Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I’m going to ask you one last time,” Soldier says, and that only makes Pearl cry that much louder.

  “Stop it,” Emmie says, and for a second she wonders if she means the swaying attic or if she means Pearl and Soldier. I’m going to puke, she thinks, but then the nausea passes, and Soldier’s looking at her instead of the alchemist’s daughter.

  “Pearl’s right; we’re just children,” Emmie says, sitting down, holding tightly to one of the table’s legs. “Just kids. That’s all we are, all three of us. Sure, I’m too weird and too smart and my eyes are yellow, and Soldier’s too old, and Pearl’s not nearly old enough, but we’re all three still just children.”

  Soldier glances at the gun in her hand, then back at Emmie. “If you have a point—”

  “That is my point, Soldier. Can’t you see? That is my goddamn point,” and she rests her face against the leg of the table. The nausea’s back again, worse than before, and she’s trying to decide which of the two Soldiers she’s seeing is the real one. “Pearl, please, if you still have it, give it back to her. It belongs to her. Give it to her, and I’ll build your bridge for you.”

  “You don’t understand,” Pearl sobs. “They’ll find me anyway. They’ll come across the bridge, too, or the ghouls that live in Weir will kill us both, me and my father.”

  Soldier, both of her, sits down on the floor, halfway between Emmie and Pearl, and looks down at the pistol again.

  “Please,” Emmie begs the two Pearls huddled under the table. “I’ll tear the bridge down once you’re across. No one will follow you, I promise. Cross my heart—”

  “Hope to die?” Soldier asks, and then she laughs again and rubs at her forehead with the barrel of the gun.

  “Yes,” Emmie says. “Yes. Cross my heart and hope to die. Give it back to her, and then I’ll build your bridge, and then, when you’re across, I’ll tear it down so no one can come after you or your father.”

  “They made me do it,” Pearl whimpers. “They can make you do things, too, Emma Jean.”

  “No, they can’t. I have a secret place to hide where even they can’t follow.” Emmie only half understands the things she’s saying, but she says them anyway. “I can go there, if I have to. Give it to her, Pearl. Give Soldier what you took from her.” And then there are no more words, nothing left to say, and she wants to shut her eyes because she’s tired of the tilting and there being two of everything and everyone, but she doesn’t because Deacon always said that closing your eyes only makes nausea worse. And he ought to know, she thinks and hangs onto the table leg.

  “I’m sorry,” Pearl says to Soldier, and she reaches into the pocket of her dress, the same pocket where she keeps the gold watch. She takes out a very small thing, round and smooth and glassy, something the color of buttermilk and no larger than a marble. “I knew how wrong it was, but I was so afraid.” And she holds it out to Soldier.

  “That’s it?” Soldier asks, and Pearl puts the marble into her hand.

  “There wasn’t much,” she says and wipes at her eyes. “You weren’t yet even six years old.”

  Soldier stops rubbing at her forehead with the pistol and rolls the buttermilk marble back and forth in her palm. “What the hell am I supposed to do with it?”

  “That’s the easy part,” Pearl tells her. “Just put it beneath your tongue.”

  “I think I’m going to pass out,” Emmie says, but the words sound so strange, having been said, that she decides she’s probably wrong. Anyway, neither Soldier nor Pearl seems to have heard her.

  “Put it under my tongue?”

  “Yeah,” Pearl replies and makes a wet, sniffling noise. “Time will do the rest. My father used to say that time is always trying to repair itself, and that’s why it’s so hard to change the past.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Emmie says, trying to sit up straighter. “You just contradicted yourself.”

  “I’m only telling you what he said. I can’t help it if you don’t understand.” And then Pearl starts weeping again.

  “Try it,” Emmie tells Soldier. “Put it under your tongue and see what happens.”

  “What the fuck,” Soldier says, and stares at the marble a few seconds more before slipping it into her mouth.

  “Emma Jean Silvey, you’ve promised me.” The two Pearls sniffle and blink their four bloodshot eyes at Emmie. “You’ve promised to build a bridge for me. You’ve crossed your heart and hoped to die.”

  “As long as I don’t pass out first,” Emmie says and lets her head rest against the table leg again.

  Soldier tries to say something, but the words come out all wrong because of the marble beneath her tongue.

  “Don’t swallow it,” Pearl tells her. “If you swallow it, it’ll only make things worse.”

  How could things possibly be worse? Emmie thinks, and then Soldier opens her mouth, as if she’s about to cry out, and there’s a brilliant burst of blue-white electricity, a lightning flash and the throaty rumble of thunder right behind it, real thunder this time, and it’s nothing like the rumbling noise the gun made when Soldier shot Odd Willie. Emmie turns her face away, and Pearl screams again, and then Emmie can feel the time flowing around her, flowing from everywhere all at once towards Soldier—the smallest fractions of seconds and countless interminable hours and days that never seem to end.

  “You promised me!” Pearl shouts above the din of the storm raging around and inside Soldier, the storm that Soldier has become. I did, Emmie thinks. I did promise, and I have no idea how I’m supposed to build a bridge. But then it comes to her, just the same way she realized that she’d always known how to play a piano, even though no one had ever taught her. The same way she sometimes knows the right answers before people even ask her the questions. It’s just something that’s there, buried deep inside her and wanting to escape, and Emmie doesn’t try to stop it…

  …and in his big empty house on Angell Street, the house that Sadie bought for him and Emmie after her first novel sold, Deacon Silvey feels something unpleasant in his sour, alcoholic’s belly, something that isn’t quite a chill, but isn’t anything else he could ever name, either. He sets down the pint bottle of rye whiskey that he’s been working on since just after noon and glances at the clock mounted above the kitchen sink. At first, he’s not sure which way the black second hand is moving—forwards or backwards—and he tries to recall the last time he got so drunk that he hallucinated.

  She’s never coming back to me, he thinks. Not after five days. After five days, even the fucking cops know she’s never coming back.

  The clock ticks forward, and the February wind brushes roughly past the kitchen windows. He wants to cry, but there are no tears left in him. Everything cried out and nothing left inside but whiskey and helpless anger and sorrow and regret.

  You’re an old man now, Deacon Silvey, the wind mutters. Too old to fight the monsters anymore and too old to find lost children. Too old to do much of anything but get drunk and wish it hadn’t all turned out this way.

  There’s no point arguing with the wind. Only madmen argue with the wind. So he takes the bottle of rye over to the kitchen table and sits down. He thinks about the open cardboard box in the bedroom, the box Emmie must have dragged out from under the bed, all its treasures scattered shamefully across the floor. He wouldn’t let Sadie pack those things away again.

  I’ll call Sadie, he thinks, wishing she were still there with him, there to make him stop drinking, there to keep him from giving up, wishing she hadn’t taken the train back to New York the night before. But she’d already given up herself. And she’s gone too. And she’s not coming back, either.

  You’re an old man, the wind laughs. You’re an old man, and now you’re alone. Better start getting used to it.

  And Deacon pours himself another glass of whiskey and tries to ignore the cold and vacant feeling coiled in his stomach, the feeling that says the wind is always fucking right, any way you look at it, and he watches the clock eating up th
e day…

  …and Madam Terpsichore pauses on the creaking wooden steps leading up from the great basement of the yellow house on Benefit Street. It’s been at least a hundred years since she last climbed those stairs, a long red century since she had any cause to venture from the security of the burrows and tunnels and secret underground meeting places and enter the house itself. She sniffs anxiously at the air, flaring her nostrils, licking her mottled lips, and catches an unfamiliar scent slipped in amongst the comforting cellar smells. Merely a spicy, unexpected hint woven almost imperceptibly between mold and old rot and the pungent white mushrooms that grow in fleshy clumps beneath the stairs.

  “Too late,” she growls very softly and looks back down at Madam Melpomene, standing at the foot of the cellar stairs. “It’s already begun. It’s already finished.”

  Madam Melpomene bares her crooked yellow fangs and scratches furiously at the hard-packed earth with a long thumb claw. “Then we have failed,” she says. “We should have killed the wizard’s bitch long ago and been done with it. She would have been sweet, at least.”

  Madam Terpsichore grunts, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, and stares at the basement door, still another dozen steps away. She tries to push back the dim memories of that other world, that place of deep, wooded valleys and steep white mountains rising to scrape the undersides of flickering violet clouds. The towers of slate and granite built a million years before her birth, decaying beneath a dying and indifferent sun. The home her race fled millennia ago, scattering themselves between the stars, coming at last to Weir and Earth and a dozen other alien worlds.

  “We’ve been betrayed,” Madam Melpomene says and sighs and then goes back to scratching at the dirt floor.

  And Madam Terpsichore, High Dame of the Providence warrens and the last of the ghul alive who even half remembers the passage from that world or the subsequent war with the djinniyeh in this world, slowly turns and begins making her way back down the noisy basement stairs…

  …and in her bottom bunk in the warrens below College Hill, the changeling girl named Sparrow Spooner wakes from a dream of the father she’ll never have. Mr. H. Elgin Higginson, late of 7 Thomas Street, the witch who lied to her and used her, who never really loved her, who only pretended that he would carry her far away from the Cuckoo and the hounds. The man who cost her two fingers before he was fed alive to Madam Terpsichore’s students, before the ghoul snatched his escaping soul and devoured it. Sparrow Spooner lies still in the darkness, surrounded by all the other stolen children and the ghul pups sleeping all around her.

  She’s trying to find whatever it might have been that woke her, whatever interrupted the familiar, well-worn dream of Mr. Higginson buying her a Dell’s lemonade and walking with her under a summer sun while he talked about all the strange and distant places they’d visit together, places like Hollywood and Miami Beach. There was something, a ripple, a wrinkle, the faintest stutter between one moment and the next. Something not quite déjà vu that almost anyone else would have missed, but not Sparrow Spooner, who was first in Discord and Continuity, after all, and she thinks it was not so very different from what she felt that rainy night three months ago when she stood trial and her masters and mistresses spared her life but took her fingers…

  …and the Bailiff, who is not the god of men and churches or the Cuckoo or a demon or even much of a magician, who has never been anything more than the hounds needed him to be, sits with the cooling bodies of his murdered harem boys. He finishes wiping blood from the blade of the kukri onto one sleeve of his lime-green bathrobe, and glances up at the dais and the doorway connecting the octagonal chamber with the old museum in Roger Williams Park. It’s been almost two hours since he last spoke with Soldier, since he appeared to her in a convenience store and she told him he looked like a circus clown. He was so, so sure that she would come, even after Woonsocket, that Soldier would bring him the child of Saben White, and when the girl was dead and crazy Willie Lothrop had taken care of Soldier, the hounds would never have been the wiser.

  “Surely,” he says, gazing into the dead blue eyes of one of the boys, “you cannot blame a man, not merely for trying to outwit his destiny.”

  The boy doesn’t reply, though the Bailiff half expects him to.

  “Would they spare me?” the Bailiff asks. “If I carved the lot of you up nice and neat as a butcher’s window and delivered you ripe and raw, might they at least let me keep my eyes, my tongue, my hands? Might they at least spare my sorry life?”

  A sudden breeze stirs the folds of silk and muslin strung from the ceiling, and the Bailiff shivers and pulls his bathrobe closed. He’s unaccustomed to breezes in this place, sudden or otherwise. He glances at the dais again, an empty stage readied for players who will never now appear, and then, because time is precious, he begins the task of skinning and dressing the bodies…

  …and in her apartment on St. Mark’s Place, Sadie Jasper stands inside the sacred circle she’s cast upon her bedroom floor. She holds the double-bladed athame in her good hand, her power hand, and strains to see a cleansing blue-white flame dancing about the tip of the dagger. She points the athame down and to the east, then begins walking clockwise, following the inner perimeter of the circle.

  “I consecrate this circle to the Dark Mother,” she says, her voice trembling, but she’s sick of crying, sick of tears and blame and fear, and she takes another step. “To the Dark Mother and the Lord of the Hunt. Here may they manifest….”

  There’s a noise from the hallway, then, a sound like wind chimes or the sea on a summer’s day, and she takes a deep breath and draws a circle in the air with her dagger. “Here may they manifest,” she says again, “and bless their child.”

  She’s gone, a hard voice whispers behind her eyes. He asked you to stay and watch her, but you were too afraid, too angry, too weak. You were weak, and you left her there alone, and now she’s gone forever.

  “This is a time that is not a time,” she says, “in a place that is not a place, on a day that is not a day. I stand here at the threshold between the worlds, before the veil….”

  From the hall, a sound like distant thunder.

  And the voices of lost children.

  And the careless, calculated shattering of one moment against the next.

  Sadie takes another halting step, but now she’s forgotten the protection ritual, the holy words that have never before felt so completely powerless to stand between her and all the real and imagined evils of the universe. Another step and she stumbles and breaks the unfinished circle, as the walls of her bedroom collapse and melt into steam and she finds herself standing on an immense bridge built from fire, a burning, writhing span above some chasm too vast and too deep to even comprehend.

  Ahead of her, a young girl with black hair and almond skin is crossing the bridge alone, and she turns and looks back towards Sadie. Pearl, Sadie thinks. Her father calls her Pearl. And the girl’s eyes sparkle in the light of the burning bridge. Sadie looks over her right shoulder, then, peering down the bridge into a dark place, a place of shadows and secrets and lies, and there’s Emmie, and Sadie can see where the bridge begins.

  Then, all of a moment there was a rending of the blue wall (like a curtain being torn) and a terrible white light from beyond the sky, and the feel of Aslan’s mane and a Lion’s kiss on their foreheads and then…

  “They might take us to other places,” Emmie said.

  “Good places or bad places?” asked Sadie.

  Emmie shrugged. “That remains to be seen,” she said, as the bridge fades and Sadie finds herself in her bedroom on St. Mark’s Place again, standing inside the ruined circle, the athame gripped tightly in her good hand. Out on the street a car horn blares, and Sadie sits down on the floor. When the tears come, she doesn’t fight them…

  …and when it’s over, there’s only a very small burn, hardly larger than a penny, perfectly centered between Emmie’s yellow eyes, and the dizziness has gone and taken the nausea away with i
t. Pearl’s gone, too, and the air in the attic of the yellow house smells like ozone and blood and dust.

  “Is it done?” the little girl named Soldier asks, the child who chose her name from a headstone in Swan Point Cemetery. The gash on her cheek is gone, as are all the other scrapes and bruises, and her skin doesn’t look sunburned anymore. Already, her memories of everything that’s happened since the Bailiff led her up to the attic have begun to dissolve, coming apart like a cube of sugar in a cup of tea. “Was it that simple?”

  Emmie gently touches the burn on her forehead, her mind still filled with the heat of the inferno and the ice of all the not-quite-empty space between worlds, with Pearl’s joy and the surprise of seeing Sadie standing there on the bridge, looking back at her.

  “Do you think she’ll find her father?” Soldier asks. The clothes and boots that Odd Willie brought her from the Salvation Army store in Uxbridge are far too large for a girl who’s not quite six years old, and she looks like she’s been caught playing dress-up.

  “I think she already has,” Emmie says and stands up, holding on to the edge of the table, just in case the dizziness decides to come back. “I think he was waiting for her on the other side.” She’s not entirely sure if that’s the truth, but it seems like the right thing to say, here at the end of the story, and even if it’s not true, she doesn’t think that it’s a lie.

  “What do we do now?” Soldier asks her and kicks off the ridiculous cowboy boots. “I don’t think we should stay here.”

  “No, we definitely shouldn’t stay here,” Emmie replies and tries to imagine what comes next. “I have to go home,” she says. “I have to go back to Deacon and Sadie.”