Desdemona and the Deep

by C. S. E. Cooney

  A light leapt a little distance in front of her, a green and creeping foxfire phosphorescence leaking from a cairn that was built of the same glass-pale stones as the path. The cairn, piled higher than Desdemona’s head, was split down the middle by a jagged crack, like a face that was mostly mouth. Desdemona gathered her furs tightly about her, loathe to strip a single sable cuff or weasel wristband from her arms, to give up even one of her capes or collars, to unwind the baum marten boa, to shed the fox fur coat or swansdown cape or her hat with its ostrich plumes. Her taffeta gown stuck to her ribs and breasts and back. Her matted hair clung to her neck. But she was standing on her own two feet, and her mind, for the moment, was her own.

  “The Mirradarra Doorway,” Farklewhit announced, grandly and unnecessarily, coming up beside her. “Here, Tattercoats, you and I must part ways awhile.”

  “What?” She whipped around to face him. “Nanny, why?”

  Desdemona felt like they had been walking together in that thorn thicket for years, that Farklewhit had saved her and therefore belonged to her, like a faithful steed or steadfast hound, and now here he was, as if they were nothing to each other, standing there and announcing he was about to abandon her—when she could barely walk, barely think, and was in no way fit to survive the treacherous heart of this unknown world!

  Farklewhit set hairy hands on hairy hips. “We all have to drown alone—”

  “Drown?”

  “—but I’ll find you again in the Bone Kingdom, have no fear.”

  Desdemona tottered toward him, fists ready, but he danced away from her. “Now, now, Tattercoats,” he admonished. “I know you’re braw and bellicose and your dander’s up, but I’ve no time to play right now. I’ve got all kinds of arrangements to make, now we’re so close. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been looking for my girl? I mustn’t lose momentum!”

  When Desdemona shouted in protest, Farklewhit raised his voice over hers, dragging the quilted cap off his head and flapping it until its sizzling pom-pom splashed sparks into her face and she stumbled back.

  “Yes, yes!” he exclaimed. “I know you want me with you, but you’ll likely be a while, won’t you? First time going under is always discombobulating.”

  When she finally nodded in surrender, rubbing her sore eyes, Farklewhit shook his hat out again as if dousing a fire. The angry sizzling died down. He took a long, elaborate moment to turn it inside out. “After all, Tattercoats,” he said in more conciliatory tones, “you’re doing quite well for a mortal. And this being your first time world-slipping, too! Very good! Much better than the other one! All she does is wail and weep and call out the name Desdemona!”

  Desdemona’s head snapped up. “What?”

  “Desdemona,” Farklewhit continued with a scoff, and her breath quickened with dread and longing. “What kind of a name is that? So doleful, so dolorous, so wan and woebegone; I wouldn’t wish that name on my worst enemy. But she seems fond of it. Keeps shouting it, anyway—and you can be sure all the demons in the seven hells are listening. Ah well. Maybe it’s the only word she knows.”

  “Nanny—”

  When his hat was all the way everted, the pom-pom popped out of the far end again and flared like a comet. Farklewhit fluffed it with his fingers, humming tunelessly to himself.

  “No one understands how she got down there,” he said. “She wasn’t traded. Just fell through. I don’t remember the last time that happened. Mostly the others don’t fall quite so deep down. Now, I really must be going, Tattercoats.”

  “No, Nanny—wait!” Desdemona gathered her shredded thoughts about her like her furs. “This . . . girl . . . Did you see her? Was she . . . did she have red hair?”

  But Farklewhit just grinned. “Come and see for yourself, Tattercoats! She’s beneath with the best of us, all the way down. So jump on in—and don’t get your tails in a twist!”

  He turned and sprinted toward the crack in the stone-glass cairn, jamming his inside-out hat on his head as he went. Just before he passed into the cairn, he vanished. Winked out of sight, like his hat had swallowed him. But his footsteps continued on, into the darkness of the cairn. A few seconds later, there was a mighty splash.

  And Desdemona knew herself to be horribly alone.

  * * *

  Inside the cairn was a grotto, and through the grotto ran an underground river. The waters were as many colors as Farklewhit’s hat: blue and green and yellow and red, like a cauldron boiling over with poison dart frogs. The glassy gray ceiling hung low over the river, pitted and streaked and dripping down into enormous icicle-like crystals that quivered with an inward light. There was no path through the grotto—just a few paving stones acting as embankment to that motley river, which unspooled into the secret darkness. The waters smelled like the rot wafting from the faces of the Phossy Gals. It cackled and chortled as it slurped along the slippery banks.

  She just fell through . . .

  Could it be Chaz? The thought of her best friend the way she had last seen him—donkey-bray drunk and dolled up in his best dress—drove Desdemona on, though she felt her limbs failing, saw the glittering fumes rising up all around her, heard the shrill sweetness of the singing flowers. But Farklewhit’s last words, like the luminous lure of an anglerfish at crush depth, spurred her upright and onward, right to the edge of the embankment.

  See for yourself, Tattercoats!

  Her bare feet crunched on cave-fill that crackled like tiny bones. Her teeth dug into her tongue. The taste of red iron filled her mouth. Desdemona swallowed blood, along with any puerile whimper that threatened to escape, and then she jumped into the river.

  It felt like acid, going in.

  And then it felt like nothing at all, as her lungs filled, and even her screams were burned away.

  9: THOUSANDFURS

  OPENING HER EYES WAS not as . . . simple . . . as it usually was. For one thing, Desdemona seemed to have an extra pair of eyelids. Her usual eyelids opened, and she could see through them a little, filmily—enough to know that she was no longer underwater. Then her second pair of eyelids swiped sideways, and her vision cleared.

  She had a second pair of eyelids. And she could see in the dark.

  She whimpered.

  Some part of Desdemona’s brain warned her that it was not a good idea to whimper. There were things in this world—the World Beneath the World Beneath—that listened for whimpering. Homed in on it. Pounced. Best not to whimper. Better stay quiet, stay watchful, stay alive.

  At least Desdemona felt like herself, despite the extra eyelids and the ability to see in the dark. Much more like herself than she had anytime in the Valwode—or even for the last few days in Athe. She was sober at last—no shock or champagne or drugging dream clouding her thoughts—awake, aware, almost electric with energy.

  A complete and pitchy blackness surrounded her on all sides. She knew that with her brain. But her eyes perceived the utter blackness as fine gradations of silver, precisely detailed but uncannily leached of color, like the motion picture matinees she would sometimes catch with Chaz on weekends at the Seafall Square Nickelodeon. And now that she knew she hadn’t been burned alive drowning in that acid river, she looked down at herself.

  And saw, very clearly, that she was naked as an ape in a nest.

  Yelping, Desdemona scrambled to all fours and then scuttled up a wall. At about five feet up, she realized that she was crouching perpendicular to the floor, clutching nearly invisible handholds with fingers and feet that were padded and clawed, and that she seemed also to be in command of a multitude of tails, many of which ended in tiny, clinging claws that obeyed her will as well as her hands and feet did. At this point, Desdemona let go of everything, with everything that could possibly let go, and dropped to the floor again. Hard. None of her hands, feet, or tails stopped her. And at that point, she started screaming.

  Hush.

  Before she understood that she knew that voice, perhaps had always known it, knew it the way she knew her own hea
rtbeat, Desdemona hushed. The black cavern flooded with light. First, a curtain of mercury came crashing down from nowhere just a few feet from where she curled in a tight nautilus of limbs, all her new tails wrapping her. Then, from the mercury pooling on the ground, there rose a flare of white flame, and out of all this leaping light and molten quicksilver, he stepped, the dense, starry center of the cavern’s immense emptiness. The vast darkness curled around him like the arms of a spiral galaxy.

  Desdemona smothered another whimper with the furred and/or feathered crook of her arm.

  In the Breaker House library, he had been white fire and black flame. A glint of green. A voice, mostly. The sense of being seen. Now he was a tall, resplendent figure, embers sparking from his raiment like emeralds, his clothes some rich and ragged construct of unlikely elements: night-piled velvet, raven’s wing, oil-spill, ebony, jet, shadow, cinder, smoke. His fingers, too long and many-jointed, were tipped with talons like smoldering gems, and upon his brow danced a crown of thallium flame.

  Here, then, was Erl-Lord Kalos Kantzaros, King of Kobolds and the Goblinkin, Ruler of Bana the Bone Kingdom, the World Beneath the World Beneath, in his truest form. His eyes—the bright shine of copper arsenite, like the satin of her mother’s wedding dress—gazed down at Desdemona from a face that flickered and changed, melted, re-formed, growing new eyes, new ears, many mouths. Now he had a nose, now a beak, now a snout, now a muzzle. His long arms reached for her. His curving fingernails flickered like tourmalines. Desdemona shook her head, scuttling backward, wonder-smote and fearful, but he simply hauled her to her feet.

  As soon as she was upright, Desdemona shook herself out, pushed away from him, and shouted, “You nudie-peeping lech! What did you do with my gown? It was an Ernanda! You think I’ll find another down here?”

  You forget yourself.

  “And you,” she snapped, “forgot to give me a towel when your river ate my dress!”

  You choose your shape, not I. It is all the clothing you will ever need, here in the World Beneath the World Beneath.

  Desdemona crossed her arms, and several of her tails, across her chest. “I didn’t choose this! I have eyelids on top of my eyelids! I climbed a sheer rock wall—and I don’t even know how! I can see in the dark!”

  Desdemona Tattercoats!

  When the Kobold King named her, she felt her eyesight grow keener. She narrowed her eyes but said sulkily, “What?”

  But he just called out her name again: Desdemona Nine-Tails!

  Her ears pricked up—which was when she discovered she had more than two: her own ears, and just behind them, a second pair, longer, larger, thinner, lightly furred, which perked up and flicked back. She reached a hand to touch them. The feeling was sensitive and sweet. She shivered.

  Desdemona Thousandfurs!

  At this her legs gave way, and her knees crashed down of their own volition, and Desdemona abased herself before him. But before she could totally face-plant, five of her nine tails slapped down to steady her. The other four started . . . wagging. Hopefully. As if waiting for a kind word or a scrap of food to drop from the terrible vision before her. As if awaiting orders.

  Desdemona Whatever, née Mannering, Desdemona of the Nictitating Eyelids, took orders from no one, man or goblin. She flung back her head, shouting, “I have come to bargain for the lives of those thirty-six miners you stole!”

  Kantzaros’s laughter was as deep as any canyon that water yet wore deeper.

  I paid for them.

  “You traded my father for them,” Desdemona corrected him. “And he mur—” She gagged. “—he murdered th-three hundred twenty, twenty-one of them. To cover his, his tithe to you.” Turning her head to one side, she spat. “They have to go back home. They’re the only ones who survived.”

  His head, or all the possibilities of his head, tilted.

  Are they your friends? Do you know their names? Did you ever give them a thought before they went to their fate? Had you not overheard what you heard that night, and learned of the disaster the next morning, would you still care?

  “I know their names!” Desdemona’s hand moved automatically to her pocket, to that precious piece of newsprint. But she was naked. She had no pockets. The newsprint was gone, taken by the river.

  “No,” she whispered. She patted her new body all over—thighs smooth as mink, swansdown throat, breasts covered with baum marten fur, cream and brown and yellow, otter-sleek face, ostrich feathers streaming from her long black hair, bundle of silver fox tails springing from the bottom of her spine. “Where is it?” she cried. “Where is it?”

  This?

  Kantzaros opened his palm. In it, the wet, unreadable paper ball torn a lifetime ago from the pages of the Seafall Courier. As she watched, the ball flared up with the same eldritch witch-light that crowned the Kobold King’s brow, that lit his eyes.

  Desdemona leapt for it. “That’s mine!”

  But Kantzaros merely held the flaming newsprint aloft, out of reach, and the paper, instead of burning to ash, uncrumpled and dried. The writing on it became vivid and black again, magnified. Words began to fall off the page, hundreds of words. Names. Three hundred twenty-one of them, dripping to the cavern floor like black raindrops until only a short list remained.

  Ys Dedicors

  Uzami Masri

  Senel Alea

  Marus Caracul

  Thirty-six names, those stolen survivors, danced across the page, burning a brighter and brighter green until Desdemona was dazzled by them, until they were imprinted on the backs of all her eyelids. She bowed her head and shielded her face, tears soaking through her furs.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please, let me bargain for them. Please.”

  The Kobold King’s many-jointed fingers closed around the newsprint, snuffing out the glowing names. The horns and spikes of his knucklebones shone through the liquid luster of his skin.

  What do you offer?

  Desdemona stopped breathing. What could she offer? Everything was backward! Nyx told her to find the Night Hag first, then use her as a bargaining chip. But the Valwode nearly killed her before she could even start looking! And now she was here, with nothing. Worse—she owed the Kobold King for her new body. Not that she’d asked for it, or wanted it. But she’d have died without it one world up, eaten by gentry flowers . . .

  “I offer your daughter, Susurra the Night Hag.”

  He turned and stared. His features shifted beneath the thallium flame, a look of longing melting like wax into the semblance of his daughter’s face, silver-green and bruise-purple, gone in a moment.

  And why, asked the Kobold King in as dark a voice as he was bright, do you think you can find her, when in all these months uncounted my own ambassador could not?

  “Because,” Desdemona answered, swallowing, “your sister sent me.”

  The beacon of his body blazed up to a nearly lethal brightness. You conspire with my daughter’s jailer?

  “N-no,” she stammered, squinting against the blaze and scrambling backward as he advanced, “I, I only asked for her help. She told me to find Susurra, and if I did, then you would, you might . . .”

  But he kept crashing toward her, and Desdemona could no more stop him than she could stave off a hundred horses at full charge. But she remembered her father, bent double over the console in the library, brandishing an ancient contract in one hand and shrieking at the fireplace. He had not shrunk and scraped. He had insisted, repeatedly, on his rights to barter men for bitumen. And the words he’d used were . . .

  Holding her hands out before her, Desdemona bellowed, “Kalos Kantzaros, King of Kobolds, hear me! I, Desdemona Mannering . . .”

  But her voice caught in her throat. She could not—could not—command this creature. Not when she stood in his house, in the skin he gave her.

  “I . . . beseech you,” she said in a quieter voice. “Take your daughter as my tithe. I will find her and free her and trade her life for the lives of my thirty-six men. Accept thi
s bargain!” She swallowed hard, for the next word did not come naturally, and added, “Please.”

  A pause.

  An indrawn breath.

  Very well. His voice was so low it was seismic. But I will have collateral.

  And then he sprang.

  Desdemona was surrounded. Nowhere to hide or run. The Kobold King was everywhere. Quicksilver and white fire and thallium flame. His mouth stretched open—wide enough to swallow her head. From the rippling mirror of his face snaked a batrachian green tongue. It extended out and out, the forked tip swiping down and gluing itself to her forehead.

  She tried to scream, but her throat refused to obey. It was like drowning in the brilliant acid undertow of the Mirradarra Doorway all over again. And then that thin green tongue was moving, flickering, flicking: a sinuous whiplash against her forehead. Desdemona felt the shape of a figure eight emerge from her flesh like scar tissue. And then the Kobold King withdrew his tongue.

  Standing a little back from her, he opened his hand again. The crumpled newsprint blossomed from his palm like a burning rose, still feeding on the kindling of those thirty-six names. He brought his hand to Desdemona’s forehead and pressed one finger to the topmost oval of the figure eight his tongue had just described. The flame swirling on his palm leapt up to swarm his knuckles, and from there separated into thirty-six tiny tongues of fire, each enclosing a single name that marched like an ant across the bridge of his finger and onto Desdemona’s forehead.

  Her eyes crossing to focus on them, Desdemona moaned as these charred granules burrowed tick-like into her skin, filling the top bubble of the figure eight on her forehead like the upper bulb of an hourglass. Her whole brow felt on fire. Unbearably full. She could see them all so clearly, the miners whose names she carried, as if they stood before her, their faces black with coal dust, their eyes like lamps . . .

  The moment the Kobold King released her, Desdemona clawed her face. But there was nothing there to scrape away. Her forehead was round and smooth beneath her fingers. Otter-sleek, otter-soft. But her senses were lying—they had to be!—for when she dropped her hands to her sides, she could still feel the figure eight protruding from her forehead like a feverish tumor.