tumble into the dark, Susannah realized how completely the needy, terrible bitch had possessed
her life. She knew why Mia had done it —because of the chap. The question was why she,
Susannah Dean, had allowed it to happen. Because she’d been possessed before? Because she
was as addicted to the stranger inside as Eddie had been to heroin?
She feared it might be true.
Swirling dark. And when she opened her eyes again, it was upon that savage moon hanging
above the Discordia, and the flexing red glow
(forge of the King)
on the horizon.
“Over here!” cried a woman’s voice, just as it had cried before. “Over here, out of the wind!”
Susannah looked down and saw she was legless, and sitting in the same rude dog-cart as on
her previous visit to the allure. The same woman, tall and comely, with black hair streaming in the wind, was beckoning to her. Mia, of course, and all this no more real than Susannah’s vague dream-memories of the banquet room.
She thought: Fedic, though, was real. Mia’s body is there just as mine is at this very moment being hustled through the kitchen behind the Dixie Pig, where unspeakable meals are prepared for inhuman customers. The castle allure is Mia’s dream-place, her refuge, her Dogan.
“To me, Susannah of Mid-World, and away from the Red King’s glow! Come out of the wind
and into the lee of this merlon!”
Susannah shook her head. “Say what you have to say and be done, Mia. We’ve got to have a
baby — aye, somehow, between us — and once it’s out, we’re quits. You’ve poisoned my life, so
you have.”
Mia looked at her with desperate intensity, her belly blooming beneath the serape, her hair
harried backward at the wind’s urging. “‘Twas you who took the poison, Susannah! ‘Twas you who swallowed it! Aye, when the child was still a seed unbloomed in your belly!”
Was it true? And if it was, which of them had invited Mia in, like the vampire she truly was?
Had it been Susan nah, or Detta?
Susannah thought neither.
She thought it might actually have been Odetta Holmes. Odetta who would never have broken
the nasty old blue lady’s forspecial plate. Odetta who loved her dolls, even though most of them were as white as her plain cotton panties.
“What do you want with me, Mia, daughter of none? Say and have finished with it!”
“Soon we’ll be together — aye, really and truly, lying together in the same childbed. And all I ask is that if a chance comes for me to get away with my chap, you’ll help me take it.”
Susannah thought it over. In the wilderness of rocks and gaping crevasses, the hyenas cackled.
The wind was numbing, but the pain that suddenly clamped her midsection in its jaws was
worse. She saw that same pain on Mia’s face and thought again how her entire existence seemed
to have become a wilderness of mirrors. In any case, what harm could such a promise do? The
chance probably wouldn’t come, but if it did, was she going to let the thing Mia wanted to call Mordred fall into the hands of the King’s men?
“Yes,” she said. “All right. If I can help you get away with him, I will help you.”
“Anywhere!” Mia cried in a harsh whisper. “Even . . .” She stopped. Swallowed. Forced herself to go on. “Even into the todash darkness. For if I had to wander forever with my son by my side, that would be no condemnation.”
Maybe not for you, sister, Susannah thought, but said nothing. In truth, she was fed up with Mia’s megrims.
“And if there’s no way for us to be free,” Mia said, “kill us.”
Although there was no sound up here but the wind and the cackling hyenas, Susannah could
sense her physical body still on the move, now being carried down a flight of stairs. All that real-world stuff behind the thinnest of membranes. For Mia to have transported her to this world,
especially while in the throes of childbirth, suggested a being of great power. Too bad that power couldn’t be harnessed, somehow.
Mia apparently mistook Susannah’s continued silence for reluctance, for she rushed around the
allure’s circular walkway in her sturdy huaraches and almost ran to where Susannah sat in her gawky, balky cart. She seized Susannah’s shoulders and shook her.
” Yar! ” she cried vehemently. “Kill us! Better we be together in death than to . . .” She trailed off, then spoke in a dull and bitter voice: “I’ve been cozened all along. Haven’t I?”
And now that the moment had come, Susannah felt neither vindication nor sympathy nor
sorrow. She only nodded.
“Do they mean to eat him? To feed those terrible elders with his corpse?”
“I’m almost sure not,” Susannah said. And yet cannibalism was in it somewhere; her heart whispered it was so.
“They don’t care about me at all,” Mia said. “Just the baby-sitter, isn’t that what you called me?
And they won’t even let me have that, will they?”
“I don’t think so,” Susannah said. ‘You might get six months to nurse him, but even that . . .”
She shook her head, then bit her lip as a fresh contraction gusted into her, turning all the muscles in her belly and thighs to glass. When it eased a little she finished, “I doubt it.”
“Then kill us, if it comes to that. Say you will, Susannah, do ya, I beg!”
“And if I do for you, Mia, what will you do for me? Assuming I could believe any word out of your liar’s mouth?”
“I’d free you, if chance allows.”
Susannah thought it over, and decided that a poor bargain was better than no bargain at all.
She reached up and took the hands which were gripping her shoulders. “All right. I agree.”
Then, as at the end of their previous palaver in this place, the sky tore open, and the merlon
behind them, and the very air between them. Through the rip, Susannah saw a moving hallway.
The image was dim, blurry. She understood she was looking through her own eyes, which were
mostly shut. Bulldog and Hawkman still had her. They were bearing her toward the door at the
end of the hallway —always, since Roland had come into her life, there was another door — and
she guessed they must think she’d passed out, or fainted. She supposed that in a way, she had.
Then she fell back into the hybrid body with the white legs . . . only who knew how much of
her previously brown skin was now white? She thought that situation, at least, was about to end, and she was delighted. She would gladly swap those white legs, strong though they might be, for a little peace of mind.
A little peace in her mind.
NINETEEN
“She’s coming around,” someone growled. The one with the bulldog face, Susannah thought. Not that it mattered; underneath they all looked like humanoid rats with fur growing out of their
bone-crusty flesh.
“Good deal.” That was Sayre, walking behind them. She looked around and saw that her
entourage consisted of six low men, Hawkman, and a trio of vampires. The low men wore pistols
in docker’s clutches . . . only she supposed that in this world you had to call them shoulder
holsters. When in Rome, dear, do ya as the Romans do. Two of the vampires had bahs, the
crossbow weapon of the Callas. The third was carrying a bitterly buzzing electric sword of the
sort the Wolves had wielded.
Ten-to-one odds, Susannah thought coolly. Not good . . . but it could be worse.
Can you — Mia’s voice, from somewhere inside.
Shut up, Susannah told her. Talking’s done.
Ahead, on the door they were approaching, she saw this:
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.
NewYork/Fedic
Maximum Security
VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED
It was familiar, and Susannah instantly knew why. She’d seen a sign similar to this during her
one brief visit to Fedic. Fedic, where the real Mia — the being who had assumed mortality in
what might be history’s worst bargain — was imprisoned.
When they reached it, Sayre pushed past her on Hawkman’s side. He leaned toward the door
and spoke something guttural deep in his throat, some alien word Susannah never could have
pronounced herself. It doesn’t matter, Mia whispered. I can say it, and if I need to, I can teach you another that you can say. But now . . . Susannah, I’m sorry for everything. Fare you well.
The door to the Arc 16 Experimental Station in Fedic came open. Susannah could hear a
ragged humming sound and could smell ozone. No magic powered this door between the worlds;
this was the work of the old people, and failing. Those who’d made it had lost their faith in