Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean

by John Shirley

  “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

  “You 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.”

  “You mean breakfast of some kind?” Constantine asked, ever hopeful.

  “There will be a repast. It will be breakfast for the King. For the rest of us it will be the capper of our evening; we time things like that so that we can feast with him when he’s young. We sleep for much of his day.”

  “Right, I’ll listen for the gong then, mate.”

  Spurlick bowed. “Shall I show you to your quarters?”

  “Actually, I’d rather stay here. If the King don’t approve, I’ll move, how’s that?”

  “You prefer these Spartan surroundings to luxury?”

  “It’s, you know, a sorcerer thing.”

  “Is it? The King is not that sort of sorcerer. Very well; I shall see you at the feast.”

  He lingered but as the atmosphere was not welcoming, he shrugged and said, “You might want to bathe, Master Magus. We’re rather sensitive to odor in the confined spaces in which we live.” And then he abruptly made his leave.

  Maureen looked at Constantine with approval. “Good you’d rather stay here than take their luxury suite, or whatever it is. I’m glad you stayed—I mean, since Geoff vouches for you.”

  “He saved my life, I got to admit that much,” Geoff said.

  Constantine was looking at his coat. “Reckon I am a mite grubby, at that.”

  Maureen took an urn of water from a cabinet. “Why don’t you take off that shirt and coat, Mr. Constantine; I can clean them a bit. There’s water in this tub . . .”

  Constantine looked at her, started to answer, made eye contact—and couldn’t quite make his mouth work, at first. There was something about her that arrested his glibness. “I . . . well . . . yeah, that’d . . .”

  Geoff looked back and forth between Constantine and Maureen and grinned.

  Constantine scowled at him. “What are you grinning about, ‘apprentice’?”

  ~

  Men were coming to find him, and kill him.

  Shivering a little in the rising cloud of mist, Balf the troll heard them coming long before they passed under his hiding place, their torches flickering in the gloom.

  He was sequestered on a shelf of rock in the cavern of the Stabbing Falls, overlooking the churning cliff. There was little light here, just trace phosphorescence, but Balf could see well, though things looked blue and red for him, as his troll’s eyes had automatically shifted to the specialized vision his kind used in the darkness.

  The skull-soldiers of the King Underneath marched double-file along the stony path which followed the stream. This was the Stab River, a little ways farther, it pitched over the falls into the echoing cavern. The water fell a long ways, nigh six hundred feet, to crash into a pool which became a river that eventually, after many pitch-black miles, found its way to a sea cave.

  Trolls called this place something that translated to “the cavern of the Stabbing Falls,” but Balf wasn’t sure why. Because the falls seemed to stab down in the darkness? Or had some significant killing happened here long ago?

  His mind ruminated over these questions without concern for the pallid men trooping below, though he knew full well they were searching for him. King Culle
y would have told them to take him prisoner only if he did not resist. He might well kill thirty or forty of them, he supposed, in pitched combat with a wall at his back, but there were full a hundred down there, bristling with weapons. They couldn’t see him in the mist and darkness; they didn’t know this little shelf was up here. Behind him it narrowed to a passage just big enough for him to squeeze through, which in turn rose to a chamber above, an old volcanic bubble, which was his current hideout. It was a place so dark that not even his specially evolved eyes could help him; he had to ignite light-crystals so he could see his tools and materials. There he had spent his waking hours, when not hunting blind cave fish and rats to eat, making the tools that he hoped would destroy the King’s great machine.

  Of course, he might stop the machine temporarily by dislodging some of its smaller gears; he might even jam the great cylinder. But the machine kept a charge for a full course of the Earth’s turning, during which time a guard would be set up, and it would be repaired and quickly restarted, giving the King time to be rejuvenated.

  Only the section of the machine guarded by the Il-Sorg was vulnerable enough to stop the machine for long.

  And then Constantine’s plan might, just might, go forward.

  Of course, Balf was a troll, who had lived thousands of years, and he knew well that the doings of men were evanescent and conceived without the benefit of real experience. They had a tendency to fall apart. They did not take years to plan things as Balf did. When Constantine came along Balf had just been about to make his move to escape . . .

  Well, in ten years or so he’d have done it. Probably.

  Now, as the soldiers, finding nothing in the channel leading to the great cavern, turned about and went back to search in exactly the wrong places, Balf put his patience back to work again. He climbed to his hiding place and set to work scraping away at the tools he was modifying for the sabotage, the undermining, of an entire kingdom.

  The question was, could the scruffy yellow-haired human, John Constantine, do his part?

  Balf doubted it.

  ~

  “You’d be John Constantine, then?” asked the man walking up to Constantine on the battlements of the castle. Constantine had been on the ramparts looking out over the cavern, as the clouds over the glowing ceiling began to disperse for “morning.” He was wearing an old robe he’d found in a cabinet while his clothes were being washed. He might’ve passed for a local except for the cigarette in his mouth.

  “Who’s asking?”

  The stranger drew his hood back, showing Constantine a world-weary, bearded face that he supposed must be Scofield’s, from the description Bosky had given.

  “I am Philo Scofield,” the man confirmed. “The boy from the village told me you’d be here. I suppose you’re surprised to see me alive.”

  Constantine nodded. “Well, it’s a right old convention of sorcerers down here in these bloody damned Underlands of yours: the King, that bastard MacCrawley, and here we two stand, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  The two men looked each other over but did not offer to shake hands. Sorcerers don’t trust one another that much. A curse could be transferred through a hand clasp, if one knew how, among other things.

  Constantine, though, seeing Scofield staring at his cigarette, offered him one. Scofield hesitated.

  “Oh take a chance, mate. I’m not going to give you the fucking poison cigarette. I need allies here. Might need my poison cigarette for some other troublesome cove, yeah?”

  Scofield nodded and took one; Constantine lit it for him.

  “Silk Cut, eh? I appreciate it. Know it’s a risk; you may never get another pack.” Scofield drew on the smoke, and coughed. “Forgot how rough smoking is on the lungs. But then it’s nothing compared to what I breathe in the sump chamber . . .” He glanced around to see if anyone was listening. “We’re being watched, but I don’t think they’re listening.”

  “Watched? Where?”

  “Up there on that tower—you see the harpy? That one’s followed me here. There’s something else that follows me down below. It watches what I do, but doesn’t seem to pick up on what I say . . .”

  “What is it that follows you, uh, down below?”

  “Flying shadows, I call them. Looks kind of like a bat, except the bat’s not there. It’s a magical version of those flying-drone things with the cameras they were developing on the surface, when I came down.”

  “Right. Royal Air Force uses those in the war in Iraq.”

  “There’s a war in bloody Iraq, is there? Why?”

  “No good reason anyone can figure out, mate. This thing watches you, inside? How many has he got?”

  “The King has only three I know of. He’ll put one on you. But I don’t think they can hear us. Now listen, he’s got me on an alchemical project that’s going to destroy all life in Britain.”

  Constantine coughed on his cigarette smoke at that, amazed at the almost matter-of-fact way Scofield had decreed the imminent doom of his nation. After a short coughing fit, Constantine allowed, “I heard something about it, but I didn’t get anything that extreme. How’s it work?”

  “The Universal Solvent—he’s worked up his own version of it. He’s been gathering canisters of industrial waste, toxins of all kinds from underground sites around the world. He knows tunnels that connect this land and the other Underlands—”

  “Hang on! How much more Underlands are there? I read about some, but I thought it was just one place somewhere.”

  “Oh, there’s a great deal of it; tens of thousands of square miles, at several subterranean sites. It’s not the ‘hollow Earth,’ exactly, it’s not that far under the surface. Three other civilizations, there are. You think this one’s peculiar? They practice a kind of crossbreeding make you sick to look at it, underneath Mount Shasta over in the States. Then there’s one under China where everyone’s blind, see their way around with some kind of sonar. Used to be human beings, not so much anymore. Great builders, they are. Used to be five great Underland civilizations, but two of them were destroyed in earthquakes.”

  “And their sorcerers?”

  “Low grade, when they’ve got them. Specialize in eccentric forays into technology instead. Some of them have planned invasions of the upper world, but they can’t live up there so it ain’t practical. The King Underneath inverted it—”

  “Appropriately enough.”

  “He plans to bring the upper to the lower. And he wants to invade the rest of the Underlands. But he wants to force thousands of slaves from the upper world into his armies and to build a new underground civilization he’s got in mind. So he plans to make Britain and probably France unlivable up there, which will drive a few million survivors down here. He’ll take them by surprise and enslave them. He’s going to open up tunnels for them across Britain, and beyond, to draw them in once the poison starts to spread.”

  “And how’s he plan to spread it, then?” Constantine asked, feeling a chill spread out from his spine as Scofield unfolded the plot for him.

  “The poisons he’s collected will be carried on the Universal Solvent—which has the power to distribute a poison far, far from its source. The toxins will be released into the Stab River, where they’ll run off the Stabbing Falls—it’s a place deep underground, about ten miles from here. Those tunnels will be sealed off so the poison doesn’t come in here, but it won’t reach its full destructive capability immediately. It’ll spread out through other channels too . . . one of them goes right to the Thames in London! Another goes to the sea. It’ll react with the seawater, setting up a chain reaction that’ll kill the sea round about Britain! That’s all life, including plankton, algae, everything—marine photosynthesizers, don’t you know. Surface people rely on those kinds of organisms in the sea for the creation of oxygen. There’ll be great banks of air with no oxygen all round southern England and London—down here we’ll have enough air. The King has farm caverns that produce oxygen.”

  “The
sea’ll stop making oxygen round the UK, and the forests won’t be enough?”

  “Right. But that’s not all; once the Underking introduces his toxin, the sea will give off a poisonous miasma.”

  “Hold on, the sea is awfully fucking big, mate. It’s already polluted round Britain, but it’s surviving.”

  “There are vast tracts of dead sea they don’t talk about much in the papers. The fish are dying back, the whales and sea lions sickening and heaving themselves on the beaches; that’s already going on, thanks to the ordinary pollution out there. It makes the sea animals weak, so they can’t fight disease, don’t you know. A healthier ocean might survive Culley’s poison, but not this one. And d’ya’see, the Solvent will carry the poisons at great speed around much of the UK. The shortage of oxygen and the poisoned air will drive hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people underground! The King will seem to offer them shelter, but what he’s got in mind is slavery. Slavery is the source of all his power, d’ya’see.”

  “And the ones who don’t make it underground . . . or to some other safe place . . .”

  “They’ll die. Who knows how many.”

  Constantine blew smoke over the crenelated walls and watched it drift toward the crumbling old Roman settlement of Danque down below. Drifting clouds of poison. “You think it could work?”

  “The chemistry and the alchemy seem to be there. He’s got help from his secondary source of power. Of course you know about the machine. It lights the palace, provides warmth . . . and his rejuvenation.”

  Constantine snorted. “I saw how he gets his rejuvenation. I’ve been to Hell, thought I had a thick skin. But this made me sick, it did.”

  “So that story about you and Hell is true?” Scofield asked enviously. Hell might be hellish—but it was a big draw to a magician. “You actually went there . . . and came back? How?”

  “I didn’t go as a condemned spirit. There’s no coming back from that, this side of God’s intervention. And him and me are scarce talking. I went by another route, you might say. What’s this other source of power?”