Grave Importance

by Vivian Shaw

  Each of the rivers of Hell has its own characteristic qualities. Lethe grants the drinker forgetfulness; Cocytus wails, which on the face of it would not seem to be of much use but in recent years has found considerable popularity as a source for mix samples for the more avant-garde infernal DJs; Phlegethon, the source of the lake’s flame, burns; and Acheron, depending on interpretation, is a river of pain or a river of purification. In practice this last translates to extremely astringent, and Acheron water represents a widely used ingredient in some skin preparations.

  Together, however, with the waters of Styx, the rivers that give themselves up to Lake Avernus commingle their individual qualities to produce a fluid of remarkable capability. Unlike mineral springs on Earth, the waters of Lake Avernus possess considerable effective therapeutic value—at least to demons. Taken internally, Avernus water has analgesic, anxiolytic, and antidepressant effects; applied externally, it stimulates circulation and wound healing, reduces pain, and induces a warming sensation. The flames are not exactly heatless but do not and cannot burn demonic tissue; they can be ingested without harm and produce a pleasant tingling sensation on the skin.

  The Lake Avernus Spa & Resort has the monopoly on bottling and selling the lake water, although there are no penalties for individual demons who wish to collect the water for their own use. Nor is there official oversight or control of access to the waterfront except on Spa property, which is limited to the section of shore immediately surrounding the Spa complex and its grounds and gardens. Critics of the Spa are quick to point out how much it shares architecturally with the Royal Pavilion at Brighton.

  Ruthven thought he was probably a terrible person for not minding how much he liked it.

  Dr. Faust had examined him with brisk no-nonsense competence after Grisaille had left for Earth, and pronounced him well enough to be transferred to the Spa, “although you’re not to try anything energetic,” and Ruthven had assured him of his total lack of desire for energetic pursuits. He was feeling so much better that the memory of his previous agony seemed increasingly improbable, but he certainly wasn’t well; all he seemed to want to do was lie around and doze, and possibly read books, and drink fortified blood. It had come as some amusement when he realized that he was, in fact, displaying almost identical symptoms to those of an unscrupulous vampire’s victim.

  He still couldn’t remember anything about how the actual curse had happened. The blank spot in his memory was apparently intent on remaining blank; Faust had said it looked like the work of an angel, but not one they recognized, and Ruthven wasn’t sure he wanted to think about that very closely. Neither the thought of random angels wandering around putting curses on people nor the idea of strange angels, from somewhere else, was particularly comforting. Nor did he have any idea why an angel should single him out for any such attention; he couldn’t remember doing anything particularly offensive to any members of the heavenly host, even back in the day when he’d been rather less circumspect in his predations. It made no sense, and Ruthven didn’t like things that made no sense; in this he and Greta were of one mind.

  He was lying on a remarkably comfortable deck chair, covered in a blanket, on a balcony overlooking the lake, vaguely wondering what time it was. The sky in Hell was never blue, exactly; it was a sort of dim red-gold vault high above the surface, faintly gleaming. The daylight here seemed to come out of the air itself, without bothering to involve a sun of any description—it hadn’t rained once since Ruthven had been here, either—and it did change color as night drew on. Anywhere near the lake never got completely dark, of course. The dancing opaline flames didn’t give off a brilliant glow, but their light was always present.

  It felt to Ruthven as if it were late evening, getting on for nighttime. Which meant there would be a nurse arriving sometime soon with his blood. He found he was looking forward to it, and both despaired of himself for turning into such a pathetic lump and was rather glad that his appetite existed at all, after several days of violent nausea.

  He watched the little sailboats that had been scudding about far out on the lake coming in to the marina, one by one, tying up; watched the demons climbing out of them, some laughing together, some holding tails or hands or both. Presumably boating on Lake Avernus was a popular date activity; Ruthven, like most sanguivores, got seasick on a wet pavement, and had never been able to see the appeal of messing about in boats.

  Someone was coming. Ruthven’s senses were somewhat blunter down here than they were on Earth, but even so, his hearing was acute. There was a faint clear chiming sound, very sweet, that he’d noticed a few times during his stay so far; it came and went apparently at random, and Ruthven couldn’t work out where it could be coming from; it didn’t seem to be directional in any way, as if it came directly out of the air itself. He’d have to remember to ask the nurse—and wondered, not for the first time, what the nursing staff were saying about him, amongst themselves. Wondered if they’d ever had cause to treat a vampire before, and if they minded.

  “They don’t,” said a voice behind him, and Ruthven blinked, sitting up and looking over his shoulder. Fastitocalon stood there, grey suit immaculate as always, holding two glasses; he came forward and handed one of them to Ruthven. Cut crystal, brilliant as diamond. In fact, down here, it might be diamond. This time there was no bendy straw. “They’re fascinated, in fact.”

  “Since when do you make a habit of casually reading my mind?” Ruthven asked without much rancor. Fastitocalon pulled over another deck chair and sat down.

  “I’m not, actually,” he said. “You’re thinking extremely loudly; it’s impossible not to overhear. How are you feeling?”

  Ruthven rolled his eyes. “I don’t think loudly, I think at a perfectly normal volume, and it’s nice to see you properly, Fass.” The last time he’d seen the demon had been through a haze of pain and morphine in the hospital’s emergency department.

  “It’s nice to see you, too,” said Fastitocalon, leaning back in the chair with a sigh. His own glass contained something pale-gold and clear, with bubbles in it; after a moment Ruthven realized there was a tiny flame flickering from the rim. A garnish. “I haven’t had time to come and see you before now.”

  “Work being extra busy?” said Ruthven, eyebrow raised. They’d put something pleasant in the warmed blood, something a bit like brandy; it felt very nice indeed. “You look tired.”

  Fastitocalon did. Vastly better than the last time Ruthven had seen him on Earth, without the too-thin, worn, unwell expression, but tired nonetheless, and the worry-lines in his forehead were deep. “Work hasn’t stopped being busy for months. There’s so much data to sift through, I have a team of demons working on it in shifts.”

  “What data?” Ruthven was peripherally aware that Fastitocalon was in charge of some enormous complex project that had to do with the past administration of the M&E department, but that was about all he knew.

  “Well. You remember that awful business in Paris, with the reality rip.”

  “In excruciating detail,” said Ruthven.

  “Yes. Quite. So after that, an inquiry was launched into the entire department’s failure to do its bloody job right, and a lot of rather worrisome things came to light, including the behavior of the department head, and I ended up in charge instead of Asmodeus, who is currently a slug. It turned out that not only had M&E been run incredibly poorly in terms of its surface operative training and placement, in some cases not run at all, but the data analysis side of the department had basically been spending the past fifteen years sitting around, picking their noses, and occasionally submitting made-up reports on the data analysis they weren’t doing. Sam was livid.”

  “I can imagine,” said Ruthven. “A slug?”

  “A banana slug. About so big.” Fastitocalon sipped his drink. “I am told he exercises the privilege of continuing to wear his crown despite the transmogrification, which was graciously granted him upon sentencing, and please do not ask me how. The point is, we h
ave years’ worth of data from the surface placements that has barely been looked at, and my people are having to sort through all of it to see what we’ve been missing. The extent to which reality has been—corroded isn’t the right word, or dissolved, but you get the idea—indicates that this trend has been going on for quite some time, and I, or rather we, need to find out when it started and where it began. And who’s doing it. If it’s something from outside our universe.”

  “Is that why the—thing, the whatever it was in London, was able to come through and take up residence in the shelter?”

  “Yes, and why that wretched vampire’s repeated monster-summonings were able to cause that much damage in Paris; both of those were made possible by whatever’s behind this, even if they had no idea it was responsible. Reality’s been badly weakened on purpose, and that entity in London won’t be the only thing coming through from somewhere else if the fabric tears open. If it isn’t already. Somewhere, someone’s doing something they should not be.”

  “And your people on Earth now are trying to find it?” Ruthven didn’t like the idea of somewhere else, especially if the thing they’d encountered under London was a representative example.

  “We’re spread thin, and I simply don’t have the personnel to replace all the operatives, even if it badly needs to be done, and in any case I can’t spare a lot of people to analyze the new data. Sam says the priority is finding out the scope and extent of this trend; if the people on Earth become aware of any emergency, they will notify us at once, and that’s the best I can manage.”

  Ruthven stared into the depths of his glass, thinking about the awful otherness of the thing under London, its inherent alien quality, thinking about the timeslips in Paris. That sensation of sliding, helpless destabilization, the edges of everything too fluid, too vague.

  If both of those instances were due to the same underlying problem, what else must have been going wrong, all this time, all over the world, and who was responsible for it?

  “This is probably a stupid question,” he said, still looking into the glass. “But what happens if reality does… fall apart?”

  Fastitocalon gave him a long look. “It’s the end of everything,” he said. “End of this world, anyway. State of total entropy.”

  “Would we know it was happening?”

  “If the collapse was gradual? Yes. We wouldn’t enjoy it, either; better hope it goes with a bang and takes everything with it in an instant. What a cheery sickbed conversation this is, to be sure.” He took another sip of whatever he was drinking, and Ruthven noticed the little flame garnish moved itself around the rim of his glass to get out of the way.

  “I think I’d rather know about it than not,” said Ruthven slowly. The demon’s desire to change the subject was obvious, and he lay back, looking up at the vault of sky above them for a long moment before speaking again. That faint chiming sound was back, barely on the edge of audibility. He wondered again what it was; there was no breeze to stir a windchime. “But regardless, I can see why you’ve been working so hard. And why you’ve always loved it here.” He gestured to the lake, the view, the general surroundings. “It’s beautiful. I mean, I knew it was, you’d said so, but…”

  “Words don’t do it justice,” said Fastitocalon with a tired smile. “It was always beautiful, you know. Even in the very beginning, when we were all treading water and trying to work out what had just happened to us and what we were going to do about it, long before we’d built the towers of Dis, when it was just a wilderness—it was beautiful.”

  Ruthven blinked at him. “That’s right,” he said. “I keep forgetting you actually Fell.”

  “Oh, yes.” He swirled his glass, drank the last of it. Ruthven watched, feeling faintly hysterical, as he scooped the tiny flame off the rim with his fingertip and popped it into his mouth, the way a man might eat the last olive from the bottom of a martini glass. After a moment he glanced over at Ruthven. “What?”

  “You just ate a flame,” he said.

  “They’re quite nice,” said Fastitocalon, “although I don’t recommend you try one; they don’t do any damage to demons but I’ve no idea what effect they have on the undead.”

  “They don’t burn you?”

  “No. Incidentally, the main effect they did have, back in the beginning, was to bleach all our wings white. Some of us, the ones with complicated plumage, were quite annoyed about that.”

  Ruthven stared at him a moment longer, and then leaned back against the deckchair and laughed helplessly. Despite the ominous conversation, despite the lurking fear, he laughed: everything in the universe, as he had told Grisaille back in Greta’s clinic, was hilarious. After a moment Fastitocalon joined in; and a couple of demons walking along the promenade looked up and wondered what in the Spa could possibly be that funny.

  The jet lag coming this way was far easier than the kind you got heading east, Cranswell thought. It was unsettling to have taken off around eight p.m. and landed at half past ten, the seven hours of the flight collapsed to two, but he’d had absolutely no trouble falling asleep the moment he faceplanted onto the hotel bed; and this morning he’d been up with the dawn.

  He had, in fact, been so very awake that he’d taken the opportunity to slip out and go for a quick walk in the waking city, while it was still quiet. He loved the sense of vast waiting potential at this time of day, a whole microcosm’s worth of people and machinery and ideas gearing up to begin their work; it always felt almost electric. Mostly he couldn’t be bothered to roll out of bed before seven a.m., but on those instances when he’d had to be up very early, Cranswell had enjoyed watching London waking up. New York was no different.

  (Sure, they were here to commit antiquities theft on the orders of a witch with prehensile hair, but he could have a good time beforehand, couldn’t he?)

  By the time he’d got back, Grisaille was beginning to stir, but Cranswell had had time to shower and dress and order and mostly consume room service breakfast before he appeared. It had taken two cups of black coffee before Grisaille progressed beyond monosyllabic into sardonic, and Cranswell thought he could see how he and Ruthven would get along like the proverbial house on fire.

  The Met didn’t open until ten, and they spent some little time strolling along Fifth Avenue and looking at the trees in Central Park; they were a riot of autumn color, brilliant against a white sky.

  “So what’s the plan?” Cranswell asked, leaning on the wall separating the park from the sidewalk. “I mean. We’re here to case the joint, right? And figure out how the hell to get the thing out of there?”

  “That’s what that unfortunate phrase means,” said Grisaille, lighting a cigarette. They were black and smelled of cloves; Cranswell wasn’t even slightly surprised. Grisaille’s wardrobe appeared to be limited to black, grey, and very dark red. “And yes, in effect. We go and look at it and I come up with a way to pull this off. The easiest is probably to arrange for it to be moved, and nick it in the process, rather than trying to get it out of the case our own selves.”

  “Which is why I’m here,” said Cranswell. “Me and my nice new doctored expertise in Egyptology. You want me to convince the museum they need to move one of their most prized exhibits for reasons.”

  “Something like that,” said Grisaille, not sounding happy about it. “Perhaps you need to examine it in the conservation department, or run tests, or whatever it is curators do. I thought you mostly hung pictures on walls and frowned at people.”

  “That’s art gallery curators,” said Cranswell. “An easy mistake to make. I think they’ll let us in now, it’s after ten.”

  “Wait a few more minutes,” Grisaille said. “Never be the first one to enter or the last to leave, because people tend to remember you, and it’s easy to find on the security footage. Best to attach yourself to a random group. And don’t look self-conscious and don’t look exaggeratedly casual and don’t say anything unless spoken to.”

  “… you realize now I’m going to l
ook incredibly self-conscious,” said Cranswell, beginning to wish he hadn’t had breakfast after all.

  Grisaille flicked away the butt of his black cigarette. “No,” he said, “you’re not,” and looked Cranswell full in the eyes—his were so weird, they looked like red contacts—and all of a sudden Cranswell felt entirely calm. Grisaille’s pupils were expanding and contracting in a slow pulse, hypnotic, fascinating.

  Then he blinked, and the effect cut off. Cranswell’s equanimity remained.

  “… you just thralled me,” he said.

  “I absolutely did,” said Grisaille. “Come along, let’s go experience some culture.”

  Cranswell had spent some time in America, growing up; he’d been to the Met once, when he’d been quite little. All he could clearly remember was a vast echoing open space, and a lot of columns, and some statues with no clothes on. This time it was a rather different experience. This time he wished very much they weren’t here on a mission, because he wanted to see everything.

  Grisaille paid cash for their entry stickers, and Cranswell could tell he was doing the thing vampires sometimes did where they made themselves less noticeable; a tall slender dark-skinned man all in black with long dreadlocks and bright red eyes was difficult to ignore, but as he watched, the cashier didn’t even stare, barely looking up from the till to hand him his change.

  “This way,” said Grisaille, looking at a map. “Stick close to me and no one is likely to pay us much attention.” He led Cranswell through a huge doorway into a gallery largely taken up by what looked like an actual tomb, but didn’t stop to let him read anything about it; didn’t stop to look at anything, in fact, passing through room after room until they came to the one he wanted. It was smaller than several of the galleries they’d passed through, high-ceilinged, almost square, with a doorway in each soft-ochre-painted wall; a piece of stone frieze hung opposite a little case containing a red stone statue of a kneeling figure; headless statues and statueless heads were arrayed around the walls, and in the middle of the floor were two tall thin glass cases on plinths, and inside the cases—