by John Shirley
The big man looked up at him, slightly startled, but with steady eyes that seemed to brim with experience, an experience stretching back ages.
“It is not human flesh!” The giant seemed insulted. “You are not gripplers, nor Administrators—you have the look of escaped food for the mushroom men!” the big man rumbled. He had a curious accent to his English—clearly not his first language—perhaps tinged with something like Danish inflections. “As for the stew, I am boiling some very fine plump cave rats, and my own garden mushrooms, and very nutritious they are too. Occasionally we have a fine fat sheep down here, brought from the surface, when the gripplers do their task as they should. But they are sluggish creatures, without much enterprise, and they have been remiss, so cave rats will have to do today. So you are hungry, are you? Then step forward and eat. Here is the ladle.”
He laid the ladle across the pot, which was about four feet high, and stepped back.
Constantine looked closely at the chain and decided that it only just reached the pot; if he was careful he could get close enough to eat without getting in reach. He edged close to the pot. He had to get sustenance in him—he could only draw so much energy for living from the psychic world. And physical energy was the raw material of magical energy.
He stopped a stride before the pot, hesitated a long moment, then leaned forward, grabbed the ladle—
The giant was on him with remarkable speed for his size, his big hands closing around Constantine’s neck, lifting him off his feet. The chained giant smelled of primeval sweat and musk. “Ha!” said the big man triumphantly. “The chain on me extends from the hole in the wall a good long ways so I can do the maintenance here—it’s on a spindle, you see. Now let us find out what comes out when I squeeze your neck hard enough . . .”
His windpipe all but shut, Constantine barely managed to squeak out, “About them chains, squire—like to have them off? I know a spell for that! I can help you, friend; I can set you free!”
The big man—the inordinately big man—stared into Constantine’s eyes, and then let go of his neck, letting him fall to the floor. The giant gazed balefully down at him.
“My name,” the giant rumbled, “is Balf Corunsiggert Stonecracker of the Icy Black Unseen River Which Seeks the North Sea.”
Constantine, getting up and gasping for breath, nodded. “If it’s all the same to you, squire, I’ll call you Balf.”
“What is your name?”
Constantine hesitated. His reputation wasn’t sparkling-immaculate in every corner of the magical world, and this was clearly a magical being. But looking into Balf’s eyes he decided dishonesty would be a lethal mistake. “My name’s John, squire—John Constantine.”
“John Constantine? The one who’s both young and old? The one who was once the beloved of N’Hept and remains the enemy of Nergal?”
“The same, mate.”
“I have heard the stone spirits speak of you. Some speak with disdain, some with amusement, some with admiration. But they did not speak of your truthfulness. Do not move. I will examine your verity, yes?”
With that, Balf reached into a pocket of his robe, took out two large irregular chunks of crystalline stone. He took one stone in each hand and clapped them, fairly hard but not bone-crackingly, against the sides of Constantine’s head.
Constantine yelped. “Oy! No more of that, mate, please!”
The stones were humming, ringing, resonating like tuning forks from their contact with Constantine’s skull—his skull was doing its own ringing, just then—and Balf lifted them to his pointed, tufted ears and listened, first to one stone, and then the other.
“Ummmm . . . it sounds as if . . . you are not false. You may be able to release me from the chains, and it seems you are willing to do so. And you are not a servant of my enemies. Very well . . . Have some stew.”
6
THAT’S WHAT I CALL ALTERNATIVE ENERGY, EH?
Bosky and Garth had been climbing up through the warren of caves for an hour and a half before they came to a cross-tunnel that led to an opening high up, looking out onto the great cavern that had swallowed up the village of Tonsell-on-the-Stream. It was all there below them, the whole village except Smithson Manor, though some of the village buildings were crumpled; a few of the taller structures were tilted, making Bosky think of that tower in Pisa.
Their ledge was still a good hundred yards below the ceiling of the cavern. Bosky squinted up at the overarching stone that had taken the place of the sky, trying to see into the crack in the cavern ceiling, a black crevice zigzagging between the glowing blue stalactites. He could just glimpse cave openings up there, and a gray shape that seemed to quiver, gelatin-like, as he watched, before settling back again.
Isn’t very likely Geoff is alive, he thought. But I’d want someone to look for me, even if I was likely dead. If nobody looks for you when you’ve gone missing, what are you?
He looked back down at the village. A mist hung over the rooftops and strangely large birds flapped around the crooked steeple of St. Leonard’s. One of them alit on the top of it and folded its wings.
Birds? Would birds have come down with the village? Not bloody likely. Then what were those things? “You see those things, Granddad? What do you make of them?”
“They look like vultures, but bigger. Like condors. But . . . those aren’t feathers on them, exactly. Look like flying people to me—except for the lower half of ’em.”
“They weren’t around the village before we set out, Granddad. Someone brought us here for their own reasons. They got to be watching us. Maybe when we left the village, our going was noticed, yeah? And those buggers were sent to keep the others from leaving!”
The old man nodded. “You could well be right, Bosky.”
They stepped closer to the edge of the precipice and the movement attracted the attention of one of the flyers soaring near the ceiling. It started toward them, weaving its way between several phosphorescent stalactites. Bosky stared in fascination as it approached. It was an old woman with wings, he thought at first—but that was only partly right. As it came nearer, its featherless, leathery wings beating with the rhythm of a raptor on the hunt, he saw that while its taut gray-black upper body was like a lean old woman’s, its legs were like those of an eagle, but bigger, with scales instead of feathers, and the lipless mouth in its cruelly-human face—its eyes were without whites, black as coal—was baring snaggly fangs; its talons were larger than a big man’s hands, talons getting closer and closer, opening—
“Bosky!” Granddad Garth yelled, shoving him aside.
The creature screeched in furious frustration, talons raking the air where Bosky had stood a moment before as it arced away, having to push off from the face of the cliff. It did an aerial somersault, turned, and came back at them, while Bosky was still getting up, bringing his rifle to bear. Before his fatal accident his father had taken him shooting at a range, seven or eight times, and he’d gotten fairly competent with a rifle. It was already loaded, and as the creature dived at them with a blood-icing scream—its wings outspread, its arms clutching in front of it, its legs forward, talons slashing—Bosky flipped off the safety with his thumb and fired almost point-blank, the butt recoiling painfully into his shoulder.
The flyer’s scream this time spoke of pain, as the bullet caught it between its flattened breasts, shattering its sternum, smashing up to emerge, jetting gore, from the back of its neck. The impact of the bullet knocked it back from the ledge and it plummeted, falling end over end to the stony ground at the base of the cliff outside the village.
“Good shot, Bosky!”
“Ow, I forgot what a kick this thing has—Oh, shite, here come the other ones!”
A flock of the creatures was now screaming and flapping toward them, spreading out to make it harder to hit them. “Come on, Boswell—back in the tunnel! We’ll bottleneck the bitches!”
They backed into the cave, reluctant to turn their backs on the ledge, and moments later th
e creatures began to land out there, their talons clicking on the stone, hissing to one another, one of them calling screechingly out:
“Paradido Anthropinos!”
Bosky reloaded the bolt-action rifle, popped it to his shoulder, braced himself, and fired at the two creatures who were starting one after the other into the tunnel; they could only come one at a time because of their wingspread. Two of them, just thirty feet away, went down with a single bullet, flapping in their death throes, and the others scattered from the ledge, intimidated, at least for now. Gunsmoke made Bosky and Garth cough and they backed up, rifle at ready. The vulturish creatures could be glimpsed at the end of the tunnel, like something seen in the objective of a telescope, circling and diving past the ledge, but no more tried to enter.
“That’s holding them for a while,” Granddad said, as they started back down the tunnel. “Vicious brutes.”
“What the hell were they?”
“Some kind of harpy, I expect. I’ve seen them in old books. Magical creatures. I doubt an ordinary weapon would do them harm. You did well to get the Lady of Waters to bless them bullets.”
A short distance past the tunnel crossroads, deeper into the stone that enclosed their village’s cavern, the tunnel widened out to a roughly square-edged chamber of granite which rose vertically into blackness, broken here and there with horizontal shafts of dull blue light. A stone stairway zigzagged up the farther wall. Around the base of the stairway were piles of loose rock that looked freshly chipped away. The rough stone steps that were cut into the wall seemed of recent manufacture.
“This stairway, Granddad—it looks like it was cut recently.”
“Could be that they’d prepared the big cave for Tonsell. They cut some steps in for their own use because they knew we’d be coming down. Look, there’s another door, over there, with steps going down—to where I wonder?”
“I don’t know. I’m going up. That’s where they took Geoff.”
Granddad sighed but assented and they began to climb. A good long climb, and Bosky was sweating, his legs aching, and Granddad was wheezing, but at last they came to a landing that followed the edges of the shaft, going to a tunnel on the far side that Bosky estimated was about level with the crack Geoff had been pulled into.
They went cautiously along the wall, afraid to look down, and entered the tunnel. The sound of trickling water drew them—a thin underground spring ran through a fissure in the wall, to one side. Here they sat down and ate a quick meal of the supplies Garth had brought, washing it down with the spring water, which tasted heavily of minerals. Garth began to doze, sitting up and nodding, before they’d quite finished, and Bosky had to shake him. “Come on, Granddad, wake up—we’ve got to find out what became of Geoff.”
“Right, I was just closing my eyes for a mo’. We’re off.”
They traveled onward through the tunnel, the walls dimly lit by the same phosphorescence that provided illumination everywhere in this underground realm. A quarter mile of winding tunnel on, and then Bosky, out ahead, came back with a finger to his lips for quiet, and led his granddad back up the tunnel to where it met the crack in the ceiling over the village.
Up ahead, great bulky gray things humped along in the shadows.
~
“You know, cave rat’s not half bad, stewed,” Constantine remarked, putting down his bowl and wiping his mouth.
He and Geoff were sitting against a stone wall near a litter of iron tools, wooden blocks, chunks of stone, wedges of some shiny unidentified metal that Balf used in his toil, and stone jugs of grease for oiling cogs. Still festooned in chains, Balf hunkered near the cauldron, which sat in a basin of crystal in the floor, the crystal glowing from an unknown energy source, providing heat and most of the light. In a stone recess across from them was a bed of moss and sand covered with tanned skins. A few more urns stood beside the bed.
“You got anything to drink back there, mate?” Constantine asked.
“Only water,” Balf said.
“Oh. Well. I’ll have some of that . . . later.” Constantine studied the chains crisscrossing Balf’s body, constraining him to the adamantine leash of the King Underneath. “Those chains are enchanted, are they?”
“I would break them easily, were they not. The metals of the earth are like clay to me; I am a son of the earth spirits, the last of my kind, so far as I know.”
“Are you now. You wouldn’t be one of the Azki-Hak?”
“I am! Perhaps the only one still living.”
“There may be others. I have heard stories . . . They’re often mistaken for ‘abominable snowmen’ and such.”
“What are Azki-Hak?” Geoff asked, picking suspiciously at his stew.
“According to Scofield’s Grimoire of the Underlands, they’re bred from earth elementals and Neanderthals. In old times, they called them trolls.”
Geoff’s head snapped up, and his eyes widened. “What?” He looked at Balf, who was close enough to easily reach him. “He’s a . . . ?” And Geoff shrank back against the wall.
Balf sighed and shook his head. “Many are the wicked stories told about my people. Calumnies they are, and lies! For the most part.”
Constantine smiled. “For the most part?”
“There were a few . . . rogues,” Balf admitted. “An Azki-Hak—what you call a troll—would suffer from a toothache and run mad, now and again, slay a few dozen humans. Or he foolishly drank the human’s vinous brew—such drinks corrupt his soul!—and he became violent under its influence. He may also fail under the malign authority of a demon, whereupon he may indulge in the eating of human flesh and the occasional destruction of some unimportant small town . . . here and there.”
“Quite understandable, when you consider the circumstances, really,” Constantine allowed.
“Myself, I am enslaved by a malevolent human—if human he still is—but I have done no evil I was not compelled to do. To roam free in the caves of the great mother, that is all a true Azki-Hak wants.”
“Then it looks like trolls have gotten a bad rap, squire,” Constantine said. “Got any writing materials?”
“For the freeing spell?” asked Balf, suddenly eager.
“I hope so, squire; these surroundings ain’t the best for me magic. I’m more of a tatty hotel room or abandoned junkyard sort of magician. But maybe this one’ll work, because the spirits I’ll summon are from the dark places of the world, and those’re right handy to us here.”
“Good!” Balf said. “I have something that may serve!”
He went to his rubble pile and fished out a large fragment of mineral chalk. Constantine used the chalk to draw a magic circle around Balf, and then wrote the words ADSERTORIS UBERTAS over and over around the circle. He asked, rather hesitantly, for a few drops of Balf’s blood but the troll was happy to comply. Balf put his own wrist in his mouth and bit down hard with one of his remaining fangs—blood spurted, trickled heavily from his lips. He grabbed one of Constantine’s hands and spat a mouthful of blood into his palm.
“Ah,” Constantine said, grimacing. “Thanks.”
Geoff watched skeptically as Constantine dripped the blood into the center of the circle around Balf’s feet, muttering certain words of power as he did so. Then he laid his hands on the chains and shouted, “Adsertoris! Libertas!”
The chains vibrated . . . and then hung limp, not visibly different than before.
“Didn’t work, did it, mate!” Geoff said. “These things never do. Superstition, really.”
“That right, Geoff?” said Constantine, stepping out of the circle. “Then how’d you and your little township end up down here, eh?”
“Well . . .”
“And what kind of creature snatched you up? You think them things are natural?”
“Oh well, if you want to be technical . . .”
The troll, meanwhile, was straining at his chains, holding a length of it in his two beefy hands, growling to himself.
And then the chain snapped wi
th a crack. “Ha!” roared Balf. “It worked—the spell of protection is lifted!” A few moments more and he was entirely free. There were marks on his skin where the chain had abraded and scarred him over the years. “You see what they have done to me! Five centuries and more have I endured these chains! I will make them pay for that delay in my plans!”
“Five centuries!” Geoff exclaimed. “How old are you?”
Balf shrugged, a movement like the quaking of hills over centuries. “The mother has circled the great shining god that men call Sol three thousand times and seven, since I came into the world!”
“The shining god that men call . . . You mean the sun? Three thousand . . . You’re more than three thousand years old!”
“Why that appalled look on your face, boy—you make me feel old! Others of my kind have lived far longer. I am but a stripling. We can live twelve thousand revolutions of Sol and morel” He kicked happily at the discarded chains, flinging them clankingly away. “And now I will more truly live! And I will take revenge on the King of this place!”
“I’m on a mission to bring the bastard down meself,” Constantine said, lighting a cigarette. “But best we approach the job circumspectly, like.” He blew a thoughtful plume of smoke at the ceiling. “He’s got the gripplers, and he must have another gang of bullies too . . .”
“He has a small army of men!” Balf asserted. “They are pale, strange, inbred men, but they can fight! He keeps them in fighting shape by pitting their legions one against another in his coliseum! And the harpies! He found them dozing in the crypts beneath the sunken city your people call Atlantis, deep underneath the sea. He woke them, enslaved them to his will, and brought them by cave-ways to this place! A hundred of them serve him!”
“Harpies,” Geoff muttered, wryly. “Trolls. I’m going to have a word with my biology teacher when I get back. He never mentioned those species.”
“Where’d the King get this army, then?” Constantine asked.
