Song of Susannah

“No mark on his forehead, though?”

“Nay, I’m sure not, for he’s not one of what Pere Callahan calls the low men. Their job is the Breakers. The Breakers and no more.”

Susa

It was awful.

“Walter is, I suppose, what you’d call the Crimson King’s Prime Minister. He often travels in disguise, and is known in other worlds under other names, but always he is a gri

“I met him briefly,” Susa

“If you truly knew him, you’d wish for no such thing.”

“The Breakers you spoke of—where are they?”

“Why…Thunderclap, do’ee not know? The shadow-lands. Why do you ask?”

“No reason but curiosity,” Susa

Mia signaled a weary acceptance that Susa

“Susa

“No, I was just thinking what a relief it must have been when he came to you.”

Mia considered that, then smiled. Smiling changed her, made her look girlish and artless and shy. Susa

“After discovering your purpose and being trapped here by it…after seeing the Wolves getting ready to store the kids and then operate on them…after all that, Walter comes. The devil, in fact, but at least he can see you. At least he can hear your sad tale. And he makes you an offer.”

“He said the Crimson King would give me a child,” Mia said, and put her hands gently against the great globe of her belly. “My Mordred, whose time has come round at last.”

Mia pointed again at the Arc 16 Experimental Station. What she had called the Dogan of Dogans. The last remnant of her smile lingered on her lips, but there was no happiness or real amusement in it now. Her eyes were shiny with fear and—perhaps—awe.

“That’s where they changed me, made me mortal. Once there were many such places—there must have been—but I’d set my watch and warrant that’s the only one left in all of In-World, Mid-World, or End-World. It’s a place both wonderful and terrible. And it was there I was taken.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.” Susa

“Beneath it are passages which go under the castle,” Mia said. “At the end of one is a door that opens on the Calla side of Thunderclap, just under the last edge of the darkness. That’s the one the Wolves use when they go on their raids.”

Susa

“Nay, lady, do it please you; like many doors, the one that takes the Wolves from Fedic to the Calla side of Thunderclap goes in only one direction. When you’re on the other side, it’s no longer there.”

“Because it’s not amagic door, right?”

Mia smiled and nodded and patted her knee.

Susa

“Do you say so?”

“Yes. Only this time Tweedledum and Tweedledee are science and magic. Rational and irrational. Sane and insane. No matter what terms you pick, that’s a double-damned pair if ever there was one.”

“Aye? Do you say so?”

“Yes!Magic doors—like the one Eddie found and you took me through to New York—go both ways. The doors North Central Positronics made to replace them when thePrim receded and the magic faded…they go only one way. Have I got that right?”

“I think so, aye.”

“Maybe they didn’t have time to figure out how to make teleportation a two-lane highway before the world moved on. In any case, the Wolves go to the Calla side of Thunderclap by door and come back to Fedic by train. Right?”

Mia nodded.

Susa

“Aye.”

“Why do they bother takin em back at all?”

“Lady, I know not.” Then Mia’s voice dropped. “There’s another door under Castle Discordia. Another door in the rooms of ruin. One that goes…” She licked her lips. “That goes todash.”

“Todash?…I know the word, but I don’t understand what’s so bad—”

“There are endless worlds, your dinh is correct about that, but even when those worlds are close together—like some of the multiple New Yorks—there are endless spaces between. Think ya of the spaces between the i

There are monsters in the todash darkness.

Who had said that? Roland? She couldn’t remember for sure, and what did it matter? She thought she understood what Mia was saying, and if so, it was horrible.

“Rats in the walls, Susa

“Stop it, I get the picture.”

“That door beneath the castle—one of their mistakes, I have no doubt—goes tonowhere at all. Into the darkness between worlds. Todash-space. But not empty space.” Her voice lowered further. “That door is reserved for the Red King’s most bitter enemies. They’re thrown into a darkness where they may exist—blind, wandering, insane—for years. But in the end, something always finds them and devours them. Monsters beyond the ability of such minds as ours to bear thought of.”

Susa

In that same low and somehow horrible tone of confidentiality, Mia said, “There were many places where the old people tried to join magic and science together, but yon may be the only one left.” She nodded toward the Dogan. “It was there that Walter took me, to make me mortal and take me out ofPrim ’s way forever.

“To make me like you.”

Mia didn’t know everything, but so far as Susa