“Yes,” Sayre said. “I do seem to recall that, Mia.” He frowned as one does when presented with an especially pernicious problem, then brightened. The area of mask around one corner of
his mouth wrinkled up for a moment when he smiled, revealing a yellow snag of tooth growing
out of the fold where his lower lip met his upper. He let go of her with one hand in order to raise a finger in the gesture pedagogical. “The best of everything, yes. Question is, do you fill that particular bill?”
Appreciative murmurs of laughter greeted this sally. Mia recalled them calling her Mother and
saluting her hile, but that seemed distant now, like a meaningless fragment of dream.
You was good enough to tote him, though, wasn’t you? Detta asked from someplace deep
inside — from the brig, in fact. Yassuh! You ‘us good enough to do dot, sho!
“I was good enough to carry him, wasn’t I?” Mia almost spat at him. “Good enough to send the other one into the swamp to eat frogs, her all the time thinking they were caviar . . . I was good enough for that, wasn’t I?”
Sayre blinked, clearly startled by so brisk a response.
Mia softened again. “Sai, think of all I gave up!”
“Pish, you had nothing! ” Sayre replied. “What were you but a meaningless spirit whose existence revolved around no more than fucking the occasional saddletramp? Slut of the winds,
isn’t that what Roland calls your kind?”
“Then think of the other one,” Mia said. “She who calls herself Susannah. I have stolen all her life and purpose for my chap, and at your bidding.”
Sayre made a dismissive gesture. “Your mouth does you no credit, Mia. Therefore close it.”
He nodded to his left. A low man with a wide, bulldoggy face and a luxuriant head of curly
gray hair came forward. The red hole in his brow had an oddly slanted Chinese look. Walking
behind him was another of the bird-things, this one with a fierce, dark brown hawk’s head
protruding from the round neck of a tee-shirt with duke blue devils printed on it. They took hold of her. The bird-thing’s grip was repulsive — scaly and alien.
“You have been an excellent custodian,” Sayre said, “on that much we can surely agree. But we must also remember that it was Roland of Gilead’s jilly who actually bred the child, mustn’t we?”
” That’s a lie! ” she screamed. ” Oh, that is a filthy . . . LIE! ”
He went on as if he’d not heard her. “And different jobs require different skills. Different strokes for different folks, as they say.”
” PLEASE! ” Mia shrieked.
The hawkman put its taloned hands to the sides of its head and then rocked from side to side,
as if deafened. This witty pantomime drew laughter and even a few cheers.
Susannah dimly felt warmth gush down her legs — Mia’s legs — and saw her jeans darken at the crotch and thighs. Her water had finally broken.
“Let’s go-ooo-ooo . . . and have a BABY! ” Sayre proclaimed in game-show-host tones of excitement. There were too many teeth in that smile, a double row both top and bottom. “After that, we’ll see. I promise you that your request will be taken under consideration. In the
meantime . . . Hile, Mia! Hile, Mother!”
” Hile, Mia! Hile, Mother! ” the rest cried, and Mia suddenly found herself borne toward the back of the room, the bulldog-faced low man gripping her left arm and the hawkman gripping
her right. Hawkman made a faint and unpleasant buzzing sound in his throat each time he
exhaled. Her feet barely touched the rug as she was carried toward the bird-thing with the yellow feathers; Canaryman, she thought him.
Sayre brought her to a stop with a single hand-gesture and spoke to Canaryman, pointing
toward the Dixie Pig’s street door as he did. Mia heard Roland’s name, and also Jake’s. The
Canaryman nodded. Sayre pointed emphatically at the door again and shook his head. Nothing
gets in, that headshake said. Nothing!
The Canaryman nodded again and then spoke in buzzing chirps that made Mia feel like
screaming. She looked away, and her gaze happened on the mural of the knights and their ladies.
They were at a table she recognized — it was the one in the banqueting hall of Castle Discordia.
Arthur Eld sat at the head with his crown on his brow and his lady-wife at his right hand. And his eyes were a blue she knew from her dreams.
Ka might have chosen that particular moment to puff some errant draft across the dining room of the Dixie Pig and twitch aside the tapestry. It was only for a second or two, but long enough for Mia to see there was another dining room — a private dining room — behind it.
Sitting at a long wooden table beneath a blazing crystal chandelier were perhaps a dozen men
and women, their appledoll faces twisted and shrunken with age and evil. Their lips had burst
back from great croggled bouquets of teeth; the days when any of these monstrosities could close their mouths were long gone. Their eyes were black and oozing some sort of noisome tarry stuff
from the corners. Their skin was yellow, scaled with teeth, and covered with patches of diseased-looking fur.
What are they? Mia screamed. What in the name of the gods are they?
Mutants, Susannah said. Or perhaps the word is hybrids. And it doesn’t matter, Mia. You saw what matters, didn’t you?
She had, and Susannah knew it. Although the velvet swag had been twitched aside but briefly,
it had been long enough for both of them to see the rotisserie which had been set in the middle of that table, and the headless corpse twirling upon it, skin browning and puckering and sizzling
fragrant juices. No, the smell in the air hadn’t been pork. The thing turning on the spit, brown as a squab, was a human baby. The creatures around it dipped delicate china cups into the drippings beneath, toasted each other . . . and drank.
The draft died. The tapestry settled back into place. And before the laboring woman was once
more taken by the arms and hustled away from the dining room and deeper into this building that straddled many worlds along the Beam, she saw the joke of that picture. It wasn’t a drumstick
Arthur Eld was lifting to his lips, as a first, casual, glance might have suggested; it was a baby’s leg. The glass Queen Rowena had raised in toast was not filled with wine but with blood.
“Hile, Mia!” Sayre cried again. Oh, he was in the best of spirits, now that the homing pigeon had come back to the cote.
Hile, Mia! the others screamed back. It was like some sort of crazy football cheer. Those from behind the mural joined in, although their voices were reduced to little more than growls. And
their mouths, of course, were stuffed with food.
“Hile, Mother!” This time Sayre offered her a mocking bow to go with the mockery of his respect.
Hile, Mother! the vampires and the low men responded, and on the satiric wave of their applause she was carried away, first into the kitchen, then into the pantry, and then down the
stairs beyond.
Ultimately, of course, there was a door.
EIGHTEEN
Susannah knew the kitchen of the Dixie Pig by the smell of obscene cookery: not pork after all, but certainly what the pirates of the eighteenth century had called long pork.
For how many years had this outpost served the vampires and low men of New York City?
Since Callahan’s time, in the seventies and eighties? Since her own, in the sixties? Almost
certainly longer. Susannah supposed there might have been a version of the Dixie Pig here since the time of the Dutch, they who had bought off the Indians with sacks of beads and planted their murderous Christian beliefs ever so much more deeply than their flag. A practical folk, the
Dutch, with a taste for spareribs and little patience for magic, either white or black.
She saw enough to recognize the kitchen for the twin of the one she had visited in the bowels of Castle Discordia. That was where Mia had killed a rat that had been trying to claim the last remaining food in the place, a pork-roast in the oven.
Except there was no oven and no roast, she thought. Hell, no kitchen. There was a piglet out behind the barn, one of Tian and Zalia Jaffords’s. And I was the one who killed it and drank its hot blood, not she. By then she mostly had me, although I still didn’t know it. I wonder if Eddie
—
As Mia took her away for the last time, tearing her free from her thoughts and sending her a-