Heiresses of Russ 2012

by Connie Wilkins

  I thanked the ladies for their time and made my way up the walk. Although the land was pretty flat here, it felt like walking uphill. Each front step felt three feet high, and when I crossed the porch it was like walking into a stiff wind. It was only my native talent and Guild training that made it possible for me to continue; any ordinary person would have felt vaguely uncomfortable and turned around. Probably wouldn’t even remember having tried.

  I’d brought a prybar with me, but the front door swung open to my touch. Stepping over the threshold felt like pushing through a gluey membrane, but once I was inside the feeling of pressure vanished completely.

  I found myself in a tall, elegant entry hall, with a long straight staircase sweeping up on the right and a spacious parlor to my left. The place smelled like my grandmother’s attic, a little musty but not unpleasantly so.

  There was no furniture at all.

  There was also no dust.

  Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

  I closed my eyes and held out my hands to either side. What I felt was unlike any house I’d ever been in. Pipes ran in bizarre, random directions through every single wall and floor, like a mad dryad’s trail or a poem written in some alien language. But with the house’s water shut off it was a dead trail, a poem unread.

  There was one other thing here I’d never felt before, something I couldn’t put a name to. A sense of enormous power under great pressure, like a deep ocean current. I headed up the stairs to the locus of the sensation.

  In the clawfoot bathtub lay an undine.

  My heart damn near stopped.

  I’ve been in the Guild for most of my life, ever since my sponsor and mentor Steve McGonagall spotted a natural talent in a six-year-old shirtless tomboy playing endlessly with the hose in her front yard. In that time I’d met nixies, nymphs, sprites, nereids, and various other water spirits. All of these were pretty much the same kind of creature—in the same way that a cat and a cow are both mammals—being inseparable from the water in which they lived. Even undertows and tsunamis were pretty much the same thing, just bigger and meaner. But there was a whole separate class of intelligent water spirits, including kelpies, sirens, and undines, that I’d never encountered and never wanted to. They could sink ships. They could cause horrendous storms. And they were notoriously temperamental.

  This one, though, wasn’t going to be hurting anyone any time soon. If the undine in the Guild manual was Venus on the half shell, this was a spoiled oyster.

  The undine lay on her back in the tub, a human female figure made all of water, with sea foam forming the hair on her head and elsewhere. But the foam swirled sluggishly, and the water of her body was still and murky. Her breasts lay flat and shriveled on her chest; her cheeks were sunken. She smelled like a stagnant pond.

  And then her eyes flickered open: two dark whirlpools of endless depth and power. At the sight of me she gasped, the air gurgling in the waters of her chest.

  At that moment another quake struck, rattling the little Victorian bathroom’s windows and the lid of the tank above the toilet. I held onto the sink until the tremor passed.

  “Help me,” the undine said, in a voice like the wind off the sea.

  •

  “Turn the water back on?” Charlie said to me, one elegant eyebrow raised. “You have no idea how much of a pain it was to get the whole block shut off.”

  “It’s really important,” I said. I didn’t know where the undine had come from or how she’d wound up in the house, but without free-flowing water she would certainly die. If I let such a rare and powerful creature pass from the world, the balance between this world and the other would be thrown off so badly it would take decades to restore. And if her distress was causing the quakes, as I suspected it was, I didn’t want to know what might happen to the city if she died. “The, uh, the historic plumbing needs to be washed out before I can salvage it.” Lying to the public is an important part of being a Guild member, but I’ve always been crap at it.

  “No.”

  “Uh.” My mind thrashed, like treading water in a whirlpool. “You shouldn’t be able to tear down that house anyway. It’s…it’s seriously historic.”

  “Yeah, there was some noise about that, but the developer got eminent domain on the whole block.” He shrugged. “Not my department. Now you get back there and finish your job. Or don’t. It’s up to you. That house is coming down tomorrow, and if some historic plumbing goes to the landfill along with the rest that’s just too bad.” He leaned over his desk. “And you don’t get paid.”

  “I get it.”

  •

  “Hey Shel,” I said, the phone warm in my hand. When we’d been together we’d been Shel and Lou, like a couple of old Jewish guys. “How’s the baby-making business?”

  “Expensive. I keep telling Jenni we should have gone the turkey-baster route, but we couldn’t agree on a donor. What’s up?”

  “I need a temporary water service permit. Right away.”

  “What type?”

  A power saw started up nearby. I pressed the phone to my ear and moved to the other side of the house where it was a little quieter. “Fire hydrant, short term, for a residence.”

  Shelly’s keyboard clattered. “For how long?”

  “Just until Friday.” One way or the other.

  “Address?”

  I told her. The house didn’t have a street number on its front wall, not too surprising given its history, but it was painted on the curb.

  “Are you sure about that? According to the records, it’s a vacant lot.”

  Of course. “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “You’ve got a double check backflow valve, right?”

  “Right.”

  More keys clattered. “Okay, you’re good to go.” She gave me the permit number and I wrote it on the back of my hand.

  “Thanks a million, Shel. Give Jenni a kiss for me.”

  I went to my truck and got the special five-sided wrench and the valve to convert the fire hydrant’s power to something residential plumbing could handle. Fortunately I had permits for both of those already. My ex Debra-the-firefighter had helped me get them.

  Nobody noticed me uncoiling the hose and running it from the fire hydrant to the house. Everyone swarming the job site was on his own business, and under the same schedule gun as I was. Though my situation was a little more urgent.

  Naturally, the house didn’t have a water meter. It took me about fifteen minutes to cut the line at the curb and splice in a T, losing a few gallons of water in the process. I swore and waited for another earthquake, but I guess the loss wasn’t noticeable. Finally I fitted the big red-painted wrench onto the pentagonal nut on top of the hydrant and pulled.

  “Taking a drink from a fire hose” isn’t just a metaphor. The hydrant’s flow surged with power that I could feel beneath my feet all up and down the block. But the step-down valve did its job and I didn’t feel or hear anything leaking from the house. Now I had to check on the undine.

  With the water flowing through the house’s strange pipes, pushing through its defenses was even harder than it had been before. I was panting and sweating by the time I got to the porch.

  I stepped through the door.

  And was engulfed by an enraged tsunami.

  Water battered my face. Water pummeled my chest. Water pressed me against the door and forced itself into my nose. I choked, tasting salt, feeling it burn in my nose. Then the water receded and I collapsed to the sodden carpet.

  I looked up. The undine stood above me, now a swirling waterspout in female form, with clouds for hair and lightning eyes. She gestured with both hands and another wave engulfed me, flinging me once more against the door. “I’m trying to help you!” I gasped as the second wave ebbed. “I was the one who turned the water back on!”

  The third wave slammed me even harder, cracking my head against the door behind me. I floated, half-stunned, as the waters raged around me, trying to hold my breath while the currents
shook me like a dog with a rag doll. Again the wave withdrew, leaving me choking on the floor.

  The fourth wave would surely finish me.

  But the fourth wave didn’t come.

  After a while I managed to stop hacking long enough to get a decent breath, and raised my head to see why I was still alive.

  The undine, too, had collapsed on the floor. No longer as shriveled and feeble as she’d been in the tub upstairs, she wasn’t a raging goddess any more either…more like a normal human woman, maybe a little on the skinny side, formed of swirling clear water. Clearly she’d overexerted herself in attacking me.

  I hoped she hadn’t killed herself.

  Still coughing, I crawled across the carpet toward her. It wasn’t nearly as soaked as I’d expected, and I soon realized why: all the water in the room was being drawn back into her liquid body. By the time I got to her, even my hair was dry, and the undine’s form had become attractively zaftig. Just my type, I thought, apart from being immortal, inhuman, and quick to anger.

  The undine’s eyes fluttered open, still dark as storm clouds but now free of lightning. “You are the one?” she said, her breath the salt air after a storm at the coast. “You are the one who caused the water to return?”

  I had to turn away and cough some more water out of my lungs before I could reply. “Yes,” I managed at last. “I couldn’t let you die.”

  “I am sorry, then, for my attack.” She raised herself to one elbow, flowing like a dream into the new position; though her outward form was human, she was still a creature of liquid and currents rather than bone and muscle. “I feared you were the hated Binder, drawn by my weakened state, returned at last to do away with me for good and all. But now I see you are no man at all.”

  “The Binder?”

  “The Captain,” she sneered. “The Navigator. The Founder. The Couch.” She pronounced it “kooch,” and her intonation made it a curse. “The one who caught my heart, drew me to this place, then wove the net of life and metal that prisons me here.”

  “And how long ago was this?”

  “One hundred and fifty-nine summers and one hundred and fifty-eight winters.”

  Now I grasped what must have happened. Although the formal Guild in Portland only went back to the city’s population boom after WWII, there have been natural talents as long as there have been people, and Captain Couch must have been one of those. He’d found some way to trap the undine, then engineered the house with its bizarre plumbing to keep her there. That’s how the Guild works: although we can sense the other world with our talents, we can affect it only by manipulating the four elements in the physical world.

  “He caught your heart, you say.”

  The undine’s brows drew together and I felt the storm gather behind her eyes. “He wooed me and he flattered me and he promised we would marry. He built for me a fine house.” She gestured all around. “But when I stepped inside, I found I could not leave. He kissed me once and then he left me here.”

  Undines are incurable romantics, and have a real tendency to fall in love with human men, even though when an undine marries a human she loses her immortality. I don’t get it, myself. But apparently Captain Couch had known this fact and taken unfair advantage of it.

  “What a prick,” I said.

  I just blurted it out, the same way I would if I were talking to a woman at a bar, and immediately wished I could grab my words back before they struck her beautiful wave-like ears. How could I talk like that to someone so…so refined, so ethereal, so supernatural?

  But then she smiled. And I felt her heart warm toward me.

  I’ve never felt such a thing before. But, of course, her heart was made of water.

  Just as I was about to speak, a tremendous crash from outside rattled the windows and made the whole house shudder. We both turned toward the sound.

  Outside the window, the excavator was beginning to tear down the house next door. The enormous metal claw grasped the roof at its peak and pulled, tearing off a hunk of joists and rafters and shingles. Nails and shreds of insulation rained down as the huge yellow machine turned and dumped the hunk into a metal bin. It landed with a thundering clang that I felt in my gut. Then, with a diesel roar and a whine of hydraulics, the claw machine returned to the house for another bite.

  The protective effect that had held Couch’s house inviolate for a hundred and fifty years only extended to the property line. It wouldn’t hold that back for a second.

  •

  Charlie was not pleased with me. “No, we cannot delay demolition. I don’t care how historic that house is. I don’t care how much trouble you’re having with the antique water heater. I don’t care if you’ve found a whole freakin’ nest of endangered snail darters in the attic. We are on a schedule here, and that house is coming down tomorrow. With you in it, if necessary.”

  •

  “We have to get you out of here today,” I told the undine, whose name was Naïda, pronounced “ny-ee-da.” But she couldn’t pass through the door or any of the windows. When she tried, she only flattened against the barrier. Even the basement was off-limits to her.

  I tried cutting off the water to part of the house, but that just made her cry out in pain and set off another earthquake.

  I tore the plaster off the living room wall with my prybar, revealing the strange and convoluted pipes of Naïda’s prison. The pattern made no sense to me. I tried moving some of the pipes around, hoping to create an opening in the net, but everything I tried hurt her.

  I sat in the living room, looking through the open front door at the bustling job site outside. No one even looked at the house—it was still protected by Couch’s work. I remembered how hard I’d had to push to get through the front door the first time I’d come in. “Maybe if we both worked together we could get you through.”

  “We could make an attempt,” she said, with a small shy smile.

  We stepped together to the front door, with me standing behind her. Hesitantly I reached out one hand and laid it gently on her hip. Her skin felt like water-skiing, wet and soft and warm, yet firm and vibrantly resistant.

  My heart pounded. But what was I nervous about, really? Saving an undine, or the close proximity of this warm, feminine creature? “Ready?” I put my other hand on her other hip.

  Naïda nodded. Was she, too, trembling?

  I swallowed and leaned my shoulder into the space between her shoulder blades, pressing her against the barrier. The warm fluidity of her body resisted the effort—it felt like living tissue, though unlike flesh and bone. She grunted, and I felt her torso thrum with the sound. “Am I hurting you?”

  “Keep pushing,” she said through gritted teeth. “I think…we are getting…a little farther in…”

  I pressed harder, putting all the strength of my back and legs into it, the smooth warmth of her watery skin trembling beneath my cheek. I could feel the strain in her as I crushed her against the unyielding barrier, but she refused to complain, bearing the pressure for long minutes. At last another quake began, rattling the house’s structure, and she shrieked in anguish. Panting, I fell back, and she landed with a soggy thud on the carpet beside me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, sitting up and taking her hand as the tremor subsided.

  “Do not regret,” she gasped, and laid her other hand on my cheek. “I thank you for your endeavors.”

  I took her in my arms, the warm moist weight of her pressed against me. She was so brave, so steadfast, so fearless…there had to be some way to save her.

  •

  Steve, my mentor, was mostly retired now. He’d gone all round and gray, and he moved like his bones ached, but he still had that bricklayer’s grip. We sat at his kitchen table, with Guild manuals and maps spread all over the smooth cool Formica. Outside, night had already spread its blanket over the city.

  “Lookie here,” he said, and smoothed out an old plat map of Portland. “This is Couch’s Addition.” He traced the boundaries of a rough triangl
e bounded by Burnside, 23rd Avenue, and the Willamette River. “And here’s your undine.” His rough finger smacked down. “Right in the middle of it.”

  “So?”

  “Trust an old bricklayer. She’s the foundation of his empire.”

  We hauled out more maps, including some arcane Guild treasures I’d never before been allowed to handle. Fault lines, underground streams, ley lines…they all passed right through, or at least near, the house.

  Steve tapped his nose with one finger, as he often did when deep in thought. “I feel a right fool,” he said after a time. “We should have known all along that she was there…that everything depended on her.”

  “You should see those pipes. Couch was some kind of genius, and he wanted to make sure nobody would ever find out she was there. If the water hadn’t been cut off, even I probably wouldn’t have been able to force my way into the house the first time.”

  “Maybe so.” He tapped his nose again. “But now we’ve got a bit of a situation.”

  I waited. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like this.

  “I believe,” Steve said at last, “that Portland’s entire maritime economy has been driven by the presence of this undine, since 1850. She may be the reason that Portland overtook Oregon City as the territory’s preeminent city. In a sense, she is the city. And if she dies, or even if she goes free…”

  Economic collapse. Earthquakes. End times.

  “It would be bad,” I said.

  “It would be bad,” Steve said, nodding.

  •

  Steve called in Todd Piaskowski, an HVAC guy, and Hank Muller, a furnace guy, to help. Together we formed what the Guild called a “full house” of water, earth, air, and fire. We pounded our brains against the problem for hours, trying to get our hands around a very thorny problem without getting injured.

  Finally, about one in the morning, we agreed we couldn’t think of anything better than the plan we had. We gathered our equipment and headed off in my truck.

  None of us spoke as we drove through the dark and empty streets.