Desdemona and the Deep

by C. S. E. Cooney

  “Not Dark Breakers,” Desdemona protested. “I lived in, in . . . Day Breakers. And only for the summer months. I hardly . . .”

  “Stop whining, Desi!” Chaz’s fingernails dug in again as she hauled herself up to a sitting position. “Think! Hiding places! How many times in our lives did you thrust me into a closet—or a wardrobe, or a kitchen cupboard—and lock me in and leave me there for hours? What you don’t know about imprisoning princesses who’ve displeased you isn’t worth knowing.”

  Desdemona realized she was smiling. “The butler’s pantry?”

  Chaz dusted smut off her sequins, shuddering delicately. “Don’t remind me. That place didn’t even have the affordances of liquor. Just all your mother’s old china and silver. I was ready to drink metal polish by the time you let me out.”

  Farklewhit kicked a spindle across the room like a pigskin ball, startling both of them. “No, no, no! The oubliette where Nyx consigned Susurra won’t take its mortal parallel in a butler’s pantry or an old wardrobe. It will be in some forgotten spot. It cannot,” he explicated, “have any other function but to contain something secret.” And though he sounded calm and reasonable, Desdemona saw the ardent hope flash across his face and was almost afraid of it. “Do you know of a place like this, Tattercoats?”

  Stiffening her resolve, Desdemona settled to the work of serious thought. “H.H.’s safe?”

  “The one in his office?” asked Chaz. “Everyone knows where that is.”

  “But they don’t all know the combo.” And after all, Desdemona thought, it’s where H.H. keeps the contract.

  Chaz suggested, “What about the storage attics?”

  Desdemona shook her head. “Servants live up there. Not a private corner to kiss in.”

  Plopping herself atop a barrel of wine, sparkling skirts spread, elbows on knees, Chaz said, “Wine cellar?” and peered around. “A cellar’s sort of like a sub-basement, right? And if—like Farklewhit suggested—we emerged here for a reason, maybe . . . ?” she trailed off.

  Desdemona snorted. “Chaz—you know the traffic in our wine cellar rivals Seafall’s rush hour! We can’t sneak out a bottle of sherry without three sommeliers popping out of thin air to lecture us on its provenance. It would be the absolute worst place to hide something. Except, of course, that time when Mother hid an entire . . .”

  She stopped. She had spoken before the memory completed itself. But now, remembering, Desdemona’s tongue curled against the roof of her mouth, and she stared into the murk-light of Dark Breakers’ deepest chamber, seeing a different cellar out of much, much younger eyes.

  “Hid wha—” Chaz began, but Farklewhit said sharply, “Hush! Let her think!”

  But nothing Chaz said could distract Desdemona from the memories now crowding in. Until her fifth birthday (in which landmark year the women of Southern Leressa and the Federation Islands finally won the right to vote), Tracy Mannering, whose maternal instincts in no way conflicted with her political leanings, would strap her young daughter—gussied up in cuirass and bronze galea for the occasion—into a wagon disguised as a float and give her a FORWARD OUT OF DARKNESS sign to carry. Together, they would attend events like the All Women of Seafall suffrage parades, which had been organized, of course, by Tracy Mannering and her sister-in-law, Audrey. Sometimes they would go to secret meetings, where women gathered to discuss strategy and practice self-defense. And the place where Tracy and Audrey held those meetings was . . .

  Desdemona shouted, “The Damsel Hole!”

  Chaz blinked. “The . . . excuse me?”

  The bulbous itch on the bridge of her nose blazed joyously. Desdemona rubbed it and paced, paced and rubbed, and remembered. “Mother’s hidden room! In our cellar at Breaker House. For the suffragists. They called it the Damsel Hole. It was”—she grinned suddenly—“one of Aunt Audrey’s little vulgarities.”

  Farklewhit squatted down at Chaz’s side, watching with silent intensity as Desdemona strode back and forth. “Twenty-something years ago”—the words were tumbling out of her now—“before we got the vote, the political temper of the city was really heating up. The women of Seafall were given a curfew. It became illegal for them to meet publicly in numbers greater than three. So Mother and Aunt Audrey walled off part of the wine cellar at Breaker House. It was our summer cottage, shuttered all the rest of the year, so they came down in winter without H.H. knowing and brought in all-female contractors from the mainland. They excavated a tunnel to a secret entrance some distance from the house, so that women from the suffrage movement could enter and leave without being seen. Anyway—after winning the franchise, Mother walled off the room again and paved over the tunnel’s entrance. She built a pagoda there, planted a few rosebushes. A secret place should be kept a secret, she said, till it’s needed again. And, according to Mother, it will always be needed again.”

  Desdemona realized she had stopped pacing, right in front of a moonstone-paneled wall. It was half-obscured behind a stack of casks, and she stared at it almost without seeing it. “Mother ordered me to lock it up, too—in my head. For women only, she said. So I’d forgot about it. Until now.”

  Farklewhit sprang from the floor, amber eyes alight, and scooped her into a rib-cracking embrace, singing out, “That’s it!!”

  He squeezed her until she squeaked. “I knew it!” he said. “I knew you’d have it tucked away in you somewhere. That’s my good monster!”

  Desdemona grinned crookedly, sagging into his radiant stench. “I am my mother’s daughter,” she said softly, and wished—how she wished!—it were really true.

  Farklewhit barked a happy shout of laughter. “That you are!”

  Shaking her to and fro, he twirled her around and around until she laughed and shouted, “What next, Nanny?”

  “Take us to her, Tattercoats. Bring us to Susurra!”

  Desdemona was so giddy by then that she grabbed Farklewhit by his curly horns, reared back, and smashed forward, ramming the hourglass on her forehead against his woolly pate.

  The knock sent stars spinning through her skull. She reeled through the cosmos, through the forgotten detritus of uncounted gentry generations, and came up hard up against the blank, featureless wall. She set her hand upon its glassy surface . . .

  And pushed right through.

  11: DURANCE VILE

  THE SECRET ROOM WAS small and round. At its center, dominating the space but for a thin circumference of walkway surrounding it, was a cage. Its bars grew down from the ceiling and pierced through the floor like the roots of an old iron tree. The iron looked out of place in the Valwode, cruel and dull, as if even the light feared to touch it. A rusty abscess burrowing into the beautiful dream.

  Desdemona gripped her splitting skull and closed her eyes. Why had she butted Farklewhit’s head like that? She had to swallow several mouthfuls of saliva before the nausea passed and she could see again.

  The opaque outer walls of the oubliette, having thinned to mist when Desdemona passed through them, firmed up again after Chaz and Farklewhit tumbled into the room behind her. They jostled her throbbing skull with loud congratulations and crowded her with exultant embraces. Swallowing a surge of near-vomit, she shoved them away, and they went off laughing to examine the cage more closely. Desdemona crumpled against the smooth wall, head between her knees, and tried to breathe deeply.

  She only looked up when she heard Farklewhit call out in a tender voice, “Surra-lurra? O my hagliest? My nursling? Wake thou, and speak to thine own Umber-sire.”

  Desdemona could see him standing on the far side of the cage, peering in. His eyes flashed between the bars, jeweled pools of fiery amber in the moon-cool room. After a long pause, something stirred within the cage. Thin as snakeskin tumbling over a stony plain, the answer came.

  “Nanny?”

  Farklewhit’s sensitive lips trembled. He stepped closer to the cage, raising his hands, almost touching the iron bars. “It is I, my mandragora. And these two here, who helped me find you.”
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  He nodded toward Desdemona through the bars. Desdemona thought she saw movement in the cage, something turning slowly to look at her.

  “A Tattercoats came down-worlds to barter for her heart’s desire—and you were your fond father’s fee. He has branded her brow, threatened those she held dear, and demanded her life in forfeit if she failed—but she performed her task beautifully.” He pointed at Chaz. “This one’s the beloved. The sacrifice, should we fail to ply you free.”

  “Poor maid,” said the voice, and another slight, restless movement indicated that the speaker had turned toward Chaz. “How tender she is. How new.”

  Desdemona’s eyes began to sort the shadows at the center of the cage into a heap of rags and spindly limbs. Susurra was sucked as deeply into herself—and as far from the iron bars—as goblinly possible. Two black-purple points, like the berries of a deadly nightshade, gleamed out from a face the color of lace left to molder on a tombstone. She was staring at Chaz.

  “Would you be goblin meat, maid,” she asked, “for my sake? Flee!”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Chaz. “I’m not anyone’s meat.” Her back was to her best friend; Chaz could not see Desdemona flinch and stagger to her feet as she herself advanced toward the cage in a rustle of soiled glitter. Puddling down to the floor, Chaz pressed her face against the bars.

  “Why do you look at me so kindly?” Susurra demanded in her desiccated voice. “I am nothing. I am finished.”

  “Princess, I came all this way,” Chaz whispered across the malicious shadows that piled between herself and Susurra. Her voice was so tender with pity that Desdemona almost did not recognize it. “Three nights ago—a lifetime ago—I saw your likeness in a painting. Ever since then, I have longed to help you. I, too, know what it’s like to be”—she drew in an unsteady breath—“caged.”

  Susurra let out a soughing sob. “Free me! Free me, maid, I beg you! Or kill me before you leave again—for I cannot bear it!”

  Chaz thrust an arm through the bars and reached out to her. “Princess . . . how long is it since you’ve been touched?”

  “Years.”

  After a short hesitation, Susurra stretched out on her belly. Slowly, she began sliding herself, inch by agonizing inch, closer to the iron bars.

  “Years since any touch or taste or kiss.”

  Her long, many-jointed fingers sidled up to Chaz’s wrist, wrapping it once about, then twice—like, Desdemona thought, a parasitic vine.

  “Years,” said Susurra, “since I have sucked the fruit of the Ympsie tree, or drunk of hangman’s dew, or licked the dwayberries our merry boys brought to market in their baskets of blue grave moss.”

  Bending her head, the goblin girl set her pallid cheek against Chaz’s palm. The dark lights in her eyes blinked out as her exhausted lids fell.

  “Beloved maid,” she whispered, “I beg you. Pass me some blade, some broken mirror. Open your kindly veins for my cup—a very little will do. Let me drink the iron in your blood and die of it. Oh, if Nyx had been kind, she would have killed me quickly! But she left me here—and forgot me!”

  Farklewhit made a noise of distress. Tears were rolling down Chaz’s face. Only Desdemona, trying to hold her splitting head together and keep her nausea at bay, felt nothing but a sick impatience.

  “Oh, my princess!” said Chaz. “We will free you and be rid of this place. You will live—and thrive!—and spite those who would obliterate you. I know something of this, too. I’ll help you.” Casting a quick, scolding look over her shoulder, Chaz ordered Desdemona, “Don’t lummox about like a knuckle-dragger! Unlock her cage!”

  Desdemona opened her mouth to retort, but a searing pain scorched her brow and took all her breath with it. She whumphed instead.

  “There is no door,” Farklewhit said flatly. “I’ve been around the cage twice.”

  Susurra nestled deeper into Chaz’s palm. Chaz reached her other arm through the bars to stroke her hair.

  “There is no door,” the goblin girl affirmed. “There is no key. There is no way out for you or me . . . my beloved.”

  Desdemona blinked, dizzy, as the scoring pain began to fade. Something was happening inside the cage. A series of slow, slender movements she could not quite parse. Until she could. Inspirited by Chaz’s caresses, Susurra’s hair had begun to stir. The long strands lifted themselves into the air like the legs of prodigious black widows stitched abdomen-first into the mushroom-sallow skin of Susurra’s skull. Stiff, strange, and shiny black like Farklewhit’s hooves, each separate strand was segmented and clawed, sensitive to the movements of its neighbors but acting of its own accord.

  “Chaz,” Desdemona warned apprehensively.

  Chaz’s glower of burning reproach was harsh enough to make Desdemona drive her thumbs under the ridge of her brow. She wished her fingers were either very hot knitting needles or sharpened icicles. On the floor, still stroking Susurra’s sinister hair, Chaz started crooning to the Night Hag as if she happened to be a stray animal bedraggled by rain and wind.

  “You poor thing. You poor, tired darling.”

  Susurra’s unhappy yawn showed a glimpse of tiny, pointed teeth.

  “Nyx caged me that I might learn to dream the Valwode strong,” she confided in her iron-abraded voice. “But I could never dream here. Never sleep. Not once, with all this iron about me. No friends, no food, no night to shutter my eyes. For years. To be imprisoned, I know, was what I deserved for my act of treachery. But oh, I would have preferred death!”

  “Hush! No more talk of death. Sleep now.” Chaz set the fingertips of her free hand over Susurra’s eyelids, like silk buttons on a butterfly’s wings. “Dream that you wake free.”

  Susurra’s breathing slowed and deepened. Soon, she was asleep.

  The bridge of Desdemona’s nose was flaring and pulsing like a terrible green coal. The top of her skull felt sawed off, empty. Time, time! She was almost out of it. But she could not think. She could barely see through the rain of infinitesimal scalpels lancing the whites of her eyeballs. Think! She had to think!

  Farklewhit pounced. “Tattercoats!”

  Desdemona yelped. Last she’d glimpsed him, Farklewhit had been prowling around the cage, examining it from all angles. Now, he was standing before her, crackling with fury.

  “No door!” His shout penetrated her pain fog. “Seven hells swallow me! Did I come all this way under your hourglass just to stare at what I cannot touch?”

  Desdemona shook her head, trying to free it from the thorn thicket growing out of her eye sockets.

  “What do you mean there’s no door?”

  Farklewhit threw up his hairy arms. “What do you mean what do I mean? See for yourself: all bars, no door. All cage, no key. No window, no latch, no catch, no joint, no jamb, no ingress or egress. No hope. For any of us!”

  “But . . .” Desdemona pointed. “There is a door!”

  “What?” Farklewhit’s arms fell. Very quietly he asked, “What did you say?”

  “That door. There.”

  It was right in front of them; Desdemona could see it more clearly than anything else through the green-edged aura of her migraine. The door was the shape of an hourglass, translucent. It had not been there until Chaz put Susurra to sleep, after adjuring her to dream herself free. Susurra, it seemed, was following orders.

  Farklewhit turned to look and yelped. But Chaz, whose left arm had seemingly been bisected by a vitreous guillotine when the door appeared, only gasped softly. On the other side of the glass, her hand kept stroking Susurra’s hair. The clear pane magnified and distorted Susurra’s shape, bloating her like a river-bottom corpse, her hair an undulating forest of black waterweeds. Desdemona began to laugh. The sound came out in short, sharp screams.

  “There! Now she’s dreamed the key! The key is in the lock!”

  But though it was Susurra who dreamed the door, it was still Nyx the Nightwalker’s key. The bow was an elaborate twist of black iron, cold and deadly, and the shan
k, long as a shiv, was jammed up to its collar in the center of the hourglass. Farklewhit leapt at it, and when his fingers closed around the shank, he sighed in triumphant relief.

  This immediately turned into a hiss of pain. His hand began to smoke. Green blood boiled from his cuticles. The woolly hair on his fingers blackened and curled off in singed crisps. Farklewhit roared in pain but kept his grip on the key, throwing his body’s weight against the lock. But the key would not turn.

  Finally, he wrenched away before the iron melted his hand right through, howling, “Nyx, you night worm! You slimy, daughter-stealing, double-crossing, clay-kissing traitor! Give me a key I can turn!” and hurled himself against the iron bars. Each time his body made impact, there was a clang like the inside of a cathedral bell, the smell of scorched mutton.

  “Nanny!” Desdemona flattened herself against the bars in front of him, throwing her arms out. “Nanny, stop! Stop!”

  Her outstretched fingers slicked the iron key. It was cold to the touch, slick from Farklewhit’s greasy goblin blood, but it did not burn her.

  Farklewhit wheeled away from her, burly arms blackened, broad chest smoking, looking for another opening in the cage. His pink lace apron was in tatters, his pelt matted, splattered with blood and fluid from burst blisters. At the sight of his wildness, Desdemona was crushed by the same pity she had seen on Chaz’s face. She had never known anything like it. It felt like dying.

  No. That was not precisely true, was it? She had felt this panicked sadness, this helplessness, twice before. The first time a few days ago at her mother’s fund-raiser at the Seafall City Opera. And then again, when she read the headlines the next day. Terrible as this feeling was, it had brought her here, to this.

  She said quietly, “Let me try, Nanny.”

  Whatever he heard in her voice stopped Farklewhit from throwing himself against the cage yet again. He sagged in front of Desdemona, eerily, mournfully calm.

  “It’s our last chance, Tattercoats. Your hourglass is almost . . .”