One girl, her face identical to that of the girl on the cot, had a new jaw entirely carved of shining alabaster, with mother-of-pearl insets. Her teeth were gemstones. Her hair ran with living veins of copper and gold, and her bones were as strong as the iron crystal core of Athe.
“I know you’re afraid,” Tattercoats told the girl on the cot, holding her wide-eyed gaze all the while. “I know you’re in pain. I want to help you. If what you see in the picture is what you wish to be—blink thrice, and I will make it so.”
The girl did not blink, but her glance shifted slightly. Tattercoats followed her gaze to the other cots.
“I’ll come for them, too,” she promised. “I’ll take as many as I can. You can help. Together, we’ll empty the wards—Matchbox, Printing Press, Undark, Stone. We’ll turn all these walls into doors.”
That seemed to satisfy her. Dragging her gaze from the cots to the contract, the girl blinked once.
The illuminated vellum began to gleam like quicksilver.
She blinked twice.
Across the page, the words of the contract scrambled themselves, re-forming into the shape of a spiral staircase that wound down from the top edge of the contract to the bottom.
The girl blinked a third time.
Tattercoats cast the contract to the floor, where it unrolled into a trapdoor, which opened. The first slick mercury steps appeared in the next moment, and a moment later, there were a thousand more, going ever down, vanishing into the darkness.
“Take my hand,” said the goblin Tattercoats. “It’s beautiful, beneath.”
Acknowledgments
I met my writing mentor Gene Wolfe when I was eighteen. Over years of brunches, conventions, road trips, and letters, the spirit of mimetic desire filled me; I grew to want two things desperately in order to be more like Gene. I wanted a World Fantasy Award (he had lots of those hanging around his shelves), and I wanted a Tor publication (likewise). When I had these things, I figured—at last!—I would have “made it.” This novella completes the set. Now all I have to do is actually be more like him: as generous, as insightful, as brilliant. Thank you, Gene.
The stories set in the Dark Breakers world began with my admiration for author Sharon Shinn. I wanted to pen fantastical romances set in a semi-historical, artsy-fartsy, sort of scapigliatura-meets-hobgoblin milieu. Two of these novellas I self-published for fun and experimental purposes. Sharon loved both of them—and her love went a long way in urging me to finish Desdemona. Thank you, Sharon! And thank you, all you early readers of those first Dark Breakers books!
Which brings me to Rich Horton. Thank you, Rich (whose name is synonymous with “champion” in my heart) for taking those first novellas seriously.
I was writing Desdemona from the end of 2016 to the end of 2017. “Times being what they are / dark and getting darker all the time” (Anaïs Mitchell, Hadestown), I found writing that year to be grindingly difficult. It was hard to feel like anything mattered, least of all art. But I have always loved reading my work aloud, and author Caitlyn Paxson was there through it all, listening to bits on the phone, reading her own work-in-progress in return, and encouraging, encouraging, encouraging. Thank you, Caitlyn.
And thank you, Sita, for listening—in the garden, in the bathtub, doing dishes, first thing in the morning or last thing at night whenever I called you up from two time zones away. You somehow always have time for me, Mama—and an exceptional ear.
Thank you to my editor, Ellen Datlow. What an abiding pleasure to work with you! And thank you, Markus Hoffmann, my agent at Regal Hoffmann & Associates. (I don’t quite believe you are actually from this world. Maybe one world down? Or perhaps the World Beneath the World Beneath . . . ?)
To my Goblin Girls, my Infernal Harpies, my RAMP writing group, my Chicago cronies, and my Women of Westerly: I love you so much, and owe you the good cheer and gumption in me. Patty Templeton, Amal El-Mohtar, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Jessica Paige Wick, Betsie Withey, Christa Carmen, Ysabeau Wilce, Tiffany Trent, Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Joel Derfner, Liz Duffy Adams, John O’Neill, Tina Jens, Jeanine Marie Vaughn, Rebecca Huston, Katie Redding, and Stephanie Shaw. Thank you, beloveds.
Thank you, Mir and Kiri, longest-running friends in existence. Thank you, Francesca Forrest and Tina Connolly and Robert V. S. Reddick for reading Desdemona upon its early completion and believing in me—you put the “courage” in encouraging.
You will see that this book is dedicated to Julia Rios, Moss Collum, and their black cat Desdemona, who has now gone down to dwell among the goblins. Julia and Moss know why, but I just wanted to thank them again. For everything. For being family.
And Carlos. Carlos Hernandez, companion of my life, writing partner, who stretched the nature of Farklewhit to encompass a Kobold King. To Carlos, my darling, my fiend, mi enjambre, mi esposo. You extraordinary beast. You beautiful human. Thank you. Thank you for relentlessly transforming the darkness of our times into the deep radiance of creation. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” you remind me in my bleaker moments, “but it bends toward justice.”
That quote, while extremely heartening, does come with a complex pedigree and context. Without the work of activists and human rights organizations like the ACLU, Amnesty International, Habitat for Humanity, Doctors Without Borders &c, along with millions of individual people, I do not think the arc of the moral universe would bend toward justice. So this book is for them, too. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
About the Author
C. S. E. COONEY lives and writes in the borough of Queens, whose borders are water. She is an audiobook narrator, the singer/songwriter Brimstone Rhine, and the author of the World Fantasy Award–winning Bone Swans: Stories. Her short fiction can be found in Ellen Datlow’s Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Jonathan Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 12, Paula Guran’s 2016 The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas, five editions of Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, Mike Allen’s Clockwork Phoenix Anthology (3 and 5), Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Apex, Uncanny, Black Gate, Papaveria Press, GigaNotoSaurus, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, and elsewhere.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1: A BENEFIT FOR THE FACTORY GIRLS WITH PHOSSY JAW
2: VOICES AT MIDNIGHT
3: CANDLETOWN COMPANY DISASTER! 356 SOULS LOST!
4: LUNCHEON AT THE CHIAMBERRA
5: CHAMPAGNE AND FURS
6: TWILIGHT OF THE GENTRY
7: ORCHARDS OF SILVER AND OF GOLD
8: THE MIRRADARRA DOORWAY
9: THOUSANDFURS
10: THE DAMSEL HOLE
11: DURANCE VILE
12: HAG OF NIGHT
13: THE THREE-PETALED VOW
14: QUEEN AT THE THRESHOLD
15: REVERSE KATABASIS
16: SEVERING THE LINE
17: MEND HER WITH RUBIES
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DESDEMONA AND THE DEEP
Copyright © 2019 by
C. S. E. Cooney
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Alyssa Winans
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Ellen Datlow
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10271
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-22982-3 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-22983-0 (trade paperback)
First Edition: July 2019
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