Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Do you have a point, old woman?” Soldier asks her, and the woman from the desert smiles and shrugs her shoulders. She sets the starfish back down on the sand, then wipes her hand on the hem of her thobe.

  “A lot of them died anyway,” she says. “That’s all I wanted you to know. The world makes orphans of us all, sooner or later. It puts us where and when we don’t belong, and even if we manage to find our way home again, we might discover home doesn’t want us anymore. That’s the truth, and there’s not much we can do about it.”

  Low waves break against the edge of the desert, speaking in a secret language Soldier thinks she might have understood once, a long time ago, before the Bailiff took her up to the attic. A warm wind whispers through the dunes at her back and tugs at the black-skinned woman’s pale dreadlocks.

  “She was a fine little boat,” the woman says and pats the hull of the capsized dory. “A fine little boat, was the Fly-Away Horse. She sailed all the seven seas. She saw typhoons and maelstroms. And she even got you this far.”

  “And just how the hell far is that?” Soldier asks, and she starts to reach for the starfish, but the sun is much hotter than she expected, and Soldier pulls her hand back into the shade of the wrecked dory.

  “Far enough and then some,” the woman says, standing up. She shades her amber eyes with her left hand and gazes up at the sky. “Far enough you have to make a choice how this thing’s gonna end. That child’s mother’s coming for her, Soldier, and she means to have the girl.”

  “What’s that to me?”

  “Well, now that would seem to be the most important question,” the black-skinned woman replies, still watching the wide and simmering sky. “But don’t you sit here too long thinking it all over. She’s a natural-born sorceress, that one, and she knows well enough how to ride the coattails of a snowstorm. The child is hers, and she believes that you are the last and only thing standing between them. She has a fearful hatred for you.”

  And then the woman’s gone, as are the Fly-Away Horse and the sand and the sea and the blue starfish. The falling snow confuses Soldier for only a moment—a passing dislocation, the half blink of a sleeping eye, a breath—and she’s glad for the cold and the winter night after so much sun, lost in fever and grateful for cool air, and the weight of the Winchester shotgun feels good in her hands. She’s standing in a parking lot, cars and trucks half-buried in snow, everything veiled in white and countless shades of blue and gray trailing off to black, everything except the soft orange pools from streetlights and the flashing red and green neon of the tall motel sign at the edge of the road. The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles is there, too, walking in circles, catching snowflakes on her tongue. She stops and looks at Soldier.

  “We make a fine pair, don’t you think?” the girl asks. “Me with too much childhood and you with hardly any at all. That almost makes us sisters, of a sort.”

  “I’m still dreaming,” Soldier says.

  “Of course. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. They apprehended me in the old railway tunnel. Miss Emma Jean Silvey slipped away, but they caught me—because Barnaby’s a coward and a louse—and then they shut me away again. But all that time was wonderful. I aged almost an entire day and night.”

  Soldier pumps the shotgun, chambering a round, and stares into the swirling, shifting gloom. The storm is filled with shadows and the less distinct shadows of shadows, with almost endless possibility and potential. It is a crucible, like all storms, dreaming or awake.

  The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles stops and stares down at the pattern her boots have pressed into the snow and slush—two intersecting triangles to form a six-pointed star. And Soldier realizes that she hasn’t been walking in circles at all.

  “Saben,” she says, and the alchemist’s daughter holds one finger up to her lips and frowns.

  “Not so loud. She’s coming. She’s probably already here somewhere,” and the girl glances nervously over her shoulder. “There’s no need to call her.”

  “Ballou’s dead. Why didn’t she just run?”

  “She wants her daughter back, and besides, she knows you’d come after her. She knows that if she runs now, she’ll never be able to stop running.”

  At least she got that part right, Soldier thinks and shuts her eyes, or she dreams she shuts her eyes, and she’s back in the yellow house on Benefit Street, sitting across the mahogany dining table from the ghost of Sheldon Vale. He lays a tarot card on the table—the Tower—and tells her what it means.

  “Saben chose to face me in a dream, didn’t she?” Soldier asks him.

  “Yeah,” he says and taps the card once, twice, three times. “It was her idea, if everything went to shit and she wound up with you on her ass. She understands that you’re much weaker here, sleeping. You have to be awake to do that…that thing you do.” And he makes a staccato tick-tock-tick-tock noise with his tongue, his index finger up to mimic a clock’s second hand moving steadily backwards, and then he winks at her. “No hard feelings, though. We made a fine pair while it lasted, don’t you think?”

  “Come back,” the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles says and shakes Soldier so hard she almost drops the shotgun, almost squeezes the trigger. “You can’t keep wandering off like that. She’ll kill you if you do. She began the dream, so the labyrinth always works to her advantage.”

  Two triangles to make a star, you see? Two intersecting dreams, and one angle remains always invisible—the overlap—a shared point in space and time and sentience, the Bailiff said and pulled at his beard.

  “You should go now,” Soldier tells the girl.

  “Are you sure? You may yet have need of me.”

  “Then I’ll find you when I do,” Soldier says, and the girl comes apart in a sudden gust of icy wind, becoming briefly something bright and sparkling and even less substantial than the snow.

  And Saben White is standing ten or fifteen feet away, on the other side of the star traced in the snow. Her clothes are torn and dirty, and there’s dried blood on her face and hands. She isn’t alone. One of the Woonsocket mongrels is crouched on either side of her.

  “You should’ve run,” Soldier says, and the half-breeds bristle and bare their teeth.

  “Haven’t you ever loved anything?” Saben asks bitterly. “Haven’t you ever once loved something so much that you’d die for it?”

  “You can’t have the girl, Saben. She belongs to the Cuckoo, just like you do. Just like me. And even if she didn’t, after all this bullshit, I still wouldn’t let you have her.”

  “She’s my fucking daughter,” Saben says, and the mongrel on her left cries out, an ugly, feral shriek that Soldier knows is the nightmare of Saben’s loss and denial, and it lunges, bounding through the snow on all fours. Soldier pulls the trigger, and for a heartbeat the roar of the shotgun drowns out every other sound. The half-breed thing goes down in a spray of blood and shredded flesh, becoming only a faceless, broken heap in the snow.

  “See what you made me do?” Soldier says, the echo of the Winchester fading away across the shell-shocked winter night.

  “After everything they’ve done to you,” Saben says, “you’re still willing to fight for them?”

  “This isn’t about them. You tried to kill me, Saben. Twice now you’ve tried to kill me. And, unless I’m mistaken, you came here tonight to kill me. That makes three times,” and Soldier holds up three fingers.

  “I came here for my child.”

  “Like I said, she’s not your child. She belongs to the Cuckoo.”

  “Soldier, how can you stand there and say that? They’ve stolen so much from you. You don’t even fucking know the things they’ve taken away from you. Your whole life is lived in a fog they’ve spun to keep you ignorant. And now the Bailiff—”

  “Am I going to have to shoot that one, too?” Soldier asks and points the barrel of the gun at the second Woonsocket mongrel. It snarls and retreats, cowering behind Saben.

  “Listen to me, Sold
ier. You think he didn’t know exactly what Ballou was doing? You think he believed you’d ever be coming back to Providence alive?”

  “Right now, I don’t exactly know. But I figure all that shit’s between me and the Bailiff.”

  “You have to understand,” Saben says, “they want to leave the world,” and she draws a circle in the air with her left hand as she speaks, a ring of silver fire that hangs suspended above the snow. Soldier takes a step back and pumps the shotgun again.

  If you fully comprehend the sum of these angles, and if you can see all the points of convergence simultaneously, then the game may always be turned to your advantage, the Bailiff said, and Soldier stopped nibbling at the cookie and watched what he was doing with his hands. It’s a bit like origami, only without the paper. See? A fold here, a bend there—

  “Don’t make me kill you,” Saben White says, and her ring of silver flame grows brighter. She draws another with her right hand.

  “Jesus, Saben. You’ve tried to kill me three goddamn times now, and you want me to think you’re feeling merciful?”

  —it’s simple. Valley fold the left side of the first triangle so the edge falls on the closest crease. Now, Soldier, simply mountain fold the right side of the second intersecting triangle without severing—

  “You were in my way before. All you have to do is let me have her. She’s my daughter.”

  There’s a tug at the shotgun, the tidal drag of Saben’s spell, and Soldier doesn’t resist it. A moment later the Winchester slips from her hands and falls to the ground.

  —to make a new crease and complete that side of the star. It’s up to you where you want the star point to be realized, where you wish it to appear.

  “Let me have her, and you won’t be in my way anymore.”

  “Suck my dick,” Soldier says and folds the star that the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles trampled into the snow. It’s much easier than she remembers—valley fold, mountain fold—and she shuts her eyes again as the geometry of the dream begins to ravel and fray. She feels the sudden eddy when Saben’s wheels of silver fire shift into another range of the spectrum. And she hears Saben scream when the fire folds back upon her.

  Soldier stands between the desert and the sea, and the black-skinned woman smiles and kisses her softly on the lips. “You see, that wasn’t so difficult. That wasn’t hard at all.”

  “But it’s not over,” Soldier tells her.

  “Child, it’s never over. You’d better get used to that.”

  And the Fly-Away Horse moves across a calm green sea, a school of dolphins racing one another at its prow. The old man at the tiller puffs his pipe and tells her about the time he sailed all the way to the Pillars of Hercules.

  Deep beneath Providence, on the night of the Full Hunger Moon, Soldier begins the long walk down to the dragon, the walk she never had to make.

  These and a thousand other cusps spaced out along a tissue-paper star with seven points, and in the end, she finds her way back past George Ballou’s fire in the cavern and the greater fire trapped inside a cracked glass sphere, the twin fires burning at the beginning of the dream, which she sees now are all fires and all dreams. She breathes out an inferno, and in the great emptiness beyond the heat, she can rest and heal and remember herself. And she can hear the girl’s voice calling her, the voice of the child who saved her, Saben White’s daughter, and she wakes up.

  NINE

  The Bailiff

  T he clouds have gone, and the sky above the highway is a bright shade of blue, a cold and perfect cloudless blue spread out above the sagging power lines and bare tree branches glistening with ice. The snow is piled high along the sides of the road, and Emmie thinks it’ll start melting soon, if it hasn’t started already. Odd Willie’s driving, and Soldier’s riding up front with him, so Emmie has the backseat all to herself. The stolen Chevy sedan glides over brown slush—ice and salt and sand—and the black streaks of asphalt showing through. There’s a Beatles song playing on the radio, “Hey Jude,” and Odd Willie is humming along to it. Every now and then he smiles at Emmie from the rearview mirror.

  “I’m sorry,” Soldier says again.

  “She was my mother,” Emmie replies, but no matter how many times she says the words, it doesn’t feel any less unreal. “She was my mother, and she’d come to find me, and you killed her.”

  Soldier lights another cigarette and rolls her window down an inch or so. She doesn’t look much better than she did the night before. Her face seems somehow pale, despite the sunburn that isn’t a sunburn, and there are too many bruises and scrapes to even bother counting. The edges of the long gash Ballou made in her left cheek are swollen and scabby. Odd Willie stitched the wound closed with dental floss, but it looks fevery and infected.

  “She didn’t leave me any fucking choice,” Soldier says again, but Emmie’s not sure she believes that. Sadie’s told her that people always have choices, even when they believe that they don’t, that sometimes they just say they don’t because it helps them feel better.

  “You could have let her come to me like she wanted; you could have let me…” But then Emmie trails off, all these things already said once or twice or three times since they left the motel in Uxbridge, and she knows that repeating them over and over isn’t going to do anything to chase away the empty, confused feeling. It isn’t going to change what Soldier’s done. It isn’t going to bring Saben White back from the dead.

  “I did what I had to do,” Soldier says firmly and exhales. Most of the smoke is sucked out through the open window, but some hangs about her head like a veil.

  Odd Willie stops humming and glances up at Emmie again. “You better listen to her, kid,” he says. “She knows what she’s talking about. Believe me, you’re way the hell better off without that bitch.”

  “She was my mother,” Emmie says quietly and shuts her eyes. The bright day is swallowed in darkness, and there are only sounds—the tires against the frozen road, the spray of sand and salt pinging against the wheel wells and the undercarriage of the car, the music from the radio. “Willie, please, just take me home now.”

  “He can’t do that yet,” Soldier replies. “We’ll do it when we can, but not yet. Maybe after we see the Bailiff, maybe then.”

  “But none of this has anything to do with me,” Emmie tells her, even though she knows that it does, that maybe, somehow, it has an awful lot to do with her. She opens her eyes, and Soldier’s watching her across the seat, watching her with Chance Silvey’s green eyes.

  “Emmie, you have to be patient,” Soldier says. “There’s too much at stake here. We have to try to do this the right way. I still don’t know exactly how you fit into this mess, or where you got hold of that sphere, and I have to find out before you can go home.”

  “I didn’t want to run away,” Emmie says and opens her eyes. The day seems even brighter than before. “I didn’t want to go into that tunnel. I only did it because Pearl said they’d hurt Deacon if I didn’t.”

  Soldier nods her head. “She was right about that. The way things stand, you’re a loose end, and the ghouls don’t like loose ends. They’d have come for you and killed anyone else they found with you, because, like I said, they don’t like loose ends.”

  “But now you’re taking me to them?”

  “I’m gonna find out what the hell’s going on, that’s all. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you.”

  And Odd Willie glances at Emmie again from the rearview mirror, a flash of something guarded and uncertain on his face, something she catches despite the sunglasses hiding his eyes. He doesn’t believe her, Emmie thinks. He doesn’t believe a word she’s saying.

  “Like I told you,” Soldier says, “I think someone tried to kill me and Willie, and until I find out precisely what—”

  “I’m not deaf,” Emmie snaps at her. “You don’t have to keep telling me the same damn lie over and over and over like I’m a retard. I heard you the first time.”

  “Fine,” Soldier says
and turns away. She takes another drag off her cigarette and fiddles with the volume knob on the radio. “Hey Jude” ends, and now the dj’s talking about a wreck and a traffic jam at the Thurbers Avenue curve.

  Last night, Emmie thinks, last night my mother died. Last night Deacon’s real daughter killed my real mother.

  In the motel room, she waited almost a whole half hour for Willie to come back from having his smoke, and then Soldier started talking, still unconscious but talking in her sleep, muttering about starfish and storms and drowning while her eyelids fluttered and her hands trembled. Emmie thought that maybe she was having a seizure or a stroke or something, and went outside to find Odd Willie. He wasn’t standing by the purple Malibu, so she walked from one side of the motel parking lot to the other and back again, calling his name, but he didn’t answer, and she couldn’t find him anywhere. She gave up and started to go back in the room to see if Soldier was still alive when there was a scream, a woman’s scream, and a brilliant flash of blue-white light from the woods directly behind the motel.

  Just go back inside, she told herself. Go back inside the room and watch TV and wait for Willie to come back and tell me not to worry. Do that, and everything will be okay.

  Instead, she went around to the rear of the motel, pushing her way through the snow and a dense tangle of wild grape-and greenbrier vines, past the sleeping trees. Emmie found Odd Willie sitting alone in a little clearing smoking a cigarette. The night was dark, but the dark has never kept her from seeing, not Emmie Silvey, the girl with yellow eyes, and she clearly saw him sitting there on a rock, and she also saw the thing scattered across the snow, the thing that had once been Saben White. There were tracks everywhere, footprints that Emmie had learned enough to know only looked like the tracks of dogs. Odd Willie sighed and tossed the butt of his cigarette into the woods, then turned to look at her. But she didn’t take her eyes off the broken, bloody thing on the snow. It had been folded somehow, white bone and red flesh folded into something like a six-pointed star.