Then she shouted again, dismayed, as the flames ran off the parchment like water and died on the hearthstones. Hurling the matchbox against the wall, Desdemona roared, “I’ll take an ax to you next!”
“Wouldn’t work,” said a voice from the fireplace. “There’re specific rules to this sort of thing.”
“Nanny!” Desdemona dropped to her hands and knees and crawled forward eagerly. She almost started laughing, babbling, begging to be taken back—but remembered just in time. “Or is it,” she asked suspiciously, “Your Dark Majesty?”
The fireplace was more than large enough to contain the Umber Farklewhit, even when he was lounging at full stretch on his side, propped up on one elbow, hooves crossed. A muted thumping came from the hearthstones behind him, where his tail wagged against them. Desdemona wished she had a hundred tails to wag back.
“I’m only Kantzaros at need,” Farklewhit replied nonchalantly. “When I call him, he takes over. Or he calls me, and I’m suddenly there, where he can’t be. We are each other, yes—but we are also separate. And sometimes both at once. If you see what I mean?”
“I don’t.”
“Well . . .”
Farklewhit scratched. Scratched everywhere. Scratched indulgently, luxuriously, extravagantly. Desdemona started scratching herself out of sheer covetousness.
“So, see,” he explained, “once upon a time, Kalos Kantzaros had twelve daughters. By and by he decided—preoccupied with responsibilities as he was, and not being, exactly, you know, what you might call cuddly—that a nursemaid was in order. So he made me from himself, and set me apart from himself, bounding me in nursery walls with a list of constraints and duties, and left me in care of our girls. After that, he went about his business, and forgot, mostly, what he had done. I didn’t mind. I had more than plenty to occupy me. But one by one, our girls grew tall. One by one, they went off on their adventures, and I was abandoned to my own devices. I grew strong in myself—separate from the self who made me. But not exactly all the way.”
“How does that even work?” Desdemona asked dubiously.
Farklewhit stopped scratching to think. “You humans have two brains, right? One in your head, one in your stomach?”
She nodded uncertainly. She remembered learning something along those lines in uni: how the stomach has its own ganglion, sort of a pre-brain—a thinking unit, separate from the brain seated inside the skull.
“And your little brain, your stomach brain, that’s what you call your gut instinct, right?” Farklewhit asked.
Desdemona nodded again.
“Well, me? I’m like the Kobold King’s stomach brain, housed in this Farklewhit you see before you. My thoughts may not be his, but they influence him nonetheless.”
“And you speak with his voice,” said Desdemona, recollecting Susurra mentioning something of the sort just before the wedding.
Farklewhit admitted, bashfully, “Sometimes. Though it’s a bit like burping acid! I’m so scalded after, so stretched and furiously formless, that I have to dive down-world to cool off. But I’m back now, with a change of apron and a shine on my hooves—here for all your Farklewhit concerns!”
He stroked the contract he was currently half reclining on and offered up another of his winsome grins.
“Now, Tattercoats, trust me, I’m awfully good at goblin contracts . . .”
Desdemona thumped back on her heels. “Trust you? You bamboozled me once already!”
Farklewhit looked shocked. And shifty.
“I, bamboozle? Tattercoats, you wound me!”
“My exchange with Kalos Kantzaros,” Desdemona spat, “was for thirty-six men. Thirty-six miners! How many came out with me?” she asked, then bellowed, “Twenty-one!” and slapped the hearthstones with the flat of her hand. “Twenty-one, Nanny! Where are my other fifteen?”
Farklewhit nervously tugged at his curly horns. “Oh, Tattercoats! It’s not so simple. Yes, we bargained. Yes, you fulfilled your end—beautifully, may I add,” he said with an admiring flutter of his eyelashes. “But every tithe who comes down to Breakers Beyond is offered full citizenship of Bana. Difficult as it may be for you to believe, there were a few miners who preferred going native, as it were, to going back to work for your father.”
Desdemona slumped and almost fell. Without her tails, she felt hideously unbalanced.
“You still owe me fifteen lives.”
“I? Do I owe you? Or does Kalos Kantzaros?”
“You, him, either, both.” Desdemona rallied, declaring, “Nanny, I want my fifteen lives!”
“And you’d, what,” Farklewhit challenged her dryly, “pluck a goblin subject from Bana like the fruit of an Ympsie tree and drag them, unwilling, up-world to make them live again in the light?”
“I’d ask them first!”
“You bargained for miners.”
“Yes, and you shortchanged me!”
Instead of exploding back at her, like her father would have done, Farklewhit paused and then asked mildly, “Well, Tattercoats, what do you propose we do about that?”
She blew out a breath, glaring at the contract, which had started to roll itself up again like an infernal fern.
“Does that thing burn, Nanny?”
“Not in this fire or the next.”
“Would you burn it if you could?”
“Oh,” Farklewhit breathed out, “I’d extinguish myself and Kalos, too, if doing so would destroy it.”
“What can?”
“Only a Mannering,” Farklewhit said.
Desdemona caught her breath.
“Or rather . . .” He cleared his throat. “Or rather, only the end of the Mannering line.”
Her mouth fell open as she absorbed the implications of this. Farklewhit quickly wagged his head at her; Desdemona could not tell if he was nodding or shaking it.
“Not your death, Tattercoats. Well, not necessarily. After all, your father might produce again.”
“No-o,” Desdemona said slowly. “Mother tried for years to get me. H.H. has been with the Countess even longer—she was much younger than Mother when she met my father—and they’ve tried, too. It was”—her teeth clenched briefly—“made plain to me, on several memorable occasions, that if Lupe ever spawned, H.H. would straightaway legitimize her whelp and disown me, bilking me of my inheritance.” She tapped her knee with a grubby fingernail, missing her claws. “You can imagine how eager that made me to slip monk’s pepper into his coffee each morning. Not that I ever did.”
“But you thought about it.”
“Yes.”
“More than once.”
“Yes.”
Desdemona snuck a glance at him. Farklewhit was grinning broadly, exposing all of his square yellow teeth.
“You are such a goblin girl!” he exclaimed. “How you ended up in a mortal uterus is beyond my comprehension. You did very well as a Thousandfurs, you know. Dear Tattercoats . . .” He trailed off invitingly. His slit-pupil gaze grew very compelling.
Desdemona looked down at her lap, full of longing and abashed by it. Inhaling deeply, she was rewarded by a dizzying stink—though her present nose lacked the ability to detect the piquant complexity of the bouquet. In that moment, she decided she would not stand for it anymore. She wanted her sense of smell back.
Slapping her palm on the hearthstones again, Desdemona flattened one corner of the contract and blew out all her breath on a sharp “Ha!” like she was kicking a horse to gallop. “A bargain, Ambassador Farklewhit!”
“I am ready.”
And he was. Suddenly Farklewhit was squatting on his glossy black hooves, one hand pressing over hers where it lay upon the contract. They were almost nose-to-nose.
Desdemona held his gaze. “Do you speak for Kalos Kantzaros in this?”
“Tattercoats.” Farklewhit’s yellow eyes filled with green flames, his horns shining like quicksilver. “I am he—voice and all. Even when—or especially when—he is not paying attention. Speak your words.”
In a ringing voice, Desdemona proclaimed, “I, the last of my line, will revoke the name Mannering in return for the name Tattercoats. I will break the alliance between my family and yours, renounce Athe, and live all my days—all my nights, I mean—in the World Beneath the World Beneath. But”—her voice dropped—“I want full citizenship in Bana. And I want the fifteen lives, Your Majesty, that are owed me. Perhaps there are others who are trapped beneath, who want a way out but cannot find it. I will be their doorway into daylight. And you will not stop me.”
Beneath their hands, Desdemona felt the lettering on the contract shift and writhe. The pictures began re-drawing themselves. Colors and gilding seeped up and bled around their fingers. But negotiations were not finished. The contract was an agreement between two worlds, not one.
They were forehead-to-forehead now, Farklewhit and Desdemona. The sharps of his horns brushed the outer edges of her ears. His musk mingled with her unwashed odor, and she inhaled this new fragrance raptly through her nose.
In his bottomless Kalos Kantzaros boom, Farklewhit countered: “If you would be Tattercoats full through, a true goblin of Bana, you will be charged with a vocation. You must—and shall!—serve. Begin as my courier, my messenger between worlds. You shall forthwith be granted the ability to slip your thousand furs and slide back into them at will. We shall put your knightly knack for rescuing to good use.”
When he bopped her nose with his, he was Farklewhit again.
“Now, isn’t that a nobler way of saying ‘you shall fetch and carry on my whim’? Anyway, it’s not like we’ll ask you to steal babies for the glory of the Bone Kingdom. I’ve had my fill of diapers, thank you. But by trick, temptation, or trade, we must cross-pollinate the three petals of the World Flower—lest all our peoples dwindle and diminish. It was always our way to take in the unwanted of other worlds, even after our borders were mostly sealed. We just hate it”—Farklewhit glared at the oil painting of H.H. Mannering that was mounted on the wall opposite the fireplace—“when we’re forced.”
Something like butterflies, but with more claws and incandescence, swarmed Desdemona’s chest cavity. “So,” she reiterated, “as long as a mortal is willing to come beneath, I can escort them down-world?”
Farklewhit made that indeterminate wagging motion of his head. “Well . . . not without consulting me at least—or we’ll be flooded with doughty journalists and pesky sopranos!” He winked.
The writing kept on scribbling and re-scribbling itself beneath their palms, but Desdemona knew it the moment the contract settled into its new shape. She stared thoughtfully at her hand, now joined with Farklewhit’s, where it rested on the vellum. Around their fingers, the marginalia of the contract had filled in with new faces. Some of them she recognized. She had once feared the sight of them, had been filled with sickness and disgust and pity, and loathed them because of that. Now she could only marvel at their potential.
Oh, no. It was not opera singers she would be bringing to Breakers Beyond on her first journey home.
“After all,” Desdemona said slowly, her forehead still pressed to Farklewhit’s, “there’s stealing . . . and then there’s—more like Chaz in the Valwode, right?—there’s . . . inviting? A kind of immigration?”
She felt Farklewhit’s smile curl around hers. “Precisely.”
17: MEND HER WITH RUBIES
THE GOBLIN KNOWN AS Tattercoats Thousandfurs looked almost exactly like Desdemona Mannering. Except, beneath her sleek brown walking suit with its tessellated puppytooth pattern, she had tucked her nine tails, which made wearing a bustle absolutely redundant. The velvet applejack hat pulled low over her brow hid all her ears. Smoky quartz lenses concealed her light-sensitive eyes. From a fob at her waistcoat hung a pocket watch that, when opened, showed the glowing rune of an hourglass. Her time outside Bana was strictly limited.
Tattercoats approached a nurse at the receptionist station at the Seafall City Working Women’s Almshouse. She kept her smile small, careful not to flash her tiny sharp teeth.
“Hello. I have an appointment in the Matchbox.”
The nurse looked taken aback at this breezy reference to the ward in question. But no one who worked in that building would dare castigate a Mannering. The nurse gestured to a row of chairs and invited, “Have a seat, Miss Mannering. I’ll fetch someone to escort you up.”
The Seafall City Working Women’s Almshouse was an institution for the ailing poor of the working class, who, unable to keep their jobs due to their conditions, could not afford medical attention. It consisted of four six-bed wards, each nicknamed by the graveyard nurses in their gallows weariness: the “Undark Ward,” where girls from the radium factory went to die; the “Stone Ward,” where foundry workers, their lungs scarred to flint-like hardness after years spent inhaling particulate, struggled for breath; the “Printing Press,” where women in different lead industries lay in seizures and poisoned comas; and finally the “Matchbox,” where the Phossy Jaw Girls, their bones necrotizing from close contact with the white phosphorous used in matchmaking, disintegrated to death.
Work on the expansion of the Matchbox, funded by Mrs. Tracy Mannering’s charity, had already begun. What had been the eastern wall of the reception room was now sealed off with tarp. Signage warned visitors that what lay beyond was a construction zone and to PLEASE FORGIVE OUR DUST. Instead of taking a seat, Tattercoats, loose-hipped and swaggering, ambled over near the site. She examined a scale model of the plans set up on a table. Next to it, a detailed sandwich board explained the project, complete with a pasted-on clipping from a recent article by Salissay Dimaguiba. The headline read: TRACY’S PLACE: A HEROIC RENOVATION.
Dimaguiba opened with the history of the Almshouse, which had been founded a hundred years ago by Lataisha Mannering and kept solvent by Mannering women ever since. She went on to give details about the new ward: designed especially for “the women who give their lives for light,” it would be “outfitted with the very latest in medical technology” and staffed “by the first generation of female physicians allowed to graduate from the University of Southern Leressa.”
Tattercoats could always tell when Salissay was planting the seeds of another feature article in whatever she was currently working on. Grinning, she kept reading.
The rest of the article was an interview with Tracy Mannering, mostly about the benefit she had staged for the new ward at the Seafall City Opera House. It ended with a description of Tracy, “staring into the middle distance,” murmuring that her fondest hope was that “this ward will be my cenotaph” and that it would last “long after I am gone.” In typical Dimaguiba style, the journalist concluded: “While it is to be hoped that Mrs. Mannering’s work with the Southern Leressa Convention Respecting the Prohibition of White Phosphorous in Matches might one day bear legislative fruit, her new ward must serve as a reminder that any laws we propose to protect our factory workers will be passed far too late to save the patients admitted herein—both now and in the foreseeable future.”
Tattercoats shook her head in undisguised appreciation, saluting the sandwich board with a gloved hand (the brown chamois disguising hard black claws and padded fingers) before moving on to examine the easel standing next to it. It was set up like a miniature shrine, with a row of plain glass devotional candles burning beneath it on a low wooden stool, along with a large lockbox that had a slot on top for donations. Upon the easel was propped a framed portrait of Mrs. Tracy Mannering, rendered in glowing pastels.
Elliot Howell’s work, of course—Tattercoats could tell by his distinctive style, his explosive Voluptuist colors. In the portrait, Tracy sat enthroned upon a massive oak chair. She was dressed in red, the sash across her chest reading STRIKE THE MATCH! One arm was propped on the armrest. Her other hand was upraised, fingers pinched around a lit match. She held it close to her face, which was turned toward the flare in sober contemplation. The match illumined only half her features. The shadowed half suggested a skull—a typically Howellian reference to
Last Century artists’ obsession with memento mori.
Tattercoats stared at the portrait for many a long minute.
Then she blinked two pairs of eyelids and took a step back. Reaching into her brown leather attaché case, she removed a bouquet of gold and silver branches, whose long stems bowed with sparkling fruit-shaped gems, and stuffed the whole thing pell-mell into the donation box.
“Goodbye, Mother,” whispered Tattercoats. “Good luck.”
Behind her, the receptionist called out, “Miss Mannering? The Nurse Director will see you now.”
* * *
The hour was late, and in the Matchbox, all the patients were asleep.
Tattercoats took a seat on a chair nearest the first cot. She adjusted her tails beneath her, opening her attaché case and rummaging within, not taking any particular care to be quiet. Seconds later, aware that the girl in the cot had awoken and was watching her, Tattercoats glanced up and grinned.
The girl stared up from her pillow with feverish solemnity. Early twenties. Lank hair. Barely any face left at all, the hole in her skin and muscle emitting an oily-sweet smell that Tattercoats could remember once finding revolting. Not any longer. She merely removed her applejack hat, letting all her ears spring loose, and the goblin beneath her skin rippled, revealing the patchwork of otter - mink - weasel - badger - bear - swan - ostrich - chinchilla - rabbit - squirrel - lynx - wolf - fox - what have you.
Leaning in close, Tattercoats whispered, “Do you know about the World Flower?”
A light dawned in the girl’s laudanum-dulled eyes—Tattercoats took that flicker as good enough for a nod. She wasted no time, sliding to her knees beside the cot and drawing the contract from her attaché case, where she held it up like a children’s book.
“I am charged to bring mortals into the Bone Kingdom. Anyone I like. Anyone who is worthy. Like the women in these illustrations, see?”
The marginalia of the contract was crowded with human figures undergoing goblin transformation as they descended to Bana. Those nearest the top were thin and sallow-faced, with awful abscesses eating their lower jaws and steel braces bearing them upright. But their counterparts, having passed into the lower half of the contract, into the night-dark ink and the green glow cast by the Kobold King’s crown, were different. They had become creatures of the underground, part flesh, part gemstone. Their jaws were no longer gaping wounds but carved of ruby, white jade, sapphire.
Desdemona and the Deep Page 13
