Desdemona and the Deep Page 5

  “Open up!” Chaz sang out, laughing. “Open up, we’ve come to see the Kobold King!”

  Two sounds responded, one near and one far. Bone bells ringing in a wailing wind. And water. Deep water. Like a mighty river rising over its embankments.

  Desdemona grinned at Chaz. It was working! A chill wind blew back her black hair, bringing with it the perfume of deep ice and fresh flowers. Chaz’s wig was plastered to his face, wet red ribbons trailing over white flesh.

  “You’re the best sister I never had!” she called above the crash of bells, the rushing roar of white-water rapids. “I’ll see you beneath!”

  “Desdemona!” Chaz lunged to grab her hand. Laughing, she gripped him back. Then, bulky in her furs and feathers and skins, she began twirling with him, tromping grapes and trampling cheese crumbs into the table, kicking the remaining half boule of sourdough out of her way. She danced Chaz around the ivory billiard balls, faster and faster, her bare feet kicking out from beneath the hem of her bubble skirt, and then she ran right up to the edge of the table, dragging him along, and leapt as high into the air as she could—and fell.

  And fell.

  And kept falling.

  6: TWILIGHT OF THE GENTRY

  THE FIRST THING DESDEMONA saw was a colossus enthroned upon a dais. And because she knew that if she looked around the room and saw anything else even half as strange, she might run screaming out of her own skin, she focused on it alone.

  Human-shaped, more or less, but lacking genitalia. Nothing of its body left to the imagination. It was draped, barely, at shoulders and hips, in gold-shot cloth, shimmering now like wine, now like rubies. Its skin—shell? casing?—was hard, marble-white, patterned with branching capillaries of deepest lapis lazuli, like the proposed map of Seafall’s new underground rapid transit system. Crowning its sculpted white curls was a towering tangle of antler horns. Tier upon tier burst from its skull like the chandelier in H.H.’s hunting lodge, a great circle of elk, whitetail, and mule deer antlers that dominated the ceiling.

  It was the Antler Crown. That, at least, Desdemona could identify from stories and Elliot Howell’s paintings. It could only belong to the Gentry Sovereign. This towering white creature, then, was the ruler Mrs. Howell had chosen to replace her when she cast her first heir, Susurra the Night Hag, into prison.

  Right. So there was that. One recognizable thing.

  Feeling steadier, Desdemona took chary stock of her surroundings. That was when she saw the second thing. Or rather didn’t see it. Because it—or he—was missing. Chaz had been just behind her. He had jumped when she did. Hadn’t he? He always followed her; of course he’d jumped! Only . . . perhaps he had not this time. Perhaps he was still standing on top of the billiards table, looking down at the empty space where Desdemona had been. Or perhaps Desdemona was, in fact, lying on the billiards room floor with a broken neck.

  Well, and if she was, no matter. She was here now. Or dead. Maybe both. And Chaz was . . .

  Well, he was not. Desdemona would just have to go it alone, like she had originally planned.

  A cramp stabbed her right behind her breastbone. Her rib cage squeezed like a fist, digging bony bars into her heart. Desdemona tore her gaze from the Gentry Sovereign and dared her first real glance around the Valwode, just in case Chaz was somewhere near.

  So this was Dark Breakers, was it? The shadow of Breaker House one world down. What had been the billiards room in Breaker House had become in Dark Breakers some kind of royal court or something: a vast chamber, faintly glowing, as if every surface reflected moonlight but from no moon she could see.

  That was when Desdemona noticed the third thing. Really, she scolded herself, reeling internally, it should have been the first thing.

  The room—or royal court, or whatever it was—was packed like one of Tracy’s philanthropic jamborees. Desdemona had hurtled herself, it seemed, into the midst of a heated debate.

  “Alban Idris!” called a voice near Desdemona’s elbow. “You must abdicate!”

  The immense white creature on the dais flinched. The movement sent a sort of mild shock wave through the room. Desdemona felt it in her gut, but did not know why. The eyes staring from that marble face at the angry crowd were wide and wet and black and deep. Even as imposing as it was, with the authority of its stature and the Antler Crown upon its head, the Gentry Sovereign had yet a cowering stillness that Desdemona associated with hunted things.

  “You cannot rule us if you cannot dream us!” shouted another voice, somewhere behind Desdemona.

  The flinch this time from the Gentry Sovereign was not visible, but its entire body seemed to shrink back into its wickedly bright silver throne. If it withdrew any deeper into its seat, the Gentry Sovereign ran the risk of impaling itself on one of the protruding razor-sharp crescents that seemed to make up its throne. From across the room, which seemed acres away, Desdemona saw an owl-headed man leap up from the floor to perch on the shoulders of his neighbor and screech in a voice like a rusted grate swinging shut, “If you do not dream us, we will die!”

  “You are murdering us!” another cried.

  “Our world is sloughing off at the edges!”

  “We are disappearing!”

  “This is your doing, Alban Idris! You were sent to dream us! You must dream us!”

  And yet, for all their fury—and in a room stuffed with hundreds of gentry, Desdemona could smell the fury like flowers burning on some desperate pyre—none of the creatures rushed the dais, or in any way attempted to attack. She slunk into her furs, trying to hide inside them the way the Gentry Sovereign tried to hide inside its throne, and wondered why the gentry held back.

  A few months ago, during the hottest days of the “Summer Troubles,” when the United Locomotive Engineers went on strike for better hours, better pay, and safer working conditions on the rails, Desdemona had seen demonstrations in the streets of Seafall with the same sense of angry urgency. At the time, she’d been sleeping with Salissay Dimaguiba, her mother’s pet journalist. She’d pick up Salissay in H.H.’s Model Noir and take her cruising past the picket lines, the ULE headquarters, where union leaders met to organize, the police station, where officers in riot gear readied their horses and hitched up their paddy wagons, and even Titan Row, where the millionaire magnates of industry lived—anywhere Salissay wanted to go to get her scoop. Months of protests, arrests, several “accidental” deaths, even a bombing later, and at last the ULE celebrated what they called their Harvest Victory.

  Desdemona had not marched among them—she would never willingly open herself up to any more of her father’s contempt or her mother’s enthusiastic volunteerism-by-proxy—but she had seen the rage and determination in their eyes from behind the windows of her automobile. She saw it again now, in the gentry. That female-looking thing with two horns of freshwater pearl where her eyes should have been; that tiny, two-headed child sporting a double ruff of rainbow plumage about the neck and little else; those three green sisters with identical long silver hair, each dressed in soft gray leathers and armed to the teeth with skinners, gut hooks, folding saws, and flensing knives, with thick stone machetes strapped to their backs . . . Everywhere she looked, Desdemona saw a people angry enough to kill. And yet, they did not move.

  Civil protest? In the Valwode?

  Surreptitiously, Desdemona peeked around for signs of mounted policemen in riot gear, armed with clubs and bats. She did not find them. What she found instead were dozens of cold, silent giants, each—like the Gentry Sovereign itself—seemingly carved of living stone, each as tall as a monolith, studding the restless crowd like land mines.

  It was easier for Desdemona to think of them as policemen, rather than her initial reaction, which was to think of them as gods. They were enormous. Very like, in fact, the twelve gods of the ancient kingdom Liriat who were depicted in marble at the Seafall Museum of Antiquities. Some were smooth and white, others veined in grays and greens. The shortest was well over eight feet tall. With its rough-
hewn face and crimson cape and flickering eyes, which watched the crowd with a fury that matched the gentry’s, it exuded a far more predacious air than its prey-like, if larger, counterpart enthroned on the dais.

  Whatever they were, Desdemona had not read of their kind in books, nor heard them talked of in tales, nor found their likeness in any of the Voluptuist art she had encountered. The closest she’d come to something of their ilk were the remarkable statues her cousin Gideon, who now lived retired in the country, used to build out of clay—but he had given all that up years ago and taken to whittling. Even the gentry, who seemed to Desdemona each more fantastic than the last, apparently found these statue-like giants uncanny, for they left careful pockets of space between the giants and themselves, even at the cost of crowding each other.

  But none of those deliberate spaces were as large or as painfully described as that which separated the Gentry Sovereign from the rest of its court.

  “This cannot continue, Alban Idris!”

  This shout came from Desdemona’s right. She turned to look, and sucked back a gawk. The roly-poly creature was as bald as an eggplant, and as purple. She had no legs, but split off at the waist into a nest of black eels. Round, pinpricked eyes and gaping fangs took the place of her feet. She slid about on a slick of purple guck that her eelfare oozed beneath her.

  “The Valwode shreds at its boundaries,” this eely creature continued. “Nyx the Nightwalker’s true successor would give us new dreams. She would expand our boundaries, quicken our nurseries, call down new stars, new storms, renew us. But we waste away. All we have are our own memories of ourselves, and these we are fast forgetting. The feast of yesterday cannot sustain us today. Abdicate!” she shrieked, her eel-mouthed lower half sludging her across the floor. “Choose an heir who knows our ways! A ruler not made by cursed mortal hands to subjugate and destroy us! Give us back our own and go back to your own world!”

  “This is our world,” said the Gentry Sovereign, heavy as rain clouds. “It is ours too. We may have been made by mortal hands, but we were quickened by gentry magic. The Valwode is ours like Athe can never be. But we would share it with you.”

  “You would destroy it for us—and yourselves with it!”

  The Gentry Sovereign shook its antler-crowned head. At the movement, Desdemona felt another shock wave ripple through the crowd, like the electric spark of wool on a winter’s day, but room-wide.

  “It will not come to that.” Its voice was that of an avalanche troubled by melancholy: ashamed of its nature but unable to stop itself, ultimately, from burying whole villages beneath it. “But we understand your concerns. We hear you and will consider what you say. You have our word.”

  “Your word is noth—”

  But the angry voice stopped abruptly when the Gentry Sovereign stood.

  Desdemona shivered. All the voices, she realized, had fallen silent. All noise—the little restless movement of hair tossing, of wings shirring and fluttering, of claws clicking or hooves stamping on tile—had ceased. She would have tried to back away, out of that eerie silence, edge herself from the room, but she was wedged in by frozen gentry, and they would not—could not—move. It was as if the Gentry Sovereign, by the mere act of standing up, had cast over them a pall, like the velvet mantel that is laid upon a casket to signal the end of a funeral.

  Desdemona stirred uneasily, sweating under her furs. She regretted the motion a second later, when the Gentry Sovereign’s head turned, and it looked right at her.

  “No,” it said. “Stay.”

  The command was not directed at her, Desdemona realized (once her heart slid out of her throat and back into its proper cavity), but at several of its policemen-like siblings. They, she now saw, had begun moving toward her through the frozen gentry the second she showed agency of movement, drawing edged weapons from the scabbards and shoulder harnesses they wore. But obedient to the Gentry Sovereign, the policemen did not close in on her. They also did not re-sheathe their blades. The one in the red cape looked at her like it wanted to crush her skull in its bare hands. Nonetheless, each returned to its original position, resumed its unmoving stance, and stillness descended once again, as if everyone in the room except Desdemona and the Gentry Sovereign had been coffined and confined in crystal.

  “Come,” it said softly, to Desdemona.

  7: ORCHARDS OF SILVER AND OF GOLD

  “YOU ARE VERY KIND for receiving me so cordially on so little notice.”

  Desdemona was pleased to note that her voice was warm, her hand steady on the Gentry Sovereign’s arm. She felt clammy beneath her furs, and the sweet pink fog of champagne was rapidly disappearing behind her eyes, but at least she pronounced all her words correctly, and in order. Her mother would be proud.

  The Gentry Sovereign smiled. “My reign here is of recent appointment, but in that time I have not seen a mortal come through from Athe. I, of course, came from there, as did my siblings. We were . . . commissioned.”

  “Oh?” Desdemona asked politely. “By whom? I know a lot of artists. Maybe we are acquainted.”

  “We do not speak his name,” the Gentry Sovereign said. “When he realized we were conscious beings, that it was a gentry enchantment that compelled him to make us out of clay and then also quickened us to life, he sought to destroy us. The work of his own hands.” It shook its mighty head. “If ever we leave this place and return to Athe, we fear he will finish what he started. But if ever he comes here”—and the marble sinews beneath Desdemona’s hand tensed like folded steel—“we will break him apart.”

  Desdemona swallowed. She cast about for some light comment. What passed for idle chat about the weather in the perpetual pleasant twilight of the Valwode? How could she gossip without knowing any of the particulars of the court at Dark Breakers? What might this colossal, crowned ruler with eyes as sad as a dying deer’s consider a compliment?

  But she had trained at all the best cocktail parties of the Seafall glitterati; surely that training would not fail her now!

  “You certainly have a very interesting effect on your subjects,” she began caressingly. “How is it that you got that crowd of impudent rowdies to quiet down? I thought for sure I’d be thrown under their heels and stomped to death. But you controlled them so beautifully.”

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  “Alas,” said the Gentry Sovereign. “Oh, alas for that control!”

  They had left the throne room together by means of a hanging tapestry, sewn—or perhaps forged—of interlocking metallic leaves: oak, maple, catalpa, ash, yew, and elm. The leaves shimmered in alternating colors, pink gold to palladium to copper, yellow gold to platinum to silver to bronze. It had parted down the middle as they approached and peeled its parts up and back, the foliage furling and curling as shy as ferns. The passageway behind it had conducted them out into an orchard of trees, each made of the same precious metals as the tapestry’s leaves and twinkling under an opal vault of sky, and here the Gentry Sovereign stopped at last, pale feet sinking soundlessly into the many-hued depths of the mossery’s tiles. It lowered its great head to examine Desdemona, scrutinizing her so minutely that she felt peeled of all her layers of furs.

  “You are . . . not a poet?” it guessed.

  “I . . . no!” Desdemona almost wailed. “Why do people keep saying that? Why does that even matter?” Her throat was dry, dusty from the gold and silver pollen of those impossible trees.

  “Poetry might have protected you, somewhat, in this place. The gentry are as vulnerable to human art as humans are to gentry magic.”

  “Not all art, surely?” Desdemona asked, startled. She went up on her tiptoes. Though she was among the tallest of her acquaintances, this movement succeeded in extending her reach only to the Gentry Sovereign’s clavicle. “I’ve seen some very bad art in my day,” she whispered conspiratorially. “My friend Chaz can call it outsider art all he wants—but I say an elephant with a paintbrush has more technique.”

  “Good? Bad?” The Gentr
y Sovereign shook its head. “Art is humanity’s grasp for immortality. Humans seldom live a hundred years; gentry are more or less immortal—unless they destroy each other, or self-destruct. In the Valwode, art is the only thing that can teach an immortal how to die as a human dies. The gentry have always been susceptible to it. If a human fiddler plays for them, they must dance. If a human painter paints for them, they will pine before the work, helplessly transfixed until the novelty wears off—which, for those who have the leisure, might take decades. If a human makes a statue out of clay”—here the mountainous melancholy of its voice threatened another avalanche—“and gentry magic quickens it to life, that statue will rule as tyrant in the Valwode, no matter how it wishes otherwise.”

  “I’ve known tyrants,” Desdemona told it, her voice clotted with some passion she did not understand. “I saw you back there, and I don’t think that’s what you are.”

  The Gentry Sovereign shook its head sadly. “You have not been here long. Come,” it invited her. “Let us venture deeper into the orchard, that our subjects may wake from their stupor. We have found,” it explained, “that when we move, we bespell them almost instantly. Art in motion. For the gentry, that is a heady thing. For you, it would be as if, accustomed to drinking a single glass of wine, you were suddenly submerged headfirst in a barrel of it.”

  Desdemona snorted. She was accustomed to drinking a great deal more than one glass of wine. She had even, on one occasion, filled her bathtub with pink champagne and dipped herself bodily in it.

  The Gentry Sovereign continued, “But if we keep still and seated, our power is just diminished enough that our subjects may air their grievances, which are many and hard. For what the gentry say is true: we cannot dream them strong again. We cannot dream at all—we never learned!” it exclaimed bitterly. “And therefore our rule is but a rapid rush to Valwode’s end. The end of the gentry. And the end of us.”