Song of Susannah

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.

Susa

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. Susa

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-tumble into the dark, Susa

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!”

Susa

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, Susa

Susa

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, Susa

Was it true? And if it was, which of them had invited Mia in, like the vampire she truly was? Had it been Susa

Susa

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.”

Susa

“Yes,” she said. “All right. If I can help you get away with him, Iwill 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 foryou,sister, Susa

“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, Susa

Mia apparently mistook Susa

“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, Susa

“Do they mean to eat him? To feed those terrible elders with his corpse?”

“I’m almost sure not,” Susa

“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 havethat, will they?”

“I don’t think so,” Susa

“Then kill us, if it comes to that. Say you will, Susa

“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.”