by John Shirley
Scofield hesitated, looking at Constantine with cold, calculating eyes.
“Not sure if you want to trust me to tell me everything you know?” Constantine asked. “Right. Suit yourself. But from what I hear, there’s precious little time to waffle about in.”
Scofield grunted. “Got to trust someone. All right . . . in a room, beyond the upper room of the rejuvenation projector, is a powerful elemental, trapped. Once the King trapped him, he forced him to help him create the gripplers, and to give him control over the harpies. Within the caverns, the harpies obey the earth elementals. The King used this power to make the Fallen Romans his minions—”
“Fallen Romans? Oh, those noseless, pasty fellows with the pigstickers I’ve been running into?”
“The very chaps. Once they hated Culley’s guts. Now he’s gotten them completely under his sway. He’s a cult of personality to these gormless idjits. They live to try to get enough service so they can be elevated to the pleasure merry-go-round of his courtiers; a lot of vile wankers, his courtiers.”
“That was my impression. Tossers all. But, Scofield—” Constantine had spotted the collar around Scofield’s neck. He’d recognized runes that meant the destruction of anyone who tried to remove it, and the runes kept the wearer contained within a certain distance of its maker. “He’s got you enslaved too, then, has he?”
“I saw you looking at the collar,” Scofield said bitterly. “Aye. Once I was the best magician in England.” He looked narrowly at Constantine as if challenging him to deny it. Constantine shrugged. “But now,” Scofield went on, his voice dripping with self-contempt, “I’m but Culley’s magical potboy. His assistant he calls it, but in fact his slave.”
“Meaning you’ve helped him develop this . . . this toxic sump he’s going to release?”
“It was all his design. But . . .” Scofield sighed and threw his cigarette butt over the balcony’s edge; everything about the gesture spoke of disgust. For himself. For the world. “But I’ve been supervising the work, getting it ready,” he admitted.
Constantine flicked away his own cigarette butt, watching the dying ember turn end over end as it fell, a spinning red spark. “It don’t bother you, killing millions of people, enslaving thousands more?”
“I’m not so cold-hearted as that. Only there’s that room. The people in the projector vessels, the invasive mold—Culley threatened me with that, and . . .” He chewed his lower lip so hard it began to bleed, ever so slightly. “I should have hung myself first chance, instead of taking the job on. But he had gotten the collar on me, so there was no escape. I talked myself into doing his dirty work by figuring I could find a way to sabotage the process. I couldn’t do it right away; he checks on it too closely. Every bloody day. Still, I figured I could bide my time. Or maybe . . .” He lowered his voice so it was all but inaudible. “Or maybe watch for some way to get past his defenses, kill him in his bed, d’ya’see. I put one of his queens up to stealing . . .” He glanced nervously around. “Well. It doesn’t matter. She failed. And the worst happened. I had hypnotized her, so she’d forget her encounter with me if she were caught. And she was caught. She . . .” He broke off, closing his eyes. Looking like he was fighting tears now. “God I hate him.”
“You know she’s dead, don’t you?”
“She is? Thank God! I’m glad for her. Often wish I was dead. I know, reeks of self-pity. But having to do this work so I could find a way to stop it. It’s maddening. This whole fucking place is maddening.”
Constantine scratched his thatchy head and, tense with the imminence of catastrophe, lit another cigarette. “When’s he plan to release this poison, then?”
“Why, about forty-eight hours from now.”
“Strewth! We’ve bloody well got to stop him, fast!”
“A cauldron containing the Universal Solvent now hangs over the sump; I’ve just helped put it there. You might say it’s cooking, coming to complete transmutation. It’ll be ready in about forty-eight hours. When it’s completed its transmutation it’ll be poured into what he calls the lower cauldron, the toxin sump. That’ll set up a chain reaction that will dissolve the stone walls between the lower cauldron and the river. With the walls down the mixture will then pour freely into the river, and from there into the sea, in a matter of a few hours.”
“You have a plan for blocking that sump room up to keep all that muck in there? Diverting the Solvent? You said you hoped to sabotage him and I hope to fuck you thought of something, Scofield, considering if you don’t want to be remembered by the survivors as one of the worst mass murderers in history. You and Culley’ll make Hitler and Stalin look like amateurs, mate.”
“There might be a way. But I’ve got to divert his army; they’re fanatically guarding the thing. And his gripplers must be dealt with. If his machine ends, you know, he’ll first be weakened and then he’ll die. You’d have chaos throughout his kingdom. In all the chaos, we might, we just might get away with it. The harpies and the gripplers, though . . .”
“You leave them to me. I’ve got some thoughts on that, and on that machine of his.”
“Constantine!”
He jumped at that, expecting to be seized by the Fallen Romans. But it was Bosky. “You’re to come and change clothes and go to the feast,” the boy said, trotting up. “The gong rang.”
“Well I bloody well didn’t hear it and we have no time for feasts.”
“You’d better go,” Scofield advised him. “You’ll be too conspicuous by your absence. Culley will assume you’re up to something. We need to think before we act. There’s one we can trust—Fallesco, his name is. He’ll be in touch with you. He’ll be there and he’ll act as my go-between . . . Uh-oh.”
The harpy who’d been watching them had leaped into the air, was circling close overhead, exuding a rank smell of wet leather, and shrieking something in Latin that Constantine couldn’t make out.
“It’s telling me to go back to the cave, to get back to work,” he said. “The King must have looked through its eyes and sent it the message. Oh, check this boy’s hip. And now—” He bowed slightly to Constantine, giving him a significant look, and turned to stride away toward the sump cavern, the harpy flying above, swooping back and forth, chivvying him along.
“What’d he mean?” Constantine asked. “About your hip?”
Bosky groaned. “Oh I suppose . . . wait.” He looked around. “Be sure that Spurlick perv’s not around. Right. Have a gander.” He pulled his waistband down just enough to show the birthmark on his hip.
“Hmmm . . .” Constantine said, looking at the birthmark. “He must figure it’s a fairy thing. You’ve got fairy blood, then.”
“That’s what my granddad said. It comes from me mum’s side of the family, he said.” His eyes misted when he thought of Granddad. He cleared his throat and went on, “Though how those little fairy creatures could, you know, manage to shag with a grown woman—”
“Nah, that’s all wrong about fairies being small. That’s sprites, the small ones. Fairies are the same size as people. They’re a kind of people—magically empowered people from another dimension, like. But one that overlaps with ours, you might say. Scary, treacherous bastards, for all their pretty looks and elegant ways, are fairies. That mark must be why you’re wandering around free. The King’s got something in mind for you. We’d best get you out of here fast.”
“You coming to this feast or not?” After a moment, looking off the ramparts and trying to seem casual, he added, “Me mum’ll be there.”
“Sod it. Lead the way.” Constantine followed Bosky back, muttering. “This is mad. Going to a party. Fiddling while Rome burns.”
Forty-eight hours . . .
~
“Mr. Constantine,” Maureen began, laying his clothes out on the cot. “I was wondering—”
“John.”
“What?” She looked up at him, startled at the interruption; there was a peculiar, not unpleasant tension between them that made them both s
tartle easily.
“My name is John, innit?” he said. “All right I call you Maureen, then?”
“Well . . . yes. Why not. I mean . . . certainly.” They looked at one another; he in his robe, she in the slightly frayed old butter-yellow gown the queen had picked out for her. “Any gate, I was wondering—you aren’t the John Constantine of Mucous Membrane, are you?”
The John Constantine of Mucous Membrane looked at her in frank astonishment. “Get on with you! You never heard of it!”
“I did. I had your 45—‘Lies of My Own.’ ”
“You didn’t! You’re not old enough!”
“Oh I’m almost old enough. Anyway I was kind of obsessed with music from that era when I was young. Later on I got more into traditional music—Celtic folk, that kind of thing. Played some harmonium, sang with a little group that used to do pubs about Cornwall.”
“Really? I’d . . . like to hear it. Sometime. I mean . . . when all this is, you know, sorted out.”
In the unlikely event it’s sorted out, he added, to himself.
Their gazes seemed to cling to one another. Then she quickly looked away, examining his folded clothing in an almost fiercely businesslike way. “Right. Anyway . . . I’ve found something like borax and managed to get your clothes something like clean, and if you’re to get something like clean for the King’s feast, you’d better hurry, you can wash behind that curtain there. Oh and here’s a straight razor; the queen had several she uses for her legs and I nicked it, actually . . .”
“You nicked it? Not your legs, I’m guessing. I mean—not that they’re—that is—”
She laughed softly. “Not for that no. I just don’t like the way some of these twits have been looking at me.”
Constantine smiled. She was ready to slash some bastard who tried to force himself on her; he liked her even better now.
He went behind the curtain, found a basin with water and a cloth, a crude sort of soap, managed something like a sponge bath, and scraped away his beard with the straight razor. He was fantasizing that Maureen would come in to give him his clothes and with him standing there naked she’d lose control, though nothing about him naked was likely to make a woman lose control. Except in the fantasy—with their chemistry overwhelming them both—she’d fling herself into his arms and . . .
And then she handed him the clothes, crooking her arm around the curtain without coming around.
What did you think, you childish oik, he told himself savagely.
Dressed in his old clothes and trench coat, feeling more human for being more presentable, and not minding that the pants weren’t quite dry yet, he came out from the curtain, lit a celebratory cigarette, and offered her one.
“No thanks.”
“You’re smart not to smoke. Where’s our likely lads?”
“They had some notion of trying to find out what happened to Finn, or someone they could ask. Some of the saner palace people.”
He sighed, exhaling at the same time. “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news on that front, Maureen.” Geoff had described Finn to him and he’d guessed whose dismembered body he’d glimpsed far below; whose hand it had been in the bowl. “That boy is as dead as a boy can be.”
“Oh no. Are you sure?”
He nodded. He didn’t want to tell her about how he knew. And he didn’t think he should tell her what Scofield had told him about the Universal Solvent. News like that, that there were two days till much of Britain would choke to death like a man in a gas chamber—in fact, less than that by now—could plunge Maureen into despair. And he didn’t want to see Maureen despair.
She looked at him. “Funny to think of you in that rock band, and now up to your neck in magic. Down here.”
“Funny to think of you with that rare 45 in your hands, and up to your neck in fairy blood.”
“Oh. Bosky told you?”
“Yeah. Better keep it quiet, for now. Well . . .” He didn’t want to leave her, to go off to the intrigues of the Underking’s degenerate court. He tried to think of some reason to linger. “Not good, those boys wandering about this place. If you see them, tell them so, that’s my advice. Don’t want you to worry, but . . . better they stay out of sight in the gaff here. Geoff’s supposed to be my apprentice; he’ll babble something to the wrong person.”
Stupid, you’re just making her worry.
She glanced at the door. “I told Bosky to be back here, to stay away from that feast. But . . .” She shrugged. “He goes his own way nowadays. I’ve got to attend to the queen.”
He looked at her; she looked back at him—then quickly away.
What is it that attracts me to her so bloody much? She’s no great beauty, though she’s pretty in an ordinary kind of way. Lot of character in her face, true. Intelligence. Sensitivity. But this feeling . . .
Is it the fairy thing?
It didn’t feel that way, though. It wasn’t magic, drawing him to her. Not that kind of magic. Making him linger like this . . .
He tapped his cigarette. Cleared his throat. Thought he ought to go. But somehow he didn’t.
She hummed to herself. Glanced at him. Away. “Well . . .”
“Well . . .”
She started to laugh again, then, in a peculiarly pleasurable embarrassment, and he grinned. “Right, Maureen. I’m off.”
She broke off laughing as their gazes caught again.
Her eyes.
Then he made himself turn away and look for the throne room.
~
“Curious ’tis, how seductive numbness is,”
. . . recited the courtier, Fallesco, a tall slender man, elegantly attired in a scarlet and silver coat and tails, accompanying himself on a lyre:
To insulate, to obfuscate,
A strange way to elevate—but wait!
What when benumbed, now resonates?
The signals sent before, always more,
Had muted what sung at the core;
The clamor of the world, outside—
Masked the rising of the inner tide;
And not until I was stoned to dumbness,
Not until I was smashed to numbness,
Not until I was crashed to dullness,
Not till I was choked with fullness,
Not till I had made my head ring—
Fallesco paused and everyone at the feast, sitting on the cushions about the smoky throne room floor listening to his recital, including the now-rejuvenated King and the queen, leaned forward on their reclining cushions to hear the conclusion of his musical poem, and he said:
—“could I understand . . . the King!”
And so saying he genuflected toward the King Underneath.
The room erupted in applause, which Constantine joined in, just as soon as he finished draining his glass. He looked at the young man who was evidently the King Underneath, Iain Culley. It took a moment to confirm that was indeed who it was; you could just make out something of the old man’s features in this person who was outwardly a twenty-year-old.
A five-hundred-year-old twenty-year-old, he thought.
Easy to understand the King being morally seduced by regular restoration of youth, Constantine reckoned, signaling a servant girl who poured him some more from a stone jug. He tried to smile at her, but it came out a leer. She leered back showing a forked tongue and filed teeth. Or were they naturally a set of fangs all the way round? It looked as if the forked tongue had been done at some point with a knife, a crude surgery, the local version of having a plate in your lips. She sashayed off to serve the King. The queen was yawning beside Culley; their thrones had been hidden behind decorative screens and the sovereigns were now lounging luxuriantly on a raised dais covered with opulent gold-trimmed silken cushions. Maureen sat a little behind the queen, and to one side. It looked to Constantine like she was trying to make herself seem small, inconspicuous. She avoided the eyes of the male courtiers, and some of the females, who looked at her with garishly candid lust.
“Constantine?
”
He looked up to see the urbane Fallesco hunkering close beside his cushions. Constantine nodded, lighting a cigarette. “Fallesco, the court poet, yeah? I did applaud, I think. Or did I? Not sure.”
“May I intrude?”
“On me pillows, not me body.”
Fallesco smiled; he was a fox-faced man with a delicate, braided beard, a sharp nose, and deceptively sleepy green eyes. “A touch of wit. I do enjoy it.” He sat beside Constantine with a single graceful motion, as several muscular black men who seemed to have been captured somewhere, judging by the chains linking their necks, and playing against their will, judging by their sullenness, were now beating out something like salsa on conga drums, just in front of the King. And the now-younger King bobbed his head to the beat.
The noise was such that Fallesco had to lean close to Constantine to make himself heard. “I believe we’re both acquainted with Scofield?”
“Yes.” Constantine spotted Bosky and Geoff drifting around the edges of the feast, snagging food from the trays, clearly looking for something else entirely. Bosky’s mum had told them to stay away. Little bastards going to steal some drink, Constantine thought. He tried to organize his thoughts around Scofield so he could plan with Fallesco, but the strange green liquor seemed to make everything beyond the present moment, even the catastrophe waiting to claim the UK, so far away and unreal. “Ah. Scofield. Need to stop the King’s machine so Scofield can do his mischief.”
He seemed alarmed at Constantine’s directness, and he looked at the glass Constantine was drinking from. “I can see this is not the time to talk of this. Fortunately the drums are muffling our conversation. Be careful what you say tonight, my friend; I beg you, trust no one. And speaking of caution, if I may take the liberty of observing it, that liqueur—which we call the Emerald Mead—is perhaps rather more powerful than you realize. You may lose all track of time, and all moral center, under the Emerald’s crafty influence. Those who are new to the Underlands often find themselves undone by it, as when Scofield woke from a binge with the Emerald to find a collar about his neck . . .”
