Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean (21 page)

With the soldiers following closely, the King shufflingly led the group to stand not quite directly under one of the vessels in which the “subject” sagged—a woman, quite obviously dead. “This one died this morning. One of my queens, she had been unusually naughty and so I placed her here, replacing another who’d died due to a feeding accident. But Dierdre here, my divorced queen, has killed herself. A remarkable achievement. Do you know how she killed herself?” He lowered his voice so the other “subjects” wouldn’t hear. “It was almost admirably resourceful. She had been here for, oh, a mere twenty years, and went quite mad—well, they all do—and in her madness managed to bite off her tongue and chew a hole in her cheek. You can see it there. A hole so big that, together with the bleeding from the stump of her tongue, she bled to death. We failed to notice it until too late.”

“Oh . . .” Geoff muttered, staring at the woman’s body, mounted overhead. “Oh that . . . this is fucking sick. This is all . . . just all of it . . .”

Constantine looked at him, the boy swaying in place, looking like he might faint. Overcome by what he was seeing.

The King frowned at the boy. “Your apprentice has a weak stomach. How you can have much hope for him, I don’t know. Perhaps you might want to sell him to me. I’ll give you a box of gems for the wastrel. We have plenty of those. I could find some better use for him.”

Geoff gaped at the King, looking dangerously like he was going to retort. Constantine, inwardly wincing, made himself turn to Geoff and give him another sharp slap across the face. “Boy! Stop gaping at the King so! Now walk around the device and make observations! Forget nothing you see!”

Geoff put a hand to his face, blinking. Then, seeing the look in Constantine’s eyes, he nodded. “Yes . . . master.” He started around the column of the rejuvenation projector, staring at its base.

Constantine inclined his head apologetically toward the King. “My apologies; young people now have attention deficit problems, Your Majesty. For now, I will retain the boy; I have invested a great deal of time training him.”

MacCrawley looked suspiciously at Constantine and then at Geoff, but said nothing.

Clearly, the King needed a new “subject” for his projector to replace the dead woman, and soon. Constantine, aware that he was near powerless here, and very aware of the presence of the guards behind him, thought he ought to try to appear useful, and quickly. He forced himself to look at the whole construction. “I have some thoughts on a redesign, Your Majesty, but I will need a few days to organize them, and perhaps time to observe the rejuvenation projector a little more. It is a work of genius, and thus not simple to understand.”

“True, true,” the King Underneath conceded magnanimously.

Constantine pointed at the small, locked door in the shadows. A door of brass. “I’m curious as to that other door, on the farther side of the room, sire. Is there more machinery there? Perhaps some equipment I should know about, so that I can help perfect it?”

“Hm? That?” The King seemed suddenly pensive, annoyed. “No, nothing of interest there. Just storage. And now . . .” He clumped on his bony cane over to the central shaft of the rejuvenation projector, opened a panel on its side, and twisted a lever within the panel. The vessel with the dead woman at the end of its vane quivered once, then lowered itself mechanically to the floor, making Constantine think of a seat in a carnival ride lowering for a rider. The King took a vial from a pocket in his robes and approached the fungus enclosing the dead woman, and sprinkled blue fluid from the vial on the fungus. It shuddered and withdrew its gray-black petals, its steel wool interior shrinking back with a sound like tearing paper, and the woman’s body slumped, freed. The King muttered in Latin to his litter bearers, who reached in, pulled the corpse free, and dragged it unceremoniously to a corner of the room. “We’ll clean that up later,” the King remarked. “I don’t like to be untidy.”

Then he gestured to the skull-faced guards and spoke in Latin. MacCrawley took a quick step away from Lord Smithson, who looked around in blinking uncertainty—which became a horrible certainty as the guards seized him and dragged him to the now-empty vessel where the hungry fungus awaited him.

“No! Your Majesty!” Smithson wailed, his face contorted in naked fear, as he realized who was to replace the dead woman. “Is this how a great sovereign repays those who have given him a gift? Is this how a gracious King shows his hospitality? No no no! Take that useless boy there! I believe I have seen him in the—”

Fortunately, before Geoff could be outed as merely another of the residents of Tonsell-on-the-Stream, Smithson broke off to howl in terror as the guards ripped his clothing away. They stripped him nude, knocking him down with the butts of their weapons when he tried to run or fight back, and then four of them grabbed him and forced him snugly into the open center of the artichoke-like cluster of giant fungus in the containment vessel.

He screamed even more shrilly when the big fungus closed around him, gripping him with implacable firmness, and the wooly probes rustled and climbed up around his neck, beginning to penetrate his pores . . .

“No no no . . .
no!”
Smithson screamed. “MacCrawley! You led me into this! I have done all you asked! I gave him the village, I transferred my gold to you!”

“And you’re getting your desserts in return!” MacCrawley crowed.

“This cannot be! For God’s sake! You may not betray a lodge brother, MacCrawley!”

MacCrawley showed his teeth like a shark; it might’ve been some form of smile. “Why, I’ve given you what you bargained for! Immortality! Or as close as possible! You will live for centuries, perhaps even millennia, right there, never dying! You wanted to be a King? Long live the King!”

The King laughed creakily at that. “How I do enjoy a good prank! Especially one that may last a thousand years and more.” He shook his head with amusement, still chuckling as he returned the control lever to its former position and the vane lifted up into place with Smithson, who was now whimpering madly, muttering to himself, “Oh I feel them . . . they’re so . . . so very dry and crisp and eager, pushing into my . . . into veins, into my heart . . . my brain! But it’s like the roots of royalty stretching out, stretching out into the body politic . . . and it tickles from within, tickles most painfully! Oh hee hee hee hee heeeeeeeeee . . . oh hee oh
heeeeeeeee . . .”
And then the mad giggles stopped for a moment and he spoke out in awed tones, each word spoken with a surprising clarity, quoting from the gospel of Luke:
“It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and him cast into the sea . . .”
And then he resumed his babbling: “The sea . . . by the beautiful sea, the sea-ee-eee . . . hee-hee-
heeeeee . . .”

The faint purple rays were now emanating from the pentagon outward to all five of the vessels, and as the King threw another switch, Constantine could see a corresponding glow, more red than purple, shining down from the bottom of the vessels, to pool onto the floor. “And now gentlemen,” said King Culley, his voice rusty with age, “please observe closely.”

The King walked anti-clockwise around the circular room under the vessels, through one pool of reddish-purple light after another, shuffling along without his cane, arms upraised, muttering certain words of power.

When he’d passed through the final pool of light he called for his litter. His nude littermen carried it to him and the King, looking like he might fall without the litter to lie upon, stretched out on it. To Constantine’s relief, they all trooped out of the horrid room, leaving its smell of decay and fungus, its moaning, its burbling, its palpable emanation of misery.

“By the sea, by the sea . . . by the beautiful sea-eeeeee . . .”
Smithson warbled.
“Kill me, kill me, kill me-me-me-me-ee-ee!”

And then the door clanged shut behind them.

~

They had almost passed through the corridor that led past the chamber of frozen queens when MacCrawley, feeling the chill from the ice window, put his hands in his pocket and said, startled, “What the devil?”

And he pulled out the crystal that Constantine had planted when he’d jostled him in the throne room. He stared at it in astonishment. Then he scowled.

Constantine reached into his own coat pocket and closed his fingers on the other crystal. He squeezed it hard with his hand, concentrating his psychic field, sending current down his arm into the stone, all as Balf had instructed him. Ritual magic was not possible here, except the King’s, but telepathy was another matter (or more precisely, another energy), and Constantine sent a telepathic message directly to Balf through the troll crystal. He thought Balf’s name first, so that his transmission was directed to the stone that Balf held, in a cavern somewhere far below . . .

Balf!
Constantine thought,
The time has come! Do it now!

“What are you doing with that sensing stone, MacCrawley?” the King asked, looking over sleepily from his litter. “That is a troll artifact! What have you to do with troll-stuff here?” He sat up, glowering with suspicion at MacCrawley through his hooded, red-rimmed eyes.

“But someone must have . . . Constantine!” MacCrawley turned to accuse Constantine, but already Balf’s voice was emitting loudly from the stone MacCrawley held in his hand. The telepathic impulse, coming through at the receiving end, was translated into spoken words.

“When are we to move against the King, MacCrawley?”
came the voice from the crystal.

“So!” The King said, standing. He pointed to MacCrawley. “Take him!”

“Your Majesty—no! It was Constantine!”

The soldiers crowded around the black magician, and he struggled for a moment before one of them thrust a crossbow against his temple and grinned.

MacCrawley slumped in their arms, but spoke to the King with all the dignity he could muster. “My Lord and King, John Constantine planted the stone on me! He is the one clearly in league with the trolls!”

“It is not Constantine’s name I heard Balf speak just now, for that was that rascal Balf, if I am not mistaken. I may be feeble at this time of night, but my hearing is not gone yet, MacCrawley!” The King took the crystal from MacCrawley and then pointed at the door. “Drag him to the work pits! He’ll join the sump slaves until I’ve decided how best to kill him! Perhaps he might take someone’s place in the projector; it would please Lord Smithson to have the company! We shall see! Take the traitor out now! I don’t wish to hear another syllable of his dissembling!”

“Your Majesty—it was Constantine—in the throne room—he—!” But they had dragged MacCrawley through the door, and away down the corridor.

“And see that he is well chained! He is not to be trusted!” the King called after them. “And then get a deputation out to find that troll! Send fifty men and kill him if he won’t surrender!”

Constantine felt confident they’d never catch Balf now that he was unchained. He tried to look more concerned than pleased, but it wasn’t easy; he had succeeded in eliminating an enemy who would have destroyed him at the first opportunity. And now he was the only “consultant” the King could turn to.

The King looked at Constantine with a grim curiosity. “I wonder . . .”

“Your Majesty?”

“Hmph. We shall see. I’ll be watching you closely, Constantine. You’d better make yourself useful to me, and soon. Or
you’ll
be in the vessel on the other side of Lord Smithson, making yourself useful in another way entirely. For a long, long time.”

11

CURIOUS ’TIS, HOW SEDUCTIVE NUMBNESS IS

“Y
ou want me to trust
this
geezer?” asked Bosky dubiously, looking at Constantine. Who looked especially shabby, after the tunnels, the pit of the crankers, and Balf’s quarters.

“Well,” Geoff said, grimacing a little, “it’s true he’s not exactly . . . the
best
ally. I mean, the only way he could think of to impress the King was to
slap
me, and really
hard
too . . . twice!” The last he said looking at Constantine with narrowed eyes.

“All theatre, my lad,” Constantine said airily, shaking a wine bottle to see if anything was left in it. “Had to give it me method acting best, yeah? Bloody hell, this one’s empty too . . .”

They were in the servants’ quarters, down a granite-walled corridor adjoining the throne room: Bosky, Maureen, Geoff, and Constantine—waiting for Scofield to arrive. There were three cots, a wash basin, two rough wooden cabinets, a glowing crystal in the floor for heat and light, a hole in a corner of the floor for elimination, and little else. Constantine and Geoff had been escorted here to “await the King’s pleasure” and found Maureen talking to Bosky.

“There’s some kind of wine in that cabinet, I think,” Bosky said. “I sniffed it. Didn’t want to touch the stuff.”

“Where’s this Scofield bloke?” Constantine asked, looking in the cabinet. He found a clay-pot bottle of wine that contained a green slurry floating on a liquid which smelled of alcohol and God knew what else. He tasted it and made a face—and tasted some more. Felt a creeping numbness around the edges . . . not unpleasant.

“Went off to talk to the King about me,” Bosky said. “Got some kind of permission to bring me round and he wants to prime the pump, he says. Don’t think I like the idea. I think we ought to get the bloody hell out of here before the queen wakes up and finds Mum missing. Find a way to the surface.”

“Not so easy to do, from what I’ve seen,” Geoff said. “Those gripplers guarding everything. Not to mention those skull-faced bastards and them ugly bitches with the wings. Pardon, Mrs.” This last to Bosky’s mum, who was sitting on a cot gazing at Bosky with a kind of muted wonder.

The door opened then and in came Lord Spurlick. He introduced himself to Constantine, though his gaze tended to return to Bosky and Geoff. “I saw you, Master Magus, during your audience in the throne room. I honor you for your boldness, and I’m here to inform you that the King has found better quarters for you. Also you and your apprentice are invited—more properly, commanded—to appear at the feast this morning, when the King arises. You will shortly hear a gong ring to announce the event.” He smiled at Geoff, showing teeth intricately carved into gargoyle faces. “Clothes are optional.”