, an opera cape lined in swansdown, and a monumental beaver hat with enough sweeping ostrich plumes to fly away with. Chaz doubled over laughing at the sight of her. He was still upright, though listing alarmingly, trying to refill their champagne flutes from a bottle so large he had to hold it in both hands.

  “Desi, my dearest, what are you wearing? You look absolutely ridiculous!”

  “It’s cold underground,” Desdemona said with great, if muffled, dignity.

  “Underground?”

  “Where the miners are.”

  He blinked at her and said slowly, “Desi. You’re frightening me.”

  “Look.” Desdemona thrust a piece of damp and crumpled newsprint, torn from the late afternoon edition of the Seafall Courier, into his hand. “Do you see now? Do you understand?”

  Chaz looked it over. “It’s a list of . . . names. Oh.”

  She waited.

  “Yes, I read . . . I read about this.” He folded the paper very carefully and handed it back, whispering, “Those are the names of the men who went into Merula Colliery this morning. Aren’t they?”

  “Yes.” Desdemona tucked the paper safely away in one of her many fur pockets. “I have to go find the ones who are just missing.”

  “Desi. Sweetheart, H.H. sealed the mines. Those miners, they’re gone now
, no one could have survived . . .”

  “They did! They had to! Some of them!” Desdemona kept shaking her head, seeing Chaz’s lips moving but refusing to hear him, until she grew sick and dizzy with the movement. “And I am going after them.” Sweeping past him, she clambered onto the billiards table once more and looked down into the doleful eyes of her best friend. How she loved him! Desdemona had a cold heart, she knew—everyone said so—but if any kernel of warmth lay buried in all that ice, beneath all those layers and layers and layers of fur, it was due to him. Lumberingly, she knelt, held out her hand.

  “Want to come? I’m on a mission. Rescue my men. Find your goblin girl. Trade her in. Back. Something. Name of the game’s barter. Generations of Mannerings’ve done it. Some kind of contract with the Erl-King. Erl-Prince? Erl-something anyway. Details are fuzzy. In H.H.’s safe, gods damn him.”

  Chaz’s mouth hung slack. “Are you playing? I can’t tell. I can always tell. No. Are you serious?”

  “Are you coming or not?” She heaved to her feet. “Make up your mind, Chaz—it’s nearly midnight!”

  Chaz scrambled to the chair. “I’m in.” Draping his sequined train over his arm, he ascended the billiards table like a high priestess the steps of her mountain temple. “Where are we going again?”

  “To the Bone Kingdom!” Desdemona announced grandly. “Or . . . was it the Valwode?” She shrugged. “One before the other. One after the next. Order matters, apparently, says Mrs. Barefoot Tattooed Queen-in-Exile. Well, we’ll try it her way first.” Throwing out her arms like a general running headlong into a bayonet charge, Desdemona stomped up and down the green baize field of the billiards table, shouting to the marble walls, “Well? Well? It’s midnight, damn you! KNOCK KNOCK! Won’t you take me for a poet? I’m sure I’ve got something the gentry want!”