Desdemona and the Deep Read online

  The expression on the Gentry Sovereign’s sculpted face reminded Desdemona of the Phossy Gals from Albright Match Factory. She saw them again with dizzying clarity, just as they had been when her mother brought her to meet them, so that they could thank her for the loan of her dresses. Fifteen girls, standing in the greenroom of the Seafall City Opera House in borrowed satin and diamonds, staring at her.

  Twisted faces and tumorous abscesses aside, that dying, hopeless look was the same.

  Ashamed, she whispered, “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

  “It seems that since our birth we have brought nothing but sorrow. But let us walk on, while there are still paths to walk.”

  Covering her hand with its, the Gentry Sovereign proceeded with Desdemona into the orchard. For many minutes there was no noise but the wind-chime rustle of metal leaves, the sound of their footsteps swallowed by moss. Even accustomed as she was to artifice, Desdemona could tell the luminous calm of this ever-evening air lacked vitality. There was no birdsong, no busy buzz of insects; there was not even an invisible sense of slow sap moving, fungi sporing in the sweet decay of deadfall, taciturn earthworms cycling through their brief, necessary lives just out of sight beneath the loam.

  “What happens to . . . un-poets?” she asked presently, jittery in the twinkling air. “What will being in the Valwode do to someone like me? Eventually?” Would that fine drifting glitter coat her lungs until they hardened into silver and gold and she suffocated like a miner slowly dying from silicosis after too many decades underground?

  “Eventually?” The Gentry Sovereign’s wide black eyes turned toward her, already wet with tears. “It will happen sooner than that. It is happening now, and you do not even realize it. Before we leave this orchard, you will surrender all capacity for thought to the drowning pleasures of your senses. Drugged by the dream of this place, you will forget your home world, your desire to return, your family, friends, beloveds, all the while sickening for the sunlight of Athe that never shines beyond the Veil. Most humans come here to do precisely that. Forget.”

  “I won’t forget!” Desdemona protested, but her tongue tasted metallic, as if she had been licking lies. “I can’t!”

  “Perhaps you ought to tell us why you are here,” said the Gentry Sovereign, with a soft and frightening compassion. “Just in case.”

  Drawing deeply of that dusty hush, Desdemona opened her mouth to tell her story but started coughing instead. The spell lasted long enough that her eyes and nose were streaming by the time she lifted her pounding head. Wiping her lips on her weasel wristband, she saw that her saliva left streaks of gold and silver on the brown fur. The shimmering dizzied her. She felt it was a secret alphabet she was on the brink of learning. “No,” she said, and rubbed the wet spot out. “No!”

  Glancing fearfully up into the Gentry Sovereign’s patient face, Desdemona confessed everything. From her mother’s Factory Girls with Phossy Jaw Charity Fund-raiser, and tricking Chaz into buying Elliot Howell’s encaustic at the silent auction and drinking too much rum that night only to return to Breaker House, where she overheard a conversation between her father and his fireplace, and the newspaper article about the mining disaster the following morning, and meeting Mrs. Howell for lunch at the Chiamberra, and learning that she must become a poet by midnight that night, so that she could pass through the walls and thence through worlds.

  “I didn’t think I’d come this far!” Desdemona burst out. “I can’t afford to drown in dreams now. I have to find Susurra the Night Hag! Mrs. Howell says she’s the only thing the Kobold King wants. The only thing he’ll trade for. If I want to get my miners back . . .”

  At her mention of Susurra the Night Hag, the Gentry Sovereign stirred restlessly. As Desdemona talked on, it began to pace, striding the wide aisles of the orchard, the rake of its antlers tearing clumps of copper and silver leaves from the trees and sending fist-sized spheres of faceted fruit tumbling from branches of galvanized gold. Only when she ran out of words did the Gentry Sovereign pause in its paces, nodding to itself, slowly, slowly, like a branch bowed under too great a weight of snow, and whisper, “If she can but be found!”

  “Will you help me, then?” Desdemona asked, practically panting with eagerness, hearing the wheeze in her lungs. “Help me look for her—before it’s too late? Before I forget?”

  “Help you? Do you not understand?” the Gentry Sovereign cried, rounding on her so swiftly she uttered a surprised yelp. “We have searched for her already! The Kobold King sent us his ambassador when we first took on the Antler Crown, begging us to return his daughter. We gave the ambassador our full cooperation. Between us, we have torn Dark Breakers apart looking for her—to no avail. But you!”

  Galloping forward, the Gentry Sovereign seized Desdemona by the fur on her shoulders, lifting her in the air like a child. “You! Nyx the Nightwalker sent you! At last! The Queen-in-Exile speaks from beyond the Veil! She has forgiven the gentry for backing Susurra’s mutinous attempt at deposition. When she gave us her Antler Crown, she must have known the wrack and ruin we would cause. That was her vengeance. But now, now she declares her mercy!”

  For the first time, the Gentry Sovereign smiled, wild hope illuminating its face like saint-fire. “She means you to find the true heir,” it told Desdemona. “The Dreamer! The one who will save us. Nyx does not mean the Valwode to die after all!”

  “I—I don’t think you understand,” Desdemona stammered. “I don’t know where she . . .”

  “You will. You were chosen for the task. But we must find you some protection. You are not a poet,” the Gentry Sovereign reminded her worriedly, “and as you are, you will not last long. We are powerless to help you, but . . .” Again that smile. “But we know someone who can.”

  Desdemona’s heart pounded harder in her chest. Or was it just laboring to remember how to beat?

  Throwing back its mighty horned head, the Gentry Sovereign bellowed, “FARKLEWHIT!”

  The response was immediate. From the air at Desdemona’s left elbow there came a loud popping noise. This was followed by a fizz, a flare, a sizzling dazzle of color so bright in the mother-of-pearl twilight that Desdemona had to squint her eyes against it. And out of this fireworks display stepped a cloven-hoofed creature in a pink lace apron.

  With ample belly, round biceps, round calves, and round haunches, he looked as if all his disparate parts had been sewn of very hairy, very taut, pincushions. Even his curly horns wound round and around themselves, looping tightly behind his ears and curving up again to frame a cherubic face. His horns were rooted just above the corkscrewing thatch of his eyebrows, which were in no way discernable from the rest of his hairline. Between these horns was perched a baggy, sagging, many-colored, quilted nightcap that terminated at the tip with a pom-pom of pulsating light, like a parade sparkler that never fizzled out. He was grinning from ear to ear.

  “You called, sire?”

  8: THE MIRRADARRA DOORWAY

  THE UMBER FARKLEWHIT, OFFICIAL goblin emissary for Erl-Lord Kalos Kantzaros in the Valwode, beamed at Desdemona from beneath his lurid cap as the Gentry Sovereign made introductions.

  “Thank you, sire, thank you—very flattering, sire,” he said, and curtsied to the Gentry Sovereign. Thin black lips in a whitish muzzle formed curlicues when he smiled, the bridge of his V-shaped nose wrinkling, the corners of his eyes crinkling. His eyes were wide, mellow amber in color, split sideways with pupils like flattened black boxes. The ruffled hem of his pink apron flounced up occasionally to reveal such of his genitalia as was not obscured by the astonishing quantity of woolly brown hair that covered his body from neck to ankles. At that point, his shaggy legs gave way to a pair of hooves, obsidian-glass-black and polished to a shine that reminded Desdemona of a favorite pair of patent leather T-bars she had worn to holes at age five.

  The hooves gave a clicking little caper. She laughed, and her lungs felt more her own, her vision clearing of the copper and silver flecks that floated before it. She
looked directly down into the amber eyes smiling up at her and made a curtsy of her own.

  “Oh, succulent and sweetly moistened mortal maid!” cried the Umber Farklewhit, with another rammy grin and a flirt of his immodest apron. “Do you, by chance, like to polka?”

  “I do, in fact!” Desdemona said. Her voice came out strong and clear, unladen of ore, and Farklewhit, with that grin that split his face into hemispheres, seized her hands and swung her about, as if to dance a polka down the orchard aisles that very moment. But the Gentry Sovereign intervened.

  “Farklewhit, halt. This maid has come—has been sent by Nyx herself!—to rescue Susurra! But the Valwode eats at her; we fear she has no time. We thought perhaps . . .” it trailed off, suddenly unsure.

  “You want me to take her to the Mirradarra Doorway, eh?” Farklewhit bounced from Desdemona’s side right up to the Gentry Sovereign. “Well, well, why not? What wouldn’t I do, after all, for so ripe and knightly a maid, who has volunteered for such a perilous journey to rescue our princess—asking no reward for herself!”

  “Actually . . .” Desdemona began, but the effect of the orchard redoubled when Farklewhit moved away from her, and now her tongue felt thick and slow. Almost immediately, he was at her side again, with a cozy little head-butt to the ribs. It was quite the clout, but it knocked her brain clear again.

  “All this glitter getting to you, Tattercoats?” Farklewhit asked, with a sympathetic but mischievous wink. “Good thing you’re wearing furs, eh? You’d have seven hells of a time washing this stuff off your skin.”

  Desdemona shifted under the heavy mass of capes and coats and cuffs. She was hot, sweaty, vaguely nauseated, but she had no desire to remove even one layer. She said, muzzily, “First time I’ve taken Mother’s advice since I started wearing lipstick. She said the world is a war zone and beauty can be weaponized, so treat all makeup like war paint.”

  He stroked her sable collar. “Furs are a fine look for you. Like the Wild Hunt had a hangover when they dressed you.”

  One of the Gentry Sovereign’s cool, bloodless hands fell upon Farklewhit’s burly shoulder, the other on Desdemona’s. She thought the exquisite gentleness of its touch must be a matter of practice: a moment’s inattention, and it could snap her collarbone like a straw. If this were a real danger, Farklewhit did not seem to fear it; his eyes rolled lasciviously and his eyelashes fluttered maniacally, and his hairy hips vibrated so rambunctiously that Desdemona began to intuit a tail somewhere beneath the apron’s ribbons. She only just stopped herself from peeking to verify its presence.

  “Will you help her?” the Gentry Sovereign asked Farklewhit, drawing the three of them together so tightly their heads touched. “She is our only hope, and she hasn’t much time. Look into her eyes.”

  Farklewhit obeyed. “Duplicitous and far from innocent,” he pronounced, like a doctor with a diagnosis or a judge with verdict. “I like her! We’ll see what the Mirradarra can do in the way of, what do mortals call it, protective coloration? No guarantees, of course.” He peered hopefully at Desdemona. “It might just swallow you up. But if it doesn’t, you’ll have free range of the Valwode, my chicken—and Bana besides—without the usual perils. Of course, it’ll change you. But you won’t mind that, will you? You’ll hardly notice it. Mostly cosmetic.”

  Desdemona had no idea what he was talking about, but the power of his proximity had begun to fail her, and her knees were going soft again, running down the backs of her legs like molten metal. She was melting right down to the ground . . .

  “Oops! Upsy-daisy, Tattercoats!” Farklewhit cried and heaved her over his shoulder. “That’s it. Mind your cranium.”

  He was quite strong, his arms like knots of wood about her. Desdemona, bent in half, head hanging upside down near his rank and woolly backside—Farklewhit did have a tail, after all!—finally felt solid again.

  “Go! Go!” cried the Gentry Sovereign. “Speed you on your way and back again—for if the Valwode fails, Susurra fails with it—and so do we all!”

  * * *

  There was a wood of black thorn, twined all about in vines like milk-white pythons, and a tunnel burrowing through it from one end to the other without stutter or curve. “Woodwyrm hatchling,” Farklewhit informed Desdemona, during one of her brief reentries into consciousness. “You can tell by the frass. Ravenous at birth. Worse when it grows up.” Other than that, Desdemona remembered little about the journey.

  Later, much later, what she recalled most was the singing.

  It was the flowers she was hearing, of course, their swelling silver throb, but she did not realize it at the time, jouncing like a sack of wet socks against Farklewhit’s backside. The light from their petals was the only illumination in that deep couloir of thorn and vine: an eerie, low-sunk luster that shivered and chimed whenever it was noticed. Desdemona, fading in and out of consciousness, noticed. How could she ignore them? The flowers formed the endless incandescent archway through which they moved, and they bobbed and nodded, glistered and glowed at her, as if wrought from jewels by a gentry lapidary’s immortal hands.

  “Sopranos,” Desdemona muttered.

  “Like their singing, do you, Tattercoats?” Farklewhit asked her. “That’s gentry magic for you! Pah! Even their flora is all nectar bribes and snap traps. Now, where I come from, we tend to go a more fungal route, and since we’ve hardy stomachs, we’ll happily finish off a nice death cap risotto with a deadly dapperling soufflé and consider ourselves well-fed! But those flowers! Try not to listen to them too closely, Tattercoats—not till the Mirradarra Doorway gets through with you. After that, you’ll be able to hum along!”

  Desdemona burrowed her face into the straggly bow of his apron strings. “Never trust sopranos.”

  “I never do,” Farklewhit agreed cheerily. “Especially ones that exude sticky mucilage!”

  She dreamed, then, of all the opera singers she had ever bedded—the number was not moderate—parading past her, wearing nothing but parasitic flowers. The baritone-basses, affable and cuddly (but terribly convincing as villains from a distance); the earthy, bluestocking contraltos (the lower their tessitura, the better they kissed, though they always wanted to hold hands and discuss literature afterward); the tenors, who were not invariably treacherous (and were even better when they came in threes, but good luck getting them to talk about anything except themselves); and the perilous sopranos. Desdemona liked sopranos best when they were corralled en masse in her sunken bathtub, ethereal voices rising from the steam like flights of naughty angels.

  “If only I hadn’t cleaned my ears the other night,” Farklewhit complained, bounding along, “I might’ve lent you the wax to stop your own! Oh well. I’ll just blather on a bit, see if the down-world bray of my lusty lungs interferes with their harmonics—at least long enough to get you to the door. Where shall we start? Introductions? I feel so close to you already, what with your nose in my crack. You can call me Nanny, now we’ve been so intimate. Nanny Farklewhit, at your service, nursemaid to Kalos Kantzaros’s twelve fiendish daughters before ever I was his ambassador. Oh, my girls! My noxious little beauties. A nest of vipers! How I loved their wickedness. You remind me of them—Susurra especially. You never told me your name, but never mind—best not say such things aloud in the Valwode. Tattercoats will do. And it suits you. You can always tell a Tattercoats by her fashion sense. That is, she doesn’t have any. Now, a Tattercoats is a species of the Nine-Tails genus, from the Thousandfurs family. But if you weren’t a Tattercoats, you might just be a Night Hag, like my girl Susurra. Something of the scorpion when you smile . . .”

  Desdemona faded out again, this time dreaming that the crumpled wad of newsprint in her pocket, soggy and balled up like an egg, hatched three hundred fifty-six scorpions, each one bearing the name of a dead or missing miner. They crawled out of her pocket and into her furs, finding the skin beneath and stabbing her three hundred fifty-six times, then three hundred fifty-six times again, and again, and again, until she
screamed and screamed for them to stop, but nothing stopped the stabbing, or the venom coursing like fire ants through her veins.

  “That’s right, Tattercoats. Screaming means you’re still here. Screaming means you’re fighting.”

  For the first time since she met him, Farklewhit sounded grim. Desdemona tried to open her eyes, to see what had worried him so, but they seemed to have swelled shut. She was falling apart, rotting through and through, like her mother’s Phossy Gals . . .

  She moaned softly.

  “Keep fighting it. That’s what hurts so much. If you gave in, it’d be bliss. It’s hurting you because you’re fighting it. But we’re almost to the Mirradarra Doorway now. Come on. Flash some fang. Show some claw. Do like the goblins do. Never mind the gentry dream.”

  She woke again when her head abruptly stopped bobbing up and down in time to Farklewhit’s fast trot. He slithered her off his shoulder and stood her on her feet, the rough callouses of his finger pads digging into her eyelids, cracking the hard honey-crust of pollen and precious metal that sealed them shut, scraping them free. Desdemona opened her bleary eyes to see Farklewhit’s long, flat, leaf-shaped ears twitching in the gloom. He saw her staring and gave her a little push and spin.

  “No time to waste. Turn around. March. Have to approach the Mirradarra Doorway on your own two feet. Them’s the rules.”

  Wearily, she marched, the bubble hem of her pink taffeta train rustling after her, dragging up bits of moss and fern and fallen petal like a trawl. The moss gave way to paving stones under her feet: glass-smooth, sea-gray, lighting up at each footfall, and then going dark again. Black thorns caught at her hair. White vines whipped her face. The flowers sang and sang and sang.

  “Is it getting darker?” she asked, her voice as scratched as her face.

  Farklewhit was lost in the murk behind her. Only his heavy breathing and the heat at her back reassured her. He said quietly, “We approach the boundary between twilight and night.”