Smiling wryly, Chaz followed in the wake of her demolition, silently collecting fallen boughs and arranging them in a bouquet of precious metals that sagged with jewels. They wandered the Woodwyrm tunnel through the thornwood, and when the flowers started singing at them, Chaz spared them a single glare from her alluvial larimar-on-scarlet eyes and said, “Hush.”
The flowers furled back into chastened buds, practically vibrating with obedient silence.
“Sopranos,” Chaz muttered when Desdemona raised her eyebrows. “They’ll eat you alive.”
Desdemona’s grin was a little lopsided. “They tried, last time I came through.”
That seemed a hundred years ago now.
Chaz tugged one of her tails. The tail swatted back. “You’ve changed since then.”
“Some. You too.”
“Some.”
Before Desdemona was ready for it, they came to the luminous cairn of the Mirradarra Doorway.
Chaz stopped. She handed Desdemona her armful of precious metals, tucking Farklewhit’s hat into their midst like a yarn bomb in a jewelry box. “This isn’t goodbye forever, Desi,” she said. “So don’t go off ruining lives and wrecking nations just because you’re feeling sorry for yourself. I know you.”
“But, Chaz, will I . . .” Desdemona hesitated. “Do you think . . . going home will change me . . . back?”
“If I returned,” Chaz countered patiently, “would I change back?”
“No!” Desdemona burst out. “You were always you!”
Chaz spread her hands. Her bloodstained ivory gown sparkled like hellish stars. “And so,” she said, “you will still be you, Tattercoats. Wherever you are. Whatever that looks like.”
“But . . .”
Desperate for reassurance, Desdemona burst out, “How will I ever see you again? The Valwode won’t mistake me for a poet without you. There’s not enough champagne in Athe! I’ll be stuck up there forever, kicking my Ernanda heels . . .”
Chaz shook her head, her crown of horns shedding flecks of velvet like drops of blood. “When the bone bells ring at midnight, the walls of Breaker House open, and we of the Valwode take what we want. That is how the stories go. Well. Now Breaker House will have something that I want. Be ready.”
A sound inside the cairn interrupted them: the barking of dogs, echoing off the gray crystal walls of the grotto. Chaz turned toward the sound.
“The tithe returns.”
Soon they came bursting out of the split in the gray crystal rock, dozens of goblin hounds, their coats sleeked down with river water like stained-glass windowpanes cast back into the forge: cadmium-yellow, verdigris, indigo, cranberry, cobalt, ruby, orange, and peacock-green. They circled Desdemona and Chaz, sniffing, exploring, and then, satisfied, sat back on their haunches in a silent crescent, watching them with human eyes.
Far away, on the other side of the thornwood, in the direction of Dark Breakers, Desdemona could hear the bone bells start to ring.
“It’s midnight above,” Chaz observed. “Quickly now. There’s not much time.”
“How do you know it’s midnight?” Desdemona demanded.
Chaz flicked her Antler Crown. The red iron rang. “It’s in me now, Desi. This dream of time. Come on—I’ll open a door for you.” Grabbing Desdemona’s hand, she ducked inside the Mirradarra Doorway. But Chaz did not lead her to the river’s edge, whose mouth emptied into the world below. Instead, she laid her freckled, blood-speckled hand against one of the rock walls and knocked three times—just like Farklewhit had done to the stalagmite in Breakers Beyond.
As it had done then, the rock shifted, the crystals parting like draperies to reveal a staircase winding up. These steps were made of hard, compact coal, such as might lead, eventually, to the shaft of a colliery.
“Go on, Desdemona,” Chaz said. “Take them home.”
15: REVERSE KATABASIS
CANDLETOWN COMPANY’S MERULA COLLIERY served the Grackle, Cowbird, and Bobolink Mines. Miles and miles of underground galleries interconnected these mines, with five pits of access, all sealed since the disaster.
Eventually, after another dizzying, thigh-burning, lung-wheezing, eternal climb—during which Desdemona contemplated eating her metal bouquet, Farklewhit’s hat, the dogs, and herself—the anthracite stair leveled out into a tunnel shored up by wooden beams. Two rusted metal tracks led away from what became, as soon as it ceased being a stairway through worlds, a solid rock wall.
The moment her foot touched the metal rail, Desdemona’s furs sagged off her skin. She tested her tails. Not a single wag. They hung limply off her belted coat, no longer a part of her. Salmon-gold ribbons of a ragged taffeta hem flapped around her ankles.
She was home.
Before she could wail at the loss, even the light from Farklewhit’s hat winked out, taking her vision with it.
No night-sight now. Only darkness.
The air was close. This far underground, the climate was tropical but stuffy. The pack of hounds, however, seemed indifferent to air quality, their eager shapes trotting past her when she hesitated, their paws making no noise in the debris-filled tunnels. Trembling, sore, sweltering, Desdemona picked her way after them, following the rails by tentative touch, with only her breathing to bear her company, until, gradually, the silence began to murmur and seethe. Darkness split into dancing shadows. Somewhere nearby—just up ahead—there were lights. They were moving her way. No human voices yet reached her straining ears (she was, alas, down to a single, dull pair now), but the urgent activity of breath whistled down the shaft: the rhythmic, mechanical inhalations and exhalations of oxygen rebreathing apparatuses. And footsteps: plodding, diligent, deliberate.
The dogs had vanished around a bend. Desdemona hastily stopped on the tracks and drew back against a wall. Tucking the bouquet Chaz had given her under her arm, she shook out Farklewhit’s cap and quickly flipped it inside out, jamming it over her head. She had seen him do this trick her first time at the Mirradarra Doorway to effect a quick disappearance and only hoped it would work for her. The last thing she wanted was to explain to a party of rescue workers how the socialite daughter of H.H. Mannering, Candletown Company heiress, the Anthracite Princess herself, came to be in the depths of Merula Colliery with the sole survivors of the underground explosion. Who just happened to be dogs. If they were still dogs.
The hat sort of melted around her face, stink-first, and Desdemona felt herself disappear. She leaned into that fetor-of-Farklewhit blackness, closing her eyes as a feeling of intense comfort washed over her. It wasn’t the whole world going black, she knew—only herself in it—as if she and Farklewhit were alone together in Bana the Bone Kingdom on an errand of great importance, with only a pink apron between their nakedness. Feeling safer now, steadier, Desdemona plunged ahead around the bend—right into the milling midst of miners and rescue workers.
The latter were sometimes called “frogmen” because of their equipment, which was based on that of combat divers. In fact, the monstrous hodgepodge of their apparatuses lent them more a chimerical aspect than amphibious, with their pig-snouted rebreathers, the camel humps of their great backpacks, their rubber-skinned suits, and their goggle eyes. In contrast, the miners looked like they had stepped full-formed out of Merula’s dusty womb. They were tense and nervous, faces black with coal dust, eyes like carbide lamps. They said almost nothing but allowed themselves to be patched and palpitated, swabbed, and bandaged. The rescue workers, communicating mostly through hand gestures, offered them sandwiches.
Refusing the food, one of the miners said in a soft, crackly voice that he thought maybe they’d been eating all right, out of the lunch pails of their dead pals, but they’d drunk the last of their water last night and could use a swig?
The rescue workers’ response was a swift deluge of canteens, then just as efficiently, they ushered the bewildered miners up the same shaft whence they had come. Invisible Desdemona slunk in their wake, one arm full of gold and silver branches, the othe
r piled with the sandwiches the miners had let fall, all of which she single-mindedly consumed long before they reached the surface.
Then, sunlight—like a blow to the head.
The world became the negative of a photograph. White silhouettes against a black background. This impression faded slowly into color and substance, and soon the static roar of radio silence splintered into many noises all jabbering at once.
Desdemona shielded her eyes and humped up her stinking furs all about her for protection. She knew she was invisible, that she was safe from the pops and clicks of the cameras, the journalists yelling questions to the rescue team, the police whistles, the cries of bereaved friends and families converging on the survivors. Even so, she wished herself back in the mines. Better yet, in the labyrinthine midnight caverns two worlds below . . .
It took her a few more minutes of recalibration before she noticed the protestors marching around the colliery, their numbers swelling by the minute as word of the rescue spread throughout Seafall. There were strikers from different labor unions—the Mine Workers, the Iron Knights, the Leressan Teamsters, the United Locomotive Engineers. There was her former lover Salissay, side by side with Lu “The Pit Bull” Dimaguiba, Salissay’s auntie and union steward to the ULE. She stood chatting with Mrs. Mannering and Mrs. Alderwood, who both wore very large hats and carried even larger signs that read: RETREAT LATER! RESCUE NOW!
Other fashionably dressed women, of the sort Chaz called “Tracy’s hyenas,” all wearing similar hats and carrying similar signs, faced off against the Candletown Company Coal Enforcers, H.H.’s private security squad, whose ranks were joined by the sheriff of Seafall’s citizen posse. The deputies were armed with rifles, billy clubs, and riot shields. The female philanthropists had custom shoes and tailored suits and surnames of note, and if these were not enough—which was always a grim possibility—the heft of their handbags and the steel tips of their umbrellas gave warning that they were more than ready to hit back.
Usually such an astonishingly photogenic confrontation would attract the attention of the press. But today, nothing less exciting than a fusillade could drag their lenses away from the rescue team emerging from the pithead, survivors in tow. The rescuers shouted for order, for space. The crowd ignored them, swamping the miners with blankets, lifting them in their arms, bearing them away to waiting ambulances.
Desdemona stumbled after, pausing only once when she passed Salissay in her signature black-and-white-checkered coat, scribbling furiously in her notebook while taking a headcount of the survivors.
“Twenty-one,” she was shouting excitedly. “Twenty-one recovered! Does anyone know their names? Their names?”
The number disturbed Desdemona for some reason. She tried to think. It wasn’t the right number. She was so tired she couldn’t remember what the right number should be. The hulk of her furs weighed on her. The bulk of a dozen dry-scarfed sandwiches sat edgily in her belly. Her bare feet were blistered and cracked.
Pushing past her aunt Audrey, who had joined her well-coiffed comrades in jeering at H.H.’s bullyboys, Desdemona clambered into the bed of one of the rescue trucks. She squeezed between a pile of body suits and a stack of oxygen tanks, settled back, and was asleep before the engine coughed to life.
16: SEVERING THE LINE
IN THE VESTIBULE OF Breaker House, Desdemona divested herself of her filthy furs and ruined evening gown, leaving them, along with her gold and silver bouquet, in a heap on the floor. They reappeared out of invisibility as soon as they broke contact with her body, jeweled fruit sparkling against the marble tiles. Desdemona stood in her slip, shivering, Farklewhit’s friendly cap her only point of warmth.
She was glad to remain imperceptible—even if just to herself. She was not yet ready to espy her own reflection in some gilded mirror. This mortal body. This pared-down, plucked-raw flesh, nubbly, horripilating.
The floor was like ice underfoot. It was long past midnight, and the house was completely dark, shut up for the season now that H.H. was gone to the continent. But Desdemona could make her way through Breaker House blindfolded and drunk. Had, in fact—on more than one occasion. She padded from the vestibule into H.H.’s library and pulled the chain of the green-shaded brass banker’s lamp on the desk. Then she picked up the phone and called her mother.
“Hi, Tracy’s place!” said a woman who was not Tracy.
“This is her daughter,” said Desdemona. “Put her on, please.”
“Oh, yeah, hey, Dolores! One sec! Tracy? Traaaaaaace!” the voice sang out. “Hey, were you at the protest today?” she asked Desdemona excitedly. “We had upward of fifty thousand marchers by the end! They kept trying to arrest us, but there aren’t enough jails in Southern Leressa! Oh, here’s Tracy! It’s Dolores, Tracy.”
“Who?” asked Tracy, laughing, and said into the mouthpiece, “Hello?”
“Hello, Mother.”
Tracy’s gasp almost sucked Desdemona ear-first through the phone lines. She said nothing for several seconds, then whispered very quietly, “Was that you? Did you bring them back?”
“Some,” said Desdemona. “Not enough.”
“It’s never enough,” Tracy said, still quietly. “But it’s more than . . . more than nothing. It makes a difference. I promise.”
“How many . . .” Desdemona trailed off. She knew the answer, but she wanted it verified.
“Salissay reported twenty-one recovered. We didn’t imagine—we couldn’t believe—anyone had survived at all.”
Desdemona shook her head. Kept shaking it. Twenty-one was wrong. It was fifteen short. Thirty-six. There were supposed to be thirty-six. A tithe was a tenth. Three hundred fifty-six had gone down that day. When was that? Three days ago? A week? A lifetime? And she had bargained to bring thirty-six back up.
She only realized she had bitten her tongue when she tasted blood.
“Mother.” Desdemona turned her head, and spat on her father’s desk, and did not wipe it away. “I need to know the combination to H.H.’s safe. There’s something in it I need.”
This time, Tracy did not hesitate at all.
“Do you have a pencil ready?”
* * *
The contract between the Mannerings of old and the Kobold King was written upon some manner of membranous vellum. No matter what Desdemona did to it—and she went after it like a mantis attacking a hummingbird—the material rejected all damage. It stretched like rubber. Objects rebounded from it. She sawed it with scissors, skewered it with letter openers, even tried running it through with a poker. To no avail. The contract was as impervious to outside attack as H.H. Mannering’s reputation, which had weathered far worse than scandal with nothing but a smirk.
When destroying the thing didn’t work, Desdemona decided to try reading it. Decorated drop caps initiated each paragraph, lettered in various colored inks. Glowing illustrations paraded through the marginalia. But no matter which angle she came at it, Desdemona could not decipher the writing itself; she suspected it was not in any language originating in Athe. But the illustrations were plain enough.
The top of the contract was a thing of turquoise skies and green grasses, with golden suns and stars spanning the uppermost margin. The bottommost margin swirled with midnight inks, and silvery, spider-haired creatures perched on clusters of jeweled outcroppings that jutted up from the lower edges of the page. A wisp of indigo-colored smoke unfurled across the middle of the page, representing the Veil-Between-Worlds, wherein vague forms of gentry creatures pranced and preened and gamboled. In the bottom left corner of the contract was a slender, smoky figure, crowned in green flame. One of its arms was lifted, fingers outspread, reaching up and to the right. A silver shackle looped its wrist, the silver chain welded to it winding all the way through the bewildering writing to attach to a second shackle at the top right corner, this one worn by a second figure, human, reaching down and to the left.
No doubt that dark, determined face belonged to some Mannering ancestor whose name had
since been lost to history. But Desdemona could read the expression on it like it was her own face: stormy and stubborn and frightened. Whatever the document said, Desdemona knew what it meant. It was the details of that first tithe: the exchange of favors between worlds, drawn up for desperate reasons no one alive, human or goblin, now knew. Whatever its original purpose, the contract was now corrupted. H.H. and his forebears had turned the tithe into a blood-barter for power. Murder and disappearance in exchange for the stuff of the deep: metals, minerals, coal, oil.
Desdemona sighed. What did it matter why the Kobold King—or rather, his predecessor—had entered into this contract? Why should she care why he would want humans in his world?
But she did wonder: Was it for their company? For particular human skill sets that did not come easily to goblins? Or perhaps—as the Gentry Sovereign had told Chaz—for their perspective? Something to keep the worlds in balance . . . ?
Desdemona rapidly grew weary of this futile line of inquiry. Already the languid ease of her life in Athe was tugging at her, as deadly and as stultifying in its way as the singing flowers of the Valwode. She wasn’t sure what she would become after a bath and a change of clothes, when the beautiful stench of her time below disintegrated under scented soap, talcum powder, a spritz of Aniqua Adrian perfume—and whether, at that point, she would even care anymore. She had no thought for the future; all she wanted was to destroy something now. Chaz would have understood her in this mood. Desdemona was not sure there was anyone left in her own world who did.
Finally, when all her initial attempts at annihilating the contract failed, Desdemona marched over to the fireplace, which was the largest in Breaker House. Tossing the contract into the impeccable hearth, she snatched a box of Albright Safety Matches (“Support Seafall Industries!”) from the mantel, struck one to flame, and kneeling on the hearthrug, laid the lit match to one illuminated corner of the contract. A turquoise bonfire leapt up immediately, scarlet at the tips, and Desdemona shouted her triumph.
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