Desdemona and the Deep Read online

  She hung up.

  * * *

  That morning, Desdemona ate her breakfast off delicate porcelain inherited from her great-great-great-grandmother, Lataisha Mannering. Her espresso was hot, black, sweet as syrup, spiky with cardamom, but she could not taste it. Two things haunted her: her dream from last night—looking into a mirror and seeing in her reflection a festering Phossy Gal all carved up like a turnip lantern on Gentry Moon, her disintegrating mouth stuffed with burning matches—and the nightmare she’d woken to this morning.

  Three hundred fifty-six workers went down this morning . . .

  Putting her demitasse down, she submitted to her maid’s deft hand with a hairbrush and stared into her own eyes in the mirror, wondering at the stranger who stared back.

  “We’ll do an upsweep today, Miss Mannering,” said Ranli.

  Her soft voice, with its hard-rolled Rs and slim Ls, barely made a dent in Desdemona’s concentration. Ranli was Leechese, an immigrant to Seafall. She had unerring taste in all matters sartorial and tonsorial and supported three, far younger, highly decorative husbands on her not inconsiderable salary, while they kept house and raised their children in one of the gaudier, cheaper boroughs of the city. Chaz kept trying and failing to hire Ranli away. He was not the only one of Desdemona’s friends to attempt this, but he was the only one who regularly almost succeeded. Ranli’s wage was unspeakable. Worth every last gilt penny.

  “Pompadour with a low cottage loaf,” Ranli continued. “A few loose coils. The white felt hat, of course, with brown velvet trim and pom-poms. You’ll be visiting today?”

  Take your tenth . . . I’ll dispose of the rest . . .

  “Yes,” Desdemona answered absently.

  “The brown corduroy trotting suit, then,” Ranli informed her with regal efficiency. Ranli never wasted words with her employer. She had been hired for her opinion in exactly one field—and in that field, her opinion was law. “With your baum marten boa and muff. It’s a chill day, and lowering.”

  Are you your father’s daughter or your mother’s?

  Restless and listless by turns, Desdemona replied, “Yes, the furs. Heap me up in dead things. I need all the creature comforts today.”

  Ranli, her spine straight as a scepter, disappeared into the dressing room to fetch the selected items while Desdemona toyed with the demitasse, staring into it as if trying to see through worlds.

  “If the World Flower is real . . .” she murmured, hardly believing she was saying the words aloud.

  If it was real—Three Worlds theory, gentry tales, all the stories of goblin ghoulies dwelling in the World Beneath the World Beneath—then early that morning, just after midnight, her father had sold, to a blaze of black-and-white light in his fireplace, thirty-six of his own Candletown Company employees in exchange for a load of bitumen on White Raven Island. Then he manufactured a mining incident to murder the other three hundred twenty-one to cover up the missing men.

  You take your tenth of them . . . I’ll dispose of the rest.

  Desdemona thunked down the demitasse. The dregs of her espresso sloshed over the rim, spraying the newspaper beneath it so that it read, CANDLETOWN COMPANY DI—splotch—STER!

  A tithe was a tenth, was it not? And her father, whom Desdemona had always known to be rude, ruthless, amoral, and brutal, but whom she had never imagined could murder hundreds of men with a shrug of his shoulders, had done just that. And for what? For oil?

  She looked down at her hands.

  For oil. For the porcelain place setting in front of her. For the lace waterfalling down the sleeves of her dressing gown. For this room, with its silk linens, its lustrous mohair velvet upholstery, its jacquard coverlet, and the vanity of lacquered ebony and shagreen. For the Aniqua Adrian perfume she wore at her inner wrists. For her amber and topaz rings. For people like Ranli to do up her hair.

  Feverishly, Desdemona clawed the rings off her fingers. They rained onto the patterned silk-and-wool carpet like precipitation from a gentry sky, which lets fall jewels and coins and pearls on the virtuous, but snakes and centipedes and toads on the wicked. So the stories went.

  She glanced up. Winged heads of plaster gentry babes festooned every corner of the ceiling, but not a single toad did they spit from their leering mouths. No, the toads were all in her belly, agitated and slimy. Sweating out the stuff of hallucinations.

  If it was real . . .

  Desdemona glanced around the room, her eyes wide, her breath coming in fast.

  . . . then these walls could be doors.

  There had always been stories about Breaker House. It was, so the stories went, one of the last thresholds between worlds. Every night at midnight, there was a far-off sound of bells (bells made from the bones of lost mortals, they said), and the walls of Breaker House opened into the next world below.

  That world was the Valwode, where the gentry lived. In the Valwode there was another Breaker House, called Dark Breakers, the seat of the Gentry Sovereign.

  Desdemona had not read gentry stories since she was a child. Even then she was more interested in sports and pranks than books. But thanks to Voluptuist artists like Elliot Howell, who had taken to reinvigorating World Flower mythos through their media, she was fairly familiar with the players.

  Howell often used his creepy wife for a model when depicting the Gentry Sovereign. He painted the tiny, terrifying woman as a powerful queen with a crown of antlers bursting from her brow, or sitting on a throne made of a hundred crescent moons, or limned in stars as if extruding them from her skin.

  After attending Howell’s first-ever gallery opening in Seafall, Chaz had gone directly home and spent weeks poring over all his old nursery book texts, subjecting Desdemona—whenever she came over to drag him back into the light—to endless lectures about the Gentry Sovereign, “Queen Nyx the Nightwalker, who ruled the gentryfolk by dreaming the very Valwode into being, over and again, so that it never died.” Her royal seat, Dark Breakers, apparently opened onto another world even deeper down, a midnight realm, where stood another house called Breakers Beyond. This house resided in Bana the Bone Kingdom, where lived Erl-Lord Kalos Kantzaros, King of the Kobolds, and all his goblin court.

  Kalos Kantzaros, King of Kobolds, hear me! I, Harlan Hunt Mannering, command you.

  Desdemona pushed back from her chair and stood. Then sat again, uncertainly. Her hand hovered over the handset of her telephone, like a phantom deciding if a particular object was worth haunting.

  Are you your father’s daughter or your mother’s?

  The headline stared up at her from beneath a spreading circle of espresso, bleak as her own eyes in the mirror.

  35— S—ULS —OST!

  Her fists clenched.

  Take as many miners as you want in exchange . . . They are the tithe. That’s the bargain.

  It was true. All of it. Her father was a murderer, Desdemona his witness. She had let this thing happen. This massacre. She was complicit.

  The Seafall Courier splatted against the wall—a pigeon flying full speed into a windowpane—and fluttered to the floor. Gray and white. Desdemona snatched up the phone and spun the rotary dial with cold but steady hands. A moment later, a voice on the other end of the line said, “Hello, this is the Howell residence. Nixie Howell speaking.”

  “Mrs. Howell? This is Desdemona Mannering. Could you—are you free for lunch?”

  4: LUNCHEON AT THE CHIAMBERRA

  MRS. ELLIOT HOWELL sipped freshly squeezed grapefruit juice from a crystal glass and studied Desdemona curiously over the rim.

  Desdemona swallowed. Cleared her throat. Gave it the old Mannering bravado.

  “So. Mrs. Howell. You’re . . . you’re Nyx the Nightwalker, Dreamer of the Valwode, Most Eminent and Reverend Sovereign of Dark Breakers, and Queen of the Gentry. I presume.”

  “Queen-in-Exile,” Mrs. Howell corrected her, without missing a beat. “I am retired. A thousand years of dreaming makes one so long to be awake, you understand. Even if it means d
eciding on the day of my own death.”

  Was that a joke? Desdemona never could tell if Nixie Howell was joking. The woman always made her uncomfortable. She stared across the table, a vast and sparkling expanse of crystal, gold, silver, and damask, and frowned.

  At first she thought sourly that Mrs. Howell looked like no queen she had ever imagined. But the longer she looked, the more Desdemona realized how, at every prior encounter with Mrs. Howell, she had allowed her gaze to willfully sidle past her face. Never once had she looked Mrs. Howell right in the eye and seen the obvious: her uncanny nature. From her eyes—the bottomless black of ink, with no whites showing, but which, when she tilted her head, showed a startling flash of azurite—to her hair, a peculiar glow-spill of ebony-indigo, plaited into hundreds of ropy braids that swung over her shoulders and down her back, shining with the sheen of starling wings—to her face . . . Her face! Like a great-grandmother who, in her extreme eld, resumes certain aspects of a little girl again, both in mockery of and homage to her youth.

  Mrs. Howell’s dark brown skin was dotted all over with small inkblot tattoos that danced, as Desdemona watched, in infinitesimal patterns, like the wheeling constellations of an unknown sky. The marks were everywhere. Her face. Her throat. Her hands. Her nails were long, blue-black, curved, filigreed in silver.

  Taking another deliberate sip of grapefruit juice, Mrs. Howell raised her eyebrows at Desdemona and winked.

  Desdemona dropped her gaze to the figured tablecloth, studying it like a fashion magazine. The Chiamberra always set a luscious table. The linen was the royal ultramarine of a late autumn sky, with silver and gold leaves figured upon it. Silver cutlery with tines and handles of plated gold glittered next to translucent dishes thin as windowpane oysters and enameled with the Bramble-and-Briar pattern, a riotous forest that came brilliantly alive under scrutiny. The longer she studied the pattern, the more Desdemona began to see the countless gentry creatures hidden amongst the flowers and tree branches. Or was it simply that now, everywhere she looked, she saw Mrs. Howell’s face?

  “It is just a trick,” Mrs. Howell said softly. “I foreswore most of my powers. I am as mortal as you. Mostly.”

  Desdemona looked up again. It was no easier the second time, but she forced herself to hold Mrs. Howell’s gaze. “I had no idea.”

  One corner of Mrs. Howell’s mouth twitched. “You had some idea, I think. But you are good at pretending. I am not good at pretending for fun; whatever I dream becomes real. Or at least, it did, where I once ruled. Here, I do not dream.”

  She removed a jeweled eggcup from the silver cruet set at the center of the table, took a small round spoon, tapped the fat end of her soft-boiled egg, and then lifted off the broken top of the shell with a knife. Her knife did not match the table set. The hilt was carved of bone or horn, dyed a wine-dark red, its steel blade mottled like rippled water. When she finished shelling her egg, Mrs. Howell re-sheathed her knife—somewhere out of sight, below the table, and leaned over her plate to grin at Desdemona.

  “It was a birthday present from Elliot,” she confided. “He meant it to be a boot knife, I think. But I do not like to wear shoes. So he made me a very beautiful thigh sheath.”

  Desdemona could not help it; she dipped her head to stare beneath the tablecloth at Mrs. Howell’s feet and gawped.

  The woman was barefoot. And—what was she wearing? How on Athe had Mrs. Howell managed to saunter into the most exclusive restaurant of the most distinguished hotel in Seafall—past the hawk-eyed doorman, the haughty maître d’, and a host of hushed servitors expert in ushering out the unwanted with minimum fuss and maximum grace—dressed in nothing but an enormous, butterfly-yellow, cast-off artist’s smock, belted loosely with laundry line, her feet as naked as a peasant girl’s?

  However she had done it, the sight of those bare brown feet gave Desdemona something to feel superior to. Her shoes, a pair of dusty-rose pumps with silk ribbons, cost more than their present luncheon would. Which was saying something. The thought imparted courage. She cleared her throat. As pleasantly as she could, she said, “I need to get down to the Bone Kingdom.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Howell.

  Desdemona looked up sharply at the word she loathed most. “Of course I do! How dare you . . .”

  Mrs. Howell’s black eyes flashed blue, and the angry words died in Desdemona’s throat like ants under a magnifying glass.

  “You need,” the Queen-in-Exile corrected her gently, “to go to the Valwode. There is something there you will want—in order to travel further down.”

  Then she grinned again, a look so conniving that Desdemona’s eyes unfocused. When she could see clearly again, she was absolutely certain that Mrs. Howell’s constellation tattoos had rearranged themselves.

  “What”—she licked her lips—“what do I want in the, the Valwode?”

  “Ah. We will come to that. First, you must solve the problem of getting there.” Mrs. Howell made a face of friendly doubt, accompanied by a shrug, as if to say, Worth trying, anyway.

  Desdemona lifted her chin. “Apparently the walls of Breaker House become somewhat . . . flexible . . . at midnight. But—I’ve been spending summers there my whole life, and I never saw them do anything extraordinary!” She leaned in. “How do I get through?”

  Mrs. Howell laughed like cellos laughing. “You are not a poet!”

  “A poet?” Desdemona sat back. “Well, of course I’m not!”

  She was the patroness of poets. Poets worshipped her, curried her favor, vied for the honor of presenting their verses at her literary salons. A dedication “to D.K.M.” beneath the title of a sonnet might garner its author a publication credit in the society pages of the Seafall Courier. Miss Desdemona Kirtida Mannering’s word could be the making or breaking of a poet’s career. But she did not write the stuff herself. The very idea was absurd!

  Desdemona breathed out through her nose, like her mother did while pouring tea for a politician she did not care for but knew could be useful. Toying with her fork, she rammed a raspberry through a dollop of cream and said reasonably, “Elliot isn’t a poet. He’s a painter. Yet he went through—obviously.”

  “Obviously,” Mrs. Howell agreed. “And countless others have gone through, too—even after the boundaries were all but closed. They had something the gentry wanted.”

  Desdemona’s moniker at uni had been “the Anthracite Princess,” referring as much to her glittering implacability as to her position as Candletown Company’s sole heiress. She had always taken pride in it, and a certain refuge. But now she felt her carapace of insouciance begin to crack. She thought of the fires raging beneath the sealed pitheads of Merula Colliery. Her face flushing with that heat, she hissed, “My business is not with the gentry. My business is with . . .”

  “With Erl-Lord Kalos Kantzaros, King of Kobolds.” Mrs. Howell lifted a thin slice of rye bread heaped with dilled gravlax and mustard sauce to her mouth. “He is my brother. My younger brother, give or take a century as a mortal lives and dies. Last night, your father forced him into a trade for oil fields on White Raven Island, and now you wish to take back that trade. To barter with him and win the lives of those thirty-six men for yourself. You see”—Mrs. Howell smiled invitingly—“I still keep my finger on the wild pulse of our three-petal flower. An ancient habit, I fear, that will not die till I do.”

  Desdemona closed her eyes. “Please,” she said. “If you know so much—you must know how to help me! Please help me!”

  Mrs. Howell laughed. “There! You do know your courtesies! I can see why Elliot likes you, against his instinct for self-preservation. Or, perhaps I should say, why he enjoyed painting you. You have so many teeth and claws, I wager you cannot turn over in your sleep but you draw blood.” She added approvingly, “That will stand you in good stead where you are going.”

  Opening her eyes again, Desdemona pushed crystal and cutlery aside. “Please tell me how.”

  Mrs. Howell set her hands on the table, palms fla
t against the embroidered linen. Her eyes were like two pinwheels: coal, cobalt, coal again. Three star clusters arched in a bow above her brow. A spiral galaxy whirled minutely on her right cheekbone.

  “You will need all your wits, Desdemona Mannering, all your scimitar wiles, to bargain with Kalos Kantzaros in Breakers Beyond. And you will need an edge. Something to hold over him in negotiations. Your family has used him ill these many generations, and he will not look kindly on any boon you beg of him.”

  “What does he want?” Desdemona demanded. “If you know something he wants, and how I can get it . . . Do you know?”

  “Oh, yes.” Nyx the Nightwalker’s smile went a thousand years deep. “I know what my brother wants most in all the Three Worlds. The question is,” she asked, “will you do what I need, in return for this information?”

  Desdemona realized she had balled her hands into fists, and forced them to relax. “Yes. Whatever it is, I’ll do it. Only tell me how to get to him. And how to get those men back.”

  “Two years ago”—Mrs. Howell returned to her lunch with great vigor—“I imprisoned my brother’s youngest daughter in my court at Dark Breakers. I did not want to do it—Susurra the Night Hag was my chosen heir—but she gave me no choice.”

  Desdemona blurted, “Susurra the—the subject of Howell’s newest encaustic?”

  “The very one! He met her once—barely survived. Goblin girls are not notorious for their gentleness.” Mrs. Howell sighed. “My niece had the wit to rule and the mind to dream—and, being goblinborn, she’d not brook any rebellious gentry mischief without immediate reprisal. I would have passed my crown to her when came the time, but—alas! For all her felicities, she was young and foolish. She betrayed me, tried to take the Antler Crown for her own before her turn. I punished her—cast her into an oubliette of iron and sank her out of sight, where no gentry creature knows to find her.”

  Desdemona thought she could see where this was going. She began shaking her head in denial, but Mrs. Howell ignored the cue and continued, “Susurra’s prison term is almost up. But the Veil is closed to me; I cannot pass into it again. When I married my Elliot, I left the Valwode behind, never to return. Therefore, I need you”—she smiled her very reasonable, not-at-all paralyzing, ancient-infant smile at Desdemona, who was still shaking her head, hoping her skull would not explode—“to go to Dark Breakers and secure Susurra’s release. Do this, return the girl to her father in Breakers Beyond, and perhaps then Kalos Kantzaros will give you back the lives your father sold.”