"What-?" Mia asked, and started up on her elbows once again. Blood had begun to pour from her breast. The baby drank it like milk, losing not a drop. Beside Mia, Sayre was standing as still as a graven image, his mouth open and his eyes bulging from their sockets. Whatever he'd expected from this birth-whatever he'd been told to expect-it wasn't this.
The Detta part of Susannah took a child's vicious pleasure in the man's shocked expression: he looked like the comedian Jack Benny milking a laugh.
For a moment only Mia seemed to realize what had happened, for her face began to lengthen with a kind of informed horror-and, perhaps, pain. Then her smile returned, that angelic madonna's smile. She reached out and stroked the still-changing freak at her breast, the black spider with the tiny human head and the red mark on its bristly gut.
"Is he not beautiful?" she cried. "Is my son not beautiful, as fair as the summer sun. "
These were her last words.
FIVE
Her face didn't freeze, exactly, but stilled. Her cheeks and brow and throat, flushed dark with the exertions of childbirth only a moment before, faded to the waxy whiteness of orchid petals.
Her shining eyes grew still and fixed in their sockets. And suddenly it was as if Susannah were looking not at a woman lying on a bed but the rfratwng- of a woman. An extraordinarily good one, but still something that had been created on paper with strokes of charcoal and a few pale colors.
Susannah remembered how she had returned to the Plaza-Park Hyatt Hotel after her first visit to the allure of Castle Discordia, and how she'd come here to Fedic after her last palaver with Mia, in the shelter of the merlon. How the sky and the castle and the very stone of the merlon had torn open. And then, as if her thought had caused it, Mia's face was ripped apart from hairline to chin. Her fixed and dulling eyes fell crookedly away to either side. Her lips split into a crazy double twin-grin.
And it wasn't blood that poured out of that widening fissure in her face but a stale^melling white powder. Susannah had a fragmented memory of T. S. Eliot
> (hollow men stuffed men headpiece filled with straw)
and Lewis Carroll
(why you 're nothing but a pack of cards)
before Mia's dan-tete raised its unspeakable head from its first meal. Its blood-smeared mouth opened and it hoisted itself, lower legs scrabbling for purchase on its mother's deflating belly, upper ones almost seeming to shadowbox at Susannah.
It squealed with triumph, and if it had at that moment chosen to attack the other woman who had given it nurture, Susannah Dean would surely have died next to Mia. Instead, it returned to the deflated sac of breast from which it had taken its first suck, and tore it off. The sound of its chewing was wet and loose. A moment later it burrowed into the hole it had made, the white human face disappearing while Mia's was obliterated by the dust boiling out of her deflating head. There was a harsh, almost industrial sucking sound and Susannah thought, It's taking all the moisture out of her, all the moisture that's left. And look at it! Look at it swell! Like a leech on a horse's neck!
Just then a ridiculously English voice-it was the plummy intonation of the lifelong gentleman's gentleman-said: "Pardon me, sirs, but will you be wanting this incubator after all? For the situation seems to have altered somewhat, if you don't mind my saying. "
It broke Susannah's paralysis. She pushed herself upward with one hand and seized Scowther's automatic pistol with the other. She yanked, but the gun was strapped across the butt and wouldn't come free. Her questing index finger found the little sliding knob that was the safety and pushed it. She turned the gun, holster and all, toward Scowther's ribcage.
"What the dev-" he began, and then she pulled the trigger with her middle finger, at the same time yanking back on the shoulder-rig with all her force. The straps binding the holster to Scowther's body held, but the thinner one holding the automatic in place snapped, and as Scowther fell sideways, trying to look down at the smoking black hole in his white labcoat,
Susannah took full possession of his gun. She shot Straw and the vampire beside him, the one with the electric sword.
For a moment the vampire was there, still staring at the spidergod that had looked so much like a baby to begin with, and then its aura whiffed out. The thing's flesh went with it. For a moment there was nothing where it had been but an empty shirt tucked into an empty pair of bluejeans. Then the clothes collapsed.
"Kill her!" Sayre screamed, reaching for his own gun. "Kill that bitch!"
Susannah rolled away from the spider crouched on the body of its rapidly deflating mother, raking at the helmet she was wearing even as she tumbled off the side of the bed. There was a moment of excruciating pain when she thought it wasn't going to come away and then she hit the floor, free of it. It hung over the side of the bed, fringed with her hair. The spider-thing, momentarily pulled off its roost when its mother's body jerked, chittered angrily.
Susannah rolled beneath the bed as a series of gunshots went off above her. She heard a loud SPROINK as one of the slugs hit a spring. She saw the rathead nurse's feet and hairy lower legs and put a bullet into one of her knees. The nurse gave a scream, turned, and began to limp away, squalling.
Sayre leaned forward, pointing the gun at the makeshift double bed just beyond Mia's deflating body. There were already three smoking, smoldering holes in the groundsheet. Before he could add a fourth, one of the spider's legs caressed his cheek, tearing open the mask he wore and revealing the hairy cheek beneath. Sayre recoiled, crying out. The spider turned to him and made a mewling noise. The white thing high on its back-a node with a human face-glared, as if to warn Sayre away from its meal. Then it turned back to the woman, who was really not recognizable as a woman any longer; she looked like the ruins of some incredibly ancient mummy which had now turned to rags and powder.
"I say, this is a bit confusing," the robot with the incubator remarked. "Shall I retire? Perhaps I might return when matters have clarified somewhat. "
Susannah reversed direction, rolling out from beneath the bed. She saw that two of the low men had taken to their heels.
Jey, the hawkman, didn't seem to be able to make up his mind.
Stay or go? Susannah made it up for him, putting a single shot into the sleek brown head. Blood and feathers flew.
Susannah got up as well as she could, gripping the side of the bed for balance, holding Scowther's gun out in front of her.
khe had gotten four. The rathead nurse and one other had run.
Sayre had dropped his gun and was trying to hide behind the robot with the incubator.
Susannah shot the two remaining vampires and the low man with the bulldog face. That one-Haber-hadn't forgotten Susannah; he'd been holding his ground and waiting for a clear shot. She got hers first and watched him fall backward with deep satisfaction. Haber, she thought, had been the most dangerous.
"Madam, I wonder if you could tell me-" began the robot, and Susannah put two quick shots into its steel face, darkening the blue electric eyes. This trick she had learned from Eddie. A gigantic siren immediately went off. Susannah felt that if she listened to it long, she would be deafened.
"I HAVE BEEN BLINDED BY GUNFIRE!" the robot bellowed, still in its absurd would-you-like-another-cup-of-tea-madam accent. "VISION ZERO, I NEED HELP, CODE 7,1 SAY, HELP!"
Sayre stepped away from it, hands held high. Susannah couldn't hear him over the siren and the robot's blatting, but she could read the words as they came off the bastard's lips: surrender, will you accept my parole?
She smiled at this amusing idea, unaware that she smiled. It was without humor and without mercy and meant only one thing: she wished she could get him to lick her stumps, as he had forced Mia to lick his boots. But there wasn't time enough.
He saw his doom in her grin and turned to run and Susannah shot him twice in the back of the head-once for Mia, once for Pere Callahan. Sayre's skull shattered in a fury of blood and brains. He grabbed the wall, scrabbled at a shelf loaded with equipment and supplies, and then went down dead.
Susannah now took aim at the spider-god. The tiny white human head on its black and bristly back turned to look at her.
The blue eyes, so uncannily like Roland's, blazed.
No, you cannot! You must not! For I am the King's only son!
I can't? she sent back, leveling the automatic. Oh, sugar, you are just. . . so. . . WRONG!
But before she could pull the trigger, there was a gunshot from behind her. A slug burned across the side of her neck.
Susannah reacted instantly, turning and throwing herself sideways into the aisle. One of the low men who'd run had had a change of heart and come back. Susannah put two bullets into his chest and made him mortally sorry.
She turned, eager for more-yes, this was what she wanted, what she had been made for, and she'd always revere Roland for showing her-but the others were either dead or fled. The spider raced down the side of its birthbed on its many legs, leaving the papier-mache corpse of its mother behind. It turned its white infant's head briefly toward her.
You'd do ivell to let me pass, Blackie, or-
She fired at it, but stumbled over the hawkman's outstretched hand as she did. The bullet that would have killed the abomination went a little awry, clipping off one of its eight hairy legs instead. A yellowish-red fluid, more like pus than blood, poured from the place where the leg had joined the body. The thing screamed at her in pain and surprise. The audible portion of that scream was hard to hear over the endless cycling blat of the robot's siren, but she heard it in her head loud and clear.
I'll pay you back for that! My father and I, we'll pay you back!
Make you cry for death, so we will!
You ain't gonna have a chance, sugar, Susannah sent back, trying to project all the confidence she possibly could, not wanting the thing to know what she believed: that Scowther's automatic might have been shot dry. She aimed with a deliberation that was unnecessary, and the spider scuttled rapidly away from her, darting
first behind the endlessly sirening robot and then through a dark doorway.
All right. Not great, not the best solution by any means, but she was still alive, and that much was grand.
And the fact that all of sai Sayre's crew were dead or run off? That wasn't bad, either.
Susannah tossed Scowther's gun aside and selected another, this one a Walther PPK. She took it from the docker's clutch ktraw had been wearing, then rummaged in his pockets, where she found half a dozen extra clips. She briefly considered adding the vampire's electric sword to her armory and decided to leave it where it was. Better the tools you knew than those you didn't.
She tried to get in touch with Jake, couldn't hear herself think, and turned to the robot. "Hey, big boy! Shut off that damn sireen, what do you say?"
She had no idea if it would work, but it did. The silence was immediate and wonderful, with the sensuous texture of moire silk. Silence might be useful. If there was a counterattack, she'd hear them coming. And the dirty truth? She hoped for a counterattack, wanted them to come, and never mind whether that made sense or not. She had a gun and her blood was up. That was all that mattered.