Susannah had an idea it might be very close indeed.
She pushed the balky, gawky, protesting cart out of the wind and looked at the woman in the serape, ashamed to be so out of breath after moving less than a dozen yards but unable to help panting. She drew down deep breaths of the dank and somehow stony air. The pillars - she had an idea they were called merlons, or something like that - were on her right. On her left was a circular pool of darkness surrounded by crumbling stone walls. Across the way, two towers rose high above the outer wall, but one had been shattered, as if by lightning or some powerful explosive.
"This where we stand is the allure," Mia said. "The wall-walk of the Castle on the Abyss, once known as Castle Discordia. You said you wanted fresh air. I hope this does ya, as they say in the Calla. This is far beyond there, Susannah, this is deep in End-World, near the place where your quest ends, for good or for ill." She paused and then said, "For ill, almost surely. Yet I care nothing for that, no, not I. I am Mia, daughter of none, mother of one. I care for my chap and nothing more. Chap be enough for me, aye! Would you palaver? Fine. I'll tell you what I may and be true. Why not? What is it to me, one way or the other?"
Susannah looked around. When she faced in toward the center of the castle - what she supposed was the courtyard - she caught an aroma of ancient rot. Mia saw her wrinkle her nose and smiled.
"Aye, they're long gone, and the machines the later ones left behind are mostly stilled, but the smell of their dying lingers, doesn't it? The smell of death always does. Ask your friend the gunslinger, thetrue gunslinger. He knows, for he's dealt his share of it. He is responsible for much, Susannah of New York. The guilt of worlds hangs around his neck like a rotting corpse. Yet he's gone far enough with his dry and lusty determination to finally draw the eyes of the great. He will be destroyed, aye, and all those who stand with him. I carry his doom in my own belly, and I care not." Her chin jutted forward in the starlight. Beneath the serape her br**sts heaved...and, Susannah saw, her belly curved. In this world, at least, Mia was very clearly pregnant. Ready to burst, in fact.
"Ask your questions, have at me," Mia said. "Just remember, we exist in the other world, too, the one where we're bound together. We're lying on a bed in the inn, as if asleep...but we don't sleep, do we, Susannah? Nay. And when the telephone rings, when my friends call, we leave this place and go to them. If your questions have been asked and answered, fine. If not, that's also fine. Ask. Or...are you not a gunslinger?" Her lips curved in a disdainful smile. Susannah thought she was pert, yes, pert indeed. Especially for someone who wouldn't be able to find her way from Forty-sixth Street to Forty-seventh in the world they had to go back to. "Soshoot! I should say."
Susannah looked once more into the darkened, broken well that was the castle's soft center, where lay its keeps and lists, its barbicans and murder holes, its God-knew-what. She had taken a course in medieval history and knew some of the terms, but that had been long ago. Surely there was a banqueting hall somewhere down there, one that she herself had supplied with food, at least for awhile. But her catering days were done. If Mia tried to push her too hard or too far, she'd find that out for herself.
Meantime, she thought she'd start with something relatively easy.
"If this is the Castle on the Abyss," she said, "where's the Abyss? I don't see anything out that way except for a minefield of rocks. And that red glow on the horizon."
Mia, her shoulder-length black hair flying out behind her (not a bit of kink in that hair, as there was in Susannah's; Mia's was like silk), pointed across the inner chasm below them to the far wall, where the towers rose and the allure continued its curve.
"This is the inner keep," she said. "Beyond it is the village of Fedic, now deserted, all dead of the Red Death a thousand years ago and more. Beyond that - "
"The Red Death?" Susannah asked, startled (also frightened in spite of herself). "Poe'sRed Death? Like in the story?" And why not? Hadn't they already wandered into - and then back out of - L. Frank Baum's Oz? What came next? The White Rabbit and the Red Queen?
"Lady, I know not. All I can tell you is that beyond the deserted village is the outer wall, and beyond the outer wall is a great crack in the earth filled with monsters that cozen, diddle, increase, and plot to escape. Once there was a bridge across, but it fell long ago. 'In the time before counting,' as 'tis said. They're horrors that might drive an ordinary man or woman mad at a glance."
She favored Susannah with a glance of her own. A decidedly satiric one.
"But not agunslinger. Surely not one such asthee. "