by Y. S. Lee
The Underwater Ballroom Society
Edited by
Tiffany Trent and Stephanie Burgis
Cover Design by Patrick Samphire
Contents
Introduction: The Power of What If
Ysabeau S. Wilce
The Queen of Life
Y.S. Lee
Twelve Sisters
Iona Datt Sharma
Penhallow Amid Passing Things
Tiffany Trent
Mermaids, Singing
Jenny Moss
A Brand New Thing
Cassandra Khaw
Four Revelations from the Rusalka Ball
Stephanie Burgis
Spellswept
Laura Anne Gilman
The River Always Wins
Shveta Thakrar
The Amethyst Deceiver
Patrick Samphire
A Spy in the Deep
Afterword
Introduction: The Power of What If
by Tiffany Trent
As science fiction and fantasy writers, the power of ‘what if’ is our stock in trade. But ‘what if’ means nothing if it’s not followed with ‘yes.’
It was years ago that I first heard the tragic (and quite Gothic) story of the underwater ballroom at Witley Park. The tale of Whitaker Wright and his fraudulent investment schemes in 1890s London is surely worth a novel in and of itself, but the estate he built (and abandoned) at Witley Park with its underwater ballroom has captured many imaginations. I had saved files and images of it, knowing I wanted to write a story about it someday, unsure quite how I would do it justice.
Then, one day I saw my dear friend Stephanie Burgis talking about it on Twitter.
“Wouldn’t it be great if…?”
“What if…?”
We asked each other what if we edited an anthology in which each story featured an underwater ballroom, but then we took the crucial step of saying yes to the adventure before us. Immediately, other authors who saw the conversation wanted into the ballroom, and thus The Underwater Ballroom Society was born. We built it, and they came.
In this anthology, you will visit an old hangout one last time with an ex-punk siren and find out what the twelve dancing princesses learned in their secret world. You will feel the fallout of Oberon stealing a guitar god. You will wonder if magic might finally find a lonely officer of the Crown and a smuggler. You will learn about the secret society of Mycologians and find love with a girl who never otherwise fit in to society’s expectations. You will know what happened to Syrus Reed after The Tinker King, and you will be swept away by the determined romance of Amy Standish and Jonathan Harwood in Spellswept, the prequel novella to Snowspelled. You will solve mysteries with Harriet George under the Valles Marineris on Mars, and you will be left longing at the rusalkas’ ball.
Setting is so often relegated as mere furniture in stories, but it is far more than that. Setting not only imbues a work with atmosphere, but often has a mind of its own. As Robert McFarlane said in Landmarks, “Books, like landscapes, leave their marks in us.” We hope this book will leave its mark in you, and that you will return often to the underwater ballroom.
The Queen of Life
Ysabeau S. Wilce
The Queen of Life
Once upon a time there was a band that was bigger than big, louder than bombs. This was back in the glorious days of the Old Regime, long before the Waking World fell at last fast asleep. Long ago fabulous days, when the Voivode of Shingleton swam the poisonous Winnequah Sea for a five diva bet, and died not long after of an agonizing skin ailment, smug with accomplishment to the end. When the great singer Lotta Peachblossom, in the role of Joleta, sang el dugüello at the Porkopolis Opera House, shattering all the glass within a twenty-mile radius and giving every spectator a migraine that lasted for two weeks. When the lift took three hours to get to the top of Porkopolis’ tallest building, The Gaudy Pikestaff, and served snacks on the way and had velvet couches to nap upon. When Drusilla Van Hofferan tricked ice elementals into freezing her rooftop pool and hosted an ice skating party there—in the middle of the inferno summer. When the dancer called Lady Grinning Soul was fined ten thousand divas for walking a were-lion down the Munificent Mile during rush hour. When Puppy Blake and the diarist Xi Hoon conducted a duel to the death entirely with bon mots while standing at the bar in Brennen’s Hotel drinking pink gins.
A glorious time, full of glorious people, and this band, Love’s Secret Domain, the most of glorious of all. Everyone in the Waking World knew Love’s Secret Domain. They knew the band’s singer, the incandescent Sylvanna de Godervya, who kept that incandescence, her fans whispered, by bathing in donkey’s milk and faery ichor. They knew Merrick, the drummer, who had been a pig changeling in Faery until he had been released by Titania in exchange for a jar of thick-cut tawny marmalade. By then, Merrick had been a pig so long that he couldn’t change back to human entirely, but his trotters were more formidable strikers than the hardest drumsticks. (The tabloids said that his drumskins were made from his own sloughed pigskin, but that rumour was completely unverified.) (And yet one hundred percent true.) And Litacia, the bassist, whose skin crawled with tattoos of every note of her bass lines, and who, it was said, was handfasted to a percussion demon from the fourth level of Erebus.
And the guitarist: Robert Mynwar.
O Robert Mynwar! That iconic portrait, guitar slung to his knees, white doves in flight over his sun-kissed, wind-blown, blonde locks, hung on thousands of walls, sighed over by thousands of day-dreaming fans. The glittering blue eyes; the oh-so-very-tight kilt, slung so low over that taut belly, the fantastically muscled calves. They said that the Muse of Music taught Robert Mynwar to play: that She made his guitar, the Queen of Life, with Her own hands, carved the guitar’s body from Her own shin bone, strung the neck with strands of Her own hair, and made the pearlescent inlays on the fretboard with teeth plucked from Her own mouth. When Robert Mynwar’s long elegant fingers blurred along the neck of the Queen of Life, the sound he coaxed from her made the Waking World fall silent. Birds dropped from the sky, so struck by the melodious rhythm that they forgot to fly; rabid dogs lay down peacefully in the street, foaming no more; crying children found their tears had turned to diamonds. Newly-made spouses left their partners at the altar to hear Robert Mynwar play; babies came early; the dead left their graves to dance.
Perhaps somewhere there were a few people who had never heard of Love’s Secret Domain—hermits, castaways, cat-ladies—but by the time the band was midway through the Horses of Instruction Tour, those people were few and far-between. Word of their musical prowess had spread beyond the Waking World, into Faery, into Elsewhere—and beyond.
The Horses of Instruction tour was massive; each show more legendary than the last. The show where Sylvanna’s and Robert’s voices entwined into a summoning of the Muse of Music Herself, who stayed to play an encore that left the delirious audience’s ears permanently ringing with the final lick of The Crystal Cabinet. The show where the stage slowly rolled forward during the band’s biggest hit, A Tender Curb, crushing twenty-five ecstatic fans into jelly. The show where the son of financier Sookie Kodos flung himself onto Robert Mynwar, hoping to clip a lock of that sunshine hair; instead, Sylvanna beat him around the head with her mandolin before the bodyguards dragged him offstage. The show where Robert’s guitar solo ignited the roof of Oaktown Ballyhoo on fire, and the rest of the show had to be canceled much to the fans’ dismay, who would have been happy to be burned alive if they could do so while listening to the pulverizing roar of The Crystal Cabinet. The show where a glade of aspens uprooted themselves from their hillside, and, lured by the thundering bass line to Pity, A Human Face, tried to storm t
he Ticonderoga Gaiety Music Hall only to be repelled in a pitched battle with an enormous murder of crows, who had been following the band from town to town for weeks.
Then one day, towards the end of this triumphant tour, Oberon himself left his palace under the Hill, stepped out of Faery into the Waking World, to hear Love’s Secret Domain play. He stood in the front row, halting the mosh pit’s churn with his presence, and though Sylvanna de Godervya’s voice that night was sweeter than honey, it was Robert Mynwar’s guitar that made his black eyes glow green. Faeries, as you know, love music but they cannot make it themselves, being as inherently tuneless as the night air. As the last bars of The Crystal Cabinet fell away, Oberon stepped through the ear-splitting roar of the crowd, over the heads of eager fans who had pushed forward in a desperate attempt to reach their idol, up onto the stage. As the twinkle of thousands of lighters sparked the darkened bowl of the amphitheater, Oberon enfolded the surprised sweaty guitarist into a swirl of crimson cape.
And then they were both gone.
That was the last show Love’s Secret Domain ever played.
Robert Mynwar was never again seen in the Waking World and though Oberon, or Titania, might be seen from time to time, hunting humans through the forest on Crimble, or shopping at the Porkopolis Prada, Robert Mynwar stayed beneath the Hill. Sometimes news came of him, but always gossip unverified. A few months after his abduction, a changeling staggered out of Faery, and told The Porkopolis Music News he had seen Robert Mynwar and Oberon walking hand-in-hand through a pleached alley of hornbeams in the garden of Castle Fare-thee-Well. A year or so later, a hedgewitch claimed she’d been gathering green melancholy from a faery field when she had spied Robert Mynwar standing on a cliff above the Heart’s End Sea, sobbing into a spidersilk handkerchief. Five years after that, a beggar who stumbled into a faery ring on New Year’s Day and spent ten years (ten minutes) in Faery before being expelled by Mab, the Faery Seneschal, for drunkenness, said that when he was taken before the Faery court, he saw Robert Mynwar, bound to Oberon’s throne with a chain twisted from ivy and his own hair. Twenty years gone, a milkmaid from Monona, who had seen Love’s Secret Domain play one hundred and fifty-six times, said she had a vision of the great guitarist in a bucket of milk she’d squeezed from a blue-tinged cow; he was sitting in Titania’s solar on a tussock of green moss, playing a guitar with no strings.
After that, nothing.
And Robert Mynwar, already a legend, became legendary.
A boy stands at a crossroads. It doesn’t matter which crossroads, or where. Above, a wolf moon sails up the curve of the sky, round as an eye. The crossed arms of the two roadways stretching away from him shine white as silk. The trees that surround the crossroads whistle in the night breeze; every leaf, every branch exposed in the moon’s glare. A spire of smoke drifts upward from the cigarillo the boy smokes. The smell of cloves mingles with the spicy scent of eucalyptus, and the boy’s perfume, which is the loamy fragrance of dirt.
After a time, a month, a year, an eternity, the moon reaches its height, directly over the center of the crossroads. The moon should begin its majestic descent downward, towards its set, but instead it pauses. The wind ceases; the moonlight becomes thick and still as paint. The cigarillo smoke hangs motionless in the air, like tree moss. The boy drops the cigarillo and steps on the red ember eye, crushing it.
A long black vehicle is coming down one of the roads; its headlamps cut through the darkness like searching antennae. Illuminating the boy, they pin him into place in the center of the crossroads. The limo is going fast, too fast; it’s going to mow him down if he doesn’t move. But instead of jumping out of the way, the boy extends his arm, extends his thumb. Brakes screeching, puffing black smoke, the limo barely stops in time. Its front bumper brushes the boy’s knees. Despite the garish glow of the headlights, the boy’s features remain sunk in shadow. He walks to the side of the limo, opens the door, and climbs inside.
The boy is greeted with excited yapping; the fox-faced corgi sitting on the jump seat has leapt up on its stubby legs and is alarming loudly. He gives the corgi a firm look, and the dog collapses into a furry pillow, tongue derping. In the middle of the back seat, Sylvanna de Godervya is sunk into a pile of white fur, so thick and deep that only her face is visible. A black guitar case sits next to her. Time has taken the sharp edge of her jaw, the smooth line of her cheek and forehead and the raven-black hair is now tarnished silver. But she’s still incandescent and those violet eyes are still deep enough to drown in.
“You took your time,” Sylvanna says. That famously rough voice is even raspier now, but lovelier too, its cragginess evoking weary experience and heartbreak.
“I’ve been busy,” the boy says, settling into the seat opposite. The corgi tries to worm onto his lap, whacking at his hand with a fat paw. He scratches its pointy ears.
“When I wanted you, you didn’t come.”
“Don’t be silly. You were busy too,” the boy says. “Songs to write, shows, children, grandchildren, the recording label, this fat little baby here.”
Her lip curls, as though to dismiss all those things. “I didn’t expect you to look so—handsome—so frivolous. Like a groupie.”
The boy grins, shakes his curly head, and crosses his legs, sheathed in trousers so tight it’s a wonder they don’t split at the motion. The plunging neckline on his flowing shirts shows off a muscular chest; his wrists are wreathed in turquoise and silver; more silver chains dangle from his neck. The heels on his red leather boots are five inches high. The clothes have been unfashionable for at least sixty years. “I take the form I think most pleasing; it makes things easier. More pleasant. More familiar.”
“You missed my mark,” Sylvanna says, but the smile quirking around her lips says he hit it most exactly. “Anyway, you should take your gorgeous ass and sashay out of my limo. I’m not ready. I’m on my way to the Were-Flamingo Gala. I’m the guest of honor. They are expecting me.” The purple eyes glitter fiercely. “I have things to do.”
“I’m sorry, honey, but it’s time. You’ve been wavering for months. Your heart…”
“My heart died long ago. That’s nothing to do with my health.” Then she sighs, her voice crumpling. “I suppose there is no fighting Death. I will go with you if you tell me that one day I shall see him again. But you won’t, because it’s not true. They live forever in Faery. I’ll never see him again.”
The boy shrugs. Never is a long time—to her at least. To him, there’s no never, only the inevitable. He draws on his clove cigarillo, exhales. Sylvanna closes her eyes, breathes the waft of smoke in. “That smell. I haven’t smelled that smell in years. It always reminds me of him. Those foul cigarillos he smoked. Spicy, dark. You aren’t as pretty as he was. What a god. That hair, like spun gold, that ass, tight as a drum. When our voices came together, they said our harmony was a stairway to heaven.”
When the boy doesn’t reply, she says, “I looked for him everywhere. Faery-rings and sunsets. Hollow trees and elf-steeds. Solstice and Beltane. The Valley of Evermore and the vales of Kashmir. But I never found the way under the Hill.”
“Few mortals do, my dear,” the boy says. “And think of the songs you wrote in your sorrow. In a thousand years, those songs will still be sung. Heartbreak, sorrow, love.”
“His songs. Songs about him. I wrote other songs but no one cared about them.”
“Your songs,” he says gently. “But anyway, it doesn’t matter now.”
“It matters to me,” Sylvanna says. “It still matters to me.”
The boy sighs. “When it is your time, you must come. That is how it works. How it’s always worked. The natural order of things.”
“For humans, that is. But not for faeries. And not for humans in Faery. Doesn’t that bother you, that you, who hold sway over everything in this world, are barred from theirs? And that they may come and steal your subjects, take them beyond your reach, and you can do nothing?”
This does bother him; she�
��s got him there. He has a tidy nature; there are rules and he follows them. The rules must be followed else there would be chaos. But faeries don’t follow the rules; they love chaos, and when they steal a human, they upset his books, ruin his reckonings, leave an empty space in his ledger that he might never be able to fill. It is very annoying.
“You, so powerful, and against them powerless,” she jeers. Then, more gently: “Tell me, if he hadn’t been taken, would he be with you now? Would I be alone now anyway? It doesn’t hurt to tell me; it would be a great comfort to know.” Her eyes are soft and welling—the color of a bruise. Even the boy is not immune to such eyes; besides, Love’s Secret Domain is his favorite band.
He says: “In a crash, at the end of the Horses of Instruction tour, at the age of thirty-five. Driving too fast on a backroad; a farmer misses the yield sign. ”
“Instantly?”
“Instantly.”
“Ah….” Sylvanna says, and those eyes close for a second, and the lines of pain around her mouth smooth away. “Thank you. Now, humor an old lady. Open that case there.”
The boy lifts the case and opens it. Inside lies a guitar, as curvy as a woman, glossy and plump. He lays it across her lap. She pats the fretboard with a claw-like hand: “The Queen of Life, Bobby’s guitar. He left her behind—Oberon couldn’t take her, you see—Bobby always said her strings were made from strands of the Muse’s hair, but that’s not true. Just ordinary guitar strings. But they have iron in them and faeries loathe iron.”