Tears of the Furies (A Novel of the Menagerie) (43 page)

Sanguedolce stood before a towering object made from blocks
of stone that could only have been the Forge of Hephaestus. A pulsing orange
glow like a miniature sun still burned from within the belly of the stone
furnace, and Conan Doyle could feel its blistering heat on his face. There was
something about the Forge, something that made him feel afraid. He could see by
the expression on his former master’s face that he was not alone in these
feelings.

"No, I’m not," Sweetblood confessed. "But I
don’t believe we have any choice."

The drape of night still hung heavy across the sky when Clay
rode into Sparta, but the eastern horizon was tinted to indigo, just the barest
hint that dawn would soon arrive. Squire sat behind him on the battered
motorcycle they had taken from an alley near the docks where they made
landfall. Dr. Graves had wanted to leave compensation, or a note for the owner.
Clay had dismissed the suggestion as impractical. They had no way of knowing if
the owner would ever find the money.

"Besides," Squire had snorted. "We’re hunting
a monster. It’s not like we’re the friggin’ Justice League."

Now Graves flew overhead, a silhouette barely visible
against the night sky, and only to those who were looking. Clay maneuvered the
motorcycle through the streets of Sparta with Squire clinging to the bike
behind him and the forbidding shapes of the mountains looming in the distance. The
nearer they had come to Sparta, the quieter they became. Even Squire had fallen
silent now, with the dawn approaching. Clay wondered if he was simply tired or
if he somehow sensed that they were at last gaining ground on their prey.

Medusa had stopped running. He assumed she needed to rest,
because he doubted that this was her final destination. Clay clutched the
handlebars of the motorcycle and focused on the tendril of ectoplasmic energy
that stretched out ahead of him, the soul trail left by the passing of the
monster and the spectral remnant of the last human she had slain. He had hunted
many killers in his long existence and when he drew near to them he was always
aware.

He could feel the murder in her heart.

The motorcycle’s roar shattered the predawn quiet, grinding
the air even as its tires bit the road. It was as though Sparta itself
slumbered and the engine startled it awake.

They passed a decrepit hotel and a café, then came to a
crossroads where Clay brought the bike to a halt, engine grumbling, struggling
to spring forward once more. Squire continued his recent silence and Clay
wondered if the hobgoblin had somehow fallen asleep while straddling the
motorcycle.

"What is it?" whispered the voice of Dr. Graves.

Clay glanced to his left and saw the ghost hovering there, a
golden tint to his spectral form, as though the sunrise tinted not only the
eastern sky but the adventurer’s wandering soul.

"We’re going to have to get off and walk soon. I don’t
want the engine to give us away."

Graves nodded once. "At your discretion."

Clay revved the engine and turned right. The road took them
up into the hills, toward Sparta’s own acropolis. In the bustle of the day,
Clay thought there must have been a great deal of traffic on these streets, but
at this hour the only vehicles they passed were trucks he assumed were on their
way to make early deliveries. Otherwise the city seemed abandoned.

For long minutes he navigated the motorcycle in pursuit of
that ectoplasmic thread, moving farther and farther from the populated center
of the city. At the base of the hill upon which was the Spartan acropolis, Clay
pulled the motorcycle off the road and into a small gulley that ran along
beside the pavement.

"Thank Christ," Squire grunted as he dismounted
the bike with some difficulty. "My balls couldn’t have survived another
mile."

Clay couldn’t help it. He laughed. They had ridden fast and
hard, daring disaster on every curve, and he had felt the tension of their
hunt. Now they must be more cautious than ever, stealthy yet savage. The moment
was not without trepidation. For perhaps the first time since he had known the
hobgoblin, Clay found that Squire’s humor was precisely what he needed. All the
time Squire had been silent he must have been gritting his teeth in pain.

"Oh, sure, laugh it up. I don’t see you walking like
John Wayne."

Squire staggered stiffly away, walking off his discomfort.

Dr. Graves alighted upon the ground several feet away. The
ghost seemed barely an echo, almost entirely insubstantial. If Clay looked
away, or tried to see the specter in his peripheral vision, he thought he might
not be able to see Graves at all.

"You seem . . . less, somehow," Clay said. "Why
is that?"

The pinpoint lights in the ghost’s bottomless eyes glowed
more brightly and he narrowed his gaze. There was a tightness to his expression
that belied the camaraderie that was usually between them.

"The night is ending. Dawn is near. Spirits are . . .
thinnest
then. I could manifest completely, but it takes more effort. I thought I ought
to save that effort for Medusa."

Clay nodded. "I meant no offense."

Graves waved him off. "I took none. It just saddens me."
The ghost rippled in the darkness as though in the breeze and turned to look up
the hill. "She’s up there, is she? On the acropolis?"

"No." Clay pointed to the west. "The
soul-tether leads this way, around the base. My guess is our destination is on
the other side."

The ghost drifted for several yards in the direction Clay
had pointed and then seemed to realize what he was doing. With obvious purpose,
Graves began to walk rather than float.

"Shall we?" he asked, glancing back.

Squire had gone the wrong way, but he had not strayed far. The
hobgoblin had been watching them and now came strolling back, his gait no
longer awkward.

"Game time, huh?"

Clay laid the motorcycle down in the gulley, hoping to come
back for it. "Yeah. And I don’t know if we’re going to get another shot at
this, so —"

Squire bristled. "You think I’m some amateur?"

"Not at all." Clay shook his head for emphasis. "Not
at all. You’re Hell in a skirmish. But you get carried away sometimes, get
loud. You like to talk."

The hobgoblin took a deep breath and let it out. "Not a
sound. We’ll get her. Greece is nice, but I’m through with the scenic tour. We
end it here."

Clay looked at him a moment longer and then the two of them
set off after Dr. Graves, the ghost visible only in silhouette against the
indigo of the horizon. A glimmer of gold had appeared in the east, now, as though
the edge of the night had begun to kindle into flame.

The corpse of Hades had become its own Hell, a city of
damnation within the vaster Underworld. The Furies had tortured souls for an
eternity in their lair, and the suffering screamed through the vast hollow
caverns of Hades’ chest. The anguish in the very texture of the air was
tangible and oppressive, and now it seemed to close in around Ceridwen so that
she felt the weight of this darkest of realms fully for the first time.

A warrior sorceress of Faerie, a Princess of the Fey, she
was tainted by this place.

She had to escape.

"Come," she said, grabbing Eve’s arm.

Still nearly feral, the blood of gods staining her fangs and
chin, the vampire spun on her, snarling. Then her face softened.

"Eve, we must go now."

They had made their way back along the path that had taken
them to Hades’ heart and now stood within sight of one of the dead god’s ribs,
the massive bones that arced up the sides of the flesh city, columns that
supported the dark heavens of this Hell. Even here the upper reaches of the
cadaver’s roof were not visible, the sky too dark to see.

A wind of ancient screams blew past them and out through the
gaping wound in side of the suicidal god’s corpse. Eve had slain one of the
Erinyes, murdered part of the fabric of the mythology that had sifted down from
the earliest age of the world. The myths and legends, the soul debris of that
primeval time, had not so much woken as twitched in the midst of its death
throes. The ghosts of gods and the lingering specter of a thousand years of
worship had felt the slaughter of one of the Kindly Ones, and had lashed back. Like
a tornado of retribution, the grandeur of a bygone age had risen against them. It
might subside, but Ceridwen did not believe it would do so before they were all
dead, before blood had been spilled in exchange for the blood of Tisiphone of
the Erinyes.

Once more she urged Eve toward the way out of Hades’ corpse.
It would take ages to return to the surface world — to Conan Doyle’s
world of Blight — but Ceridwen did not want to think about how they would
manage the journey. She only wanted to be moving.

"We can’t. We have to wait for Doyle," Eve said,
eyes narrowed in anger and doubt.

Ceridwen bared her own teeth, aware that her ire could be
just as terrible as Eve’s if pushed. "Arthur left us to face some task he
felt he had to confront alone. If his life were ebbing, I would know. If his
heart were breaking, I would know. I
feel
him, woman, every moment of my
life. How can you think I would leave him here? He will follow, and the best we
can do to aid him is get ourselves to the exit from this blasted place so that
he does not have to concern himself with our escape."

Eve stared at her, eyes gleaming yellow in the strange
darklight of the Furies’ Hell.

In the midst of Hades’ heart there was a battle raging. Gigantic
figures of metal and leather armor, supported only by bones and spirit-wraiths,
the mad ghosts of the Greek gods, were battling with an army of swift, brutal
soldiers grown from the ivory teeth of the Hydra.

Danny Ferrick had saved them all, forcing Nigel Gull to sing
in the voice of Orpheus. Even now the demon boy was by Gull’s side and he no
longer looked so much like a boy. It pained Ceridwen to see his transformation,
but Danny was all demon now. The hatred in his eyes and the way his black-red
skin glistened made him monstrous and terrifying, even more so than his horns
or claws. He seemed to have grown during their time in the Underworld, his
chest broader, his arms thicker and more powerful. It occurred to her that
perhaps he had been tainted by this place just as she had been, and she hoped
that both of them could somehow be cleansed.

But Ceridwen had little faith that either of them would ever
be the same.

The changeling was clearly ready to kill Gull if he stopped
singing. The voice of Orpheus rang sweetly through the Underworld, cutting
through even the ancient cries of the damned. But Gull could not sing forever. The
towering, shambling gods had ceased their battle. Even the Hydra’s children had
stopped attacking the dead things, the shades of gods.

Ceridwen gestured for Eve to look at Gull. The sorcerer’s
twisted face — as misshapen as his soul — showed the strain of his
effort, and his eyes revealed his fear of Danny. Somehow, once controlled by
Orpheus’s song, the demon boy had become immune to it, and Gull had not
bothered to try it on Eve and Ceridwen.

The girl, Jezebel, was dead, leaving Gull with only Hawkins
as an ally, and the cold man with his colder eyes seemed only to want to
survive, now that things had gone so terribly wrong.

"We’ve got to go," Ceridwen insisted.

Eve stared a moment longer at Danny, Gull, and Hawkins, and
then she nodded.

"All right. But we don’t go back out through the gates
of this place without Arthur."

Ceridwen moved so swiftly that Eve could not stop her. Her
fingers tangled in the vampire’s hair and she gripped it painfully tight, even
as she sent tendrils of ice racing down over Eve’s face.

"We are allies, sometimes friends," Ceridwen said.
"But question my loyalty once more and one of us will die."

Eve slapped her hand away, fangs lengthening again. She
hissed softly, held Ceridwen’s gaze, then turned away.

"Danny! We’re going!" Eve snapped.

The demon boy looked as though he wanted to argue, but then
his gaze shifted from Eve to Ceridwen and back again, and instead he nodded
once. He grabbed Nigel Gull and propelled the mage toward the wound in Hades’
side. The skin around that gaping wound was ossified, insects and strange
creatures fossilized in the dead god’s flesh.

Ceridwen led the way, leaping from the dizzying height of
the exit toward the black ashen earth below. She drew a wind beneath her as she
fell, and landed easily. Before she could even turn, Eve dropped to the ground
beside her, striking hard and rolling, kicking up ebony dust on impact.

Both of them turned to watch Danny climbing down the
exterior of the unimaginably huge body, plunging his claws into the dead flesh
and scrambling downward as though he was a spider. For a moment Ceridwen was
surprised he had left Gull and Hawkins to find their own way down, but then she
realized that the mage and his operative needed to flee this place just as
quickly as she and her allies did. Emerging through the wound, Gull grabbed
Hawkins by the hand, his mouth still open, the voice of Orpheus still flowing
sweetly from his throat. Tentacles of blue-black fire wrapped around them, then
shot toward the ground like lightning, carrying them down to stand only a few
feet from Ceridwen and Eve.

Hawkins’s expression had changed. He pulled away from Gull
with a rictus of horror contorting his face.

"You right bastard!" he snarled. "You fucking
killed her!"

Gull had no chance to argue. He had chosen Hawkins not only
for his various psychic skills, but also for his murderous talents. When the
man had touched Gull, he had learned who was responsible for Jezebel’s fate. Now
Hawkins backhanded Gull, driving him to the ground with a pair of quick jabs to
the throat and gut. The mage had no time even to summon a spell to defend
himself before Hawkins launched a kick at his head.