THE SECRET ROOM WAS small and round. At its center, dominating the space but for a thin circumference of walkway surrounding it, was a cage. Its bars grew down from the ceiling and pierced through the floor like the roots of an old iron tree. The iron looked out of place in the Valwode, cruel and dull, as if even the light feared to touch it. A rusty abscess burrowing into the beautiful dream.
Desdemona gripped her splitting skull and closed her eyes. Why had she butted Farklewhit’s head like that? She had to swallow several mouthfuls of saliva before the nausea passed and she could see again.
The opaque outer walls of the oubliette, having thinned to mist when Desdemona passed through them, firmed up again after Chaz and Farklewhit tumbled into the room behind her. They jostled her throbbing skull with loud congratulations and crowded her with exultant embraces. Swallowing a surge of near-vomit, she shoved them away, and they went off laughing to examine the cage more closely. Desdemona crumpled against the smooth wall, head between her knees, and tried to breathe deeply.
She only looked up when she heard Farklewhit call out in a tender voice, “Surra-lurra? O my hagliest? My nursling? Wake thou, and speak to thine own Umber-sire.”
Desdemona could see him standing on the far side of the cage, peering in. His eyes flashed between the bars, jeweled pools of fiery amber in the moon-cool room. After a long pause, something stirred within the cage. Thin as snakeskin tumbling over a stony plain, the answer came.
“Nanny?”
Farklewhit’s sensitive lips trembled. He stepped closer to the cage, raising his hands, almost touching the iron bars. “It is I, my mandragora. And these two here, who helped me find you.”
He nodded toward Desdemona through the bars. Desdemona thought she saw movement in the cage, something turning slowly to look at her.
“A Tattercoats came down-worlds to barter for her heart’s desire—and you were your fond father’s fee. He has branded her brow, threatened those she held dear, and demanded her life in forfeit if she failed—but she performed her task beautifully.” He pointed at Chaz. “This one’s the beloved. The sacrifice, should we fail to ply you free.”
“Poor maid,” said the voice, and another slight, restless movement indicated that the speaker had turned toward Chaz. “How tender she is. How new.”
Desdemona’s eyes began to sort the shadows at the center of the cage into a heap of rags and spindly limbs. Susurra was sucked as deeply into herself—and as far from the iron bars—as goblinly possible. Two black-purple points, like the berries of a deadly nightshade, gleamed out from a face the color of lace left to molder on a tombstone. She was staring at Chaz.
“Would you be goblin meat, maid,” she asked, “for my sake? Flee!”
“What are you talking about?” asked Chaz. “I’m not anyone’s meat.” Her back was to her best friend; Chaz could not see Desdemona flinch and stagger to her feet as she herself advanced toward the cage in a rustle of soiled glitter. Puddling down to the floor, Chaz pressed her face against the bars.
“Why do you look at me so kindly?” Susurra demanded in her desiccated voice. “I am nothing. I am finished.”
“Princess, I came all this way,” Chaz whispered across the malicious shadows that piled between herself and Susurra. Her voice was so tender with pity that Desdemona almost did not recognize it. “Three nights ago—a lifetime ago—I saw your likeness in a painting. Ever since then, I have longed to help you. I, too, know what it’s like to be”—she drew in an unsteady breath—“caged.”
Susurra let out a soughing sob. “Free me! Free me, maid, I beg you! Or kill me before you leave again—for I cannot bear it!”
Chaz thrust an arm through the bars and reached out to her. “Princess . . . how long is it since you’ve been touched?”
“Years.”
After a short hesitation, Susurra stretched out on her belly. Slowly, she began sliding herself, inch by agonizing inch, closer to the iron bars.
“Years since any touch or taste or kiss.”
Her long, many-jointed fingers sidled up to Chaz’s wrist, wrapping it once about, then twice—like, Desdemona thought, a parasitic vine.
“Years,” said Susurra, “since I have sucked the fruit of the Ympsie tree, or drunk of hangman’s dew, or licked the dwayberries our merry boys brought to market in their baskets of blue grave moss.”
Bending her head, the goblin girl set her pallid cheek against Chaz’s palm. The dark lights in her eyes blinked out as her exhausted lids fell.
“Beloved maid,” she whispered, “I beg you. Pass me some blade, some broken mirror. Open your kindly veins for my cup—a very little will do. Let me drink the iron in your blood and die of it. Oh, if Nyx had been kind, she would have killed me quickly! But she left me here—and forgot me!”
Farklewhit made a noise of distress. Tears were rolling down Chaz’s face. Only Desdemona, trying to hold her splitting head together and keep her nausea at bay, felt nothing but a sick impatience.
“Oh, my princess!” said Chaz. “We will free you and be rid of this place. You will live—and thrive!—and spite those who would obliterate you. I know something of this, too. I’ll help you.” Casting a quick, scolding look over her shoulder, Chaz ordered Desdemona, “Don’t lummox about like a knuckle-dragger! Unlock her cage!”
Desdemona opened her mouth to retort, but a searing pain scorched her brow and took all her breath with it. She whumphed instead.
“There is no door,” Farklewhit said flatly. “I’ve been around the cage twice.”
Susurra nestled deeper into Chaz’s palm. Chaz reached her other arm through the bars to stroke her hair.
“There is no door,” the goblin girl affirmed. “There is no key. There is no way out for you or me . . . my beloved.”
Desdemona blinked, dizzy, as the scoring pain began to fade. Something was happening inside the cage. A series of slow, slender movements she could not quite parse. Until she could. Inspirited by Chaz’s caresses, Susurra’s hair had begun to stir. The long strands lifted themselves into the air like the legs of prodigious black widows stitched abdomen-first into the mushroom-sallow skin of Susurra’s skull. Stiff, strange, and shiny black like Farklewhit’s hooves, each separate strand was segmented and clawed, sensitive to the movements of its neighbors but acting of its own accord.
“Chaz,” Desdemona warned apprehensively.
Chaz’s glower of burning reproach was harsh enough to make Desdemona drive her thumbs under the ridge of her brow. She wished her fingers were either very hot knitting needles or sharpened icicles. On the floor, still stroking Susurra’s sinister hair, Chaz started crooning to the Night Hag as if she happened to be a stray animal bedraggled by rain and wind.
“You poor thing. You poor, tired darling.”
Susurra’s unhappy yawn showed a glimpse of tiny, pointed teeth.
“Nyx caged me that I might learn to dream the Valwode strong,” she confided in her iron-abraded voice. “But I could never dream here. Never sleep. Not once, with all this iron about me. No friends, no food, no night to shutter my eyes. For years. To be imprisoned, I know, was what I deserved for my act of treachery. But oh, I would have preferred death!”
“Hush! No more talk of death. Sleep now.” Chaz set the fingertips of her free hand over Susurra’s eyelids, like silk buttons on a butterfly’s wings. “Dream that you wake free.”
Susurra’s breathing slowed and deepened. Soon, she was asleep.
The bridge of Desdemona’s nose was flaring and pulsing like a terrible green coal. The top of her skull felt sawed off, empty. Time, time! She was almost out of it. But she could not think. She could barely see through the rain of infinitesimal scalpels lancing the whites of her eyeballs. Think! She had to think!
Farklewhit pounced. “Tattercoats!”
Desdemona yelped. Last she’d glimpsed him, Farklewhit had been prowling around the cage, examining it from all angles. Now, he was standing before her, crackling with fury.
“No door!” His shout penetrated her pain fog. “Seven hells swallow me! Did I come all this way under your hourglass just to stare at what I cannot touch?”
Desdemona shook her head, trying to free it from the thorn thicket growing out of her eye sockets.
“What do you mean there’s no door?”
Farklewhit threw up his hairy arms. “What do you mean what do I mean? See for yourself: all bars, no door. All cage, no key. No window, no latch, no catch, no joint, no jamb, no ingress or egress. No hope. For any of us!”
“But . . .” Desdemona pointed. “There is a door!”
“What?” Farklewhit’s arms fell. Very quietly he asked, “What did you say?”
“That door. There.”
It was right in front of them; Desdemona could see it more clearly than anything else through the green-edged aura of her migraine. The door was the shape of an hourglass, translucent. It had not been there until Chaz put Susurra to sleep, after adjuring her to dream herself free. Susurra, it seemed, was following orders.
Farklewhit turned to look and yelped. But Chaz, whose left arm had seemingly been bisected by a vitreous guillotine when the door appeared, only gasped softly. On the other side of the glass, her hand kept stroking Susurra’s hair. The clear pane magnified and distorted Susurra’s shape, bloating her like a river-bottom corpse, her hair an undulating forest of black waterweeds. Desdemona began to laugh. The sound came out in short, sharp screams.
“There! Now she’s dreamed the key! The key is in the lock!”
But though it was Susurra who dreamed the door, it was still Nyx the Nightwalker’s key. The bow was an elaborate twist of black iron, cold and deadly, and the shank, long as a shiv, was jammed up to its collar in the center of the hourglass. Farklewhit leapt at it, and when his fingers closed around the shank, he sighed in triumphant relief.
This immediately turned into a hiss of pain. His hand began to smoke. Green blood boiled from his cuticles. The woolly hair on his fingers blackened and curled off in singed crisps. Farklewhit roared in pain but kept his grip on the key, throwing his body’s weight against the lock. But the key would not turn.
Finally, he wrenched away before the iron melted his hand right through, howling, “Nyx, you night worm! You slimy, daughter-stealing, double-crossing, clay-kissing traitor! Give me a key I can turn!” and hurled himself against the iron bars. Each time his body made impact, there was a clang like the inside of a cathedral bell, the smell of scorched mutton.
“Nanny!” Desdemona flattened herself against the bars in front of him, throwing her arms out. “Nanny, stop! Stop!”
Her outstretched fingers slicked the iron key. It was cold to the touch, slick from Farklewhit’s greasy goblin blood, but it did not burn her.
Farklewhit wheeled away from her, burly arms blackened, broad chest smoking, looking for another opening in the cage. His pink lace apron was in tatters, his pelt matted, splattered with blood and fluid from burst blisters. At the sight of his wildness, Desdemona was crushed by the same pity she had seen on Chaz’s face. She had never known anything like it. It felt like dying.
No. That was not precisely true, was it? She had felt this panicked sadness, this helplessness, twice before. The first time a few days ago at her mother’s fund-raiser at the Seafall City Opera. And then again, when she read the headlines the next day. Terrible as this feeling was, it had brought her here, to this.
She said quietly, “Let me try, Nanny.”
Whatever he heard in her voice stopped Farklewhit from throwing himself against the cage yet again. He sagged in front of Desdemona, eerily, mournfully calm.
“It’s our last chance, Tattercoats. Your hourglass is almost . . .”
“I know.” Desdemona turned to face the door. “But like you said—it’s my task. Mrs. Howell sent me.”
And closing her fingers around the key, she twisted it in the lock.
It was like trying to turn the world against its axis. Memory, all jumbled up with nightmare, crashed over her, like an iron tide dragging her from an iron shore: her mother at the head of a crowd of white-clad women, beating a policeman with her umbrella until he battered her to the sidewalk with his slapjack; her father, teeth clamped over his cigar, shouting into the telephone as black oil poured from his mouth; Salissay, on their stakeout of the ULE headquarters, sliding across the summer-sticky leather seats of the Model Noir to slip her tongue into Desdemona’s mouth; the Phossy Gals dolled up in their evening gowns and diamonds, dying eyes defiant for the camera; a line of miners disappearing into the shaft station at Merula Colliery, the lamps on their helmets blazing like eyes; and last, Nyx the Nightwalker, sitting across the embroidered ultramarine expanse of their table at the Chiamberra, watching Desdemona.
Watching her. Right now. Weighing her, judging her: every tuft of fur, every tail, every tooth.
And then, almost imperceptibly, across time, across worlds, staring directly into Desdemona’s eyes, Nyx nodded.
The world turned against its axis.
The iron key turned in its invisible lock.
The hourglass on Desdemona’s forehead tipped, upended, like a decanter knocked on its side by careless revelers. The desperate pressure of those green-glowing names burst into the lightness of wings.
And the cage, shrieking, fell to dust.