by John Shirley
Balf set himself and slowly heaved the great doors open. Then he hastily retreated down the stairs.
The doors continued to swing inward after he’d already gone, creaking vastly as they went, with a sound like a god tearing a moon of metal into pieces . . .
Constantine and Geoff walked through the door, into a hallway every bit as high and wide as the enormous doors. It seemed empty at first, and their footsteps echoed. Peculiar perfumes—incenses from some forgotten Atlantean temple—wafted to them from the darkness at the end of the hallway. The walls were carved with figures blurred by erosion from the trickling water running over them into gutters along the edges of the floor. Were the figures etched on the walls demons, gods, or men? The distinctions had merged over time.
“John?” Geoff asked, his voice hushed. “You sure about this? I’m no magician; don’t really know what I’m about here. Wouldn’t want to get in your way.”
“Going to need you, boy,” Constantine said, lighting a cigarette. “Not sure how yet. But I know I’ll need your help. Remember, you’re my apprentice.”
“Right. Your apprentice. I’m fucked, aren’t I?”
“Probably.”
That’s when the doors at the end of the hallway swung open and the skull-faced soldiers swarmed through and charged.
7
IT’S LATE GOTHIC, OF COURSE!
“I really think we should take our time and reconsider this, MacCrawley,” Smithson said, nervously gazing at the tunnel entrance in the barrow.
It was a gray, drizzly morning, but birds were chirping and insects buzzing in the woods around the clearing containing the mossy old barrow, and it felt almost cheerful out, in comparison to the hungry obscurity of the tunnel waiting for them.
“Don’t let it spook you,” MacCrawley said, his voice a study in mockery. “It’s just another tunnel. Why, you’ve been in deeper ones when you’ve taken the Underground—oh, I forgot, you never have taken the Underground, M’Lord. It’s limos for you; a point of pride, yes? Well. I assure you it’s just a tunnel. You won’t encounter any peasants in it. Other things perhaps, but you who have gone through several initiatic trials of the Servants of Transfiguration could not possibly be afraid of a tunnel to Hell.”
Smithson whirled, looking at him with the eyes of a frightened deer. “To Hell? You’re joking!”
“No, I’m using poetic license. It isn’t actually Hell. Oh, Hell exists, but it is not ‘under’ the earth. It is forever at right angles to us, like paradise; it is in another realm of whereness. No, this is merely ‘hellish.’ But it is nothing that a Great Initiate like yourself would be afraid of, surely!”
And with that he handed Smithson the electric torch and made an “after you!” gesture.
“You don’t mean I’m to go first, MacCrawley?”
“I assumed you would want to! You are of the high blood, as you have often reminded me! That makes you a leader!”
At last this mockery was too much for Smithson. He switched the torch on to see if it was operating and plunged into the tunnel.
Chuckling, MacCrawley ducked his head and went in after him.
They descended in a winding, looping, down-angled tunnel, dirt sometimes pattering down from the roof, making Smithson jump, which usually resulted in his knocking his head on the low stony ceiling. It seemed to Smithson they descended for more them an hour, and it got colder as they went so that he regretted not bringing an overcoat. As they descended, Smithson found himself thinking of the gold he had transferred to MacCrawley and how he might conceivably get it back. Perhaps he might persuade the King Underneath to seize MacCrawley on some pretext. Surely royalty would understand royalty . . .
Still they descended.
At last they came to a flight of steps carved from naked rock, bringing them into a large dusty room, which was pierced by a cross-tunnel.
“You can switch off your light here,” MacCrawley said.
Smithson was loathe to do so, but he switched it off and found there was still a soft bluish illumination coming from short glowing stalactites on the curved ceiling of the tunnel. Then he stepped hastily back as a grasping gray-black hand on a long, stretching arm, more like a tentacle to Smithson than like the limb implied by the hand, reached toward him, fingers wriggling as it sought his throat.
“MacCrawley!” Smithson squeaked.
“Leave this to me!” MacCrawley commanded, stepping between him and the hand. “I’ve come better prepared this time!” He drew an amulet from his pocket and dangled it before the four-fingered hand. On the amulet was an opal, carved in the image of a kingly figure with a five-pointed crown. The exploring, predatory hand stopped moving, drawing back an inch. Then it stretched out its fingers and seemed to sniff at the amulet without quite touching it. The hand then made a gesture that Smithson took to be a kind of salaam and withdrew, like a worm contracting into an apple, to vanish into the left-hand passage.
Smithson swallowed and slowly exhaled the breath he hadn’t been aware he’d been holding.
“This way,” MacCrawley said, leading him to the right.
They trekked another twenty yards before Smithson asked, “The King Underneath has been . . . been informed that he will have, ah, visiting royalty?”
“He has. Through this door . . .”
They passed through a crumbling wooden door, the old iron hinges sagging, and entered a cavern bigger than any he’d ever seen before.
Smithson gasped, gazing at the Palace of Phosphor, an intricate Gothic structure glowing with an inner light, and set atop a ziggurat-like formation to his right; on the stony ground below it was a collection of buildings that made him think of one of the old Roman settlements unearthed by archaeologists—another Pompeii. “To think that all this was beneath our very feet all the time that we . . .”
His voice trailed off as the gaunt, pale, red-eyed, hairless troops emerged from the streets nearest the palace, running up a ramp to their overlook.
“We must run, MacCrawley—those men—!”
“They are the Fallen Romans! Do not move! Stand where you are! To run would be disastrous!”
The soldiers rushed up to surround them, their skull-like faces unfathomable—but certainly not friendly.
MacCrawley held up the amulet. “Some of you may know me from my previous visit!” he said. Then he spoke to them in another language, some bastardization of Latin, Smithson thought. He caught the word socialis, which he remembered to mean allies. Their leader, an almost spectral figure, tall and thin in a black leather cuirass, a curved sword in his bony hand, nodded in response to MacCrawley’s speech and gestured for them to walk ahead of the escort—or perhaps ahead of their captors—and they started for the palace.
And Smithson thought: Oh God, what have I got myself into?
~
Maureen was a little sadder every time she went into the garden behind the little house she’d shared with Bosky. Her roses and irises and the little poplar tree, bluish in the glow from the phosphorescent ceiling of the cavern, were bowed, shriveling, crisping away. Perhaps some of the grass was still living, but nothing would live much longer in the garden, not without sun, without water. What water they had in the village was being hoarded. The town store had already been looted of food and bottled water; luckily she’d had some water put away before the “big fall.” A shadow passed over her and she looked up to see a harpy—surely those were harpies?—flapping about a hundred feet overhead, glancing fiercely down at her, moving on. Others circled higher up . . . terrifying creatures. They stopped anyone who tried to leave the village; Bosky and Garth had gotten out just in time. She wondered if they were still alive.
But she knew they were. She would feel it, if they were dead. She’d always had the ability to know something of those important to her, even when they were off somewhere, apart. She hadn’t been terribly surprised to see the harpies; something in her, some buried, cellular memory, seemed to recognize them.
Some of the m
en were drinking the last of the liquor in the pub; they were fools, for alcohol only made people dehydrated, made them want more water. She lived only a block from the pub and she could hear the noise of their carousing—the carousing of despair—even at this distance. Someone threw a bottle through a window with a tinkling crash.
How soon before one of those drunks came after her? She’d already had to block the front doors and windows of her cottage at night with furniture and boards. Someone had tried to break in twice the night before. She’d called out to them, demanded to know who they were, and two male voices only giggled in response, but at last they went away.
The village was falling apart physically and socially, which was understandable. Someone was taken every day, sometimes two or three, taken to an unknown fate. When they’d all watched the vicar lifted into that crack in the sky, the heart had gone out of them. No one was safe.
She sighed, and tried to envision Bosky and Garth, to get some sense of where they were, what was happening to them. She closed her eyes and turned her attention to her heart, and caught a flickering image of Bosky moving down a tunnel, rifle in hand . . .
Then a thumping sound from above, a reek, and a wave of palpable hatred made Maureen lift her head and look—just in time to see a harpy diving at her.
She turned and ran for the house, and got three steps and then shrieked in pain as the talons closed around her upper arms, one of them piercing the flesh of the muscle above her right breast. The thumping sound—the beating of the harpy’s wings—redoubled its rhythm, and the garden began to recede underneath her. In moments she was looking down at the roof of her cottage, then at the street and the shocked face of Mr. Gardiner, a pensioner who lived across the way from her, the pipe dropping from his gaping mouth as he saw her carried away.
She screamed and struggled, despite the pain. It would be better to fall to her death than die in some filthy nest; she pictured the harpies tearing her apart, feeding her alive to little harpies, like an eagle feeding its young, and she struck at the harpy’s scaly legs, to no effect.
Up, up, the jerky ascent was accompanied by the rhythm of the harpy’s beating wings, until they were nearly to a ledge jutting from a hole in the cliff-wall of the cavern enclosing the village. Pale men—were those men?—in black armor, blades and spears and crossbows in their hands, came out on the ledge and stood out of the way, awaiting her. Their faces . . .
She screamed once more—and fainted.
~
Constantine looked out the barred window of the prison cell at the town of Danque below. They were in a malodorous circular room in a columnar tower, with a pile of rags in the corner offering the only bedding, a wooden bucket their only plumbing.
“Not quite the Tower of London,” Constantine said, glancing around while lighting a cigarette with a practiced flick of one hand.
“Give us a brown, John!” Geoff said, staring at the cigarette.
“You can have this one when I’ve smoked it down halfway,” Constantine said. “Got to conserve.”
“This cavern’s sort of like the one the village is in,” Geoff remarked, peering out the window. “Except even bigger. Shite, who knew all this was down here.”
“That bastard MacCrawley knew,” Constantine muttered. “Or found out. Question is, why didn’t I know? My job is to know those things. Didn’t take Scofield seriously enough . . .”
“Your job? You’ve got a job?” Geoff asked dubiously.
“If it’s not my job it’s my . . . responsibility, like. ’Course, I’ve heard about the Underlands, but I always thought it was like that Hollow Earth mythology. Didn’t look any closer at the literature. My oversight.”
“This ain’t the center of the Earth. But it’s close enough for me,” Geoff said. “Come on, give me a smoke.”
Constantine handed him the cigarette. “You shouldn’t smoke. I shouldn’t’ve started up again myself.”
“I thought we had a plan, John. I don’t recall you mentioning being locked up.”
“I expected to be incarcerated, or under guard, for a while. But I’ve got a call in, so to speak, to the King—and I think he’ll see me. I’ve got to convince him I’m the magician who can renew his body for good.” He glanced at the locked door—he suspected someone was listening—then winked at Geoff as he added, “And of course I can.”
Geoff nodded and put his finger beside his nose. “But . . .” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “They know me from the village. How will they think . . . realize . . . I’m your apprentice?”
“You remember, I sent you into the village and there was a bit of a misunderstanding, they didn’t realize you didn’t belong there?”
“John,” Geoff said, his voice an even softer whisper, “what about that spell that . . .” He mimed opening a lock with a key.
“If we have to.”
“Might be too late if we wait for—”
“Hey—apprentice?”
“Yes, uh—master?”
“Do me a very large favor, and shut your pie-hole.”
Geoff shrugged, straightened his specs, and blew smoke out the window, watching it drift out over the capitol of the Underlands. Their tower actually rose from the corner of a fortress wall that enclosed the Palace of Phosphor. It was the palace that drew the eye. It was an almost perfectly preserved palace from at least half a millennium in the past; peaked roofs topped with serrated spikes of iron stretched achingly up toward the ceiling of the vast cavern, as if the palace wanted to push its towers beyond the ceiling and penetrate to the upper world. The outer walls were decorated with flamboyant traceries, the windows with intricate designs in leaded glass. The whole, interconnected by walls decorated with ornate figures in iron, pulsed faintly from an inner light.
“You recognize the architecture?” Geoff asked.
Constantine shrugged. His hand moving with a will of its own, he took out his pack of cigarettes, started to take a cigarette out, and stopped himself. He looked at it wistfully and put it back in his inside coat pocket.
“It’s Late Gothic, of course,” Geoff observed airily. “The Perpendicular style. You see the fan vault, there? It’s like the Rayonnant thing you see in Gloucester Cathedral—they insert tracery panels into the vault—”
“Hang on,” Constantine exclaimed. “Where’s all this coming from? You making it up?”
“I’m going to study architecture, once I’m in college. Been reading up. The history of buildings is dead fascinating.”
Constantine cleared his throat. “You mean, as a hobby. When you’ve”—he tilted his head toward the door—“finished your apprenticeship with me.”
“Oh. Yeah. After that.”
Constantine looked out the window again, studying a gargoyle on the eave of a building, and was startled to see it spread its wings and fly off. “Not a gargoyle—a harpy!”
Geoff stared at the harpy as it flapped over the rooftops. “I’d be gobsmacked by that sight.” He shook his head and exhaled a long slow breath. “Except nothing surprises me now.”
“Then stand by to take that back, mate,” Constantine said. “There’s always another rabid rabbit in the hat.”
“The city down there,” Geoff remarked, “beyond the palace walls—totally different architectural style, like something from Pompeii. Looks older, too. That must be what Balf was—ow!”
Constantine had jabbed him to keep him quiet. He mouthed, Don’t mention Balf you git!
They heard the tramp of boots outside the door then, and a key turning in a protesting lock. The Captain of the Fallen Romans stood in the doorway, crossbow in hand. His distinctive winged helmet—the ornaments on the sides shaped like bat-wings—seemed to denote rank. Several other soldiers waited behind him in the narrow landing, short-swords in hand.
“You gents here to have a cuppa with us?” Constantine asked, with mock congeniality. “We’re a little short on tea. Also on water, fire, pots, cups, and crumpets. But I’ll see what I can do.”
Constantine had a fair command of Latin, something a reader of ancient books on magic needs, and understood the Captain as saying, “Come here!”
“Could be this is the audience with his nibs, apprentice,” Constantine said in an aside to Geoff, with a sharp look to remind him of the role he was to play. “Come along, then.”
They went onto the landing, and were escorted down through the turret on a spiral stone staircase and out to a rampart built right up against the outer walls of the palace complex. The embrasures enclosing the ramparts were edged by iron spikes, some of them decorated with moldering human heads. Geoff stopped in his tracks and stared at one.
“Oh shite!”
“Better keep moving,” Constantine whispered, as a sword-wielding guard jabbed him warningly from behind, not quite hard enough to get through his coat.
“That—I think”—he stared transfixed at the head, a middle-aged man from the surface—“I think that’s my history teacher, from school!”
Constantine grimaced. “Could be. They might’ve decided to make a few public examples of some who didn’t do whatever they’ve brought the villagers down here to do. Come on, or we’ll join him up there—and watch what you say.”
“Confuto!” the guard commanded angrily. “Hoc agere!” Silence, continue onward!
Geoff swallowed, letting Constantine pull him along by the elbow and they continued down the open-air walkway. From here they could see people moving through the distant settlement below, even a few children. Most of them seemed paper-white, like the guards, but a few darker individuals stood out from the rest. Genetic aberrations or the result of kidnappings from the surface? Constantine wondered.
He glanced back at the guards, and looked more closely at their faces. They were fleshed; the skull effect came from the dead-white skin, the extremely upturned noses which were little more than holes in their faces, the lipless mouths, the sunken eyes. A form of albinism, and some inbreeding problem.
