At the same time, she was acutely aware of how she was planning on ending her journey, and that this meant Marietta was likely to come back to the surface without her famous charge, and several people knew Ariel had come down here with her, and it was a very poorly kept secret that Marietta was Ariel’s biggest fan and had regular sex fantasies about her. If Ariel didn’t show up, but the polizia found a creepy shrine … or worse, if Ariel didn’t show up and the polizia didn’t find a creepy shrine, and Marietta was just a sweet over-enthusiastic admirer…
She smiled at Marietta, who was still babbling breathlessly.
“So tell me about Fury,” she suggested. “You said you were down here, and you saw some people…?”
“Yes, I saw two people, I heard them say to another person on the interface that they were taking food to the Fury,” Marietta said, “and when they talked together after this, they seemed to be afraid. And I followed them to a part of the tunnel system that was very hidden and very strange, like a house in the tunnel system. Very strange. I think that is where the Fury is. Whatever the Fury is, that is where. They went into the area with the food, they came out with the empty cart.”
“Fury eats a lot, huh?” Ariel said, fighting down a feeling of unease.
“The next time I had a shift here, it was a different time of the day but I went to the same place and used my master code to open the door,” Marietta went on, showing Ariel the small plastic peg with ‘compound electromagnetics’ that was her ‘master code’ key. She was very proud of her ‘master code’, and had shown it to Ariel several times already, along with suggestions that they could go to very private ‘but also very clean and nice’ places using the key, and she had wanted Ariel to hold the key, and had then run her fingers across the key surreptitiously when Ariel passed it back. At least she hadn’t put it in her mouth.
“And you went in there?”
“A little way. That is when I heard a voice say ‘is food? Hungry’,” Marietta switched to her Fury-voice, which was deeper than her usual voice and accompanied by enough mouth-slackening and jowl-wobbling that the translator had a hard time picking out words. “I got scared and I ran,” Marietta concluded, wiping saliva off her chin, “but I cannot believe I am now down here with Ariel–!”
“It’s a really interesting place to work,” Ariel said dutifully. “I can’t believe they don’t do tours down here.”
“Oh no, it is all owned by companies,” Marietta confided, and smiled – coy, creepy, but also heartbreakingly innocent. It occurred to Ariel that she could have had Osrai run an unethically-thorough background check on Marietta before going anywhere alone with her … but the fact was, none of the other contractors with access rights to Fury’s subterranean abode could ever be bought, and Marietta was Ariel’s only chance. And she should be able to handle her with the stunner from the portable defence system. Ariel just hoped she wasn’t one of those sorts of fans. “Besides that, if there were tours all the time, somebody would see us, yes?”
“Yes,” Ariel said. She really hoped she wasn’t one of those sorts of fans. “That’s true, isn’t it?”
“Look,” Marietta went on, touching Ariel’s arm excitedly but with calculation, “it’s the main solid state virtual capacity chain…”
Ariel let Marietta’s talk wash over her again.
She hadn’t heard from Ash in about a week, although two days ago she’d seen a report on the Roman media about an attack on a private research company premises that had resulted in the destruction of several small-scale launch sites and receiving and analysis equipment for a little-known exploratory probe in the outer solar system. The Mercy 1 was no more. According to the media, the probe’s objective had been unknown but its transmissions were public, and not particularly interesting. Ariel hoped that whatever the Mercy 1 had been saving for its master, it hadn’t been particularly interesting either.
Ariel shifted the heavy pack on her shoulders. Marietta had stopped just short of physical force in her insistence that she be allowed to carry the pack, but Ariel had remained polite in her refusal. She would not have parted with the pack and its heavy machine components any more willingly than she would have parted with her shoulder-slung defence kit, although that too was heavy – and the tunnels were unpleasantly humid and poorly ventilated.
She expected Ash would be fine, no matter how Ariel’s own quest turned out. With any luck, Ash would have found and dispatched Mercy already … although they’d still been coming up blank on how precisely they were supposed to do that, short of dropping an Angel on him.
“Wasn’t it difficult for you to find the place again?” she asked Marietta after another few minutes, as they turned into the next nearly-identical length of autophosphorous-lit tunnel.
“It was quite hard, yes, even for me,” Marietta said. “I know these tunnels very well, I am never lost, and I know every passage and every entrance and every access. But the hidden rooms, it was very strange, yes. See, here soon ahead is the way in. You cannot even see it.”
Sure enough, the ‘way in’ was a room containing a collection of old metal fuse boxes, which opened without the need for a key. But then a sequence of the fuses were thrown – Marietta proudly said she deduced which ones to throw because they were the ones without dust on them, and the order didn’t appear to matter – which opened a panel where the ‘master code’ was needed. And that sent the whole fuse box sliding silently aside like the most hysterically clichéd villainous secret entrance ever. Gabriel had mentioned that the Demons were melodramatic.
“I think, maybe you should wait out here,” Ariel said quietly, as she stepped towards the dimly-lit and – as Marietta had already attested – jarringly plush antechamber the secret door had revealed. Marietta opened her mouth to protest, and Ariel quietened her with an urgent hand gesture and a warm clasp of the girl’s upper arm with her other hand. It was possible that the contact gave Marietta a small but comprehensive aneurysm, but silent was silent. “I’m expected, but you could get in trouble for letting me in here,” she whispered. “And if there’s trouble, I need you to go out and get help. If I’m not back out in … one hour…” she hesitated over that for a moment, but realised Marietta would happily wait in the fuse room until she died of thirst if Ariel asked her to, “…go back to the surface and call the police.”
Rome had been under the influence of Fury, not to mention the on-and-off influence of Mercy as well, for so long it was possible there wasn’t a single high-ranking police officer, military leader or member of the clergy who would even help Marietta to rescue a dumb lost supermodel who had stumbled into Fury’s eatin’ room. But it gave the poor wide-eyed girl something to do, some purpose and sense of duty. Marietta was nodding determinedly.
“I wait. I wait one hour and then go to get help. I help.”
“Thank you, Marietta,” Ariel gave her arm a final squeeze – Marietta trembled in something disturbingly akin to orgasm – and headed quickly into the antechamber before either of them could change their minds.
The antechamber opened onto a lavish lounge room that was old-fashioned but not exactly olde worlde ancient the way Ariel had been expecting, as the residence of a centuries-old Demon. It was more sort of cheesily outdated, an expensive 2180s-style set of matching pale-wood, black-diamond, autophos-highlighted armchairs and coffee tables with a chandelier like a massive black cluster of cobwebs hanging in the centre. It was empty, spotlessly tidy, and smelled very faintly of some kind of perfume. It was actually rather pleasant.
From that room, she tiptoed through to another expensive but slightly old-interactive-looking kitchen and cleaning station, beyond which was another antechamber. The smell of perfume was stronger here, cloying, less agreeable.
“Who is there? Is food? Is food?”
The words murmured through her interface a split-second after they reverberated through the antechamber, and were only intelligible by a group effort between the translator and Ariel’s educated guesswork. Mariet
ta’s imitation had actually been pretty good, but had not managed to accurately convey the vast, slobbery grossness of Fury’s voice.
Taking a firmer grip on her defence pack, although she was fairly sure it would do no good, Ariel steeled herself and stepped into the next room.
It was a bedroom, or perhaps another lounge that had become a bedroom by dint of its main piece of furniture being converted to a bed, and everything being set up – tables, entertainment systems, refrigerators, dispensers – around that bed. The smell of perfume was stronger, but cut through with an acrid, nasty thread that Ariel instantly recognised from the vat of tarry awfulness under the Ballywise Tavern, formerly the Bad Cow. You didn’t forget a smell like that. It was painfully obvious that the perfume, overpowering and now noticeably artificial, had been infused through the room to cover that other stench. The stench that was coming from the thing on the bed.
Ariel bit back a cry of disgust, but was unable to prevent her face from twisting.
She’d been expecting some sort of enormous, blubbery replete in scarcely-human form, a bloated bag of immobile fat that roared endlessly for more nourishment. With that expectation, Fury was actually almost normal. By human standards, she was somewhere on the fat side of plump, but by no means anomalous. Ariel had fought for her own body-image enough to be quite sensitive to the different ways people categorised size and body-fat and … no, Fury was round, and a bit saggy, but she wasn’t even on the map as far as human gluttony went.
Fury was most definitely female – or had been, once – with sweaty black hair that was either intentionally dreadlocked or had matted itself into ropes over the years. Her skin was … well, it was hard to tell, as some of it was pale and other parts dark, at least half of it covered by an oily-looking sheet and the rest … was simply missing. The Demon lay, arms and legs akimbo and head tossing on a mildewed pillow, her left breast exposed and her eyes and mouth glistening.
At the corners of her eyes, and sometimes obscuring the milky surfaces themselves, oily darkness moved. Only it wasn’t darkness, not exactly. It had the same disturbingly reflective sheen as the stuff in the Ballywise cellar. Roon had noted in her book that it had been as if the fluid was reflecting lights that weren’t there, and Ariel thought it went further than that, reflecting nothing at all but making your mind put the highlights there, filling in the blanks because that was what the human eye and brain did. But the stuff within Fury was deeper, more alive. Blood in the vein, rather than blood congealed in a bowl.
And it was within the Demon. It roiled in her eyes and it seemed to belch and vomit up in protuberances from her mouth, as though her tongue was infected with a parasite. And it ate through her skin. She healed, in slow-shifting patches, the skin growing and darkening and bleaching, swelling and stretching, but whenever it healed over, a new patch of the nightmarish shadow-stuff appeared like a stain, eating away the flesh and turning it into a gleaming puddle. Whatever the darker-than-darkness was, it looked like it had filled the Demon, and was working on eating the final scraps of her. When it did, and Fury finally died, Ariel was certain the stuff would slosh slowly off the bed, spread across the floor, and then dissolve in the air the way the goo they’d tried taking from the tub had dissolved. Every time they’d gingerly scooped some out, it had vanished until Roon had figured out how to seal it in an insulated vessel.
Gabriel had said that was what happened. That the only thing holding the stuff in this world was the fact that it contained Angel and Demon, two opposite and invincible physical manifestations, boiling against one another. With just one, collapsing into this ultimate nothingness, there was nothing to hold it.
Because it wasn’t supposed to be here. It wasn’t supposed to be.
The thought of touching that un-coming flesh, let alone diving through the very darkness that had infected it in the first place, made Ariel want to scream.
“Who are you?” Fury wobbled suspiciously as Ariel stepped closer. “Is food–?” she stopped, eyes widening, swirling black, fading back to white again. “Yala Pinian,” she hissed.
The translator didn’t know where to start with that, but Ariel had heard it before.
“Yes,” she said, “Pinian. First Disciple. Hello, Fury.”
“No,” Fury switched to the British dialect Ariel spoke as a mother tongue, albeit a little odd-sounding. “No, no, do not, do not. Begone, choru haal, Pinian. Choru haal. Die in the cold, ye foe.”
“You and your boyfriend Mercy killed our sister,” Ariel went on, stepping closer when she’d concluded that Fury was incapable of movement. The Demon shrank back against the pillow with an unspeakable wet sound, but didn’t attempt to fight or flee. “I’m here to redress the balance.”
“Ye would kill me, Pinian Marog?” Fury said, and heaved a gross, sodden chuckle. “Ye cannot. I have already become the darkness without. I am the God-sphere. I am–”
“Be quiet,” Ariel said, and Fury’s mouth puckered toothlessly before swelling back out to near-normalcy. “You’re going to take me somewhere,” she said, “using your God-space teleportation mojo. You will–”
Fury’s laugh was deeper this time, sloppy and booming. “I cannot swim the God-sphere again, Pinian Marog,” she said, and twitched an arm feebly. “I would not emerge on the other side. And neither would ye. Ye would perish, and be reborn a babe. Yes?”
“I’m pretty sure I can make you try,” Ariel said. On either side of the pack on her back was a pocket, each containing a sealed ceramic jar of tarry muck from the Ballywise cellar. Although now that she was looking at Fury, Ariel was not at all confident it would have any effect on her.
“There is no getting out,” Fury chortled. “Ye think we have not tried? Ye think this is not how I ended thus?” her arm twitched again. “No, ye would dash against the Ghååla’s cage, and perish.”
“I’m not here to get a lift through the veil,” Ariel said with a smile. “I’m here to get a lift to the Destarion.”
Fury flinched. “I do not know her.”
“Oh, I think you do,” Ariel said. “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be so afraid. And I know you know the way. Odium went there, right? You can just follow the same path.”
“I will not,” Fury said, her voice turning absurdly prim as though she was refusing to discuss the sordid details of a blind date. “The Godfang will end me.”
“That’s too bad,” Ariel took another step forward. Fury sank back further.
“Do not! Come no closer! Pinian Marog, I have not the strength to dive deep, to dive shallow,” she said in a fast, liquid jabber. “I have not the strength to make any dive and to come back out,” she quivered. “I want not to come back out.”
“I can give you the strength,” Ariel said, not quite sure why she was saying it.
The Demon let out another sodden laugh. “This is one thing ye cannot do, ye Pinian in hiding,” she said. “They call it God-space, Pinian Marog. Ye are only a part of a God, ye be not a God.”
“I don’t need to be,” Ariel said, as the emptiness within her grew steadily colder, more certain. She faced it, looked into it for the first time since it had flowered inside her. She reached into it.
Something deep, deep inside her mind stirred, rolled over, rose.
Gabriel failed to mention anything like this, she thought, a little afraid.
Gabriel does not know about it, he only suspects, she thought – or at least she thought she thought. Nobody knows, not really. I am hiding.
Time to stop, she told herself firmly.
She laughed. Fear stirred in her again, more insistently, more massively. If the unease she’d felt before had been a rattling scale, what she felt now was the slow tightening of coils bigger than the world.
You have no idea of what you speak, she thought, little Firstmade.
Something red glimmered on the wet reflective darkness spreading and receding on Fury’s skin. The Demon became suddenly very attentive, very alert.
“No,” she gasped. �
�It is impossible.”
Ariel stepped up to Fury’s bedside and reached out her hand. Fury shrieked as Ariel’s fingers dug into the feverish jellyfish wetness of her flesh. The oily darkness boiled, but Ariel felt only a light tingle in her hand. Something had surged up in answer to the darkness, risen and settled over her, filling the empty crystal Ariel with cold metallic rage.
“GoTchak kluur,” she heard a voice say, and supposed it must have been her. She wondered vaguely if it was Xidh, the lost universal language Ash had talked about from her first conversation with Gabriel, and which presumably Gabriel and now Fury had spoken to them. If it was, she mused, it was strange that she should speak it but not understand it.
“Threkta!” Fury squealed. “Threkta Fweig!”
“Ariel?”
Ariel turned her head, tightening her grip when Fury tried once again to pull away, and sighed when she saw Marietta, saucer-eyed, standing in the doorway. The girl raised a hand to her mouth, her face going pale.
“It’s okay, Marietta,” Ariel said, the cold receding for a moment. It sank back into her like some great denizen of the deep ocean. If that was what the Pinian First Disciple was – the simile had come far too readily – she wasn’t sure she was ready to handle it in this lifetime. “It’s okay, I’m fine. What are you doing here?”
“I hear the screams, of course I come,” Marietta said, with disarming bravery. She lowered her hand and her voice rose to a squeak. “Don’t hurt Ariel, you thing!”
“It’s not hurting me,” Ariel said, while Fury wobbled in panic. “It can’t hurt me. It’s going to take me somewhere. I’m going to help it,” she turned to look at Fury, who quivered and nodded, tar-black eyes leaking real human tears. Ariel turned back to Marietta.
She really will be arrested and charged with your kidnapping or murder when you don’t come back, she thought, and she was no longer certain the thought was hers. It seemed to be thinking itself. And besides, you will need a human. The Godfang will not listen to you.
Bad Cow Page 70
