The Sandman, page 25
The Witch stepped closer. “Who are you?”
The Lady settled a jeweled pin at her nape. “You,” she said.
“No,” said the Witch. “You are beautiful and I am not.” She took another step. “Your lips are fire and your neck is snow. There are mysteries in the folds of your hair and the curve of your mouth.” She was very near now. The two faces, one intent, one detached, watched her hand rise and hover toward the Lady’s shoulder.
The Lady stepped aside and turned in one smooth movement. “Do you want to kiss me? There’s a price on my kisses.”
“Who are you?” asked the Witch again.
“Your father kissed me. He gave all he had for the privilege.”
“I will give you everything I have.”
“I have that already. You have nothing left to give me. Except everything you might have had. You could give me that.”
FIDA PUT OFF her wolf’s pelt as the Witch had taught her, and wrapped it around her shoulders. Gently, she touched one torn finger to the casket, leaving a smear of blood on its clear surface, which slicked and shone for a moment, as if the blood had melted it to liquid. She lifted her finger to her mouth and ripped at the nail with her teeth until blood welled from the wound and dripped onto the casket. A fat crimson drop trembled a moment, cabochon, then collapsed and ran off the casket’s side. Where it had been was a tiny pit.
Fida tore at her wrist then, sharp wolf teeth shearing through thin human skin as easily as knives. The resulting stream of blood was strong, pulsing over the icy casket in thick waves that thinned as they sheeted down the sides, melting the facets and the fantastic carving to rose-tinted smoothness, releasing the silver bands and the moony jewels to lie among rocks and pools of ice melt. Her arm grew heavy; she rested her hand on the ice, which burned her fingers, clung to them and to her wrist, freezing her to itself. Still the wound bled sluggishly as Fida knelt by the casket, her pelt slipping from her shoulders, watching her blood soak through the ice toward the Witch’s glowing heart.
“WELL?” SAID THE Lady. “Is it a deal or isn’t it? Your father knew what he wanted, and the last deal we made, you did too.” A paper appeared in her hand, one line of small black type printed neatly across the middle and, beneath it, a blotched signature scrawled in brown ink.
“Here it is, in living color,” she said. “I help get rid of your father and give you a chance to get your heart back, and you give me your name, your life, and your mind. Signed with your heart’s blood, which is a neat trick for someone who doesn’t have one.”
The Witch reached for the paper; the Lady snatched it away. “Uh-uh,” she said. “You’ll just have to trust me. Come on, have I ever lied to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“So you don’t,” said the Lady cheerfully. “That’s the beauty of it. But I always keep my bargains. Just ask your father.”
“My father! My father! Why must you always be talking of my father? He’s gone.”
The Lady looked apologetic. “Well, that’s the problem, you see. He isn’t. When you cut out his heart, you simply covered him up with a rug and left him in the corner of the ritual chamber.” The Witch’s eyes shifted away, blank as stones. The Lady smiled and said, “I promised him you’d always be together.”
“But what of your promise to me?” the Witch wailed. “It hasn’t been easy, I can tell you. Now. What about that kiss?”
The Witch felt her hair clinging stickily to her cheeks and brow, and lifted her hand to push it back. The movement brushed her loosened gown against her nipples, which hardened. There was sweat trickling down between her breasts, and, beneath the layers of her petticoats, she felt a moist heat between her thighs. The room pulsed around her, quick and hard. She stepped forward, close enough to see the thread of a healing cut on the Lady’s lower lip.
Had Fida bitten the Lady, too? She fingered her own mouth, felt the faint ridge Fida’s tooth had left there. It hadn’t been a bite at all; it had been a kiss. And it had burned her. She recognized the heat now. It was desire for Fida. Fida of the wild smell and the bristly, brindled hair, Fida who never taunted her, Fida who was willing to brave the White Wolves for her. Fida who loved her.
“Yes,” said the Lady, “she loves you. She’s yours, by her own free gift. As you are mine.”
“I am not yours,” said the Witch.
“Very well, then; you’re not. Save your chilly charms for your little pet, if she returns. She could meet a young dog-wolf on her way back through the wood—winter is mating season for wolves, did you know? And she-wolves are notoriously horny. Or she could run off with your heart, or eat it. You haven’t been very kind to her, and she’s still a wolf. Everyone knows that wolves are by nature cruel and crafty and mean.”
“No,” said the Witch. “She’d never do that. Would she?”
“Of course she wouldn’t. She’d bring it back, or die trying. Wolves are notoriously faithful. And then you’d be whole again, mistress of your name, your life, and your mind. You’d feel warmth again, and love and fear and desire, and all sorts of other things you’ve forgotten about. Grief. Remorse. Loneliness. Oh, and you’ll grow older. White hairs, some of them growing from your chin, and lines around your eyes and mouth. Loose teeth, droopy breasts. I can’t guarantee you’ll be able to imagine food and drink and fuel from thin air anymore, either. There are certain kinds of magic only I can give you.”
The Witch made a little whimpering noise. Her reflection in the mirror flushed and paled as waves of heat and cold chased one another up her throat and licked her cheeks.
“Ah,” said the Lady. “You don’t like that, do you?”
“I want my heart,” said the Witch. “That was the bargain.”
“You can’t have both your heart and me,” said the Lady.
FIDA LAY WHITE and unmoving in a puddle of pinkish ice melt, her hand cupped protectively around a quivering human heart. The cave was like a cloudy night, dark and close and featureless. In one corner, a shadow flickered black against black and drifted toward the wolf-girl. Shaking long sleeves from its star white hands, it touched her head. Fida’s head stirred on her pillowing arm; she opened one eye and sighed. All was well. Her mistress had come to her.
“Good cub?” she whispered.
Her mistress giggled. Fida squinted up at the long face set in the depths of the cowl. No, not her mistress. Like, as a deadly mushroom is like an edible one, but not the same. Her eyes had no white, but were black from lid to lid; and where her mistress smelled of wool and woodsmoke and fear, this woman smelled faintly of peaches. Fida growled.
“Ah, you know me,” said the Lady. “Well, never mind. It will be our little secret. You have something that belongs to me, I believe.”
Fida closed her hand around the heart. It throbbed and burned in the hollow of her palm like a wound or a living coal.
“Don’t be silly,” said the Lady. “You can’t fight me.” Her white face filled the cave, round and unbearably white. “I am everything. I am wiser than heaven and more powerful than a pack leader in his prime. Truth itself is my creature and my slave.”
Fida contracted on her sodden pelt, clutching the Witch’s heart to rest against her belly, shielding it from the Lady’s pitiless eyes with her wide hands and her bony knees.
The Lady’s face waned, dwindled to a pale curve of cheek veiled by a drifting wrack of hair. “You can’t fight me,” she whimpered. “I am nothing. I am more ignorant than dirt and more powerless than a day-old cub. Truth passes through me as though I didn’t exist.”
Fida closed her eyes. Resting against her belly, the heart pulsed slowly, each beat sending warmth through her, and a trickle of strength.
IN THE BLOOD-RED chamber, the Witch sweated and shivered. “It’s the bitch-girl or me,” murmured the Lady, soft as snow falling. “You can’t have both. Why are you hesitating? She’s an animal, not like you and me. She’ll be dead in twenty years or so, just like the rest of them, and who knows whether I’ll still want you by then? What do you know about this wolf-girl? How do you know you can trust her? Don’t you want to know what she’s doing right now?”
The Witch put her hands to her burning forehead, pressed it between them until the pain stopped her. “No. Yes. No. She loves me. I trust her.”
“Suit yourself. She might be in trouble, be hurt, even dying. You could help her. But I guess you don’t care.”
“No! I do care. If she’s hurt, I want to see.”
The Lady smiled, a feral baring of the teeth. “Very well,” she said. “You asked for it.” She nodded at the mirror, which clouded and resolved into a dark painting of a naked girl curled on a wolf pelt. The girl was nursing something against her belly. Bending above her was the Witch, her proud face pleading, her hand beseechingly outstretched. The wolf-girl’s lips were drawn back, snarling. Her eyes were wild.
“Does she look hurt?” asked the Lady. “She looks . . . angry.”
“Mad as hell,” agreed the Lady. “Why won’t she give me the heart?”
“She wants it for herself,” said the Lady.
The Witch screamed and, lifting her fists, shattered the vision into a thousand glittering shards. She turned to the Lady, sobbing, the tears hot on her cheeks, bloody hands begging an embrace. “You,” she said thickly. “Who are you?”
The Lady opened her arms. “I am whatever you wish me to be,” she said. “I am Desire.”
But the Witch was still speaking and did not hear her. “You are Love,” said the Witch. “You are Family and Home and Safety. You are my Heart.”
Then she stepped into the embrace of Desire, which was as cold as the moon, and raised her lips to the lips of Desire, which sucked from her all warmth and hope of warmth. As they kissed, the fire in the hearth burned blue and white as ice, filling the room with a deadly chill. And far below, in the ritual chamber, her father’s corpse shuddered and sighed.
IN FIDA’S GRASP, the heart throbbed wildly and unevenly, gave a wild, shuddering beat, and was still. Fida cradled it to her, willing it warm again, lifting it to her mouth and licking it. It lay cool and elastic in her fingers, dead meat.
“It’s no use,” said Desire. “She doesn’t love you. She can’t love you. She belongs to me.”
“But I love her,” said Fida passionately. “I love her more than my life.”
“Die then,” said Desire.
Not long after, Desire took the Witch’s heart from between Fida’s torn and bloody paws and set it back on the rocky spur where it had reposed for the past three hundred years. She spat upon it and smoothed the spittle into a casket of ice, faceted and fantastically carved, bound in silver bands and set with moony jewels. Then she pulled her cowl up around her face, shook down her long, dark sleeves, and drifted back into the corner.
THE WITCH SITS in her blood-red room, cocooned in wolf pelts. The hands on her porphyry clock stand at half past one—whether morning or after noon is impossible to tell, for the windows are shuttered and curtained. So are the Witch’s eyes, lids closed against the ruddy firelight and veiled by the mahogany hair hanging loose over her face. Stone and glass and wood and cloth stand between her and the moon, but she can feel it nonetheless, cold and hungry outside her chamber window, riding above the Mountain where her heart lies frozen in ice. Someday she’ll get it back. All she needs is someone who will brave the moon and the Mountain and the Lady’s White Wolves, to break the spell and get it for her. Someone who will not betray her. Someone who will love her. A wolf with a human shadow. The Lady has promised.
The Mender of Broken Dreams
Nancy A. Collins
The first time I met Nancy Collins, we were sharing a hotel room. Nancy had to sleep on the floor. It was Steve Bissette’s fault, and I tell the story in the afterword to Nancy’s anthology, Nameless Sins, so you won’t hear any more of it here.
Here she gives us a glimpse further into the murky background of The Dreaming.
I AM THE MENDER OF BROKEN DREAMS. THAT IS MY OCCUPATION, my calling, if you will.
I start each day by walking the long halls of the castle, climbing great staircases that curl and wind like the chambers of a nautilus. Every day the halls are different, the stairs head in a different direction, the artwork and furnishings decorating the wings no longer the same.
Some days the door leading to the Restoration Department looks like an ancient vault, sometimes it resembles the yawning, laughing maw of a funhouse clown, other times it is twisted and off kilter, like the lurching doorways from a German expressionist film.
The Restoration Department is always huge; that much never changes. There are thousands upon thousands of towering shelves that stretch up to the dim ceiling, each shelf divided into cubbyholes of various sizes and shapes, each cubbyhole carefully labeled and marked according to some arcane filing system created while Man picked his neighbors for nits. And in each specially marked cubbyhole there is a box holding the remains of a dream.
My job is to repair the dreams or, should that prove impossible, retool them so they might somehow continue to work. It is an endless task, but immensely rewarding on a personal level. I love my work. It challenges me daily, both artistically and intellectually. I approach each case with the utmost interest and dedication. The repair and restoration of so delicate and ephemeral a thing as a dream is something only a true master craftsman would attempt. And while I blush to sound my own horn, false modesty has no place here. To state it simply: I am the best there is at my craft.
My attendant, Kroll, is waiting for me to arrive, as always. Like many of Lord Morpheus’s servants, he is not native to the Dreaming but an emissary from one of the many realms of myth. Kroll claims to be a prince of Nibelheim, the Land of Dwarves, but with his great shock of orange hair, round little belly and thick features, he looks more troll than dwarf.
I take off my topcoat and drape it over the back of a chair carved to resemble a flying monkey. “Good morning, Kroll.”
“Morning, boss. Here’s today’s schedule,” he announces in his basso profundo squeak as he hands me a sheaf of computer printouts.
I glance at the columns of serial numbers, nodding my head. “Looks like we have a busy day ahead of us.”
“Lucky us,” Kroll grunts, and heads over to the motorized cart he uses to traverse the labyrinthine stacks. To aid him in reaching the higher shelves, it comes with a cherry picker.
I do not know how long Kroll has been working in the Restoration Department, but I would hazard a guess that he has been here for a lifetime or two. Occasionally he forgets himself and makes references to my predecessor, the previous Mender. As Kroll starts up the retrieval cart, I unlock the huge freestanding cabinet behind my workbench and take out the tools of my trade: a jeweler’s eyepiece, a potting wheel, sculpting tools, a set of soldering irons and glass cutters, a sewing kit, an electron microscope, and far more mundane objects such as C-clamps and drill bits. Just as I’ve finished laying out my tools, I hear the putt-putt-putt of Kroll’s retrieval cart heading in my direction.
Today there are several small and medium-sized boxes, a couple of crates, and what looks to be a rolled-up rug on the cart. I watch Kroll as he unloads a box big enough to hold a freezer unit without breaking a sweat. Although he is the size of a three-year-old child, Kroll’s strength is prodigious. Rumor has it that once, while in his cups, he got into a brawl with one of the Aesir while in Valhalla and was forced to flee his myth cycle, which is why he’s in Lord Morpheus’s service.
I check the serial numbers on the boxes in order to make sure we have the same ones as those listed on the manifest, then open each box to check the contents.
“Hmmm. Lot number 36/92: damaged stained glass. Lot number 87/12BB: frayed tapestry. Lot number 410/ZF: broken mechanical bird-of-paradise.”
“I’ll get the looms and spinning wheels ready. Let me know what fabrics and dyes you’ll be needing.”
“Very good, Kroll. And you’d better see to the blast furnace and kiln while you’re at it.”
I decide to start with the clockwork bird-of-paradise. Mechanical things are always the easiest to fix, even when they have suffered the roughest of handling. I turn the bird-of-paradise over in my hands, admiring the workmanship.
It is made of burnished gold with delicate patterns, chased in silver along its body and with precious stones set in its tail and head. Reality has taken its toll on the thing’s beauty, though. Tarnish has corroded the silver and covered the settings with a black goo that turns the rubies and emeralds and pearls into grimy pebbles.
Screwing the jeweler’s glass into my right eye, I set myself to repairing its clockwork guts. Within a half hour the dream-machine is whole once more. I hand the bird-of-paradise to Kroll, who produces a burnishing cloth and begins polishing it like a fiendish Aladdin. Soon the clockwork bird looks as good as new—its golden skin reflecting the sunlight that spills in through the high windows like the face of the sun itself.
“Now, let’s see if she’ll fly,” I mutter, holding up the key I found in the box alongside the broken dream. It fits just below the clockwork bird’s right wing. I turn the key clockwise, careful not to overwind it. The dream jerks into motion, flapping its wings and tossing back its head to give voice to a joyful burst of clockwork birdsong.
Spreading its gold and silver wings, the bird-of-paradise takes to the air, circling over our heads a few times before flying out the open window in search of its rightful owner.
“What kind of dream do you fancy that was?” Kroll asks, scratching himself with his three-fingered hand.
“Probably one of wealth. It’s no doubt going to roost on the bedpost of a peasant farmer somewhere.”
I decide to tackle the tapestry next, since matching threads, dyes, and weaves is the most time-consuming of restorations. As I unroll the tapestry, I find myself impressed by its elaborate design and dismayed by the state of its decay.
