Tears of the Furies (A Novel of the Menagerie) (30 page)

They had to cross the Styx. And according to both myth and
reality, there was only one way to do that.

"This is it, then, huh?" Jezebel asked.

Gull glanced at her. She looked so small, so young to him
now, this teenaged girl who had left her whole world behind for him. He wanted
to protect her. But there were other things he desired more.

"Yes, Jez. This is the Styx. It only gets worse from
here. We’ve been descending all along, but once we cross the river it will not
be a simple thing to get back." He fixed her in his gaze. "In truth,
we may not come back at all."

A flicker of fear went across her face but it disappeared
quickly. "If you’re going, Nigel, then so am I. What are we waiting for?"

Hawkins shifted Eve from one shoulder to the other,
spreading out the burden of her weight, and took a step past them, nearer the
river’s edge.

"Isn’t it obvious, love? The ferryman. We’re waiting on
the ferryman."

Gull nodded. "Charon."

Jezebel glanced past him and she flinched with a sharp
intake of breath and pointed out across the water. "That would be him?"

A trickle of dread ran down Nigel Gull’s back and he
shivered, even as he turned to gaze out over the river. In his long life the
twisted mage had seen extraordinary things, impossible things. Hideous and
terrifying things. They were in the Underworld, now and were about to cross
into the land of the dead. Yet the sight of that small craft skimming across
the top of the river gave him a chill that made him feel very small, as though
he were a child again.

This was no nameless demon, no Slavic bogeyman, no trickster
spirit. This was Charon, a figure unique in myth. Not a god, not a man. Not a
monster or a demon. Simply Charon, who carried the spirits of the dead to a
land of endless nothing, a place of waiting, where waiting was the only
destiny, and at the end there was only more waiting. Gull had always envisioned
this ancient vision of Hell, left over from the Second Age of Man, as an asylum
filled with muttering, ghostly madmen, their eyes darting to follow imaginary
pests, their bodies rapt with anticipation of something, anything, that might
happen
next
.

But there would never be a next.

Not on the other side of the Styx.

The fabric of human faith had created entirely new Hells,
new spirit destinations, in this Third Age of Man. Gull had reasoned that very
few crossed the river anymore.

Yet Charon frightened him. That eternal asylum frightened
him.

The ceiling of the cavern was so high above it was lost to
sight, and though there clearly was no sky there, no sun, still a strange
illumination cast a dim gray light upon the river and its banks.

The boat moved swiftly toward shore. Gull felt he could not
breathe and both of his companions seemed equally unsettled. Hanging from the
prow of the boat was a lantern whose jaundiced light shone upon the surface of
that perhaps bottomless river. The current ran swift and deep and yet the
narrow launch was uninfluenced by its power. No sway or eddy nudged that vessel
from its course.

In the rear of the craft stood a solitary figure in dark
robes the color of river silt. If the ferryman had hands, they were lost within
those robes and whatever grim countenance might be hidden beneath his
voluminous hood, there was only darkness.

So entranced was Gull by the ferryman’s progress that when
the prow of the boat lightly touched the riverbank he flinched away as though
he had been slapped. Jezebel watched him, gnawing her lower lip and twirling a
lock of her hair in her fingers. Hawkins dumped Eve’s inert body on the shore,
her arms flopping onto the damp black soil. The vampire’s eyes were wide and
unseeing, but a glimpse of her heartened Gull’s resolve. He thought of all the
planning that had gone into this excursion.

He thought of Medusa.

Gull brought up a hand and ran the pads of his fingers
lightly over the contortions of his face.

He turned toward the ferryman and though a thin tendril of
his dread remained, he ignored it.

"Charon, will you carry us?" Gull asked, and the
river seemed to swallow his voice.

The ferryman was perhaps twenty feet away. Even this close
no trace of a face could be seen beneath his hood. Charon was entirely still
— as frozen in place as his craft — master and vessel unmoved by
ticking seconds or by the rush of the unfathomable river. It was as though they
had ceased to exist for him and Gull watched him for any sign of recognition. Even
so, when it came he was startled.

Charon extended his right hand, palm up. The skin was gray,
colorless, and as dry as parchment. There seemed on that flesh the seared
imprints of a thousand thousand coins, the images on that currency pressed into
the ferryman’s very substance.

Gull hesitated.

The ferryman beckoned with his spindly fingers.

They were not dead. Not yet spirits. But apparently he was
willing to deliver them to their destination. Perhaps with so few passengers
Charon was not as discerning as he might once have been. Or perhaps the laws
that governed this realm had withered away, just as the faith in old myths had,
all of them losing their power.

"What are you waiting for?" Hawkins whispered.

Gull had never heard him afraid before. He glanced at the
Englishman, saw Hawkins lick his lips. The man’s hands were shaking. Gull
nodded twice. They were his people, Hawkins and Jezebel. His agents. He had
brought them here. He was the catalyst for everything that was happening,
everything that would happen.

Jezebel came up beside Gull and slid her hand into his as
though seeking protection. There was ice on her fingers. "Don’t you still
have the coin?"

"I have it," Gull said.

His throat was dry as he pulled the silver coin from his
pocket. It had been struck in Mycenae in 1404 B.C. and bore the face of a ruler
whose name had long since been lost to antiquity. Gull strode to the riverbank,
hesitated a moment, and then waded in up to his knees. The water dragged at him
and he could feel it leeching vitality from him. He felt unsteady on his feet,
and not merely from the powerful pull of the current.

He placed the coin in Charon’s hand. The ferryman inclined
his head, hood draping low, then that parchment hand disappeared once more
within his robes. Charon once more gazed at Gull, or so it appeared, though it
was impossible to know for certain when his eyes were lost in shadow.

The ferryman extended his hand again, palm up, thin fingers
scratching the air, demanding.

A flame of anger ignited in Nigel Gull’s heart, burning away
whatever trepidation remained.

"What is he doing?" Jezebel asked, coming to the
river’s edge. "You paid him."

"Good sodding question," Hawkins agreed. He
grabbed the still form of Eve by the arm and dragged her across the muddy bank
to join Jezebel. "You said you did the research, that that coin would get
us all across."

"I did, and it should have," Gull said flatly.

"Wonderful," Hawkins sneered. "Maybe the
fuckin’ price went up. Inflation in the Underworld. Have you got some spell
that’ll —"

"There isn’t any magick I know that would force a being
like this to cooperate," Gull interrupted, glaring at those thin fingers,
at the coin scars on that palm. The latest was the imprint of that Mycenaean
ruler, whoever he had been.

Jezebel hugged herself and shivered, staring forlornly at
the stark figure of the ferryman, holding out that wretched hand expectantly. "What
do we do now?"

The ferryman simply waited, ominous and forbidding. Their
transaction had begun. There was no way to know what would happen if they did
not conclude it, what he might do. An unseen wind rustled Jezebel’s hair and
caressed Gull’s contorted features, but the ferryman’s robes did not so much as
shudder in the breeze. The river flowed. Charon remained motionless, implacable
in his demand.

"Now?" Gull asked.

He reached beneath his coat and withdrew his pistol, a
Robbins and Lawrence pepperbox. It was an original, made in 1849, a breech
loader that carried five shots.

Gull put the first bullet squarely into the patch of
darkness beneath Charon’s hood. The report exploded out across the river and
was lost to the vastness of the cavern above. The ferryman’s head snapped back,
but Gull kept firing. The second .31 caliber bullet struck Charon in the chest,
as did the third. The fourth struck the ferryman’s shoulder as he collapsed,
spilling over the side of the boat.

He never fired the fifth round. Gull waded in to catch the
creature — the myth — before he could slip into the water and be
swept away. He holstered his weapon and drew out a khanjarli, a curved Indian
dagger perfect for his purposes. He wrapped his arm around the ferryman’s head,
unwilling now to look at the face hidden beneath that hood, and plunged the
dagger into Charon’s throat, cutting flesh and muscle, grinding the blade
against bone.

The ferryman’s head tumbled from the hood and splashed into
the river.

"Oh, for fuck’s sake," Hawkins said, from up on
the riverbank.

Nigel Gull let the body slip into the river. Even as he did
so, the current caught the boat and it began to float away. Gull caught the
prow, the lantern swinging, throwing that sickly yellow light back and forth. At
last he turned to look at his operatives, there on the shore. Both of them
watched him wide-eyed, Hawkins still standing over the unconscious Eve, and
Jezebel hugging herself even more fiercely than before.

"What do we do now?" he echoed, staring at the
girl. "We bloody well improvise."

There was a forest in Hell.

Ceridwen knew that this ancient Underworld was not the
equivalent of the Christian hell, that it was a repository for all the dead
souls of its age, not merely those considered damned. Yet its subterranean
nature was enough to force comparisons to all Arthur had told her of damnation.
Caverns and flame, barren landscape . . . and yet it was not entirely barren.

The Cyclopes had engraved his map on stone. They could not
possibly carry it, but Ceridwen had no trouble committing it to memory. Weakened
as she was, she was still capable of that much at least. While the caverns
continued to slope downward, luring them farther from the surface world, the
Cyclopes had suggested a quicker route to the River Styx, though the blackthorn
forest. It was treacherous territory, a broad expanse of hard-packed earth from
which grew grove after grove of twisted, unnatural trees. Their trunks and
branches were thin and ebony black, ridged with dagger-sharp thorns.

Danny led the way through the blackthorns. Ceridwen had been
hesitant at first. An elemental sorceress, she had a rapport with nature in Faerie,
and had always taken for granted how easily she adapted to the nature of
Arthur’s world, the Blight. But here she was cut off. The environment was so
unnatural that her innate connection to the world around her was disconnected
here and it sapped her strength.

She could not
feel
the trees. Could not touch or
sense them. The blackthorn groves were to her like the ghost of a forest.

This was the path they must take. That knowledge had given
her the strength to forge ahead, to ignore her trepidation and move amongst
those deadly branches. Danny went first, his skin more durable than hers or
Arthur’s, and searched for the easiest passage. He blazed the trail and
Ceridwen followed. Arthur brought up the rear in silence, but Ceridwen
understood. Ever since they had descended he had been attempting to make sense
of this place, to understand what Nigel Gull’s purpose here was. Now that Eve
had been taken, he was even more haunted. He prided himself on his powers of
perception and observation. They were sorely tested here.

Ceridwen paused a moment and blinked. There were places in
the Underworld where it was light enough to see easily, but here there were
only shades of gray and sometimes the path among the trees was difficult to
spy. She pushed back her linen hood and it coiled around her throat. Where was
the boy?

"Danny?" Ceridwen called.

A rustle of snapping thorns and branches came from just
ahead of her. Startled, she took a step backward. Her tunic caught on a
blackthorn tree and the ocean-blue fabric tore as she tried to pull herself
free. Her chest hurt as though a hole had been punched through it, this place
where she ought to have felt the air and water and fire of this place, where
the trees ought to have whispered to her. She felt empty. Drained.

Yanking herself from the thorns was too great an effort. Ceridwen
stumbled sideways and fell to her knees, thorns cutting the marbled white flesh
of her arm. She swore, mewling in pain, hating the weakness in that noise.

"Ceri!" Arthur cried.

Then he was beside her, blue mist spilling from his eyes. Though
he was being affected by the nature of this place, clearly it was not so
debilitating for him. He crouched by her and held her arm, plucking out a thorn
that had torn loose of its branch and stuck there. She stared at the wounds in
her flesh as if the arm did not belong to her, amazed by the searing pain. They
would heal quickly enough, even as weakened as she was, but the pain had come
so suddenly and it burned like a flame in her mind.

"I don’t understand," she whispered.

Conan Doyle caressed her cheek and she gazed at him a moment
before he helped her up.

"What don’t you understand?" he asked.

Before she could answer there came a crack of breaking
branches and Danny emerged from the blackthorn trees just ahead. There were
scratches on his dark, leathery skin and thorns had caught at his clothes. A
branch dragged from one of his sneakers. Yet he seemed barely bothered by the
prickers.