THIS SAFE IS PROVIDED FOR YOUR PERSONAL BELONGINGS
THE MANAGEMENT OF THE PLAZA - PARK HYATT ASSUMES NO
RESPONSIBILITY FOR ITEMS LEFT HERE
CASH AND JEWELRY SHOULD BE DEPOSITED IN THE HOTEL SAFE
DOWNSTAIRS
TO SET CODE, PUNCH IN FOUR NUMBERS PLUS ENTER
TO OPEN, ENTER YOUR FOUR-NUMBER CODE 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 theright numbers. Numbers of power. Asigul. 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 caredbupkes 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 metanyonewho 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.
6th Stanza: The Castle Allure
One
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 waswhite. 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-soledhuaraches 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."