Song of Susannah (14 page)

“Yes, sai.” No more
ma’am,
not now. The turtle was working on her. Sanding away the gap between the worlds.

“You just forget you saw me, all right?”

“Yes, sai. Shall I put a do-not-disturb on the phone?”

Mia clamored. Susannah didn’t even bother paying attention. “No, don’t do that. I’m expecting a call.”

“As you like, sai.” Eyes on the turtle. Ever on the turtle. “Enjoy the Plaza–Park. Would you like a bellman to assist you with your bags?”

Look like I need help with these three pukey li’l things?
Detta thought, but Susannah only shook her head.

“Very well.”

Susannah started to turn away, but the desk clerk’s next words swung her back in a hurry.

“Soon comes the King, he of the Eye.”

Susannah gaped at the woman, her surprise close to shock. She felt gooseflesh crawling up her arms. The desk clerk’s beautiful face, meanwhile, remained placid. Dark eyes on the scrimshaw turtle. Lips parted, now damp with spittle as well as gloss.
If I stay here much longer,
Susannah thought,
she’ll start to drool.

Susannah very much wanted to pursue the business of the King and the Eye—it was
her
business—and she could, she was the one up front and driving the bus, but she staggered again and knew she couldn’t . . . unless, that was, she wanted to crawl to the elevator on her hands and knees with the empty lower legs of her jeans trailing out behind her.
Maybe later,
she thought, knowing that was unlikely; things were moving too fast now.

She started across the lobby, walking with an educated stagger. The desk clerk spoke after her in a voice expressing pleasant regret, no more than that.

“When the King comes and the Tower falls, sai, all such pretty things as yours will be broken. Then there will be darkness and nothing but the howl of Discordia and the cries of the can toi.”

Susannah made no reply, although the gooseflesh was now all the way up the nape of her neck and she could feel her scalp tightening on her very skull. Her legs (
someone’s
legs, anyway) were rapidly losing all feeling. If she’d been able to look at her bare skin, would she have seen her fine new legs going transparent? Would she have been able to see the blood flowing through her veins, bright red going down, darker and exhausted heading
back up to her heart? The interwoven pigtails of muscle?

She thought yes.

She pushed the
UP
button and then put the Oriza back into its bag, praying one of the three elevator doors would open before she collapsed. The piano player had switched to “Stormy Weather.”

The door of the middle car opened. Susannah-Mia stepped in and pushed 19. The door slid shut but the car went nowhere.

The plastic card,
she reminded herself.
You have to use the card.

She saw the slot and slid the card into it, being careful to push in the direction of the arrows. This time when she pushed 19, the number lit up. A moment later she was shoved rudely aside as Mia
came forward.

Susannah subsided at the back of her own mind with a kind of tired relief. Yes, let someone else take over, why not? Let someone else drive the bus for awhile. She could feel the strength and substance coming back into her legs, and that was enough for now.

Mia might have been a stranger in a strange land, but she was a fast learner. In the nineteenth-floor lobby she located the arrow with 1911–1923 beneath it and walked briskly down the corridor to 1919. The carpet, some thick green stuff that was delightfully soft, whispered beneath her

(
their
)

stolen shoes. She inserted the key-card, opened
the door, and stepped in. There were two beds. She put the bags on one of them, looked around without much interest, then fixed her gaze on the telephone.

Susannah!
Impatient.

What?

How do I make it ring?

Susannah laughed with genuine amusement.
Honey, you aren’t the first person to ask
that
question, believe me. Or the millionth. It either will or it won’t. In its own good time. Meanwhile, why don’t you have a look around. See if you can’t find a place to store your gunna.

She expected an argument but didn’t get one. Mia prowled the room (not bothering to open the drapes, although Susannah very much wanted to see the city from this height), peeked into the bathroom (palatial, with what looked like a marble basin and mirrors everywhere), then looked into the closet. Here, sitting on a shelf with some plastic bags for dry-cleaning on top, was a safe. There was a sign on it, but Mia couldn’t read it. Roland had had similar problems from time to time, but his had been caused by the difference between the English language alphabet and In-World’s “great letters.” Susannah had an idea that Mia’s problems were a lot more basic; although her kidnapper clearly knew numbers, Susannah didn’t think the chap’s mother could read at all.

Susannah
came forward,
but not all the way. For a moment she was looking through two sets of eyes at two signs, the sensation so peculiar that it made her feel nauseated. Then the images came together and she could read the message:

T
HIS
S
AFE IS PROVIDED FOR YOUR
P
ERSONAL
B
ELONGINGS
T
HE
M
ANAGEMENT
OF THE
P
LAZA
–P
ARK
H
YATT ASSUMES
NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR
I
TEMS LEFT HERE
C
ASH AND
J
EWELRY SHOULD BE DEPOSITED
IN THE
H
OTEL
S
AFE DOWNSTAIRS
T
O SET
C
ODE, PUNCH IN FOUR NUMBERS
PLUS
ENTER T
O OPEN, ENTER YOUR
FOUR-NUMBER
C
ODE AND PUSH
OPEN

Susannah retired and let Mia select four numbers. They turned out to be a one and three nines. It was the current year and might be one of the first combinations a room burglar would try, but at least it wasn’t quite the room number itself. Besides, they were the
right
numbers. Numbers of power. A
sigul.
They both knew it.

Mia tried the safe after programming it, found it locked tightly, then followed the directions for opening it. There was a whirring noise from somewhere inside and the door popped ajar. She put in the faded red
MIDTOWN LANES
bag—the box inside just fit on the shelf—and then the bag of Oriza plates. She closed and locked the safe’s door again, tried the handle, found it tight, and nodded. The Borders bag was still on the bed. She took the wad of cash out of it and tucked it into the right front pocket of her jeans, along with the turtle.

Have to get a clean shirt,
Susannah reminded her unwelcome guest.

Mia, daughter of none, made no reply. She clearly cared
bupkes
for shirts, clean or dirty. Mia was looking at the telephone. For the time being,
with her labor on hold, the phone was all she cared about.

Now we palaver,
Susannah said.
You promised, and it’s a promise you’re going to keep. But not in that banquet room.
She shuddered.
Somewhere outside, hear me I beg. I want fresh air. That banqueting hall smelled of death.

Mia didn’t argue. Susannah got a vague sense of the other woman riffling through various files of memory—examining, rejecting, examining, rejecting—and at last finding something that would serve.

How do we go there?
Mia asked indifferently.

The black woman who was now two women (again) sat on one of the beds and folded her hands in her lap.
Like on a sled,
the woman’s Susannah part said.
I’ll push, you steer. And remember, Susannah-Mio, if you want my cooperation, you give me some straight answers.

I will,
the other replied.
Just don’t expect to like them. Or even understand them.

What do you
—

Never mind! Gods, I never met
anyone
who could ask so many questions! Time is short! When the telephone rings, our palaver ends! So if you’d palaver at all—

Susannah didn’t bother giving her a chance to finish. She closed her eyes and let herself fall back. No bed stopped that fall; she went right through it. She was falling for real, falling through space. She could hear the jangle of the todash chimes, dim and far.

Here I go again,
she thought. And:
Eddie, I love you.

STAVE:
Commala-gin-jive

Ain’t it grand to be alive?

To look out on Discordia

When the Demon Moon arrives.

RESPONSE:
Commala-come-five!

Even when the shadows rise!

To see the world and walk the world

Makes ya glad to be alive.

All at once she was falling into her body again and the sensation provoked a memory of blinding brilliance: Odetta Holmes at sixteen, sitting on her bed in her slip, sitting in a brilliant bar of sun and pulling up a silk stocking. For the moment this memory held, she could smell White Shoulders perfume and Pond’s Beauty Bar, her mother’s soap and her mother’s borrowed perfume, so grown-up to be allowed perfume, and she thought:
It’s the Spring Hop! I’m going with Nathan Freeman!

Then it was gone. The sweet smell of Pond’s soap was replaced by a clean and cold (but somehow dank) night breeze, and all that remained was that sense, so queer and perfect, of stretching into a new body as if it were a stocking one was pulling up over one’s calf and knee.

She opened her eyes. The wind gusted, blowing a fine grit in her face. She squinted against it, grimacing and raising an arm, as if she might have to ward off a blow.

“Over here!” a woman’s voice called. It wasn’t the voice Susannah would have expected. Not strident,
not a triumphant caw. “Over here, out of the wind!”

She looked and saw a tall and comely woman beckoning to her. Susannah’s first look at Mia in the flesh astounded her, because the chap’s mother was
white.
Apparently Odetta-that-was now had a Caucasian side to her personality, and how that must frost Detta Walker’s racially sensitive butt!

She herself was legless again, and sitting in a kind of rude one-person cart. It had been parked at a notch in a low parapet wall. She looked out at the most fearsome, forbidding stretch of countryside she had ever seen in her life. Huge rock formations sawed at the sky and jostled into the distance. They glistened like alien bone beneath the glare of a savage sickle moon. Away from the glare of that lunar grin, a billion stars burned like hot ice. Amid the rocks with their broken edges and gaping crevices, a single narrow path wound into the distance. Looking at it, Susannah thought that a party would have to travel that path in single file.
And bring plenty of supplies. No mushrooms to pick along the way; no pokeberries, either.
And in the distance—dim and baleful, its source somewhere over the horizon—a dark crimson light waxed and waned.
Heart of the rose,
she thought, and then:
No, not that. Forge of the King.
She looked at the pulsing sullen light with helpless, horrified fascination. Flex . . . and loosen. Wax . . . and wane. An infection announcing itself to the sky.

“Come to me now, if you’d come at all, Susannah of New York,” said Mia. She was dressed in a heavy serape and what looked like leather pants
that stopped just below the knee. Her shins were scabbed and scratched. She wore thick-soled
huaraches
on her feet. “For the King can fascinate, even at a distance. We’re on the Discordia side of the Castle. Would you like to end your life on the needles at the foot of this wall? If he fascinates you and tells you to jump, you’ll do just that. Your bossy gunslinger-men aren’t here to help you now, are they? Nay, nay. You’re on your own, so y’are.”