Tears of the Furies (A Novel of the Menagerie) (45 page)

But it was not the gods that had caught Ceridwen’s attention
so completely. Beyond them, fire had burst up through the chest of Hades’
corpse. Broken bits of the god’s rib cage jutted from the hole the fire had
made and flames danced around the bone, charring it, sending swirls of smoke
skyward.

Rising up through that blazing wound in a sphere of
crackling flame was Arthur Conan Doyle. And he was not alone.

"Sanguedolce," Eve snarled, and the name was a
curse upon her lips.

The master sorcerer and his former pupil hovered in the air
within that fiery sphere and between them was an enormous metal cauldron filled
with gold-and-orange fire — the purest fire she had ever seen.

Ceridwen took several steps back down the hill, crackling
with power, her eyes leaking that same frigid blue mist. As she passed them, Danny,
Eve, and Gull all turned with her, staring at the sphere of fire as it rose up
above the corpse of Hades as though it were the sun in this ever-night world. Even
the shades of the dead gods down on that black field turned and looked up at
them as the sphere began to move, burning the air around it. It hurtled toward
the place where Eve and the others stood.

Beside her, she heard Gull mutter under her breath. "Ah,
now I see, Lorenzo. I’ve been your fool."

"What’s that?" Danny Ferrick demanded.

Gull snickered. "Sweetblood told me what I needed to
break Medusa’s curse, but he never worried if I would succeed. It didn’t
matter. I used Conan Doyle and all of you as my distraction to slip past
Cerberus into the Underworld. Lorenzo used us all to focus the gods’ attention
so that he could claim the Forge of Hephaestus. Mad, brilliant bastard."

"So, basically, he fucked you over the way you fucked
everyone else," Danny snarled. "Swell."

Eve was only half listening by then. She wanted to know more
about the Forge of Hephaestus, about exactly what was going on here, but there
wasn’t time. The dead of Olympus were distracted for the moment, but it would
not last.

The shrieking ghosts tore through the air, converging on
that flaming sphere. They darted at it, battering themselves against it with a
crackle and pop like insects swarming around a light. Spectral hands tore at
the fabric of the thing, tearing strips of flame away with a ravenous frenzy.

"That can’t be good," Eve whispered.

Beneath her feet the ground began to tremble, and then to
shake. It buckled and heaved and Eve was thrown down, tumbling once end over
end on the slope before stopping herself. The entire hill rocked and she looked
around, finally overwhelmed by her frustration and fear. Rage overcame her once
more, bloodlust taking her heart, fangs extruding sharply and hands hooking
into claws. She glanced around and saw Danny had also fallen and was crouched
on the hill like an animal. Ceridwen floated on air currents that she drew
around her, cloak whipping around her.

Nigel Gull was unmoved. Purple-black light coiled around him
like a nest of ebon serpents and held him aloft. His nose still bled and his
hideous countenance was distorted by a look of such malice that Eve shuddered. How
much of his disorientation had been an act she did not know, but he had
recovered.

"What now?" Danny roared.

Sweetblood and Conan Doyle hit the ground nearby with such
force that she felt sure they would be killed. The fiery sphere was like a
meteor, burning right into the soil of this hellish landscape. But when the
black dust settled and the glow of the fire dimmed, the two of them stood on
either side of the Forge, unharmed. It was enormous, at least five feet high
and six wide. There was no way to remove it from here without magic, and yet
the two mages seemed prepared to lift it.

"Ceridwen!" Conan Doyle shouted. "Come here! Quickly!"

Under other circumstances, the Fey would have snapped his
neck for speaking to her like that. But now Ceridwen raced across the still-trembling
ground toward her lover and the Forge. The hill heaved again and this time
Ceridwen did fall.

There came a thunderous crack unlike anything they had heard
before and Eve whipped her head around to look down the hill once more. The
dead gods were on the march again, most of them managing to stay on their feet
despite the buckling and shaking of the ground. Then, in their midst, the black
soil erupted with a giant, skeletal fist easily as large as the Forge of
Hephaestus. Parts of that broad, hellish plain collapsed and minor gods
disappeared into the yawning maw that appeared in the earth.

The gigantic, withered corpse that drew itself from the
ground then still had some flesh attached to its face, and white whiskers on
its chin. Its eye sockets were dark, empty holes out of which squirming white
things tumbled as it rose, maggots the size of men. When its other arm burst up
out of the earth, Eve saw that it had an axe in its hand whose double-edged
blade was the length of an automobile.

Eve had felt true fear, terror for herself, only a handful
of times since she had become immortal. After what she had suffered, few things
could frighten her. Now a single bloody tear raced down her cheek and she shook
her head, speechless. She wiped the tear from her face and stumbled across the
shaking ground to grab Danny by the shoulder and propel him after Ceridwen.

"What now, Eve?" he shouted. "What do we do
now?"

"I don’t know!" she snapped.

Danny stared for a moment at the gigantic corpse. Eve could
not help doing the same. Beyond the first one, another head had begun to
emerge, a cracked skull with one eye still intact, gleaming golden in the
shadowed land. The dead gods that had attacked them thus far were only the foot
soldiers. These others . . . they were the children of Titans.

Eve ran with Danny, the two of them rolling from side to
side as though they were aboard a ship. Gull followed, whisking through the
air, though now the blood flowed even more freely from his nose and she could
see the strain even this minimal magic was placing upon him.

Ceridwen was already at the Forge, and she was shouting at
Sanguedolce. "I can’t do it! Never with so many, and not here. My magick
isn’t the same! This place isn’t the same."

Sweetblood only glared at her and then gestured to Conan
Doyle to indicate that the problem was his to solve.

"We’ll help you, Ceri," he said as Eve, Danny, and
Gull gathered with the others around the Forge. "We can feed the strength
to you, give you whatever you need, but it’s a kind of magick none of us have. The
spell must come from your fingers, your lips."

It was difficult to hear above the cracking of the ground
and the screaming of the vengeful dead. Ceridwen did not bother to put her
reply into words. She looked at Conan Doyle a moment and then reached out a
hand to him. He took it, their fingers twining together. Eve had never seen
Conan Doyle so pale, the circles beneath his eyes so dark. He looked drained. But
when he touched Ceridwen, they both seemed to brighten with the contact, to come
alive again.

Ceridwen nodded.

Conan Doyle turned to Gull. "Come, Nigel. You’re
needed."

"Good thing we didn’t kill him, then," Eve
snarled.

Danny was in a crouch, one hand on the ground to steady
himself. He glared up at Eve. "Does this mean we’re getting out of here?"

She didn’t even dare look back down the hill. "Let’s
hope."

Ceridwen raised her hands above her head. The air seemed to
flow to her fingertips and then down her arms, caressing her, swirling around
her, beginning a kind of whirlwind current. Her body shook with the effort and
blue light sparked between her fingers. Eve shivered with the icy chill that
gathered around her, the temperature dropping rapidly. The Fey sorceress moved
her lips in silent supplication to the elements themselves.

Conan Doyle held her hand tightly. Gull took her other hand.
Both had once been students of Lorenzo Sanguedolce and now Sweetblood himself
stepped behind Ceridwen and — with one hand on the Forge of Hephaestus
— placed the other on the sorceress’s back.

Only then did Eve understand what they were doing. She
dropped into a crouch beside Danny and grabbed his hand, then reached out and
clutched the back of Conan Doyle’s jacket.

Danny was staring past her at the dead gods, at the two
ancient Titans that were emerging from the dust of history and myth. He barely
acknowledged her touch, his yellow eyes gleaming.

Thunder boomed, shattering the air with such force that Eve
winced at the pain in her ears. She glanced up at Ceridwen, but the Fey was
deep into the summoning of her spell. The thunder had not been her doing.

Lightning lit up the Netherworld as though sunshine had
broken through into the land of the dead. It flashed, accompanied by more
thunder, and then came a series of bolts that burned the air and blinded her. Eve
turned to search for the source and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust.

Beyond Hades a tower had exploded from the ground, a huge
silhouette, a monument. The next bolt of lightning streaked upward from the top
of that tower and she saw that it was not some structure at all, but a hand. With
lightning searing the sky, erupting from its fingers.

Zeus
.

"Doyle! Ceri! Get us out of here now!" Eve cried.

But even as she bellowed those words, they were stolen by
the wind that had begun to embrace them all. The traveling wind. It whistled
around her ears, grasping at her body, blinding her to her surroundings. It was
a storm, summoned by Ceridwen and powered by Conan Doyle, Gull, and their
former teacher.

A traveling wind unlike any ever summoned before.

It picked Eve up off of the ground. She tightened her grip
on Danny’s hand and tried to see his face. In the midst of the whirlwind she
saw only the cruel gleam of his demon’s eyes. Then she was hurtling through the
air, propelled by the currents, moving with the storm, wondering where in this
realm of death and suffering the traveling wind would take her.

In the grip of magick and wind, spun and blinded by the
white-gray spell-storm, Conan Doyle held tightly to Ceridwen’s hand. He had
traveled with her like this before, during the Twilight Wars, but this was
different. There was a dark tint to the winds, a texture to them as though the
black soil of the netherworld had been drawn into them and now scoured his
flesh like a desert sandstorm. And there was a smell, an unpleasant odor that
was carried on the wind. It might have been the Forge of Hephaestus, the stink
of brimstone, he knew. But Conan Doyle thought that it was something else, some
part of Ceridwen’s magick tainted by the fact that she was drawing on the
nature of this place, the elements of the Underworld.

Or perhaps it’s just Gull, and the poison that lingers in
his magick, even after all of these years. His curse.

His eyes watered, demanding that he close them, but he refused.
Though he only managed to keep them slightly open, Conan Doyle despised
surrendering control, even to Ceridwen, and if the situation demanded it, at
the very least he wanted to see where he was going. Not that there was much to
see. The winds howled, rushing him forward. He gripped Ceridwen’s fingers more
tightly.

Then his feet touched stone. The traveling wind subsided too
quickly, giving them no chance to halt their momentum, and Conan Doyle stumbled
forward, dropping to one knee. Only Ceridwen’s grip on his hand kept him from
sprawling across the floor of the cavern. But his love was the only one who
alighted gracefully. Danny and Eve struck the ground hard, tumbling painfully
but rising uncannily fast.

Gull staggered several steps and then dropped onto his hands
and knees, blood dripping from his broken nose. He trembled weakly for a moment
before getting ahold of himself.

Conan Doyle glanced around. The traveling wind had brought
them as far as it could, within this hellish world. They were at the mouth of
the tunnel through which they had entered, perhaps thirty feet wide and forty
high. In comparison to the vastness they had seen, it was narrow. It was
ordinary. He looked back the way they had come and only then did he see
Sweetblood. Conan Doyle had been wrong to think only Ceridwen had managed to
alight with any grace. Lorenzo Sanguedolce stood casually in the tunnel beside
the massive Forge of Hephaestus. It gave off light and a strange heat that lent
a warmth to the body without searing the skin.

Puppets
, Conan Doyle thought.
We’re all puppets
.

He strode to Sweetblood and the mage raised a single
eyebrow, regarding him coolly.

"I know the threat this world faces," he told his
former mentor. "We would all have aided you. You could simply have asked."

Sanguedolce’s nostrils flared. "It would have gone far
more smoothly had the temptress not slain Tisiphone. I might have come and gone
with none the wiser. That would have been best. As for your help, I have no
need of it. When the time comes to face the DemoGorgon, perhaps you can serve
again as you did this past day, as a distraction. As fodder, to buy me time for
the real battle."

Conan Doyle was a gentleman, but in his life he had also
been a soldier. Yet neither of those facets of his spirit could summon a
response to Sweetblood’s appalling arrogance. They were all silent, each of
them having heard the exchange. Ceridwen, Gull, and even smartmouthed Danny
Ferrick, all stared at Sweetblood in amazement and distaste.

Eve was frozen by her shock for only a moment. Then she
launched herself across the cave. "You cocky motherfucker! You’d still be
back there being Zeus’s fucking chew toy if it weren’t for Ceridwen. This
thing, the DemoGorgon, it’s you the Big Evil is coming for, right? I say we
just make you dead, and then it’ll ignore us again."