As Mia took her away for the last time, tearing her free from her thoughts and sending her a-tumble into the dark, Susannah realized how completely the needy, terrible bitch had possessed her life. She knew why Mia had done it - because of the chap. The question was why she, Susannah Dean, had allowed it to happen. Because she'd been possessed before? Because she was as addicted to the stranger inside as Eddie had been to heroin?
She feared it might be true.
Swirling dark. And when she opened her eyes again, it was upon that savage moon hanging above the Discordia, and the flexing red glow
(forge of the King)
on the horizon.
"Over here!" cried a woman's voice, just as it had cried before. "Over here, out of the wind!"
Susannah looked down and saw she was legless, and sitting in the same rude dog-cart as on her previous visit to the allure. The same woman, tall and comely, with black hair streaming in the wind, was beckoning to her. Mia, of course, and all this no more real than Susannah's vague dream-memories of the banquet room.
She thought:Fedic, though, was real. Mia's body is there just as mine is at this very moment being hustled through the kitchen behind the Dixie Pig, where unspeakable meals are prepared for inhuman customers. The castle allure is Mia's dream-place, her refuge, her Dogan.
"To me, Susannah of Mid-World, and away from the Red King's glow! Come out of the wind and into the lee of this merlon!"
Susannah shook her head. "Say what you have to say and be done, Mia. We've got to have a baby - aye, somehow, between us - and once it's out, we're quits. You've poisoned my life, so you have."
Mia looked at her with desperate intensity, her belly blooming beneath the serape, her hair harried backward at the wind's urging. "'Twas you who took the poison, Susannah! 'Twas you who swallowed it! Aye, when the child was still a seed unbloomed in your belly!"
Was it true? And if it was, which of them had invited Mia in, like the vampire she truly was? Had it been Susannah, or Detta?
Susannah thought neither.
She thought it might actually have been Odetta Holmes. Odetta who would never have broken the nasty old blue lady's forspecial plate. Odetta who loved her dolls, even though most of them were as white as her plain cotton panties.
"What do you want with me, Mia, daughter of none? Say and have finished with it!"
"Soon we'll be together - aye, really and truly, lying together in the same childbed. And all I ask is that if a chance comes for me to get away with my chap, you'll help me take it."
Susannah thought it over. In the wilderness of rocks and gaping crevasses, the hyenas cackled. The wind was numbing, but the pain that suddenly clamped her midsection in its jaws was worse. She saw that same pain on Mia's face and thought again how her entire existence seemed to have become a wilderness of mirrors. In any case, what harm could such a promise do? The chance probably wouldn't come, but if it did, was she going to let the thing Mia wanted to call Mordred fall into the hands of the King's men?
"Yes," she said. "All right. If I can help you get away with him, Iwill help you."
"Anywhere!" Mia cried in a harsh whisper. "Even..." She stopped. Swallowed. Forced herself to go on. "Even into the todash darkness. For if I had to wander forever with my son by my side, that would be no condemnation."
Maybe not foryou,sister, Susannah thought, but said nothing. In truth, she was fed up with Mia's megrims.
"And if there's no way for us to be free," Mia said, "kill us."
Although there was no sound up here but the wind and the cackling hyenas, Susannah could sense her physical body still on the move, now being carried down a flight of stairs. All that real-world stuff behind the thinnest of membranes. For Mia to have transported her to this world, especially while in the throes of childbirth, suggested a being of great power. Too bad that power couldn't be harnessed, somehow.
Mia apparently mistook Susannah's continued silence for reluctance, for she rushed around the allure's circular walkway in her sturdyhuaraches and almost ran to where Susannah sat in her gawky, balky cart. She seized Susannah's shoulders and shook her.
"Yar!"she cried vehemently. "Kill us! Better we be together in death than to..." She trailed off, then spoke in a dull and bitter voice: "I've been cozened all along. Haven't I?"
And now that the moment had come, Susannah felt neither vindication nor sympathy nor sorrow. She only nodded.
"Do they mean to eat him? To feed those terrible elders with his corpse?"
"I'm almost sure not," Susannah said. And yet cannibalism was in it somewhere; her heart whispered it was so.
"They don't care about me at all," Mia said. "Just the baby-sitter, isn't that what you called me? And they won't even let me havethat, will they?"
"I don't think so," Susannah said. "You might get six months to nurse him, but even that..." She shook her head, then bit her lip as a fresh contraction gusted into her, turning all the muscles in her belly and thighs to glass. When it eased a little she finished, "I doubt it."
"Then kill us, if it comes to that. Say you will, Susannah, do ya, I beg!"
"And if I do for you, Mia, what will you do for me? Assuming I could believe any word out of your liar's mouth?"
"I'd free you, if chance allows."
Susannah thought it over, and decided that a poor bargain was better than no bargain at all. She reached up and took the hands which were gripping her shoulders. "All right. I agree."
Then, as at the end of their previous palaver in this place, the sky tore open, and the merlon behind them, and the very air between them. Through the rip, Susannah saw a moving hallway. The image was dim, blurry. She understood she was looking through her own eyes, which were mostly shut. Bulldog and Hawkman still had her. They were bearing her toward the door at the end of the hallway - always, since Roland had come into her life, there was another door - and she guessed they must think she'd passed out, or fainted. She supposed that in a way, she had.