Desdemona and the Deep

by C. S. E. Cooney

  “I know.” Desdemona turned to face the door. “But like you said—it’s my task. Mrs. Howell sent me.”

  And closing her fingers around the key, she twisted it in the lock.

  It was like trying to turn the world against its axis. Memory, all jumbled up with nightmare, crashed over her, like an iron tide dragging her from an iron shore: her mother at the head of a crowd of white-clad women, beating a policeman with her umbrella until he battered her to the sidewalk with his slapjack; her father, teeth clamped over his cigar, shouting into the telephone as black oil poured from his mouth; Salissay, on their stakeout of the ULE headquarters, sliding across the summer-sticky leather seats of the Model Noir to slip her tongue into Desdemona’s mouth; the Phossy Gals dolled up in their evening gowns and diamonds, dying eyes defiant for the camera; a line of miners disappearing into the shaft station at Merula Colliery, the lamps on their helmets blazing like eyes; and last, Nyx the Nightwalker, sitting across the embroidered ultramarine expanse of their table at the Chiamberra, watching Desdemona.

  Watching her. Right now. Weighing her, judging her: every tuft of fur, every tail, every tooth.

  And then, almost imperceptibly, across time, across worlds, staring directly into Desdemona’s eyes, Nyx nodded.

  The world turned against its axis.

  The iron key turned in its invisible lock.

  The hourglass on Desdemona’s forehead tipped, upended, like a decanter knocked on its side by careless revelers. The desperate pressure of those green-glowing names burst into the lightness of wings.

  And the cage, shrieking, fell to dust.

  12: HAG OF NIGHT

  “SUSURRA!”

  “Susurra’s back!”

  “The Night Hag has returned!”

  The cage had disappeared and the secret oubliette with it, silicate walls atomizing into mists. When the mists had cleared, both from Desdemona’s eyes and from inside her head, she saw that the four of them were standing, not in the forgotten sub-cellar of Dark Breakers, but in the royal courtroom. Right in the writhe of a riot.

  The Gentry Sovereign sat on its silver-sickle throne as if trying not to sink into its hundred welcoming razors. Its hands were clenched whitely on its knees, two great golden cuffs with emeralds the size of alligator eggs clamping its wrists like shackles. If statues could sweat, Desdemona imagined the Gentry Sovereign would be perspiring like a prisoner put to the question. At the foot of the dais, the gentry mob was shouting, jostling for a better look at Susurra and her rescuers. Thankfully, they did not collectively swarm the little group, which had emerged—out of the floor? Out of the very air itself?—on the wide bottom step of the dais, where they hunkered down in a protective huddle, Susurra at their center. This was too near the Gentry Sovereign for its subjects, even riled as they were, to dare venture.

  But they wailed. They screamed. They reached for her.

  “Nyx’s heir!”

  “The Dreamer!”

  “Susurra, save us! Save us!”

  Objects rocketed overhead and splatted down on the platform above them—nothing that could hurt or harm the Gentry Sovereign; its subjects were not yet so far gone as to risk their own lives like that—but globs of refuse, raining down. Mostly they were soft, rotted things like the faceted fruit of the orchard, jewels melting to slime; a spotted salmon wheezing dire prophecies as it drowned in air; wailing mandrake rootlings, bleeding from mouths and eyes; small winged bodies, limp and broken; more, so much more, all dead or dying, evidence of the Valwode failing, of the senescing dream. Some of the mess fell at the Gentry Sovereign’s feet. Most slapped its sculpted chest and chiseled face, dripping down to mound on the green velvet and yellow satin of its robes. One tiny corpse was caught on the tines of the Antler Crown, where it slumped like a convict on a pike amidst the ivy leaves and honeysuckle entwined there.

  “Alban Idris! Abdicate now!”

  “We don’t want you! We don’t need you!”

  “Susurra has returned!”

  Desdemona covered her head and ducked an ill-lobbed papery meat-corpse just in time. But the Gentry Sovereign, on whom several simultaneous missiles actually made impact, did not so much as twitch a toe. If it did, Desdemona guessed that its older, scarier, brutal-looking policemen siblings would unsheathe their edged weapons and make short work of turning the royal courtroom into an abattoir. Cold fury rose off their bodies, but they grimly held their positions, their dank chill like something seeping up from sinkholes in the earth.

  “Des!” Chaz whispered. “Where’s the exit?” She was hunched under Farklewhit’s protective arm, cradling Susurra close to her chest. The goblin girl was still asleep, face buried in Chaz’s neck. Desdemona was anxious about this instantaneous intimacy; Elliot Howell’s painting had hinted at Susurra’s profusion of piranha teeth, and right now they were all too close to Chaz’s veins.

  “I don’t think we’re getting out of this,” she answered, “until Alban Idris gives us leave.”

  This was something she thought unlikelier by the minute, as the calls for abdication and Susurra’s coronation swelled to an ecstatic shouting, an orchestral chorus of song. There was a movement like a great wave when, as one body, all the gentry in the room surged forward.

  At last the Gentry Sovereign sprang from its throne.

  “SILENCE!”

  Silence exploded into the room like a bolide fireballing from the sky.

  Silence and stillness.

  Desdemona hardly dared breathe. Next to her, Chaz crushed Susurra closer, hiding her face in all that strange hair. Farklewhit was making low “whup whup whup whup” noises, like a goat preparing either to scream or fall down in an angry faint.

  The only thing that moved at all was the Gentry Sovereign—except, alarmingly, for the black-lit eyes of its viciously still siblings, which tracked that magnificent figure as it brushed fish scales and gem rot from its robes, shook its massive head until the corpse impaled on the Antler Crown flew across the room, and walked away from its silver throne, down the steps of the dais. The gentry mob remained frozen in bewitched watchfulness.

  Stepping quickly down the steps, the Gentry Sovereign bounded down the last three with arms outstretched, demanding, “Give the girl to us! She must be brought to safety. She is our last hope—but we fear she might become an unintended casualty of the violence about to break.”

  But Farklewhit interposed himself between Susurra and the Gentry Sovereign, lowering his head with its hard-curled ivory horns and whup-whup-whupping some more. “You’re not touching her,” he snarled. “She’s ours. You want to tangle with me, Alban Idris? I’ll ram you into the sixth hell, where demon queens chew up rocks like taffy candy!”

  “Ambassador.” The Gentry Sovereign passed a hand briefly over its flickering, wounded eyes. “Your princess is not safe here. None of you are. The egg of this world is cracked. The Valwode is running to yolk between our fingers. If we cannot patch it . . .”

  In Chaz’s arms, Susurra stirred.

  As she did, so did the gentry court, despite their enchanted stupor. The moment she opened her eyes, the first of the gentry unfroze and immediately began to rush toward her.

  One of the policemen, a red-caped giant with an unfinished-looking face and a green flash in its eyes, drew a saw-toothed crystal sword from the silver-wrought sheath on its back and began wading through paralyzed gentry, the impact of its body sending them spinning and colliding.

  Desdemona was the final impediment in its path. She could not get out of the way fast enough; the giant all but bulled her to the floor, closing in quickly on the runner. But the Gentry Sovereign caught the down-swinging blade in its hand, shouting wrathfully, “Cease this!”

  The giant protested, “Sibling, we cannot allow . . .”

  Seizing this moment of distraction, the gentry runner—a creature whose top teeth had apparently never stopped growing, for they brushed his concave belly and had been carved and colored as elaborately as scrimshaw, except for t
he roots, which still sported an inch of canvas-blank enamel—ducked beneath the Gentry Sovereign’s arm to fall at Chaz’s feet. Reaching up to take hold of Susurra’s ragged cobweb hem, he pleaded through his teeth, “O Night Hag! Save us! Save our world! Dream this dictatorship undone! Free us!”

  Sleepily, Susurra blinked down at him. Just as sleepily, she turned her face away, smiling up into Chaz’s eyes instead with those purple-green-gloss lips—just as Howell had painted them—the color of cobra lilies.

  “I woke up free,” she whispered, “with your hair warming me. The way I dreamed it.” Swiftly kissing Chaz on the mouth, she ordered, “Set me down, beloved. I am ready.”

  Chaz did not obey right away. After her first astonishment at the kiss, she bent her head and returned it, as Desdemona—and all the gentry court—watched. Even when their lips parted, their gazes remained locked, a wordless kything passing between them, such as Desdemona and Chaz had shared from their earliest years of friendship. Jealousy and bewilderment burbled at the back of Desdemona’s throat but did not quite evolve into a noise of protest.

  Chaz released Susurra to the floor, and she floated down as if suspended on threads of gossamer, landing like a water strider on the surface of a pond and glancing idly around the courtroom. Her gaze fell on the Gentry Sovereign. Her eyes glinted with arachnoidal amusement as she took in its stained opulence, the golden shackles on its wrists, the golden torque upon its throat, and at that look Desdemona recalled that Susurra was the twelfth daughter of Erl-Lord Kalos Kantzaros, and that tricks and treachery flowed through the green goblin ichor of her veins.

  “You,” the Night Hag said to the Gentry Sovereign, “are wearing my crown.”

  13: THE THREE-PETALED VOW

  FARKLEWHIT GRABBED DESDEMONA’S HAND, squeezing like he could wring wishes from her bones. Her nine tails drummed his backside in reply: some angrily, a few reassuringly, and one or two just enjoying the shape of his woolly round rump.

  His own stumpy tail lifted like a pennant in a brisk wind and flapped to and fro. He whispered excitedly, “She’s getting stronger, Tattercoats! Ah! That blush like bug-guts upon her cheek! How her hairlegs shine, how keenly they click! My Susurra!”

  What Desdemona perceived was that the longer Susurra stood there, hand in tender hand with Chaz, locked in death-by-staring combat with the Gentry Sovereign, the more substantial she seemed. She began to elongate like a shadow by moonlight until she was as stretched-tall as Alban Idris itself. Her cobwebby clothes were weaving themselves new lengths of silk, gray and gray and gray, billowing down her body in a heavy pyroclastic flow, heaping the moonstone tiles around her feet in piles of ash and folds of smoke.

  At first the Gentry Sovereign only stared, stony-faced as the statue it once had been. Then—to Desdemona’s amazement—it broke into one of its childlike, heartbreaking smiles.

  “Oh! That is what it means to dream the world anew! Teach us, Lady of the Deep! Teach us to dream! We beg you!”

  And it knelt at her feet.

  “No!” The long-toothed gentry wailed. He who had run to Susurra’s skirts now shrank behind them, hiding from the genuflecting ruler. “It is an abomination!” he moaned from concealment. “It is not one of us! It is not gentry! Even its human maker found it monstrous—he wished to smash that whole sinister race. O, Night Hag,” he begged. “Dream those things destroyed. Release us from their thrall!”

  Susurra did not spare the whingeing thing or its scrimshawed buckteeth a single glance, nor the rest of the gentry court either, however eagerly they took up his thread. A wave of movement rippled through the courtroom as they pressed closer, adjuring her in a hundred voices to dream the living statues undone, to return full vigor to the Valwode.

  The only perturbation she betrayed was the tightening of her fingers upon Chaz’s knuckles. But when the crush of gentry came too close for her comfort, she tossed her head. Her strange hair flailed out, warning whoever stood too close to get back, and she flashed a fanged smile, laughing at them all, “Who are you to make demands of me?”

  “We are your subjects!” one of the green-skinned Bog Sisters answered, her hand on the hilt of her stone sword.

  Susurra stopped laughing. She glared about with eyes like claws. “I am no gentry. I am koboldkin, born to the Bone Kingdom. I would be no temperate or solicitous ruler to you—not like this colossus who kneels before me, begging a better way to dream your world. See how it sets its hand beneath my foot? It does this for you. And yet you spurn its gentleness.”

  Her glance fell momentarily upon a single upturned face, a rapturous pair of blue eyes.

  “All I know of gentleness,” Susurra whispered, “I learned today.”

  Slipping her hand free of Chaz’s grip, she leaped lightly into the air, like a spider leaps to the wind, and landed upon the Gentry Sovereign’s bowed shoulders. It stayed perfectly still for her, surrendering to her wordless demand, content to be nothing more than a marble platform for her speeches.

  “I am not here to bend my dreams to your whim!” Susurra shouted to the courtroom scornfully. “If I dream the Valwode strong again, it shall run on the engine of my desire. Do you find the Veil Between Worlds a parlous place to live now? Wait till I have dwelled upon it! Darker than my own despair will my meditations turn your twilight. Reckless with traps and tricks, potholed with pitfalls into my father’s world—whence monsters shall arise to romp amongst us! How melting-sweet you gentry waifs will taste upon our tongues. How you will crackle in our gnashing teeth. Are you certain,” she pressed the recoiling royal court, “that you wish your perfect guardians”—and here she ran sensuous hands over the polished racks of the Antler Crown rising before her like a coppice—“gone?”

  Silence.

  “I thought not.”

  Towering above that fearful quiet, Susurra suddenly looked disoriented. Shadows shifted across her unpredictable face and then parted to reveal a lost, terrified thing, who stared into the tangle of antlers in her hands like a cage that would kill her to touch it. Throwing back her head, she began to shriek: a high, breathless, helpless noise, like a small creature being snatched up by a punishing pair of talons. She fell into the tines of the Antler Crown in a sobbing half faint. Hung there, moaning.

  Farklewhit and Chaz rushed to help her. But the Gentry Sovereign was the first to untangle her, easing her off its shoulders, cuddling her to its massive, pale chest and crooning in a lullaby voice, low as an outgoing tide, “We did search for you, Lady of the Deep, we swear it. Ourself and the ambassador, and our siblings, too. Every hour—dusk till dusk till dusk—we looked in vain. He, frantic to find you. We, no less than he. But how can we ask anything of you now, when everything was taken from you? You have forgotten what it is to have plenty. What would you have of us? We will give you anything.”

  Susurra stirred. “Anything?”

  “Anything,” the Gentry Sovereign affirmed. “Except”—with a hint of regret—“the death of the Valwode. It was ceded us by Nyx the Nightwalker, to protect and keep as best as we were able. Alas,” it sighed, “that we have done so badly against our yearning.”

  Reaching out for Chaz, who had taken one of her trembling hands, Susurra whimpered, “Beloved!”

  Her hair extended in the other direction, twining itself around Farklewhit’s neck. “Nanny! Help me!”

  Eventually, in the cradle of all their arms, her sobs became hiccups, became sighs. With her breathing tranquil again, Susurra lifted her face to meet the concerned regard of the Gentry Sovereign. Green tracks stained her silver-green face, and her mouth was a woeful bent bow. “I see now why Auntie Nyx chose you,” she said with great solemnity. “But, Majesty, it was all for naught.”

  Her head falling limply to its chest, the creeping feelers of her black hair loosened their stranglehold on Farklewhit to tiptoe up the sinewy white stalk of the Gentry Sovereign’s neck. “You are far too soft to rule this fickle and capricious race,” she told it wearily, “though you are made of stone
. And I, though smoke, am far too hard.”

  The Gentry Sovereign bowed its head. “And so the Valwode is doomed.”

  Chaz, at Desdemona’s side, opened her mouth. Paused as she considered the consequences of her words. Then drew a deep breath anyway, and with a brave and unwavering brightness, said, “But there’s your solution!”

  Susurra and the Gentry Sovereign turned to look at her.

  Farklewhit, too.

  The whole gentry court, too.

  “What a pair you’d make!” Chaz said, as if explaining the obvious. “Mrs. Howell . . .” She cleared her throat. “Queen Nyx, that is, who was . . . must have thought that the two of you, together, would be . . . would be able to find the perfect, er, composition. Not a tranquil or symmetrical one, precisely . . . But a new kind of . . . art.”

  Her face began to shine as she warmed to one of her favorite subjects. “Where I come from, Seafall, Queen Nyx’s husband is a master artist. Rarely in the art world, in the city or abroad, do we see such subtleties of asymmetry as can be found in an Elliot Howell painting. Only someone who truly understands balance can so exquisitely manufacture its opposite. Such lively uneasiness of angle and echo, of shape, shadow, tone, such repetition of pattern, intersection of line! The careful observer can scarcely tear her eyes away. And—and—” Chaz hesitated, trying to tie her thoughts together. “Just as Howell’s art embodies a powerful asymmetry”—her smile trembled—“I believe that Nyx’s last and greatest dream for the Valwode—as odd, as unlikely, as it may seem—is manifest in you. Both of you. Together.”

  Desdemona had known Chaz most of her life. Chaz could drop the monetary equivalent of a postsecondary education on a single piece of art, only to lock it up straightaway in a climate-controlled room where nobody else would ever see it—except, perhaps, her most intimate friends, and only when she was ludicrously inebriated. Art was Chaz’s lifetime’s obsession. One might even say religion. The expression on her face when she entered that sealed room and looked upon her collection could only be called worship. And it did not even approach the way Chaz looked at Susurra.